WomenBloom's blog

I have always struggled with the concept of ‘surrender’.  It sounds so wimpy, doesn’t it?  I'm not about to surrender to anyone or anything.  I am a strong woman because I'm willing to fight it.

Maybe that's worth rethinking. 

Newsflash: It seems that life does what it is going to do regardless of whether I ‘surrender’ or not.  I’ve been looking for a different outcome now most of my life, oh I can fight and resist with the best of them.  But I’ve concluded that approach doesn’t work since I certainly haven’t noticed that my refusal to surrender changes anything.

Oh well, after 50 years of pushing back, no one can say I’m not persistent.
 
So here’s what I think it means...surrender really means accepting reality as it is, not fighting it.  Have you heard the saying, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”?  Life is full of pain, but I think surrender is what helps us avoid the suffering part.

I like to think I’m a rational person. A person who considers things carefully and tries to look at the facts as they are, not as I want them to be. Someone who believes in reason. So can anyone explain to me why I read my newspaper’s daily horoscope faithfully?

I do (sort of) believe in what the signs of the Zodiac tell me in a general way about personality types in the same way I do any other system that provides useful information about different psychological types. It’s pretty clear to me that I fit the description of a Sagittarius to a ‘T’ and no one would ever mistake me for a Taurus. But that’s about as far as I go with that.

But, I don’t believe in the daily horoscopes and certainly not those in the newspaper for heaven’s sake. So, can someone tell me WHY I read them every day??  I figure it’s those occasional days where the silly thing hits a nail square on the head that keeps me coming back for more. Obviously, you don’t have to believe they are divine revelation to get food for thought from them.

All of this week on WomenBloom we are having a conversation in the forums on a particularly woman-centered spirituality with Jan Lundy, speaker, spiritual director/mentor and author of Your Truest Self:  Embracing The Woman You Are Meant To Be.  Jan has distilled her many years of working with women in to 12 transformational truths.

Jan asked me which of the truths I found most challenging.  There were a couple but the one I probably struggle with most is ‘I trust the Divine timing of my own unfolding’.  Yikes, that is a toughie.  I have made strides in this over the last few years, but I still am impatient to have the answer.  And, when in great uncertainty or ambiguity, my inclination is to fix, fix, fix.  Even if I’m not sure what the wisest course is, I have a hard time not taking some kind of action to fix the situation.

I was talking with a girlfriend this weekend about a friend of hers with adult children they are still assisting financially.  Apparently, the adult children just bought an expensive new house that is seriously pushing the envelope of what they can afford (yes, in these days and times if you can believe it), the husband is in a low level position in a very cyclical, prone-to-layoffs industry, and the parents are helping with the tab of some things like child care.  In other words, they are playing with financial fire.

These are simple middle class people, not wealthy folks.  Nonetheless, I don’t think the parents feel burdened by this, but my friend and I were shaking our heads over it.

My fellow Balance blogger, Sue Cullen, and I are in the middle of running the midlife reinvention course we’re doing together.  It’s a great group of women and we are having a blast working with them.

Interestingly, there is a common theme emerging.  And, boy can I feel their pain.  As someone who feels as though they’ve been reinventing themselves for the last 10 or 12 years, I’m ready to be done.  Come ON!  This whole process shouldn’t be that hard.

Should it?

Well, actually, yes, usually it is.  I hate to break the news, but usually it takes a while to get a handle on what you want out of your job, or some other area of your life.  Sometimes, it can happen quickly, but I think that is the rare case.

Who hasn’t found themselves in a rut occasionally?  You know, that place where you begin to think you’ve woken up in Bill Murray’s movie Ground Hog Day?  That’s the story of a weatherman sent for the FOURTH year in a row to cover the appearance/non appearance of a ground hog who predicts whether winter will prevail for a few more weeks, or spring will bloom.  To his great dismay, Murray finds that he wakes up the next day, and the next, and the next to find himself reliving the same day over and over.

In a rut, every day seems to resemble the day before.  Same routine, same people, over and over.  You tell yourself you need to get out and do something different, shake up the routine, but somehow the longer you’ve been in the rut, the harder it becomes to break out of it.

I recently had an email exchange with Maggie Crane who has written a book called Amazing Grays:  A Woman’s Guide to Making The Next 50 The Best 50 (Regardless Of Your Hair Color!).  I enjoyed reading the book last summer and thought it had a lot of helpful information in it about everything from whether to go gray or not, to self-reflective questions aimed at helping women manage some of the transitions that tend to occur at midlife.

One question I had posed to her at the time was the question of how to come to terms with the possibility that I might be single for the rest of my life.  Last summer this was weighing heavily on my heart.  I was 50 and had been single for 14 years after being widowed at age 36.  After coming to terms with my husband’s death, I had embraced my single state and thoroughly enjoyed exploring who I was without a partner in the picture.  But somehow, I found myself really wanting someone special, but that guy was nowhere in sight.

Sometimes it’s hard to be patient.  You know how you want things to be, you’re working towards them and you know you’re slowly making progress, but you’re not there NOW.  I guess it’s the old journey vs. destination concept, it’s really the journey that holds the real nuggets of gold, not the destination. 

But it isn’t that easy to be patient, is it?

How many times have you done something that your intuition was telling you wasn’t a good idea?  Did it AND it certainly didn’t work out?  Boy, have I ever done the former a number of times.  After a few hard landings, in the past few years I’ve really learned to listen more closely.

But recently I’ve been hyper-aware of what that voice is telling me.  I think the time it’s most important to keep yourself open to your inner voice is when you’re at a crossroads of some kind, there is a big question on your mind.  When in a quandary about some major decision, I’ve learned that getting really clear on the question I need to be asking is indispensable.  The answers then have a spooky way of emerging.

I went to a weekend long seminar on the subject of wealth and the kind of mindset that creates it.  It was full of excellent information on how the wealthy tend to think about money versus how the rest of us think about it.  Boy did it explain some things about my own financial picture but that is another story.

One thing that really stuck however, was about doing more with less, or the concept of leverage.  One area it made me think of was that of time management.  I’m certain I’m not alone in wishing I could accomplish more while spending less time doing it.  And I thought of all the upsets, the things that don’t quite go as I want them to, and the distractions that intrude in a typical day.