Growing up didn’t involve a lot of lectures for me. My mom gave me just enough structure that I knew where the boundaries were, but for the most part she said things like, “Listen to your insides. If it hurts…if you feel wrong…if they make you be someone else…” She gave me a good compass. What I didn’t know was how forcefully people would pressure me throughout my life to feel they way that they do—
to diet when they do
to overindulge when they do
to slack off, to stress out…you name it.
I thought I’d create a gentle space here. No challenges to create resolutions, no declarations that all of must do x, y, or z. Hopefully these are just words that stroke your spirit and offer courage to believe in yourself and your dreams. Maybe you’ll find that you want to seek out things that work for you. My wish for 2015 is that we all embrace what brings us hope and find the strength to discard that which doesn’t.
Cheers to personal peace.
“All we are not stares back at what we are.”
W.H. Auden
“Everybody’s got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but it’s the choices we make that define who we really are.”
Charles de Lint
“There is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others … Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”
Katherine Mansfield
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”
Norman Vincent Peale
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
André Gide
-Amanda
Tagged: Confidence, life
Perfect message for today. It is so hard to keep others’ needs and goals separate from ours. Sometimes we need lots of space to even see where one person’s needs end and ours begin.
Oh, Nina, “…see where one person’s needs end and ours begin.” I love that!
Ah, thank you.
Beautiful and wise words. Happy New Year!!
Happy new year to you too!
No resolutions, only hopes and goals. We ask the girls to do it too — without pressure, but just to imagine what you might want to create in the coming year. It means using the occasion for dreams and aspirations rather than proclamations and expectations. But you remind me to keep it that way.
Oh I love this, the genorosity of this. I often feel overwhelmed by all the resolutions and aspirations around me this time of year and get caught up in it like a net. Thanks for cutting me loose.