This is one of the many conversations I have with a voice in my head.  Who or what the voice is, I have no clue.  All I know is that when it's feeling in the right mood (or I am in the right mood) it has some interesting things to say.  I am in plain text, the voice is in italics.

What useful things can you say tonight?

   Life is a phase, a process that is a smaller part of a larger whole or larger process.  So don't get too caught up in the apparent seriousness and critical nature of your circumstances, because in the long-run, nothing here on Earth is critical, or not more critical that failing a high school English test.

   Sure, you want to be a good person and do the best you can, but given the overall picture, it's one English test in the context of the whole of your Earthly life... not that big of a deal.

   What changes when you are able to take the whole of your existence with a grain of salt?

   One piece of change is that Unconditional Happiness becomes a true option for folks.  Humans can't be truly unconditionally happy if every event in their life is a crisis.

Death?

   Sure, you miss the person, but death is not a crisis, only a transition to a place that's much nicer than the limitations and strife that are the backbone of your Earthly life.

   An analogy... (Read more)

For most of us, there comes a time in our lives when we want to change everything.  Our house, our finances, our health, our relationships, everything! And we want to change them all right now!

   Being good little goal-setters, we set goals for each of these areas.  And they're great goals, measurable, achievable, and we have control over them.  We know they are excellent goals and we're all excited for a couple days.

   Then reality strikes.  And we discover that we can't change everything at once, because it's just too much.  Too much change, too much chaos, too much brain rewiring.

   So, let's go back to step one and let's lay down some ground rules.

#1 - People can handle only so much change at one time.

Granted, the amount of change a person can handle varies from person to person, but each person has their limits.  And it doesn't matter how strongly they claim they want to make all these changes, if the amount of change required is beyond their ability to  cope, then the changes won't happen.  End of story.  Either they will begin to sabotage one or more of the goals, or they'll just randomly forget about some, or they'll worry themselves literally sick and end up stuck in bed for days on end. 

   If this is you, then you need to suck it up, admit that you're human, and realistically determine how much change you, as an individual, can handle.

   Look for the signs that you're trying to change too much too quickly.  Your signs are unique to you, but a starting point is to look for common signs like unconscious sabotage and sickness, then as you pay attention, over time you can determine what your unique back-off signs are. (Read more)

   I'm sitting at Panera right now, trying to get up enough ambition to face the day. This morning, that's not an easy task, so maybe that makes today a good starting point for this website and blog... in one of those first-day-of-the-rest-of-my-life kinds of ways.

   Given that premise, that today is the beginning of the rest of my life, what does this starting point look like?

   Well, the answer to that question is what is making this day so hard to face. 

   In general, I'm very healthy, which I am extremely grateful for, but I stepped on the scale this morning and today is a new high for me.   Which I find very depressing, because it's not the measly 5 or 10 pounds extra that I see some women endlessly lamenting about or the monotonous complaints that they're now a size 4 instead of a size 2, which both leave me not the least bit sympathetic. No, today's scale reading makes me 80 pounds overweight, and that's not 80 pounds over me wearing a size 2, that's 80 pounds over me wearing a size 10 (what in the old days was a size 12, before they changed all the clothes labels to make the gullible feel better about themselves). And that number-- 80 pounds-- feels and sounds so large that it feels like an impossible task to lose it. (Read more)