By Dagny Davidson
The Background story
What the heck was going on?
That is the question I had to ask myself a few years back.
I had to make a dramatic adjustment. I was suddenly in charge of a home with two teenagers, and the only income was mine. There was no life insurance. There would be no more summers spent traveling. I had to adjust, and even more importantly, I had to help my children adjust. I had to fight the urge to wallow in self-pity. I needed to focus on what was good. The things we had left. I needed to reset my mind, slosh through the muck that my life had become, and find new meaning. I had people depending on me who I didn’t want to let down.
Maybe your situation is not as dramatic as mine was. Maybe you are dealing with some other kind of muck. Perhaps you’ve reached a critical stage in your life where you’re questioning your decisions you’ve made.
Now what? What can you do?
If you are dealing with one or more changes in your life then you’re more like me than you might have imagined because I had several of these going on about the same time.
I had reached a point in my life where I knew I needed to make some changes. Bottom line: I just wanted to improve my life so I could be happier.
This meant change.
I didn’t really set out on becoming more mindful. It just seemed that as I went about dealing with the many areas I was trying to navigate, from finances and work, to sleep and taking time for just me with a few others in between, that I had made it through the muck with what is called mindfulness. Definitely lots of changes.
Dealing with change is not so bad if done is small bits over time. It is a way of adapting. Kind of like survival of the fittest. We just need to set our intentions and create some good habits.
So what, Now what?
Life has lots to offer and lots of muck to trip us up. So learning to transcend the daily muck with the help of mindfulness is a much better way to live. Living in the present (more mindfully) in any of these areas doesn’t have to be a struggle. Just a small change here or there can, over time, add up to big returns in the end. The big return would be quality of life. Reaching the end of our lives with lots of experiences and very little regret is a pretty big goal. Keeping our eye on living in the present while working towards the goal means leading a better life. I know I am far better after having made some changes in my life and if I can do them, then I have faith you can too.
