Slowing myself down: Setting in motion the creative forces of the Universe

My niece Mary's dog, Jade, sleeping on our couch after playing hard with Luke

My day unexpectedly opened up on Monday, and I decided to take a ride to Middlebury VT, (a town we are thinking about moving to) just look around and get a feel for it. It was a fluke of a warm day here (almost 90 degrees) and the drive was like heaven. I arrived in town and started slowly driving up and down every street. I didn’t want to miss anything.

After about an hour, I started to get tense and tired. It was hot, and I was in an unfamiliar town (which has traffic…a thing I’m not used to!). I pulled over and took a deep breath and reminded myself that I would be guided and shown what I needed to see, if I could relax and get out of my head, and into my heart. I never used to be able to stop myself like this. The more wound-up or frustrated I felt, the more I would try to DO SOMETHING to change it. That usually ended up in an escalation of the chaotic feelings until things got worse; either I made some rash decision, or crashed from emotional exhaustion….a tiring way to live at any age, but the older I get, the more I feel the negative effects of out-of-control emotions.

When I get excited about something, I have a tendency to want to “make it happen” and I know the reason for this is that I temporarily forget that I’m not in this (thing called my life) alone, and think that if I don’t figure it out, it won’t happen. I think that I know how it should happen, and forget that I don’t really ever get to see the big picture….this is where faith comes in.

It is a thrilling thought, that the Spirit of Life wants me (wants us all) to have a big, abundant, happy, loving, fulfilling life experience, but I notice that on a pretty regular basis, I need to be reminded that faith in this spiritual Truth is the real door-opener.

After my short period of “remembering”, I slowly drove up a hill into a lovely residential area that turned out to be a dead-end. I was turning around, just as a man was walking out of his driveway. He smiled, and looked at me like he thought I might be lost and in need of help. I told him that we were hoping to move to Middlebury and he said, “I don’t think there is anything for sale, at the moment, in this neighborhood, but a really nice old colonial home in town, just came on the market a few days ago and I can give you directions. I hadn’t known about the house he mentioned.

I did a drive by and it was the nicest and most “perfect for us” looking place that I have seen so far. I wondered, as I got home later in the day, if I would have dove-tailed with that friendly, helpful man, if I had been all stressed out and rushing? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that our energies would have matched. My little time of slowing down actually moved things along so much faster because I was working with the energy of the Divine (which always has the big picture and never rushes!)

“There is a basic law that like attracts like. Negative thinking definitely attracts negative results. Conversely, if a person habitually thinks optimistically and hopefully, his positive thinking sets in motion creative forces – and success instead of eluding him, flows toward him.” Norman Vincent Peale

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The “what ifs”

The view from our vacation house!

I went to be Wed. night saying to myself (over and over like a mantra), “The perfect place for us will present itself and it will be even better than I can imagine. I am getting excited to see how this unfolds!”. I got up early Thursday morning, checked my emails to see if any of the house owners had gotten back to me (which they hadn’t yet), so I wrote my post, and just as I was leaving for my office, an email came in saying that one of the houses was available. The cost for the week was within our budget and everything seemed perfect. As the day unfolded, and emails and phone calls were going around between the owner, myself and Jack, and my sons, everyone agreed: this was the place.

24 hrs ago, I was going on faith. Keeping an open mind, and staying away from the negative “what ifs”. Have you ever noticed that  you rarely hear anyone say, “What if this place  (or situation, or job, or relationship) is magnificent? What if it is even better than I expected?, What if it exceeds all of my hopes?” So many times, people try to keep  expectations low to avoid disappointment. But isn’t living with low expectations a disappointing way to live in the meantime?

Give it a try this weekend. If you are worried about something (or someone), why not say, “What if this is all working out even better than I could imagine?”

“We tend to get what we expect“. Norman Vincent Peale

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My beautiful mother

My mother (far left) with her brothers, sisters and parents 55 years ago

My mother told me yesterday that right before my grandfather died, she entered his hospital room and he said to the nurse at his bedside, “This is my beautiful daughter.”  She smiled as she told me this and said, “I never told anyone this story before. It was the only time that my father ever said anything like that, so I guess that is why I remembered it.”

My grandparents were of the generation that did not compliment. They felt it would “go to your head” and make you haughty if you thought that you were OK. Life was a huge struggle for them. They believed that being hard, and pointing out all of the mistakes that their children were making, would prepare them for the harsh realities of the world….and it did. It prepared them to expect the world to be hard and harsh, to not believe in themselves, to expect life to be a constant struggle.

I see my mother trying so hard to drop these beliefs now. As I look at this photograph of her, I want to go back through time and hug her. Tell her how beautiful and capable and wonderful she is.

We’ve all heard that we have to learn from our mistakes, but I think it’s more important to learn from successes. If you learn only from your mistakes, you are inclined to learn only errors.  Norman Vincent Peale

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A big life

part of my "big life"!

We had a case of fleas last fall. This is no small thing with 6 cats and a big long-haired dog. It took about 3 months of combing them all, many times a day, and treating them to finally get rid of the fleas. What was interesting about that “time of the infestation” is it gave me a good long period to work on my attitude and my mind. As I combed them, I would say, “Everything is fine and these fleas will be gone soon” or something similarly calming (calming to me that is…the cats did not seem to care one way or the other!).

One day, after about 2 months, I thought I finally had it licked….then I found one on Ben. I remember calling out to Jack, “Oh no, I thought that …….” I stopped mid-sentence. I was making it into a crisis. He said, “What did you say Mary?” …..”Oh, nothing” I said back…took a deep breath and kept combing.

Sometimes I would hit periods of discouragement and think, “Why do we have all of these animals? I am so overwhelmed.” Then I would remember that many years ago, I  wrote out a prayer for a “big life” which would include lots of cats, dogs, friends, fun experiences, meaningful work, love, laughter….and I remembered too, the wonderful words of Norman Vincent Peale about “problems”. He would say to people who came into his office complaining, “Do you want to be with some people who have no problems? And he would take them to a graveyard and say here you go. These people do not have any problems to handle”.

I am including his words below. The language is obviously outdated but I still love the “man-sized problems” statement! It really makes me smile. I think he must have been a very funny man as well as wise…I don’t think he really meant to invite problems..I think he was poking fun a bit at our fear of having them…that we think there is something wrong if we have a dilemma/problem to solve, because he would also say that the bigger the “problem” the bigger the opportunity.

“Problems constitute a sign of life. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that the more problems you have, the more alive you are. The person who has, let us say, ten good old tough, man-sized problems is, on this basis, twice as alive as the poor, miserable, apathetic character who has only five problems. And if you have no problems at all, I warn you: You are in great jeopardy. You are on the way out and don’t know it. Perhaps what you had better do is immediately go to your room and shut the door and get down on your knees and pray to the Lord, “Lord, please; look don’t you trust me anymore? Give me some problems!” Norman Vincent Peale from his book, You Can if You Think You Can.

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