Monday 6 June 2011

It's Payback Time!

Over the weekend I attended my BFF’s birthday celebration at her cottage. It was a biggie, a milestone, a rite of passage. No need for boring details like numerical facts, but now her age rhymes with ‘nifty’. That said, milestone birthdays have a nasty habit of making you reassess and evaluate your life so far. Did I make the right decisions? Did I choose the right path/partner/career/school/friends? Should I have gone left or right? Or the biggest question of all – was it stupid of me to put that info up on Facebook?

Regardless of what we’ve done or said, or not done and not said, it’s in the past. Many of the things of my past have come back to haunt or heckle me at times, so I end up putting those memories (exaggerated most of the time) in my stories. At least those lessons aren’t wasted! It’s only when you start looking in the mirror and finally seeing the real you (yes all of it – wrinkles, zits, dark circles under the eyes and hair where it shouldn’t be), that you begin to understand what all of those decisions you’ve made throughout your life have done to you. Your biology truly becomes your biography, as Carolyn Myss has pointed out in one of my favourite books called ‘Anatomy of the Spirit’. And sometimes you’re happy with the end results – of what you see in the mirror – other times you’re not.
This leads me to what my BFF asked me way back in 1995 while having lunch. She flat out asked me where I saw myself in 10 years. I stopped shoveling food in my mouth. I grabbed my wine glass. Whoa. What? Ten years? I was only in my mid-thirties. Yes, I was doing the retirement savings thing, working down to pay my mortgage, raising a family, just married off a daughter, and running a graphic trade shop with hubby, but nothing really came to me. Then, not even a month later, I began receiving synchronicities and patterns that led me to take a writing course, then later join a writing group, then in two years learn to write a book, then write another and another, until it was 2005. I couldn’t have predicted that in a million years. It was truly my call to action, and a decision I’ve never regretted, all because my BFF asked me a simple question.       

As for my older and wiser BFF, and what she did with her ten years - so  far, so good!

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