Embrace

I find that the only way I can change anything in my life is to first embrace it.  I have to think about, examine it, poke it with a stick a few times, and accept that it exists.  Until I embrace my situation and fully feel and understand it, I can't really start to change it.  It doesn't matter if the thing I want  to change is big like weight loss or starting a new chapter in life or something small and mundane like cleaning my desk. I have to do the survey first.

By embracing what is, we give ourselves permission, emotionally, physically, and mentally to deal with the whole situation, not just part of it. We get an opportunity to understand how things, ideas, situations, and people influence our behavior,

Take my desk for instance,  It's in my bedroom, and because I can't close the doors on it currently, the light from the monitor is keeping me up at night. It's messy, and has been for a while. There are papers, a fossil, a candle, some cords, a hammer, a pair of glasses, and some hair accessories mixed in among the pens and keyboard and office supplies.  Looking a the papers gives me a sense of when my desk started to have an issue. I was busy and just tossed the stack down on the desk, intending to deal with it later. That was three weeks ago.  The hair accessories tend to accumulate because I pull them out of my hair when I'm stressed and then put them back in my hair when it gets messy.  The cords are leftover from my husband trying to backup the data on my phone before it died for good, and most of the rest of the stuff is from taking things away from kids, picking stuff up off the floor, or rearranging the rest of the furniture in the room.

I can learn from this mess. I need to start putting things away rather than procrastinating.  That is something I've been working on for years, and while I am improving, I slip up when I get stressed or too busy.  Taking a deep breath, taking care of one task at time, and setting some boundaries for what gets tossed here will help me. I also need to make an effort to make sure the desk can be closed at night. Sleep is important to my health and sanity.  I also need to not start projects that I can't finish in a timely period when I know I don't have time for them. Now that I have embraced my mess, examined it, come to understand it, I can deal with it and the circumstances that led to it.

Embrace your situation, yourself, and your life. Whatever situation you find yourself in, big or small, if you can understand it, you can change it. Give yourself permission to really look at it for what it is, and ask yourself how you got there, why you stay, and start looking for ways to change whatever isn't working for you or is impeding your happiness.  Embracing doesn't require you to hold onto things forever, it just asks that you do it for long enough to understand, to connect, and to process the situations and circumstances you find yourself in. Once you've done that, you can move on to some other aspect of changing your life.