A wee bit of BS

I try to live my life in such a way as to give to others. I believe the more we have been blessed with in life, the greater our responsibility to help others who may not have those blessings. It does not make one better than the other. It is simply a part of living in community together. To me, life is about reaching out, volunteering, helping others, and giving of myself. When I post on social media about the things I do it is not to boast or make myself look good. I do it in hopes of others being inspired to see how they can reach out to the world around them. Surely if I can do it, anyone else can. After all, I am possibly the most ordinary person around. I do it in part to help keep myself accountable. It also brings me great joy that I love sharing with others.  There is another reason I do this. Focus. Lately however, I have been greatly distracted by personal issues that needing sorting. I allowed the things in my life to overtake my time, thoughts, and energy. Some w...

As my life ebbs and flows, changing constantly, I have been thinking about success. It is something we are taught to strive for. We should be successful in our jobs, as parents, as volunteers, as children, and in any role we assume. I have had many conversations with friends lately about saying 'no' more. The two are related, believe it or not. It all comes down to how we define success. Are we defining it ourselves or allowing others to tell us what it means and how it looks? For too long, maybe, many of us have allowed the society we live in to define success. We should have a house, a car (at least one), be married, have children (who are well behaved and excelling in everything), have lots of education, holidays to sunny places, have all the latest gadgets, and the list goes on. This constant striving has left many I know worn out and disappointed with life. Some are taking steps to change that. Learning to define success for ourselves is an important first step to re...

I had a friend over for tea last weekend. We had a lovely, long chat about many things. One topic she mentioned was feeling pulled in different directions. It was just a brief statement but it is something I have been feeling and thus noticing in others more lately. As a woman, I know many other women who feel this as well. Many of my women friends have children. This leads to them feeling even more 'pulled.' I am not saying men (or fathers) do not feel this too. I am sure they do. I cannot speak to it though as I do not talk to my male friends about it. With the world changing so quickly, so constantly, I believe it is safe to say most people feel pulled in many directions at any given time. It does not seem so long ago, however, when we would talk about 'stretching ourselves' to learn, to grow, to improve. So how did stretching become pulling? As I think about my own life and situation I wonder why do I feel pulled instead of stretched? I believe we start to fee...

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure if I have written about this before. I looked through the titles of past blog posts. I am feeling a bit too tired to read through them all though. So here I write anyway... I have been thinking a lot about the labels we apply to ourselves and others. We like to identify people, then define them by the labels we have created. Some labels are created by society in general. Male, female, liberal, conservative, religious, agnostic, atheist, ugly, beautiful, right, left, and the list could go on. After we learn labels, we each create our own version of what each means. Then we apply them to those around us. Maybe we even choose people we surround ourselves with based on the labels we like the best. Some exclude people with labels applied that are opposite and/or disliked. Some labels are clear, others are subtle. Yet they are always there. As someone who has been labelled (sometimes incorrectly) I can say from experience, much is lost when we see th...