Today

Tags

emotional health, family, family relations, pursuit of happiness, reinvention

Reinvention.

Pretty powerful word, if you’d ask me any given day at my whopping 48.

I’ve been up and down and all away around in my life. That’s why I named my blog,  Believing, the Ups and Downs of Life.

All of us strive or want to strive on becoming better people.  More accomplished, successful, some might want to be rich, others may want recognition, or just want to do something different with their lives.

via morgueFile

 

All I want to do is basically find purpose.

It’s not that I don’t have purpose in life because I certainly do.  My family life has always been straight and center for me.  When I married twenty-eight years ago, and then became a first time mommy almost twenty-five years ago everything changed for me.  Running my home like a fine Swiss watch has always been my pride and joy.  But, I want a bit more for myself now.

The thing is that when you are almost fifty,  the vibes you get from the people who sometimes surround us is that basically life is over.

What!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t like when people say,

“You know, what can I do really?”  –  “I’m almost fifty.”

Well let me hand down the memo and tell you that there is so much you can do, about basically everything.

We have the power to change whatever we don’t want in our lives.  The only thing we really need to do is believe we can, and go ahead and  do it.  Most of the things we need to make those changes are just right inside us.

Not everything has to do with how other see or think about you,  it’s more about how you see, think and feel about yourself.

Some people complain about their weight, others about their job, others about church, others about their families, others about their finances, but really guys, at the end it’s all about just that complaining.

Most of us don’t do hoot about resolving the issues we complain about.

Today is a new day, full of opportunities to make all those little changes that can lead up to huge ones that will impact all aspects of our lives.  The first thing I need to do and probably you can also give it a try is to change the way we think.

Let’s free old grudges, restore relationships (that are worth it) or move on to new ones, embrace life with all its mishaps (we can’t control), and basically try to find happiness and above all hope.

This doesn’t mean everything will be fine and dandy because they are times when we are just pissed off, but we have to learn to handle that last part.  Being angry isn’t even such a bad thing because positive things can come out of it if we learn to use its energy.  Just don’t hurt anyone in the process.

So, you see “mis queridos amigos” hope and believe are two simple commands that can make a world of a difference.  Today is a great day to reinvent yourself even if it’s in a small way.

Never stop believing. 

 

 

Uncovering Hope

Tags

Faith, grief, hope, Illness, Life

Believing is so hard now a days.

We’re caught in so much, so fast that basically even keeping tuned in to ourselves becomes a challenge.  There is so much debris that we can easily lose ourselves to ourselves.  If you know what I mean!!!!!!!!

Last night, as sleep eluded I lied listening to music, the song “When You Believe” came up.  As Whitney’s powerful and beautiful voice sang,

Something inside of me shifted and I just wanted to believe more than anything.  Probably because I’m scared out of my mind that my disability will prevent me from going to school this next fall and beginning my master’s degree.

This past weekend has been challenging because my breathing muscles just caved in a little leaving me helpless and feeling sick as a dog,  I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried bitterly.  People who suffer chronic ailments battle against an invisible enemy that tends to win most of the time.

If you are brave enough to battle it, in some rounds you need to be ready to be knocked down and then kicked in the stomach by this terrible opponent.  Because its fearless.

Getting through “the rain” proves to be more than challenging as we try to get ourselves up and going.

To tell you the truth, sometimes it feels impossible.

The powerful lyrics written by Stephen Schwartz and sung by such an amazing artist proved to be daunting as I remembered her life and tragic death.

It’s so easy to lose yourself in your worries about things we aren’t even living yet, but jumping to conclusions about them.  Staying in touch with our inner-self and finding resilience is a miracle in itself. We just have to believe in it.

As I listened, thinking about my life and where it was heading for a moment I grieved for myself.  Thinking that miracles don’t happen, well not for me they don’t.  I’ve lost in a sense my ability to pray because I think nobody will hear me.  As my thoughts went back and forth, I thought about my blog and my ups and downs  with faith.

Then, suddenly it slapped me in the face.  Some miracles come along each day and we’re not even aware of them.  Miracles come with each sunrise and nightfall, when we are able to sleep, when we get up in the morning and do the things we normally do, when we find joy in our loved ones company, when we embrace someone we haven’t seen in some time in a warm and loving hug,  and just by looking at an amazing sunrise with all my favorite birds chirping around my garden as life bursts in joy all around me.

It’s all about how we see life, and that’s going to take us through the rain of all the difficulties that each day brings along.

Miracles do happen.

They happened the day my husband received a new liver nineteen years ago when facing an end stage liver disease.  When a compassionate family shared a gift of life with mine. Giving my children an opportunity of having a dad and a loving husband to grow old with me. He truly believed he was going to get better, his optimism never-fading and just hanging in there.  There was a pretty big chance he wasn’t going to make it, but he did.  That proves that we just can’t stop believing.

So you see “mis queridos amigos” believing isn’t about not ever having days when the pain we carry in our souls is sharp and unbearable, but bringing hope into the equation.  Hope will carry us through the rain and deliver us to the path that leads us to making our miracles happen.

Never stop believing.   

Our Differences Bring Out Life’s Flavors

Accepting that people are different doesn’t come easy.

Racism and prejudice can probably traced back to a very young age.  It’s when we don’t like a person and just because of that we pick on their gender or ethnic background.

Now I need to clarify that sometimes our like or dislike is not really ours, but the making of someone else.  Maybe some of us have followed the pack at some point in our lives.

For me, it happened in fifth grade.

Back then (waaaaay back)  a certain Polish girl attended fifth grade in Chopin Elementary School in Chicago with me.  She was big for a fifth grader and a bit different from the rest of us.  I decided I was going to hate her with everyone else in my classroom.  A bully had begun spreading that she didn’t wear underwear to school, so I kind of began watching her closely.  Nobody really knew about it, but I joined in the collective hatred.

My hatred didn’t really last that long, I was given a very quick reality check.

My parents had relocated in Chicago from Upstate New York and that weekend a teacher I was very fond of came to visit me at home.  Miss Liska was coming to visit and I felt excited and thrilled all at the same time.  So, we began talking about this and that, she was drilling me about how school was going, and all of a sudden I said with a steel determination in my voice,

-I hate Polish people.

She seemed startled for a bit, but proceeded to ask me,

-Why?

I went on to tell her about the girl at school, and finished with,

-She’s Polish, that why!

After a moment, she informed me quietly,

-That if I hated Polish people, I also hated her because she was Polish.

-No, you’re not! – I answered startled -You’re from New Jersey.

-Yes, I am, both my parents are Polish.

I’m not sure if she said she was a second generation Polish.  I’ll have to ask her one of these days.

The thing is that she basically stopped me dead on my tracks.  All of a sudden I no longer hated Polish people, why would I?  I loved this teacher more than I was supposed to, so I needed to remedy that situation pronto.

I can’t remember what happened next at school, however I will never forget the lesson I learned that day.  Never, ever have I repeated that I hate anyone in fact.  People are different and that’s fine because we don’t live in a homogeneous world.

I’ve tried to teach my children that diversity is something to look forward too, not hide from.  We’ve suffered racism along the way and its okay because some things you can’t change, but you can do something about it.  Don’t let it get to you!

Some years ago, while I was attending a NSTA conference in St. Louis, my badge said Afghanistan instead of Anasco, PR.  It was a clerk’s mistake so I went back to ask her if she could correct it.   I heard this young woman that was next in line say to her friend,

-It’s the same thing.

Referring to both places in a tone of voice full of prejudice and so much more.  After my initial shock I chose to speak to her and address the issue, to which she answered that,

-It was a joke.

In the meantime I was called back by the clerk.  When she gave me my badge back she apologized not only for the mistake, but also for my colleague.  I left feeling pretty bad about the place I call home and for my brother that had come back after a 18 month deployment.  It didn’t seem like a joke to me.

Racism isn’t a pretty picture to those who are victims to it.

We have to make sure we not only look at ourselves carefully, but also at our children’s attitudes and help them take place in a world that is diverse in every way.

Life is much more than where you are from, or the color of your skin, or your heritage.  It’s about living the fullest and appreciating people for who they are.  So you see, “mis queridos amigos” life’s flavor is all about the variety we are able to find in it because that’s what life is all about.