Never Too Late
As we’re only drawing to a close the 2ndday of January (or for many of you, just beginning the 3rd), I’m trusting that the lustre of choosing to bring something nurturing or stimulating or creative into your life, as I encouraged in my New Year’s Eve post, has not yet worn off. And remember: it’s never too late to begin.
I find the thought of ‘bringing in’ new experiences or activities to our lives, and hopefully making them habit-worthy, simply tantalizing. I can’t wait to see and hear about how your new devotions play out in your perception and appreciation of your lives.
Discovering Doors to Our Future
It’s as if we’re opening a door to our future that we’ve barely even allowed ourselves to see before now. When we’ve looked in that direction other times, all we’ve seen is a wall because we needed to make ourselves perfect before giving ourselves permission to indulge in an urge to create something uniquely ours or engage in something that simply brings us joy.
And yes, even bringing in the opportunity to read more books is a creative endeavor. Because reading inspires us to live in so many more worlds than we realize could exist if we simply view our own experiences in our own finite bodies to be the limit of what is available to us.
The opportunity, though, to indulge in exploring an activity that has called to us, perhaps in a whisper for the first few years, but which has probably grown louder and more persistent as the years ticked by, can lead us places we might never, ever expect. And while the point of this new perspective is, essentially, to give ourselves permission to listen to our hearts, it can also lead to people outside of ourselves clamoring for more. Or to our passion saving the world. Or maybe even changing the course of history.
Early Choices Shouldn’t Define Us
In our youth-obsessed world, we often tell ourselves that we have to decide what we want to ‘be’ or ‘do’ with our lives by the time we’re 18. Some people are given leeway and permitted to explore who they are and what they want to ‘do’ in the world by taking a variety of courses in college.
I don’t know about you, but that was a myth for me (and I went to college a long damn time ago). You pretty much had to pick the area you wanted to get your degree in and were lucky if you got the chance to take a couple of electives in completely unrelated fields during your entire four (or so) years. Which makes me suspect that it’s even much more rare for young people attending college now to actually explore in that mythical, idealistic portrait painted of college life. It costs too much to lollygag around taking courses you will almost certainly see no tangible monetary benefit from taking.
I bring this up because I feel the vast majority of people walking around today were thrust far too early into making choices that influence everything about the rest of their lives. And they’re left wondering – even if only fleetingly, and ever so quietly to themselves – what it would feel like to immerse their fingers in paint and try to capture the beauty of that bluebird they saw perched on a fencepost along their walk.
As a result, we just deny, deny, deny. “I’m too old.” “It’s too late.” “I don’t know how.” “I have no time.” Oh, the excuses we mouth, each one of them killing our spirit a little bit more with each utterance.
Late Bloomers Are Real
Well, I want to hook you up to a very cool website that just might inspire you to keep up with whatever activity you decided to invite into your life this year.
The website is Later Bloomer, and is created by a friend of mine, Debra Eve. We met way back in 2014 at a writers’ conference in Taos, New Mexico.
I will let you explore her site and perhaps sign up to receive her weekly emails which always have something fascinating to teach me about the possibilities open to us simply by choosing to say yes to our passions instead of making excuses. Or feeling as if we missed the boat when we made life choices at 18 or 22. Or 30. Or…
Indeed, just today I received notification from Debra of a wonderful calendar she’s created for 2019 around the concept of ‘red letter days.’ Check it out.
This year is going to be different, you guys. I know it.
(T-1059)