Window washing from the inside out

by tammy | Oct 29, 2013 | Blog, Life Lessons

Here is a blog I wrote for my Spring Cleaning series at Life in Pleasantville. Autumn can also signal changes with the return to school and holiday rituals, where do you see opportunities to clarify your life?

You know that amazing feeling when you put on a pair of freshly cleaned pair of eyeglasses or sunglasses? Life just looks so much better for a while, and you can’t believe how cloudy and blurry your vision was before you took the time to clean your glasses. Same thing with the windshield on the car, don’t you love it when you turn on the wipers and get a crystal clear view? Every once in a while that happens to our inner vision as well. We have a conversation with someone and all of a sudden we see them for who they really are, or we see the real intention behind an action. And the best feeling is when we get a clear view of who we really are and where we want to go.

Sometimes I bemoan the rain, the drab weather and all those April showers. Then I try to look at the bright side, I tell my kids the grass and flowers need the rain, it washes the winter salt from the roads and that it helps to melt away that last bit of snow that is sticking around the shady parts of the yard. If we look at rain metaphorically, it is a cleansing agent for so many things. It washes away the old to give life to the new. So what are the soul messages we can take away from April Showers?

The Do Over

Part of the message of spring is what I covered in last week’s post, about taking the cues of the season to apply change to your lifestyle. But there is more to spring than the change of the season, there is also a huge element of re-birth—a chance to start anew. If last summer some of the perennials in the garden didn’t take, or the grass was a little yellow, we get a brand new chance to make them thrive this year. The same applies to our lives. We can always use a Do Over in some areas of our life, be it relationships, family or careers. The challenge, I find, is giving our selves permission to try again. We all too often forgive others their trespasses way easier than we forgive ourselves of our own. But that’s part of being human, the learning and the growing. After all, being is a verb. We are always evolving. If we are blessed enough to wake-up in the morning, we are given the gift of a Do Over and can make our life’s garden thrive.

I can see clearly now

I am a firm believer that none of us can fix something, or do better in the do over, if we are blind to the truth of the situation. Unfortunately, in today’s world the truth can be hard to find. It’s not always from malice that the truth is fuzzy. We live in the information age where opinions are shared at light speed on mobile devices and media outlets everywhere. We are also surrounded by many well intentioned people who love to tell us what they think about our lives. Something as personal as deciding if and when to go back to work after having a baby can lead to everyone and their dog telling you what to do. And it has got to be a cosmic joke that all that advice is usually contradictory—my mother-in-law and my best-friend consistently have opposing views. It actually takes a concentrated effort to turn off all the noise of the world and find our authentic self and what we believe in our hearts to be our own truth. But when we do we find the magic. When we are able to look at ourselves from a place of acceptance and love, and when we make decisions from a place of personal truth we thrive better than any well-tended garden.

Your homework this week is to take a few moments to quiet your mind and connect to your authentic self and then look at your life’s direction. Take a look at your relationships and your career choice and your passions from a clean window. Ask yourself if you are making choices that are right for your higher self, for the greater good of others. If your choices are not the best choice then be gentle and compassionate with your human self and take Maya Angelou’s advice “When you know better, you do better.” If your choices are just right, give yourself a big hug and get out there and dance in the springtime rain!