Let’s get inside your head.  Your last assignment was to write a very colorful, highly detailed scenario around you displaying a selected behavior.  How often were you able to put yourself into that behavior? By the end of the week did this feel natural, or did you feel like an imposter or a poser and this wasn’t really you? Did you find yourself reflecting on the thought that this is really happening, and you are becoming “that” person you always wanted to be? 

Obviously, this is not a person-to-person conversation but the idea is to stimulate similar thoughts all the same. If you don’t like the answers to the questions I ask each week, or you think that you didn’t get value, learn, grow, didn’t take it seriously… then go back and redo the week. (You can also send me a message to the blog.) You will be better off, and further ahead, to take the time and invest in the introspection and personal mental effort at each step so that you make a deep, substantial and permanent transformation/reformation from each exercise.  This is not about just going through the motions. This isn’t a sports blog, influencer blog, fashion blog… where you check in, see what’s up and move on. If you don’t have the time to invest in yourself then you are doing yourself and all around you a disservice.  Mother, father, aunt, uncle, big brother or big sister… whoever you are, you have to be a priority to yourself. I get having to care for kids, provide… but your ability to serve others is directly impacted by how well you are serving yourself.  That doesn’t mean you can’t put others first, that you can’t serve others until you have unfilled needs… it means you can’t lose track of taking care of yourself and consistently deny yourself the personal development and personal care you need. That is what we are doing here.  Connecting with deep desires and seeing movement towards them is ultimately highly nutritional to your soul.   

This Week’s Talk

You can never go home again. Home isn’t the same and you are not the same. Here we see this coming true for Scrooge.  Scrooge’s sister comes to bring him home, but he doesn’t stay long. He and his sister are well aware that the house has changed, his father changed, his sister has changed, and Scrooge himself has changed. I get the sense that they moved on and he was edged out of being part of the family.  His sister cared for him, but Scrooge was not a collective part of the new family. “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” (Heraclitus)  What would have happened if Scrooge came home and was accepted there and had his family back to “normal”?  Hard to say but I would guess he may have not been so isolated and antisocial.  One thing is for certain, this issue of going home and then having to move out again was all part of his negative transformation into becoming the curmudgeonly Scrooge that the book opens with.   I moved away the day after HS graduation and noticed every time I came home, town wasn’t the same, new houses were built where we would fish, camp or play, and it just felt like the karma wasn’t the same. In my case, what changed more, the town or me, I can’t say.  Scrooge had to move on and so did I.  You?

This Week’s Assignment

For this week, look back over your life situation and ponder the concept of crossing the same river twice.  Find something in your life that has a past and a present. Reflect on how the river changed and how you have changed ? Have you physically changed by losing weight, getting exercise, taking on challenges…. How has whatever the situation that you are evaluating changed?  Do you care less about the issue? Have your values or priorities changed and now whatever this is, is less significant to you?  Has “progress” taken over and moved your situation to a different state just due to the passage of time?  Sometimes in relationships it helps to reflect and see that it is you that changed. You can then decide that if you want to go back to the way things were, stay where you are or even move to a new state of being?  It is ok to go backwards as long as this is something that is important to you and moves you to a state you want. If success is defined as the progressive realization of a worthy goal, then regardless if that goal means having to go back to how things were, that is still progress since it is moving you toward a goal.

See you next week…