A Lifelong Mentor

What is the emotion you are most familiar with? The one that has been your traveling companion since almost before you can remember. Perhaps the one that you’ve spent your life trying to avoid.

Mine is loneliness. Hands down. No question.

Wikipedia defines it as “an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation”. How fun does that sound?

However.

Loneliness has helped me become who I am today. She has served as a wise and kind mentor, helping me learn early on to cultivate a friendship with myself. To feel comfortable in my own company. To this day, time alone is a balm, which means I am never without a friend.

She led me to books from my earliest years, introducing me to the multitude of friends that are found in those pages. My favorite Christmas present was, and is, a new book. Books offer their friendship without hesitation. Pick me up. Read me. I’m always here for you.

My love of reading led me to a love of writing. Words on the page are my way of finding meaning in lived experience. Mine. Yours. Ours. Words on the page connect writer to reader and back again, creating friendships with people we may never meet, but come to know intimately.

Writing led me to speaking. Who knew a shy, introverted, sometimes-lonely girl would love standing on a stage, but she does. Speaking is simply a way to embody the words on the page and bring them to life in the presence of others.

I’ve always been one to forge fewer but deeper friendships. While I still wonder if it might have been better to cultivate more, I wouldn’t trade the depth and connection of those on my friend dance card for one with more names on it.

In conversation with my wise spiritual director, Dane, I was reminded again that the gift of loneliness is intimacy. It invites us to forge deeper connections. With ourselves, others, and the natural world. Often when we’re lonely, we aren’t longing for other people as much as we are for our true self. The one we were created to be, and sometimes leave behind, in an attempt to please others. Loneliness isn’t due to a lack of friends, but a lack of connection to oneself.

Loneliness is an invitation to come back home to myself. And you are always welcome to join me there.


The Roundabout

Roundabouts, also known as traffic circles, allow traffic to flow in one direction around a central island. There are usually several exits that let drivers continue on down the road. More than once I’ve found myself going around a traffic circle several times, somehow having missed my exit. Eventually I would get out of the circle and continue on my way.

Sometimes processing an emotional issue feels a lot like getting caught in a roundabout. We need to keep motoring around the matter in question until finally, we are ready to exit the circle, and continue on our way.

Photo by Tuur Tisseghem from Pexels

Photo by Tuur Tisseghem from Pexels


Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED

Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of the month. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.

ENERGIZED

When I sat down to write about this word, I didn’t expect to be writing about a rabbit, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Energizer Bunny. That cool, pink, sunglass sporting, flipflop wearing, drum beating hare is, “…According to the 2017 Madison Avenue Hall of Fame Poll, the most iconic mascot…" around. Who knew? On further thought however, it makes total sense. That smiling pink bunny just keeps going, and going, and going, no matter what. It seems to have a consistent source of energy for whatever life brings. Who wouldn’t want that?

While the bunny may run on batteries, I do not.

I need physical energy to fuel this body, the only one I have. Giving it what it needs is the least I can do to repay it all the ways in which it has loved and supported me through the last 66 years. To keep up my mojo means, at the very least, making it a priority to feed and water it well, move it often, and give it a rest for at least 7, and hopefully 8 hours a night.

I need emotional energy to live with an open heart. A heart that fuels me to love fearlessly, engage with others authentically, and encounter the truth in myself and the world around me with courage and compassion. To keep my emotional tank topped off means cultivating relationships that are life-giving, reading the work of writers that invite me over the threshold of my current emotional maturity, and a dogged determination to keep doing the inner work necessary to live into my true and best self.

I need mental energy to stay present and sharp with every passing year. If I’m to live a life of purpose and meaning to the end, the only viable choice is to continue to stretch and challenge my brain even when it tires me out. it. Especially when it tires me out, as that means I am moving into new territory just waiting to be explored. Stoking my intellectual fires comes through paying attention to what sparks my curiosity, plugging into learning communities, and finding and connecting with others who are up for the same challenge.

And.

I need spiritual energy to stay connected to my core beliefs, of which there are three. We are all created in the image of that which created us. We are all called to live authentic, wholehearted lives. We are all called to love, help, and heal the world that is within our reach. If that doesn’t require spiritual energy, I don’t know what does. Spiritual fuel comes from gathering with my faith community, steeping in spiritual wisdom wherever I find it, and daily spiritual practices that remind me that it isn’t all about me.

In order to keep going, and going, and going, means knowing, and doing, what it takes to power the life we have.

pexels-photo-266429.jpeg