Wilma on Our out-of-integrity world

Family Dinner in Holland.

This week’s post ‘Me and my out-of-integrity family members’ touched on a couple of sacred cows; integrity and families.
However it was more than that, it was a post where I declared one of the ultimate examples of  ’The Emperor with no clothes’.
I said; “We live in society that is mostly out-of-integrity most of the time and nobody makes a big deal about it or notices how it complicates life. Dealing with out-of-integrity behavior is draining us and is giving us grief big time.”

I chose the example of me and my daughter because we women if we do not have daughters of our own at least we are all daughters with family dynamics to negotiate our way through.  Sure enough your comments reflected how you could see my example in your own lives.
The most common emotion it brought up was ‘frustrated’ though stronger words such as ‘infuriating’ were thrown around. Frustration is certainly an indicator that things are getting complicated.

Me and out-of-integrity family.

My daughter's first taste of a snowy Holland.

I am proud of myself. I am resembling more and more the woman I desire to be.
A woman who can lead a family, a woman who gracefully yet purposefully handles life and the humans in it.

Let’s face it, that is what most of us want to achieve isn’t it? 
Getting out of a muddle concerning our loved ones and how to organize our lives.

Being in-integrity plays a big part in achieving that and I am chuffed that I recently passed an integrity test with flying colors while dealing with a very out-of-integrity family member, my own daughter.

Now I am not picking on my daughter here, all people are out-of-integrity and family members are no exception.
In fact the whole world consistently slides into out-of-integrity most of the time and nobody makes a big deal about  it or notices how it complicates life.

Part 2. Making requests, an underestimated skill.

Ann-Marie, George mentioned in last week's post as the master of requests, guide dog Georgie and Wilma.

Writing about making requests has proven hard and really shows me I am severely lacking in this skill.

Last week’s post took me several attempts and this one has taken a long time too.

To be honest, I wish I had kept my mouth shut about making requests. All they do is confuse me and just writing about them makes me cranky.
I know that solving this request issue is valuable as I do see that I need this skill if I want to spread my wings and yet my aversion to tackle this issue is huge.

Requests for me are big scary beasts.

After all my aborted attempts to write sensibly about this topic, I have now decided to let all my emotional stuff around requests simmer for a while to see if I can unravel this issue one small step at the time. So this time I am going for a semantic approach.  

Part 1. Hate making requests? You’d better get over it. They are key to having you fly.

A clear request.

This little baby bird in its nest beside our front door is totally dependant on others for her survival and she knows it. There is no doubt about that when you see this beak and its clear request for food!
She goes for it, no hesitation.

When MY survival is at stake, I am no different from that baby bird.
When I really need to, I can make those requests too.
Thank goodness I have not been in many desperate situations; however in the few times that I have had my back up against the wall, I was very capable of making requests.
When push came to shove, believe you me I asked. I asked for things I never imagined I could ever ask for.

BUT … and this is the killer, as soon as the crisis was over I would immediately forgo my ability to make requests. I’d return as quickly as I could to my independence and I’d try to forget the instance as fast as I possibly could.

In my judgment, having to ask is horrible, horrible, horrible.
I HATE it!
I cringe when I think back on those times when I was dependant on others, I cringe about how helpless and powerless I felt.
And I vouch never to go there again, not if I can help it.

Thus requests have had an unjustifiably negative reputation in my book.
And it could have been so different.
Instead I could have looked back on those times that I needed to make requests, with gratitude and joy. I could have looked at the fact that my requests were indeed granted and that there were people who granted them so lovingly.
I never realized that requests are a superb safety net and are a tremendous way of accessing resources that could make my life amazing beyond belief.

My daughter and I on ‘why should you?’.

I am back. Thanks to all the encouragement and preparations to make the heart strong, my daughter and I had an absolutely super time together. Even the weather played along, we just had sunny days, all four of them! Yes, I did get the delighted shrieks when she saw the food and no, we did not go to a hotel in the end. She chose to stay in her flat and I honored that. She was sick of the city and being cooped up inside working those long days, so she requested a lot of walking just to be outside.

Our wonderful time together, resting at the beach.

So walking and staying away from the city we did.
In hindsight it was actually great to stay where she lived because that gave me, as her mother, a peek into this side of her life. As a proud mother I am very pleased to say that she had her small room beautifully organized. She used very clever storage systems and her whole set up worked a treat. It all looked very neat, workable, clean and tidy.
But the communal area outside her room was a totally different experience altogether.

Forget unfair and luck, integrity is what counts.

‘By living from integrity, you align yourself with the way the Universe works. When you live out of integrity you get unreliable results. You might think the world is unfair and picks on you, which it does not.’ (WomenLikeMe on Integrity) The unfair, random acts we think we receive from the Universe are generated by our own randomness around being in and out-of-integrity. Ouch. Being in- and out-of integrity guides our doing.

Sitting and enjoying the sun while being fully in integrity. John is getting the drinks

It ultimately  determines whether we end up working with the laws of the Universe and getting wholesome results or working against the laws and achieving randomness.
So what is this integrity that is so important to have the Universe effectively and pro-actively on our side and us being a reliable partner it can work with?

What happened to my Integrity?

I thought I knew what Integrity was. I thought I was ‘au fait’ with the subject. Boy was I mistaken, big time. Recently I realized that I grew up in a family that wasn’t big on integrity. I’m not ear bashing my folks here instead I’ve observed that all families have integrity issues, whether they be visible or invisible.

Dealing with my unanswered e-mails

For our family it was okay to borrow things and not return them for an eternity.
It was okay for us kids to blame each other in order to get our own way.
It was acceptable to use my mother as an excuse for being late for school or not having our homework done. “Just tell Mrs. Keane that you were helping me and it was MY fault” my mother would say.
Of course she thought she was helping us out and even though it did come from a place of love and protection, it did not bode well when the time came for me to venture out into the big wide world for myself.
I got a rude awakening; not everyone operated at the same level when it came to integrity.