Ok so I couldn't for the life of me sleep today, my body was protesting too much... So I started counting up in my mind all the beautiful things in life that bring with them happiness, and it sort of turned into this.....
Frosted white windows and snowballs in winter
Freckles on noses all scrunched up in giggles
Wellington boots crunching crisp leaves of gold
These are a few of my favourite things
Dewdrops in meadows, magnificent forests
Friends who are soul mates, and carpets of bluebells
Brown paper packages tied up with string
These are a few of my favourite things.
Soft scents of jasmine and lilacs and roses
Great sprawling oak trees & tiny pink daisies
Freshly mown grass and the babbling of brooks
These are a few of my favourite things
Black and white photos and gorgeous high heels
Mountains and rivers and bees gently busy
Rainbows on waterfalls, shell covered beach
These are a few of my favourite things
Ice cream with pretzels, and faithful white westies
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favourite things
When the pain bites
Prejudice strikes
When I'm lonely or sad
I simply remember my favourite things,
And then I don't feel so bad!
We each have the power to choose how to view our lives, what to place the most importance on, whether we want to be happy or not.
It's more of a fight for some of us than others, perhaps, to choose happiness for our lives - but no matter how hard, it has more importance than almost anything we could do for ourselves and for those around us. I wonder how much better life could be for each of us if we chose to focus on the good (however small those things may be, especially for those of us living within four walls!) rather than the bad. How much better this world could be if more people could only learn to live that way.
Happiness doesn't always just happen. Sometimes we have to actively choose it, fight for it ... choose to see the beauty around us, and keep choosing it every single day, no matter how hard it sometimes gets!
"Dwell in Possibility..."
Emily Dickinson
I'd love to hear your reply and I know it'll be valued by other readers too! I always try to respond, please just be aware that it can take me some time to find the energy to do so as I've been particularly ill recently and struggling to get online. Thanks for reading! :)
A few nights ago, my carer and I watched the movie 'Another Earth'. There's a scene in the movie that's stayed with me since. One of the main characters is telling a story to the other main character, who is in a great deal of pain in more ways than just the physical. (clip embedded below but I'll give a text version for those who can't view the video.)
The story is of a cosmonaut who is all alone in his space capsule, looking down at the curvature of the Earth, and is lost in that beautiful moment. But then a tap, tap, tap starts somewhere inside the capsule. He tries to stop it but cannot. Days go by, like torture, and he now knows that this repetitive sound would break him. Would drive him crazy before he will reach his destination.
She begins to tap on the table with a spoon, comparing her tapping to that inside the cosmonaut's capsule. The cosmonaut realised that his only chance is to fall in love with the sound. To, rather than let the repetitive tap be annoying, instead perceive it as music. So he shuts his eyes, goes into his imagination. Then he opens them, and he doesn't hear tapping anymore. He hears music! And throughout the rest of his journey, he floats through space in total peace and bliss!
I was watching this and wondering how much it could be applied to the things that pull us down, causing us pain, illness, & other struggles. Is it possible that we could make music and beauty from our pain? Could we, somehow, turn a switch in our brains that helps us to see things a different way?? Not a healing, because who can stop a storm in it's path? (excepting God) More ... to still be living with all the same pain we were only moments before - but to see it and feel it.... experience it differently, somehow?
I don't yet know the answer ... but I suspect that I would rather like to find out! I haven't been in a good place physically or emotionally recently. I want to climb out of it but it just seems impossible right now. I wish I could find a way to make it feel.... just not quite this bad, you know? To find comfort and rest within the turmoil of a storm of pain. To give myself an eye in that storm to wait it out for however long it lasts? Right now I feel like I'm living in the middle of a huge despair tornado, so I really would love for this to be possible! I do believe the brain, especially when combined with hope, is an amazing thing, capable of so much more than we know. Maybe it is possible to find a way to change our perception or our perspective! After all ... if you're on the inside of the storm pictured above, it would seem ugly and violent in the extreme, not to mention completely unforgiving. From above, though, in space, it's breathtakingly beautiful!!!
Oooh! Didn't I just get all meta-physical on you!! ;)
I'd love to hear your reply and I know it'll be valued by other readers too! I always try to respond, please just be aware that it can take me some time to find the energy to do so as I've been particularly ill recently and struggling to get online. Thanks for reading! :)
I was browsing the net yesterday and noticed one of those ad's for some kind of photo enhancing software, where there was a photo of a woman before and after they had manipulated the image. God it made me sad ... and so angry! In the first photo, the woman was beautiful and natural - and they'd taken that image and taken away everything that made her, her - turning the whole thing into something completely unattainable (they even removed her freckles!!), and quite honestly, nowhere near as beautiful.
What kind of a world do we live in when we're teaching our kids, not to mention ourselves, that they can never be beautiful??!!?? Where we believe that the photo's on the front of Elle or Vogue are real - that the models in the images actually look that way in real life. It teaches people lies. It teaches us (guys, not just girls!) to hate our own bodies!!
And it's not just the media to blame either. People are cruel to each other, from childhood right the way up to old age. Kids are teased, bullied, & abused at school (and even at home!) for being overweight, 'ugly', for not having the right clothes - for being different in any way, basically. Tiny kids as young as 5 or 6 are getting eating disorders because they believe people see them as fat, ugly, & disgusting - and they go on to be cruel to themselves, repeating all that same rubbish within their own minds, over and over again, for years - sometimes for a lifetime!
I've had body image issues, along with self esteem issues in general, since I was in infant school - that's kindergarten for you American's. I'm 34 now, and I still hate my body, my face, my weight, myself!!! I still don't know if what I see in the mirror is what I really look like! Schoolyard bullying started the whole thing off. For me, I was different purely because my family were Christians. I was isolated, degraded, and punished because I wasn't like the others. I was bullied in FIVE different schools, right up until age 18 - and every single one of those bullies used taunts about my physical image as an arrow straight to my heart.
And guess what? I went on, only around 4 years later, to marry a man who didn't know how to love me, and who repeated over and again all those messages the bullies at school had sent my way - only more severely, more violently - & with an even more damaging result. I didn't even realise for a long time that the things he was doing and saying to me weren't ok, because I'd spent almost my entire life being treated like that!
This man, my husband, the man who I loved and who I thought loved me, encouraged me to take laxatives so I'd lose weight; & he often refused to have sex with me without my being hidden under a sheet, with the lights out ... and it made me feel such deep, traumatic shame about myself - I can't even describe it to you. I hated myself!! And you know, I wasn't that fat, or that 'ugly'. I had some nice features, actually. I can look back now and say, ok I wasn't a beauty queen, but I wasn't that bad - and I made a lot of effort for him - but nothing was ever enough. Because the issue wasn't with me - it was with him
I think back to that time in my life now, and I think my view of myself was so broken. (I think it still is broken, though perhaps not quite so badly.) I think societys view of me/us/you is broken. And I'm angry at myself for letting other people, and the media, tell me how to view myself - not to mention angry at them for treating me so badly. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how to change how we view & treat each other & ourselves. I just know that I don't want to live like this anymore. I don't want to look in the mirror and see some ugly freak looking back at me - I just want to see me.
It's National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDA) in the US this week, and one of the featured organisations is Operation Beautiful, whose goal is to end negative self talk, one person & post it note at a time! They encourage women to leave encouraging notes on bathroom walls, for other women to read. When you see the huge amount of notes posted on their site, it somehow gives you faith in the human race again. So - post a note, take a photo, and send it to Operation Beautiful. You might just change someone's day, or even their life!
I'm confined to these 4 walls, so this is my post-it-note to all of you! You are beautiful. You are unique! Don't ever tell yourself otherwise!
“We do not need to change our bodies; we need to change the rules.”
~ Naomi Wolf ~
Small addition to original post :
Please also check out this music video which I happened upon after posting this blog this morning. It's by Jonny Diaz, and it's called 'a more beautiful you' - absolutely perfect for this post!
I've had some great feedback on this post so far - just wanted to say thank you! It wasn't easy to write about some of it ... but it was well worth it! :)
I'd love to hear your reply and I know it'll be valued by other readers too! I always try to respond, please just be aware that it can take me some time to find the energy to do so as I've been particularly ill recently and struggling to get online. Thanks for reading! :)
