Four Moving Parts of Life

I have been blessed to see fifty years of life. (I still get goosebumps saying that...!) And in the fifty years that I have been taking part in this beautifully painful, captivatingly mysterious process called living I have discovered that life is made up of a whole lot of moving parts. There's never a dull moment. Like it or not, something is coming. Something is jumping off. Because this blog would never end if I ventured into all of the moving parts that I believe life encompasses, for the sake of conversation and contemplative thought, I want to just lift four.

One, life is made up of what we did. Our past. We all have one. Some of us have a dark past. Some of us have a relatively boring past. Some of us are still stuck in the past. Nevertheless, there's the matter of what we did.

Two, life is made of up what we are doing. Our present. Today. Our here and now. Our breaths. Our conversations. Our relationships.

Three, life is made up of what we have to do. Our obligations. What's expected of us. The stuff that is required of us. Working. Parenting. Adulting.

And four, life is made up of what we would love to do. Our dreams. Our desires. Our fantasies. Our hopes. Our visions. Where we see our self down the road. What we'd "ideally" like our life to look like.

It has been my experience that of the four moving parts listed, most people tend to focus more on one and three while neglecting to give adequate attention to two and four. What do I mean? We can get so stuck in (the past) . . . what happened, how it happened, why it happened, who did it, and why they did it that we become completely unhappy, bitter or even depressed. We can also get so caught up in (what we have to do) . . . our obligations and the rat race thereof that we forget how to live, we forget the importance of pacing our self, we become beholding to everyone's expectations--and in the process we are miserable. We are burned out. We walk around with a chip on our should but not really knowing why.

May I suggest to you that (doing only what you want to do) . . . being present, appreciating your breaths, choosing to spend a day all by yourself, enjoying valuable conversations with people who care about you and people you care about is important. May I further suggest to you that (doing what you would love to do) making it a priority to see your dreams through, see your desires through, see your visions through is life giving and life enhancing. Research supports this. Your health care provider will corroborate this.

More than that, in case no one has told you lately, this, my friend is not a dress rehearsal. We were born. We live. We die. Somewhere between being born and dying is God's hope for us to LIVE. To live beyond our past. And to live beyond our obligations.

How do we live beyond our past and beyond our obligations? We decide to kick our life up a notch. We decide to start doing more of what we want to do. We decide to start doing more of what we'd love to do. You owe it to yourself. You are not getting out of life alive anyway, so you may as well dream big, risk responsibly, explore without inhibition, and love with your whole heart as often as you can. How about it?!