I now love my life and the difference is . . .

. Not so long ago I was agitated, often feeling  overwhelmed, irritable and quarrelsome.  Things that happened around me could very easily do my head in and I often was all over the place with my thoughts, feelings and actions.  These days I feel quite different. I am a lot more at ease and I am so much happier.

Loving my life!

I certainly notice the difference when I look at the people around me and recognize my old self in them. 
I don’t see many of them oozing calm and happiness.   

Even in these days with all the bad news stories that are doing the rounds I feel wonderful, calm and happy. 
I keep on going adoring the place where we live and I absolutely love my life. It’s uncanny how I can hold these lovely feelings in the face of all this current recession talk for example. 
In the past that would have definitely got me going too, but not now.

I have been thinking about what it is that’s making me feel so good lately and is stopping me from listening to my fearsome thoughts.   
The word happy comes to mind, feeling positive could also do it, but I think peaceful fits perfectly with what is going on for me.

So I asked myself why does peaceful fit so well? It was then that I had trouble coming up with the entire answer. So I had a look in the dictionary to see how ‘the establishment’ describes peaceful and if indeed it describes how I feel.

And this is what it said;
“Undisturbed by strife, turmoil, or disagreement; tranquil. ”
Hmm so far so good. Undisturbed sure does go with what I said about feeling less irritable, agitated and quarrelsome and does fit with how I feel, I do feel undisturbed.

Then it goes on with;
“1. Peaceful, placid, serene, tranquil refer to what is characterized by lack of strife or agitation. Peaceful today is rarely applied to persons; it refers to situations, scenes, and activities free of disturbances or, occasionally, of warfare: a peaceful life.”
OMG, here it is, can you imagine that?
An official declaration that ’Peaceful today is rarely applied to persons;’
How sad is that, how far have we all traveled off course?
This is incredible especially when I think how having regained peace has made such a difference to my life!
 
Being peaceful, that living undisturbed by strife, turmoil, or disagreement, is so wonderful, that I think it is completely nuts not to be that way.

So it looks like I am an exception as it does apply to me.
You probably want to know what has made me so peaceful then.

One big thing is that I am less and less inclined to fight my circumstances.
I have learnt to look at ‘what is so’ about my life and when I don’t like what I see, I don’t go into a big upset about how life is unfair or how I am a failure and how this is going to ruin my life.
Instead I stop, take stock and then choose what to do about it or how to live with the given circumstances.

For example last week our second car’s head gasket blew up and it’s not worth repairing.
This was certainly not something I wanted to happen right now, I can tell you.
So instead of being all upset about it and stressed out because we live in a rural area, I took a look at what was so.

This is what I came up with. 
Luckily we have another car and all it means is that from now on John and myself need to communicate with each other about who needs the car and when.
The beauty of accepting the circumstance is that I no longer lose energy on creating unnecessary drama and this of course keeps me relaxed. 

Another big difference is that I now understand the concept of choosing.
By choosing, regrets disappear and our peacefulness remains intact and undisturbed.  
 
All this makes the difference and gives me inner peace so that I have energy to go on with all my adventures.
Peacefulness and adventures, who would have thought that these two go together.