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Rusty, our cat died this weekend.
She was the sweetest yet most verbal cat I’ve ever come across.
Because she had so much to say, she played a big role in our life.
She was very wise, our little cat.
She took life as it presented itself, she showed us how to relax and be peaceful; but above all else she knew a lot about love.
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 Rusty, a balm for wounded hearts. |
That was very clever of her because if you don’t have love, no matter what else there is, it will never be enough.
This makes having a wounded heart a serious matter indeed.
To never feel satisfied, to never feel you have received enough because your wounded heart is not up to dealing with love, is a nasty life sentence in my book.
Isn’t it true that above all else we want love?
Isn’t it love that colors our world, what makes it beautiful, what has us to whistle while we work, what unearths our brilliance, our talents and our beauty?
Isn’t it love that has us live a life WE choose and has us pursue all we possibly can?
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Follow your heart, create your dreams, go for it, you can do it!
Such a great message, such a wonderful promise. These messages should get me excited, shouldn’t they?
They should have me racing off into the direction of my dreams, shouldn’t they?
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 Making a heart on Bethells beach while my heart sings. |
Did they and was I on my way?
No, I did NOT race off and no, I was NOT excited!
Even when I got as far as the start line, I had no idea what direction to race off into.
I hate to admit it, but for most of my life I couldn’t find my dream, my purpose in life and I could NOT race off powerfully mowing down every obstacle on the way.
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Gloria Steinem once eluded to the fact that “Any woman who chooses to live like a full conscious human being, looking beyond what is currently so, will need her sisterhood to keep her on track.”
So true.
I too believe that everybody who wants to tackle becoming a fully conscious human being, needs support, big time.
How come? |
 Wilma and Ann-Marie, and yes we are working! The WomenLikeMe way of course! |
Because the status quo and your familiar patterns will worry and wonder where you are off to, when you go for full human beingness.
They have no idea what you are doing and thus will reel you back in when they think you venture out too far.
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As always there is a bit more to the story of 10,000 hours than we think.
How come the Beatles and Bill Gates could stick to doing what they were doing and avoid the trap we normal mortals seem to fall into most of the time?
I am talking about the trap of stopping just 2 inches from gold, of giving up before we hit the jackpot.
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 John and I on our way to striking gold here and loving every minute of it. |
There is no doubt we are all doing things, we are all striving for something.
But how come they kept going until they made it and we don’t.
Let me begin with a story.
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Blogging scared me and being in business frightened the heck out of me even more.
And what about all these current new paradigms that are promising everything I absolutely love but which I find so hellishly hard to understand and practice.
So you can imagine that reading about putting in 10,000 hours practice to master these difficult paradigms and these things that scare me, didn’t do my insecurities any good. Not one bit. |
 Women like me, whom I met on my way to my 10.000 hours |
It left me with the question ‘Where am I at with my 10,000 hours in my quest for living life wholesomely different doing all these new things?
I’ve only just started, so how long will it be before I can see the results and more importantly how do I know I’m on the right track and doing the right thing for me?
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How do you reconcile two great books which seem to say two totally opposite things?
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proves his explanation that the Beatles and Bill Gates’ fame and fortune was a result of at least 10,000 hours practice. And at the same time Tim Ferris promotes success in life with his book entitled the ‘4 hour work’ week?
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 Could I get my 10.000 hours in this way? I wish. |
So if 10,000 hours breaks down into 5 years at 40 hours work per week then a 4 hour work week would equate to 50 years AND . . .
Bill Gates and The Beatles would never have made it until they reached their sixties.
How does that compute?
In the beginning it didn’t.
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I love Malcolm Gladwell and his book ‘Outliers’.
It all started with reading the investigations into why the Korean pilots crashed so many planes.
You can imagine that they wanted to know . . .
It was the black box AND a linguist that solved the mystery in a most unexpected way.
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 No crash here in NZ and I now know why it is not likely to happen either! |
This story gave me an insight into an unusual connection.
That is why his book so beautifully compliments my quest for questions.
You see, Malcolm obviously loves to enquire too and I am excited when I read what he comes up with.
“The premise of Outliers is to have us think about the world differently and by digging down deeper to come up with another set of explanations that can have a profound effect on how we see and do things.
The bonus here is that different sets of explanations give us a wider understanding about what is happening to us. This gives us the knowing that the future can be better than the present and we have the power to make it so.
That’s such an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.”
Hearing him say this is music to my ears!
I too am absolutely fascinated by finding new explanations that can make such a difference.
So what was it in the story in Outliers about Korean plane crashes that blew me away and showed me the extent of how this explanation can make to difference to us women.
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I am fascinated by thoughts.
Sure why wouldn’t I be; they can make or break my world.
If people keep saying that it’s their thoughts that determine how they feel then I’d better pay close attention here.
Keeping an eye on their contribution to me, so to speak.
Humm, so what IS the contribution level of my thoughts, overall that is?
Since I’ve been paying attention to them I must say that I am NOT impressed. |
 Bullying water, or just the tide coming in fast. |
I particularly noticed that I have a lot of nasty thoughts about me popping up in my head.
They come out of nowhere, uninvited, making a lot of noise and they certainly do not contribute very much.
Instead they do the opposite; they disturb, they distract and they deceive.
They are like bullies; unpleasant and uncomfortable.
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For most of my life I handled major events in a very casual manner.
As a consequence I rarely look back on these major events as a fantastic memory.
And of course, now I have regrets.
If I’d known back then just how crucial completions and celebrations were, I would not have thrown rituals and ceremonies out with the bathwater.
But I did, as they reminded me too much of religion.
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 I am so pleased we insisted on doing the birthday cake ritual in Vietnam, my daughter and me. |
If only I would have embraced ceremonies and rituals earlier in life, I am sure that I would have enjoyed my wedding day a whole lot more. Instead I wished it to be over quickly.
All the attention embarrassed me and I had no idea how to fully make the most of this experience.
I would have allowed myself to experience the births of my daughters in a totally different way. I kept it all very low key and I missed out on celebrating the wonder of it all.
I could have had said a proper goodbye to my mum when she was dying. My visit to her would have been full of wonderful moments to treasure. Instead I pretended nothing was going on and I never said how much I loved her.
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Appearances, appearances, they can be so deceiving. Don’t let your life only be guided by what you see.
Wallace D Wattles, the man I’ve quoted before, is very keen on this.
He is adamant that you should not be distracted by what you see.
As you can tell by now, I love this man’s thinking and if you can get this, it is a very powerful way to live your life. |
 Riding the tides. Gathering tuatuas at low tide. |
I understand it like this.
Life happens, it goes up and it goes down, it has good times and bad times however we normally spend a lot of our lives being stuck, very stuck or living in fear by only concentrating on the bad and down times.
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There I was on Sunday, happily pottering around in the kitchen of my Garden of Eden.
I was finding a way to deal with the abundance of figs, so I was experimenting. I’d cooked them in lots of ways and this Sunday I tried drying them.
I was excited and so looking forward to using the figs for dinner along with the veggies and potatoes I’d gathered from our garden.
I was happy, life was good. |
 After the figs I happily made dinner, once the thoughts got home. |
Once I had put the figs in the oven to dry, I went outside to see where John was hanging out. I love going outside these days.
One of the things about living here is the peace and quiet.
We live on a dirt road and with the main highway only a stones throw away hardly any traffic comes down our road.
But when I got outside, I had to do a double take.
Right in front of my eyes was a steady stream of cars driving up and down, on my road!
Being a rural know it all, I immediately knew what this traffic meant.
A closed highway due to a serious, fatal crash in which at least one person would have died.
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Are you able to grab worthwhile opportunities with both hands and run with them or do you detect resistance to go for it?
Do you see possibilities that could add tremendous value to your life or are you blind to them? |
 Wilma seeing possibilities and grabbing opportunities; John painting the new kitchen.
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In 2008 I declared that I wanted to eat flowers, after discovering the value of good, fresh real food and seeing that I no longer needed to live in the city.
Since I was young I loved nature, but growing up in a city I very seldom had a chance to be in it. My move to New Zealand was because of its greenness, but unfortunately I ended up living in a city.
But now my time had come. My daughters were doing their own thing, our business moved to online learning and here it was.
A possibility and an opportunity to finally live in nature and grow my own food!
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