Goal Boards, Kismet

There are certain things we all go through.  When I woke up this morning, I was fully expecting it to be another dreary wallowing in self-pity day.  Perhaps it would be just another day to take up the escapist mantel and continue with my current television addiction. Instead, today took a slight turn for the get up and go.  Inertia - it's something we all need but very few are able to sustain for any length of time.  I had been using the inertia from writing The Brothers and it had burnt out, and like a roller coaster, I needed more "clackety-clacketys" to get up another steep hill.  Without them, I was stuck, wallowing at the bottom.  It's been my temporary home for several months.  But today something changed.

Maybe it was the devotion book I started reading. Maybe it was the fact that I got out of the house for longer than the five minutes it takes to walk to the mail box and back or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer.  Maybe it was the fact I got to talk to a friend, just woman to woman, drinking warm comforting beverages and eating pastries.  It could have been all these things. All I know is that today two things happened.  One, my friend mentioned something that resonated with me which hasn't happened in a long, long time.  And two, I had a realization.  Let me first go back to what happened with my friend.

She talked about a book her mother lent her.  The book states that people learn ways to deal with things early in their lives and these reactions to stimuli become second nature.  However, it is possible to detach oneself from these reactions, observe them and change them if you would like.  It goes on to suggest that often times, learned reactions can take us further away from things we want.  For example, if you are afraid of failure, and you never try because you don't want to fail, you can also never succeed because you never tried. 

It reminded me of the goal board I have waiting to be hung on my wall, waiting to be re-vamped, re-imagined and regularly reviewed.  It also got me thinking about the person I have become, the changes in me over the last ten years.  I am not who I was when I was eighteen. I have morphed over and over again.  Some might even say I've been reincarnated, pulled apart and pieced back together in some strange surreal cubist version of myself. What do I want now? Have these things changed significantly since I last made my board? I know some things I got, and some I still need to work on, but are there other things I want more? Different? I need to spend some serious time considering this.

Most people don't know what they want.  You can't build inertia to go anywhere if you don't know where you want to go.  I feel like I've been flailing my arms around for a few months waiting for something to hit me, strike me, or make me cling to something when I should have been centering myself to listen to my heart of hearts for whatever it is that I want.  Smart one, Alexis.  Good job! You're a genius!  Instead, I went into one of my darker funks and freaked out the majority of the time when I wasn't watching some Netflix TV series or writing frantically (P.S. Still waiting for my book to come back from first look over.  I'll update you as changes occur.). 

After coffee, we came back to my house, played Scrabble, and then went for Chinese. After dinner, we got the customary fortune cookies and mine said I should linger over conversations because I would get good advice from them.  While I don't generally think that fortune cookies are the source of all wisdom in the universe, I do think that things in the world are used as instruments by outside forces, and that could be through a person, a song, a TV show, or a fortune cookie.  Good advice should always be heeded, even if it comes from an unexpected source. The fact that the fortune in the cookie seemed to echo the importance of what my friend said made me wonder.  Maybe it was just me getting myself off track.  Maybe I just needed some more people in my life to keep me working at the things I want, figuring out things, carving out my place in the world - all of it.

It seemed to be kismet.  Serendipity.  I had been looking for something to pull me back and there it was, a gentle nudge.  Thank GOD!

Just so you know, Divine Forces, you are super slow.  Don't you know I'm incredibly impatient? I totally needed this at least two months ago! Seriously?! Oy.