Love Life Back: January 2014

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Christmas Tree Lights

Yesterday I finally started to take down my tree. I'd planned to start on January 5 and be done by the twelfth night, but a post Christmas illness being spread around my family laid me low for two weeks, and being chronically ill, I've been recovering since. At any rate, in attempting to disentangle some ornament hooks so they can fit back in their box, and weighing the environmental cost of trashing the jumble versus the cost to my sanity, as I calmly sat disentangling hooks I was reminded of an article I read before Christmas.

In writing about relationships, the writer mentioned that you can tell a lot about a person by how she responds to putting up Christmas tree lights. And I was reminded of how wise we are in our ignorance.

Life Is Good, Love Life Back.

... is my life's motto.

Yes, it's short and I use it to remind myself that God represents the bend in the universe toward life affirmation, and my job is to reflect that back.

For me, this means trying to anticipate the consequences of each of my actions to the best of my ability. If I catch on to the fact that more heads are probably needed to consider consequences and I am able to do that, I am compelled to consult other sources for additional input.

Much of life, however, is done on the fly. We can't always know whether what we think is life affirming is, in fact, life affirming, and we may never know. What appears to be life affirming today may prove not to be 500 years after our demise. All we can do is our best.

Sometimes our best means we fly into closed doors, windows, the open mouth of an angry dog. And when that happens, well, c'est la vie. But don't forget to look, listen, make amends when appropriate and possible, and then move on.

Along the way, we can always hope to learn a thing or two to avoid all but the most necessary bumps, scrapes, and bruises.

Proof I CAN be BRIEF

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Christmas Tree Lights