Let He Who Is Perfect Cast The First Stone is a post from: Deliberate Legacies

Hmm this might be worth a read.  I mean, I could always use smart advice, if nothing else, so that I had good tidbits to pass on to my friends and family, some of which would be totally lost without my constant if-I-were-you opinions sound advice (whew… barely got that typed before the belly laughs erupted – trust me, I am in no position to be giving advice to anyone), and I tried to think of any smart advice I’d received lately but couldn’t so this was truly a timely article as my reserves were running low.

The advice came from Donna Brazile – author, political commentator, and veteran campaign strategist.  I didn’t know of her (I try to stay out of politics), but the picture of her seemed charming, and l really liked her hair cut, so I read on…

Be the buffalo. Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee nation, once told me how the cow runs away from the storm while the buffalo charges directly toward it – and gets through it quicker.  Whenever I’m confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment.  I become the buffalo. – Donna Brazile via LYBL, June 2010 page 38

Wow.  OK, that was good.  Be the buffalo, huh?  I’d like to pretend that I am a buffalo more often than I am a cow (OMGosh!  Did I just call myself a cow?? Although to be fair, neither a buffalo nor a cow is really all that attractive.) but lately I’d be lying to myself and you if I did.

This past year and a half has been one HUGE storm for us, and it feels like I start charging at the storm to get through it faster, but suddenly the storm changes direction and force and suddenly, like the cow, I am running away from it… or at the very least chasing after it but getting no where.

Every night, I go to bed determined that “tomorrow” I will be the buffalo… I will forge on, focusing on the problem and not the distractions (my favorite line so far from this season’s Leverage), seeking to fix the things that I can fix and leave the rest to God (although I reserve the right to explain to God what I think the fix should be…I am a buffalo, not a saint).

Each morning, I wake up and by about 9am, I’m done trying… I’ve become so overwhelmed with bills, collection calls, legal notices, children, pets, “work”, dinner plans, yard work, housework, etc. that I often times don’t know where to start – what to charge at – that I curl up in the fetal position (figuratively most of the time) all the while clicking my heels and chanting, “There’s no place like home!”   It should be noted that I do that more in an effort to comfort myself than to actually get transported back to Auntie Em.

Continuing on with the article….

Go help someone. My mother wasn’t a very patient woman.  If I complained about being lonely or bored, she’d tell me to go help someone, anyone.  To this day, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I look for a good deed to do.  But I keep in mind one thing…

Ask the turtle. I’m proud to call Gloria Steinam a friend, and this advice came from her.  While on a field trip in college with her geology class, she discovered a giant snapping turtle that had climbed out of the river, up a dirt path, right to the edge of a road.  Worried it would be run over, she wrestled the enormous reptile off the embankment and back down to the water.  At that moment, her professor walked up and asked what in the world she was doing.  With some pride, she told him.  He said that the turtle had probably spent months crawling up that long dirt path to safely lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road and that she had destroyed all that effort with her “rescue.”  Gloria tells this story to illustrate the most important lesson (political or otherwise) she ever learned:  Always ask the turtle.” – Donna Brazile via LYBL, June 2010 page 38

Two more good nuggets back to back.  I might be on “good advice” overdrive.  No, really, I do get these two points… helping others often makes me feel better about my own circumstances, if for no other reason than it takes the spotlight off of me and my issues and directs my focus onto something/someone else for a while, but before I rush out and help the first John or Jane Doe I see, I need to make sure they WANT my help otherwise I might be setting them back and making things even more frustrating for everyone.  It’s good advice to keep in mind and in practice.

What about you?  What good advice have you received lately?

Be the Buffalo and Ask the Turtle is a post from: Deliberate Legacies

Now, as I sit at my desk, reflecting on my son’s amazingness and our conversation, I keep thinking back to one part where he asked why a bad guy keeps on being a bad guy, and I said that sometimes it’s a choice they actively make – to do the wrong thing because it’s easier or serves only their needs, but that other times it’s because they don’t learn from their mistakes… they don’t grow.

Don’t just go through life – grow through life.  – Eric Butterworth

It’s often pretty easy to get caught up in the motions of going through life.  After college, the “wonders” of being an adult start to wear off (and for some of us, the wonders never existed).  Soon we are working 40 hours a week (or more), managing our bills and credit cards (often times not all that well), figuring out how to be in a relationship with another adult (and finding out that it’s harder than we thought AND that we aren’t necessarily all that and a bag of chips too as we had been led to believe), starting families, making major purchases like a car or a house, filing taxes (and graduating to something other than the 1040 EZ form), car maintenance, life insurance needs and retirement planning ,  meals, laundry… the list just grows and grows and at first you’re living for the weekend but soon you realize your weekends are full of responsibility too (mowing lawns, repairs, buying groceries, etc).  And before you know it, you’re just going through life on autopilot… or maybe it’s just me.

And don’t get me wrong, being on autopilot occasionally can be really nice.  For me, there are times when I just cannot stop thinking or worrying but switching myself to autopilot and cleaning the house allows my mind time to work through things without me analyzing the process along the way.

But going through life mostly on autopilot is not a good thing.  I think most of my early 20s was spent on autopilot, and I can tell you I made the same mistakes over and over again… Why?  Because I wasn’t growing with each lesson.  I wasn’t even aware that there was a lesson in most of the situations.   It’s easy to see things – the big picture – when you are on the outside looking in, but when you are smack –dab in the middle of the eye of the storm, it’s not always easy to see just how big and bad things are, where to go, or what to do.  I’d make one bad decision, realize at some point it was bad, perhaps get myself out of that situation only to rinse and repeat in one form or another… and I would be baffled as to why these things kept happening or why I couldn’t get ahead just once.  It wasn’t until I pulled myself out of the middle of the storm and started to do more than just go through life did I even begin to see the lesson that I needed to learn.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the lessons are only in the mistakes we make… because take it from me, they aren’t.   I cannot tell you the countless times something “good” has happened, and not only did I not “get” the lesson, there were many times when I actually took credit as being the reason that the good came about.  When I tried to replicate the situation and therefore achieve the good result, oddly enough, it didn’t work out the same as it had before, and I’d be disappointed, frustrated, and sometimes angry, but I didn’t see that once again perhaps I was missing the lesson the first time.

I wished I had kept a diary from my 20s or that I even kept one now – other than this blog and my Facebook status updates… I am really more of speaker than a writer – because I know that there are mistakes I am still repeating because I haven’t sat down and figured out what the lesson is and then made the appropriate course changes.  And now, I have a 4 year old son and a daughter due in March… and while I know they both will have to make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons, I’d like to think that many of my adventures and misadventures would be of benefit to them one day whether they asked my advice directly or read it in a letter.

Don’t just go through life – grow through life.  When I am 80 years old and some child comes to interview me (because you know all children get that assignment where they have to talk to an older person about what life was like or what wisdom they have to pass on), I want to experience that sweet smile many elderly get when they close their eyes and think back on their life and see the wondrous rings of growth like that found on a glorious redwood tree.

Are You Going or Growing? is a post from: Deliberate Legacies