Encouraging and equipping women over 60 to live their best life!
Molding the difficult into something new and beautiful is part of the grieving, healing process. Everything has a season. Along with the seasons of joy and celebration come seasons of mourning and loss. These rolling highs and lows are how life works. For each fading flower comes the remembrance of former beauty, love, comfort, and the hope of forward motion.
Are you feeling sad? Feeling lonely? Have you built a facade in your marriage? You need the truth here, the real down deep feelings about how you are really feeling about your marriage. I was truthful with you. I felt dead inside. I couldn’t see the future. I didn’t know how it was going to happen. But I wanted more from my marriage.
You, too, will find moments of celebration in your hard journey, if you look for and recognize them. Your momentum may be slow, but you will recover and resume forward motion, even when it is very difficult. The devastation you experience now will give way to lighter moments, like the dawning of a new, sun-filled day. Expect brighter days ahead and hold on to hope.
Have you held dreams close to your heart, thinking you are too old to try? This just may be the Godwink you need to take them out, now that you have more time, and give them serious consideration.
You won’t have the energy of previous holidays because loss depletes us emotionally, mentally, and physically. Stop and ask yourself what is most important? What can you do this year? Maybe instead of baking dozens of cookies for friends and relatives, you focus on meeting the basic needs of your family.
At the juncture of the Christmas season and family celebrations lies a potential treasure of tradition. Old handwritten recipes carefully written by a long-gone grandmother are resurrected as you prepare her memorable dish. The holidays are a season of fondly recalling prior Christmas memories while building new ones to cherish. Nothing remains static or stays the same. Life moves forward like a living mural, transporting memories and traditions and creating something new. Traditions are fluid—they only seem static from a distance.
At its core, this is really what the Best-Life Project is about. Realizing what you want and being happy with it. When we know what we want our future to be, it helps us make decisions today that move us toward that end goal. Ten years from now, even two years from now, my vision for my future may change. I may be tired of dealing with workers and customers. I may want to travel more. But for today, I’m good.
Fall brings on a little melancholy. I struggle with being as productive as I want to be. Instead of “falling hostage” to it, I have chosen to embrace it and work through it. I am also thankful for a little rule I learned to help me in those August, September, and October months to help me stay focused. It is called “The Five-Minute Rule.”
Everything we do, even the most mundane task, we have a reason for why we do what we do. Most people never think this way, but with everything we choose to do, or not do, there is a payoff. There is a reason why we are doing this all day, every day. We may not even be consciously thinking about it, but this is the way our life works. Everything from the big decisions to the little mini choices, we have reasons why we do the things we do.
If you reach a point when grief doesn’t diminish and you can’t find joy in anything, it’s time to seek help from a minister, doctor, counselor, or support group. There is no shame in asking for help.
