Day 48: What You Need

I don’t know about anyone else, but 2009 was not an ‘easy’ year. It required copious amounts of faith, patience, and surrender. It astounds me how easy those words are to type and to say, but how difficult they are to put into practice.

Sometimes Life Has Bigger Plans

Very little this year went according to plan. I am a firm believer in creating the life one wants, but as with all aspirations, there is a balance. Sometimes the universe has other plans, and sometimes those detours are what you need. If I had to assign one song for my 2009 it would be “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones. As many of you know the other part of the main chorus is “but if you try sometimes you might find, you get what you need.”

I make it a habit to reflect on each year before I begin another one. What did I learn? What were the highs and the lows? What do I want for next year? The old saying “hindsight is 20/20” bears truth for my 2009. I realize now that my intuition pointed me in the right direction every single time; I just never would have predicted some of the outcomes, lessons, or rewards.

Patience and Trust

The main reason I learned more about patience was because nothing was going ‘my way’. The more I worried, the more I tried to control, the more exhausted I became, which ultimately prompted me to let go of all that was no longer working. The ultimate irony is that I was using old ways to create new outcomes in my life.  Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I heard that quote for the first time this summer.

So why hang onto the old way of doing things? When I worry, I take away my power. Worry robs joy. Neale Donald Walsch describes joy as “life, expressing. The free flow of life energy…” If I had 6 months to live, would I spend my days worrying or would I spend them embracing and expressing my life? If I’m going to do this experiment well, I owe it to myself to let worry go, trusting that life will unfold, offering all that I need.