Sometimes we find ourselves in a new chapter in our lives and not sure how we ended up there. As I look around my life I can feel the same sort of feeling. Change is in the air, and with it, I wonder what new experiences will be blown my way. In some ways, change can make us all feel a little frightened or self-conscious. In other ways, change can be exciting and welcoming. I admit I tend to feel a little of both at times. As I dig deeper into myself and my school and professional work, I constantly feel as though I am trying to find a pause button in life to catch up. Does anyone else feel like that? Anyone looking for the pause button?
Now, I could say, unfortunately, there is no pause button, but I’m hesitant because is it really unfortunate? If we could pause our life, where would we pause it? Would it be sitting at a desk working it away, using that time to clean or pay bills and catch up on errands, or would you pause it at the moments that make your heart smile? I think many people can say all three of those they could pause their life for. I can’t help but think if we had a pause button like that, then wouldn’t that make those moments less special, time less valuable, and memories may not be so priceless anymore?
There are so many wonderful gems in life hidden in a sea of obstacles, but I have been learning that life is more than what we make of it, it’s how we handle it too. How do we handle change? How do we handle our time? How do we handle our insecurities? How do we handle the surprises life brings us? Are we controlling ourselves, or is life controlling us? I have heard that stress is the number one cause of so many health problems. The list seems to go on and on and on. When things change, or things don’t work out as we want them to, they do cause stress, but how we handle it can make a huge improvement in our life.
It gets hard sometimes as we begin to feel overwhelmed. Bills piling up, time slipping away, responsibilities calling our names everywhere we turn, so we are forced to ask, when does it stop? When is our time? When can we catch a breath? I think I have learned the answer to this recently. I think the answer is today. Today is when I catch my breath, today is when I choose my time, and today is when I am truly free. Why? Because I chose today. Today, I chose to love myself.
A close friend of mine told me, “Loving yourself, means knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.” If we can’t be honest about our feelings and overwhelming stress and insist on trying to ignore them and push through, how can we expect to not let the tower of self-doubt and stress collapse on us? No wonder the world is stressed! When was the last time you look in the mirror and loved, not liked, but loved who you saw there? Do you think if we loved ourselves, we would have less stress and be more prone to take better care of ourselves and our time? I think so…
We have all been through so much in our lives. Different trials yes, but trials just the same. We can all be prone to getting emotional or making mistakes, but we can also show love too. In one of my classes, we are studying Victorian Literature, and we had to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was so interesting to me the anxieties that the character Dr. Jekyll faced, wanting to free himself and separate all the bad or negative feelings inside him he worked so hard to repress, which resulted in becoming the very thing he hated and feared the most. It made me think, what would happen if we all ignored the bad in us? What if we spent years festering on all that suppressed stress, negative feelings, and tension? Would we succumb to Dr. Jekyll’s fate by becoming the worst of us? Or, what would happen if we decided to be honest about who we are for good and for bad and face it wanting to overcome and change ourselves to be better people? Maybe, just maybe we all have a shot then at being who we always wanted to be. We have the power to change ourselves for the better. We all look up to heroes, admiring them and telling stories about them to our children and how they overcame temptations and all kinds of things. Why can’t we?
Perhaps, change is in the air. A new chapter has begun, and with it, the world full of surprises at every turn. I realized I don’t want to pause life, I want to savor it the best way I can. This change, what will we make of it? How will we savor it? Who will we become along the way? What do you think?
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