what’s important about where you stand NOW

Image of person’s face and shoulders bathed in glittery nightclub lights from Sarah Wolfe on Unsplash.

Where do you stand toward where you stand right now?

This is a bad idea: Focus on current conditions that are not to your liking—that need fixing, that bother you, that make your life feel like a grind, that stir up dread, that make you review history for what’s been wrong forever or what was lost, that pop you to a future with more of the same, etc, etc. (Follow that link if you want more on that.)

This is a very good idea: Find what you already like about where you stand now, what your life is like right now, what feeds you and supports you and lights you up right now.

These are bad and good ideas respectively not just in terms of determining how happy you are and how much you love or even appreciate your one wild and precious life. They also affect how and how quickly you get to where you’d prefer to be than where you find yourself right now.

Feeling bad as a misguided motivator
We don’t need to pathologize wanting change, wanting more, wanting things to be better. In fact, evolution and movement toward greater well-being are the way of this world, this Universe. That’s how it works. That will always be operative. We love taking things to the next level and improving on what we got to before.

But in some weird, wobbly moment in time, human beings got it in their heads (and taught that idea to younger ones, and wrote it into books and scripts and songs, so that we all started to treat it as fact) that when we focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing, what needs to be fixed and improved, things will go better.

Actually, when we focus on what feels bad to us, we feel bad. We cultivate dissatisfaction. We feel stuck and doubt our capacity to change things, or we notice factors that make change seem hard or complicated or unlikely. We lose track of what’s going well. We talk to others from that perspective and create vibes of complaining or criticism. It’s not pretty.

That focus on WRONG actually doesn’t motivate us to move forward and create more of what we want. We do keep trying to make this warped tactic work, though. If you’re noticing now that you feel pretty married to that idea, or you’re pretty sure it’s a focus you’d better hang on to (I mean, it’s been really well-rehearsed and -reinforced), you might simply ask yourself whether there might be other and better motivators for creating the change you want and bettering things that aren’t as you want them to be.

You don’t even need to locate and name the new motivators right away. Just open to the idea that kinder and more effective ones might actually exist, and they might serve you better.

Image of adult and baby gazing at each other in delight from Ben Iwara on Unsplash.

Here’s what I know will serve you better

• Appreciate where you are now (even if you think you got to better places in the past and you must be going backward—you’re not).
• Notice all that supports you here and now, all the time.
  
• Keep charting how far you’ve come, how much better you’re doing, how much you’ve grown.
• Be in love with small, inconsequential moments.
• Delight in every encounter with every face of God that comes before you (not just wide-awake babies and tail-wagging dogs and gregarious cats and children who tell you they love your blue hair).
• Taste and savor and appreciate food and drink that tastes amazing.
• Love drinking water and how easily it comes to you.
• Notice what others do, how they do show up, how they are trying, how they’ve changed over time.
• Linger with the thing that makes you laugh.
• Stop often to look around, to take in the trees and how their leaves shimmer in the breeze, to count the colors in the sky.
• Appreciate all the tools you have in your kitchen, in your shed, in your bathroom, in your electronic devices, in your personal-growth and good-adulting tool boxes.
• Use your tools and love that you get to use them, appreciate yourself for using them.
• Notice how easy you have it. You don’t have to do this guiltily in relation to how hard someone else has it. You don’t have to be grateful. As Mary Oliver said, You do not have to be good. (Game: did you notice I already quoted her above without calling it out? Give yourself gold stars if you did.)
• Play more games, give out more gold stars, give them to yourself.
• Thank people you work and live with for what they do that makes everything work, that makes it easier for you, that shows you new ways of doing things.
• Enjoy how mobile you are, however mobile you are, whatever your feet or car or bike or wheel chair or skateboard looks like, however old or worn any of those may be.
  
  

Image of young person with hands and face informed by awe from Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash.

Appreciate where you stand right now
This is now. This is here. This is where you are.

Notice what you like about this place. Notice how it serves you. Notice how much your needs are met. Notice that there’s laughter and beauty and functionality in every corner of the Universe, this one you’re in now included. Or as Abraham-Hicks says, there’s wanted and unwanted in every particle of the Universe—and they (A-H) constantly invite us to point toward or focus on the wanted.

From feeling good about where you are, you can feel better still. From there, you can see what else is possible. You’ll be open to the inspired idea coming in, and you’ll have the wherewithal to follow the mental spark with physical action.

From there, you’ve got enough of a good mood going and good energy stirring that you can notice one next simple thing to do to feel better better better, to like your life (job, relationship, home, kids, location, avocation) even more, to make this work a bit more smoothly, to help the dynamic ease with this person or that machine or this place. …

Image of cat luxuriating as human hand scratches under their chin from Yerlin Matu on Unsplash.

I am not asking you to do anything I’m not doing myself.

I live in the midwest right now, caring for my mom in the last phase of her life. I’m here until that’s no longer needed (unless I get different operating instructions as I go). I’ve believed I hate this part of the country, it’s landlocked and I love ocean, it’s conservative politically, it’s not the easiest place to be queer (Ithaca was that!), the topography is flat (boring). I could go on.

But I don’t. Every day I love the birds I see. I gaze at the sky and remember that I’ve seen similar skies over the ocean, and think about how the ocean could be RIGHT THERE. I find dogs who want to greet me like a best friend. I visit nearby parks that feel great to me, and where I see not only dogs but blue and green herons, where I saw my first indigo bunting and first bright red summer tanager (and I’ve seen them more than once), where big ole turtles hang out on logs and cool snakes sometimes slither across the path. I’ve found some lovely and queer-friendly coffee shops with adorable baristas who remind me of my kids. I have fun making my mom laugh every day and getting involved with her in the convivial drama of The Great British Baking Show. I do my work by zoom and love it every day, every individual and group session. I play with art supplies daily. I listen to things that feel enlivening and elucidating, often in Spanish. Every day, I love my life. And every day, I believe it’s getting better. And one day, as I’ve done before, I’ll be writing you from somewhere I actually prefer, somewhere tropical, maybe, where English isn’t the first language. I’m on my way, I’m in my becoming, and where I am now is just fine.

You’re on your way. You’re in your becoming. Where you are now is absolutely just fine. Love it, and love following any small thing you think of that would make things feel even better. That will INEVITABLY take you to larger such things.

(The earlier Mary Oliver quote was … your one wild and precious life. It’s from The Summer Day. Did you get gold stars?)

Love & blessings, Jaya