It has taken me until January 23 this year to distill this year up ahead down to one solitary word that I can use as my word of intention.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Intention, Christine Kane does a wonderful job of explaining it over at her place and I highly recommend that you go there for a better explanation than I am going to give you now.
The idea is that you pick a word that symbolizes a theme you are going to focus your goals and concentration on throughout the year and that through the process, your energies will move in that direction. “As a Man Thinketh, So is He” said the great thinker James Allen, and the concept of Intention works on that same principle.
I think the reason I was struggling with what it was I wanted to focus on is because I have been journeying down a long path for the last handful of years toward authenticity. Each year, I have been peeling off layer after layer of this shrinking onion, trying to find the core, only to discover another thinly veiled peel that needed to come away.
While on one hand, I can say that I honestly endeavour to be myself at all times, I can also honestly say, I don’t always know exactly who that self currently is. I think it has caused over the last few years a sense of growing confusion and a disorientation, a lack of balance in my being. I am an ever evolving being, caught in a tide of change, between parenthood and middle age, between being someones wife and someones daughter, someone else’s friend and someone else’s mother. And then the grandchildren come over and I have these moments of looking in the mirror and wondering when the clock ran away.
And always, always, I am a child of God, in my quiet times alone, it is easy to remember that I was put here to serve and to help and to grow and to learn and to….what?
To be REAL.
To feel. To live in the moment and be all of those things at the moment that each of them come along.
But hanging on to that realness is a challenge.
SO….my challenge for this year is to embrace the raging tide with grace and dignity. To acknowledge all of the different forces and roles and needs that are all REAL parts of who I currently am and find the boundaries and balance and structure that can make my life REAL and at the same time manageable.
Maybe this only makes sense to me. Maybe this is a light that has only gone off in a small corner of my mind. But it is having a huge impact.
I was listening to Christine Kane’s song and it hit me like a brick.
I deserve to live REAL.
Listen for yourself and you might see what I mean. Click on the link and scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the song.
Thank you Christine. “Here’s To How it Feel’s To Be Real”
