Molly Davis's Blog, page 26
January 18, 2020
Word Of The Day: PRESENT
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
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To be present is to experience life in the here and now, which the only place life actually happens anyway. But sometimes we forget, and wander back into the past, or get swept away into the future, only to come back and find out that we’ve missed out on the real thing.
Photo by Daniel Kux on Pexels
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED 2.0
January 17, 2020
Word Of The Day: PLAYFUL
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
Life is more fun if you play games.Ronald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald
January 16, 2020
Word Of The Day: WONDER
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of the month. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
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WONDER I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.~Gerry Spence
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED 2.0
January 15, 2020
Word Of The Day: GRACE
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
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My grandson, Hollis, is practicing his letters. Currently he is captivated by a sort of coloring book that focuses on the big picture of such things—the uppercase letters of the alphabet. Each plastic-coated page is dedicated to a letter, and on that page there are 4 of the same uppercase letter in a row, all outlined with dashes. The task for little hands is to trace the letter with a washable marker that can be wiped off with a wet cloth, making it possible for the owner of those little hands to practice again. And again, and again, and again.
Grace is a lot like that.
It is a chance for us to wipe the slate clean and try it again. And again, and again, and again. It is also an opportunity for us to allow others to wipe their slates clean and try again too.
If there was one word, and one word only, for me to choose as a daily traveling companion, I think it would have to be this one. Life is nothing if not a maze of grace. Some days I seem to get it all right. I show up as the kind of person I aspire to be and bring what I have to offer to the day before me. Other days I get it so wrong it feels like I will never recover. Most days are a combo plate of the two.
Grace is the washable marker that traces the dashes that outline my days.
Again, and again, and again.
Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED 2.0
January 14, 2020
Word Of The Day: CONNECTED
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
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According to the New Oxford English Dictionary, a connection is the action of linking one thing to another. If that is so, then it seems first and foremost that it is important to know what to attach to what. Especially when it comes to crafting a meaningful life.
When launching my business, it took me awhile to come up with a concise statement that would capture both the philosophy behind, as well as the purpose of, my work as a writer, speaker, and coach. It also needed to be the guiding philosophy behind how I endeavor to live my own life. See if what I came up with connects for you like it did for me.
Connect who you are with how you live.
Photo by Joseph Kessler on Pexels.com
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
January 13, 2020
Word Of The Day: RESILIENT 2.0
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
Good writing, but a little too “self congratulatory” was my husband’s response after reading RESILIENT. In it I told the story of summiting and surviving an unexpected night on Mt. Adams. Tom is one of my most trusted feedback providers, and as such I work to listen with more curiosity than defensiveness. Always a growing edge for me.
This morning over coffee in the pre-dawn light, defensiveness won the first round. As a female, I was raised to keep my strengths, intelligence, and strong opinions under wraps. His comments about the tone of my post smacked of that early upbringing. He was told from his earliest years never to toot his own horn, and the tenor of my words sounded like boasting. Our morning heart-to-heart was a convergence of our early messaging. Curiosity eventually won the match, and our conversation evolved into all of the ways resilience can manifest in our lives, including the willingness to receive and reflect on feedback when it is of the more “constructive” nature.
Divorce, death of loved ones, financial hardship, broken trust, the loss of a job, unrealized dreams, failure in front of our peers, being passed over for a promotion, fighting injustice, crafting meaningful lives, taking on our own inner demons, fostering authentic relationships, strenuous exercise, living with debilitating health conditions, or the Seattle Seahawks losing a game they fought relentlessly to win. We are all daily surrounded with opportunities to practice being resilient. Some small, some large, and some that feel insurmountable. When we practice being resilient in the face of the small, the more equipped we are for the large, which is what readies us when faced with the seemingly insurmountable.
Onward.
(And for the recored, I am pretty damn proud of summiting and surviving an unexpected night on a mountain. Just sayin’)
Photo by Suliman Sallehi on Pexels.com
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
January 12, 2020
Word Of The Day: RESILIENT
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
RESILIENTStanding on the top of Mt. Adams, the 12,283 ft. high volcano we see out our window every day, the sense of accomplishment of having made it to the top was diminished by the overwhelming sense of how small I am in the bigger scheme of things. I am a tiny blip on the radar screen of the very long arc of time. I do however like to think that I’m a resilient blip.
We had arrived at the summit late in the afternoon, several hours after we should have been making our decent to pack up our tent and gear before continuing on down to our car at the trailhead. It was quickly obvious that we wouldn’t make it, and would have to spend another night on the mountain. Not the worst thing in the world to spend another night in our tent that we had left at our basecamp the night before.
When climbing up a mountain, it’s hard to lose your way as all trails converge at the top It’s a little trickier on the way back down. It is easy to get on the wrong ridge and miss your intended trail down. We obviously hadn’t paid close enough attention to our route on the way up, and as night fell it was clear that we were lost. The only option was to find a wind break and hunker down for the night. Choosing a flat spot ringed with a low stone wall erected by former climbers, we put on every piece of clothing we had, rested our heads on our packs, and pulled the space blanket (think tin foil) over us. Imagine trying to sleep in your driveway on a cold night and you get a pretty good idea of our predicament.
It was a long night.
For 7 hours I turned from one side to the other, only able to last about 10 minutes on a side before the ache in that shoulder and hip needed a rest. As cold and miserable as it was on the one hand, it was breathtakingly wondrous on the other. A chance to watch the Milky Way rotate in the sky, the fireworks of the Perseid meteor shower, and eventually the miracle of the sun touching the top of the mountain.
At first light we were up and out to find our way down. (We didn’t find our tent and gear, but that’s a whole other miraculous story to be explored another day.) By 4pm we were back home. After 36 hours with no sleep, a shower and a strong cup of coffee to go we were on our way to my brother’s 70th birthday celebration.
It’s no small thing to summit and survive an unexpected night on a mountain, just like it is no small thing to reach seventy years of age, having survived all the unexpected things that have happened along the way. Both call upon us to be resilient. To recover from difficult conditions and challenges. To spring back into shape after being bent by life’s storms. It is those same challenges, difficulties, and storms that create resilient souls. A willingness to get up and go at it, whatever it is, again, and again, and again.
Yes, we’d summited a mountain.
No, we hadn’t gotten any sleep.
Yes, we were tired.
And no, we weren’t about to miss that party.
To be resilient is both a practice and a choice. We were able to make our way to the top of the mountain because of the endurance and strength we’d trained so hard to develop. We weathered a night of aches and shivers by focusing on the miracles unfolding in the night sky above. We made it to the party because after making it back home, the option to crash for the night couldn’t compare to the chance to celebrate the life of someone we loved.
To be resilient is to remember what has brought us thus far. It is to call upon the best in ourselves in the face of the unexpected challenges, losses, and heartaches that life can throw at us. Which it has, and does, and will.
Onward.
Photo by Suliman Sallehi on Pexels.com
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED 2.0
January 11, 2020
Word Of The Day: WHOLEHEARTED
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
WHOLEHEARTEDOne of my core beliefs is that we are all called to live wholehearted lives. I aspire to live into that truth every day with varying degrees of success, and with sometimes slow but always steady progress. In my work, through speaking, writing and teaching, I invite others to aspire to the same.
It is a way of living that on the surface is hard to disagree with. I mean who would admit to wanting to live halfheartedly? And yet, what does it really mean to live with our whole heart? Our entire heart? All of it?
A friend recently reminded me of the truth found, but potentially overlooked, in the very title of David Whyte’s poem, Everything Is Waiting For You. The good news is that everything is waiting for us. The harder news is that everything is waiting for us. Everything. The good and the bad, the easy and the hard, the energizing and the exhausting, what we welcome and search for and what we dread and avoid. A whole heart has space for it all. (Hear David Whyte read Everything Is Waiting For You in his interview with Krista Tippett.)
In Autumn: A Season of Paradox, Parker Palmer, the educator, activist, and founder of The Center For Courage & Renewal puts it this way—“Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. The moment we say “yes” to both of them and join their paradoxical dance, the two conspire to make us healthy and whole.” To live wholeheartedly means to encounter and engage with the truth of our lives, the whole of which can only be found by welcoming the dark as much as the light.
There are no two ways about it. Living a wholehearted life is not for the faint of heart. It is the most challenging, and the most exhilarating, work we will ever do. It’s why we are here.
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
Word Of The Day: ENERGIZED 2.0
January 10, 2020
Word Of The Day: REPLENISHED
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
REPLENISHEDTo be replenished is to be refilled, to replace what has been used up, to be restored after having exhausted our inner resources. I know what replenished feels like, and as I discovered recently, what it does not.
One night not too long ago I found myself on the closet floor in tears, being spooned by Gracie-the-chocolate-labradoodle who refused to leave my side. I had hit the wall. It wasn’t a choice. I had used up all I had, and there simply wasn’t any more to give.
I spent the better part of the next day napping, and woke up the following morning no longer flattened against the wall. It would have been easy to just pick up life where I’d left off, thinking that I'd refilled my tank. That I was replenished.
I wasn’t.
Functional? Yes.
Replenished? No.
About that time my husband came down with the real-meal-deal flu, and was down for the long count. Basically sequestered for a week, it was no fun for him. He felt so lousy. For me however, those days under house arrest were a gift. His time to recover became mine to be replenished. To replace what had been used up.
Yesterday I wrote about being in rhythm with our lives. Being replenished is part of that rhythm. We are meant to give ourselves away, to go out into the world and return back home, to empty out and to fill back up. I know what my replenishment essentials are, and my guess is that you do too. It would be nice if we didn’t have to find ourselves on the closet floor in tears in order to remember what they are. Although being spooned by a chocolate labradoodle is pretty pretty great.
Photo: Aaron Burden on Pexels
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
January 9, 2020
Word Of The Day: RHYTHM
Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
RHYTHMWe are hardwired for rhythm.
From our earliest formation we are bathed in the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat. We arrive in a world where the sun rises and sets, the tide flows in and recedes, and our lungs fill and empty again and again and again.
Rhythm, however must not be confused with routine. Our morning cup of coffee, workout at the gym, regular bedtime, and always putting our car keys in the same place (purely aspirational example) can equip us to live in rhythm with our lives. But. They are not the rhythm.
To live in rhythm means to relinquish our grip on how things should be, and engage with them as they are.
To live in rhythm means to work for what matters, not against what doesn’t.
To live in rhythm is to be response to, not reactive against, the truth of our lives.
To live in rhythm is to go with the flow rather than swim against the tide.
Words To Hang Our 2020 Hats On
