The Wide & Open World
When you’ve moved through a period of indecision and into clarity, it’s amazing how the world opens up for you. Maybe not in a physical sense, as in clouds parting and clear blue skies blaring down at you, but more in the inner sense. The chest opens, breathing becomes easier, and your heart just feels a tad bit lighter around the edges.
That’s what my world has been like today. As I near the end of this blogging experiment — only 40 posts to go after this one — I’m moved to think about all I have been through from the time I began. After a period of enduring a lot of negativity (it seemed to come from all directions at one point, especially the people I was hanging around with, or interfacing with in my daily life), I decided to try a year of looking for beauty. Simple on the surface, but harder than it looks.
Since then, a lot of the negative people have moved out of my life. I suppose like really does attract like. I move out of funky emotional states like those caused by these folks in the past easier, and with a lot less drama. And I still feel my feelings, from the high to the low and everywhere in between, with no lying, and no real need to lie about them.
Devotion to authenticity comes with its own pitfalls. Not everyone is going to be down for that kind of thing, after all. It tends to screw with their sense of entitlement to their own misery. But when the world opens up the way it’s opening for me now, that’s all the reward I need to keep going in this direction.
