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| Life's Journey, A Digital Design by Maureen Devlin |
As people we are imperfect. We come to life with a mix of strengths and challenges related to the times. Our strengths take us forward while our challenges often stymie our journey in ways that cause us to struggle, reflect, revise, and hopefully surmount those challenges in time.
As life moves on, we continue to journey in ways that present both tough and easy patches. The best fuel for a good journey is a solid array of values as well as a respectful, positive, humble, curious, loving attitude.
There are actions we can embrace as we journey life's road; actions that support a positive journey. Those actions include the following:
Know yourself
Take time to know yourself. Know your strengths, challenges, dreams, desires, and place in life. When we don't have a good understanding of who we are, we often misstep in life. There's many ways to get to know yourself including journaling, reading, exploring a variety of life's avenues, counseling, and challenging yourself.
Know your history
Your history including the history of your family and the places where you've lived affect who you are. It's important to understand your history and make peace with your history. For example I've looked deeply into the history of my family. By looking deeply at my family's history, I've seen both positive and not so positive trends. This knowledge helps me to embrace our family's positive trends and work against the not so positive trends. This history also has made me sensitive to the challenges and strengths many family members display.
Dream
Make time to dream. No matter what stage of life you're in, it's important to dream and then work for your dreams. It is also important to reflect on your dreams with respect to your values--you want to make sure your dreams match a worthy set of values. Revisit and revise your dreams often in ways that take into account the changing nature of the world and your life.
Positive relationships
Know that as you travel the road of life, people will travel with you. Some will appear and disappear quickly, some will stay for a while, and some will be there for most of your life. Those you share life's road with will play all kinds of roles in relationship to your life. Some will challenge you. Use those challenges to refine who you are and where you are headed. Some will be a comfort to you, and others will be a source of wisdom, guidance, and vision. Respect every relationship you have along the road, and work to be an honest, respectful, positive companion. That can be difficult at times especially when you disagree with others or feel that others are not respecting you, but the truth is that will happen, and the more you can be loving, respectful, and truthful with those that share the road of life with you, the better your life will be.
You can't live all lives
As humans we're limited--we can't be all people and we can't live all lives. That's why we have to continually prioritize who we are and what we'll do. We have to decide what's most important. Recently I made a decision to leave my career in order to attend to more close-to-home priorities. In many ways, I miss my career, but I know I made the right choice since I thought deeply about the choice and why I was making it. In life, we will have to make tough decisions, and when we make those decisions, we have to keep our values and priorities up front.
We can extend the lives we live via our good relationships. When we're open minded to the many ways our friends, family, colleagues, and community members live their lives, we will be able to share in their lifeways and that broadens our lives. For example, if you choose a career where you make less money, you might not be able to enjoy the extravagances those who make a lot of money enjoy. Yet if you respect those connections, it's possible that you'll be able to enjoy their extravangances while they learn from and enjoy your lifeways too. The more we share who we are and what we do with others, the fuller our lives can be.
Forgive yourself and forgive others
You will make mistakes in life. As humans, in so many ways and for so many reasons, we are weak. We will make mistakes and we have to recognize why we made those mistakes and how we can learn from them and move forward.
Once when totally frustrated, I raised my voice in the workplace. After endless advocacy, people continued to obstruct my ideas and wishes for the organization I worked for. I had done my research. I knew I was on the right path with the advocacy, but many in the institutions blocked me. I got very frustrated, and I raised my voice. Fortunately the words I used were words of advocacy and observation, not slander. I was harshly reprimanded for raising my voice. It was a very painful episode in my career. Rather than let it take me down, I analyzed the situation and got lots of support. First, I realized that I had wells of anger in me from early life experiences. I went to counseling and dissected that anger. I also read a lot about anger, and recognized the kinds of situations that made me angry. This diffused my anger greatly. I also analyzed the organizational issues that led to this frustrating situation. In general, at the workplace, I had little voice. I was not a member of the in-group--a group favored by administration. I had been warned by members of that group to stay silent. Upon warning by the then-superintendent, I said that my advocacy wasn't making me wealthier, more beautiful, or more successful and that I was speaking up because I thought it was the right thing to do. He didn't warn me again, but he also didn't support much of my advocacy.
The organizational structure didn't support people like me much, and from what I've heard, they still lack in that kind of support. So in moving forward, I took a more strategic and collaborative approach to change which was better. I worked on minimizing my anger and finding better approaches to deal with that anger, and I continued to advocate for positive change. Did I meet all my goals--no, but I did get better and learned a lot. I recognize my path, the reasons for it, and I share this story to help others make quicker, better change with respect to their areas of struggle. I forgive myself and I forgive others who similarly have made errors in life. The only ones I don't fully forgive are those who continue to use and abuse others after multiple opportunities to make change. There are few people like that, but those that do exist are generally powerful evil people like Trump and Putin who continue to selfishly cause great harm and suffering in our world.
Move forward
Learn from the past, make the changes necessary, and then move on. There will be past hurts, missteps, and sadness, but we have to move on. Every day do the best you can and continue to move toward your life goals and values. If you're lost, simply think about love--to live in pursuit of loving one another and doing what's best for your life, the lives of others, and the world in general is a positive direction. There is always work to do to improve lives. This work can be as simple as picking up the trash on the edge of a busy street to the deeper, meaningful work of leading programs that result in better living for people and the planet.
Learn
We live in an age of endless opportunity to learn. This is an awesome, and sometimes overwhelming proposition. Make time to learn as much as you can about the areas you've prioritized. Share your knowledge in positive ways and make the changes your new knowledge leads you to make.
Create a warm, welcoming haven for living
We all need warm, welcoming spaces to relax, reflect, and connect. We can create those spaces almost anywhere. Make the time to create a space like that to support your good living. These spaces enrich our lives and the lives of others. Keep the spaces simple with the knowledge that less things create more time, and more time leads to the opportunity to do and be what we desire.
Be practical
You have to be practical too in life. To survive most of us need a positive level of income, good health, and opportunity. You can do this in alternative ways, but that's not as easy as enlisting in proven courses of success such as hard work, good jobs, quality education, positive associates, and a respectful demeanor.
We are an imperfect people with endless potential for whom we can be and what we can do. The way we journey life greatly helps us to accept our imperfections and make the most of the wonderful gifts and people we are. We can do this.