Learn to enjoy being alone because no one will stay forever.

I sat with this one for awhile because it felt cold and disappointing. But I decided to write about it because it is also truthful.

Learning to enjoy being by myself has been one of the longest and most arduous life lessons I have ever taken on. One might presume, given my only child status, that it is easy to be alone. And on some fronts, I suppose that is true.

And on the others, quite to the contrary.

People are finite. We all intersect with one another on interactive timelines that are not correlated to anything as a master plan. If you look at your life on such a timeline, you will see people who have exited your life by either Moving away, ending a friendship or relationship, or passing away. The older you get, the more of these you see on your own roadmap.

I think this is one of those cup half full or cup half empty perspectives. I think this was a huge one for me to convert from half empty to half full, but I feel as if I have crossed that threshold a few years back. If you want to suffer the loss of someone in your life, I think it is a choice. I’m not talking about grief, that is overwhelming and almost impossible to mitigate with anything having to do with philosophy. But I am talking about what you do after the grief starts to subside.

As friends of mine have passed away, I reflect back on the wonderful times that we shared and the feelings they made me feel when we were together. I think about their smile, the way they laughed, the things we loved to talk about.

The recognition that any one day in my life is so valuable as to not want to spend it grieving over any kind of a loss or expressing my disappointment over loneliness, was a paramount change in life for me.

If you can get to that perspective where you recognize that even if you are feeling grief deep inside, there is another part of you that could just as easily be celebrating the joy you shared with them and appreciating the time that you did have together, you will expend more of your life feeling good about things than disappointment over things that have been lost.

The personal evolution that it requires to get to this frame of mind is so important and yet almost no one talks about it. They offer you all sorts of psychological counseling to cope with your loneliness or depression, but as you start to see the circumstances through the cup half full perspective, so much more of your time reflecting on a lost relationship can be spent in a warm and happy place than in a sad despondent place.

Learning to enjoy yourself while you are alone is an acquired skill. It starts with the recognition that the world has so many amazing things to contemplate, experience, learn, invent, that you are sitting at the greatest feast in history for anyone who has curiosity. If I had to define the trait that has driven my focus in life, I would have to unquestionably start with curiosity. It is the determining factor between boredom and consistent satisfaction in life. The curiosity can take you in countless directions, each of which has the potential to expand your world in myriad ways.

So if you can get comfortable with the fact that your alone time is actually fertile ground for a happier life, than you are considerably further down the path of happiness because you are no longer reliant on anyone or anything to create your happiness, you have learned that it is all deep within, on tap… A life supply of interests and desires are consistently standing by to capture your attention and deliver you to a much happier place, wherever that happens to be for you. 

Happy Saturday!

I believe there is great value in being perpetually curious. 

Curiosity delivers information… some valuable and some extraneous. But in either case, the stimulation of the information triggers thoughts, emotions, and fears… then fuels the energy necessary to stimulate change.

In the study of so many of the brilliant minds that have impacted humanity, one of the most common underlying threads is curiosity. This tiny quality seems to underwrite such a large volume of the evolution in human history.

There is, of course, the tired adage that: “curiosity killed the cat” which is always followed by: “but satisfaction brought him back.”

Why do you suppose this has become such a tired adage? Is it because we are so willing to use empirical knowledge to learn and in the course of doing so, we get hurt?

Witness Marie Curie….she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.  Her intense passion to understand radioactivity ultimately killed her.

Unlike the proverbial cat which presumably has nine lives in the metaphor, she had only one life and her unquenchable desire for knowledge was her demise.

On a much deeper level, I would believe that we are carrying so many valuable pieces of information within us, there must be some driving force which causes us to try and unlock that inner code within.

One of the things that convinced me that there is so much more information encoded within us is the acupuncture illustration that transposes a human embryo on top of the adult ear and shows how each of the acupuncture points on the ear correlate directly to the human embryo body. This allows an acupuncturist to put a needle in a specific place on your ear to impact any other part of your body.

So if we have the holographic information of the universe contained within us, certainly there must be codes that will enable us to dig within and unlock those secrets.

Each of the things that we find ourselves wondering about are the stimuli that catapult us into growth.

Hoping your Saturday is off to a beautiful start😊