Deal with it

You don't have to like it, but what can you do?  So many things in life will never be the way you want them to be.  And many of them are completely outside of your control.  So, what are you going to do about it?  Are you going to complain to anyone who will listen?  Will it somehow make your life easier if someone else knows that how hard you have it?  (The answer is no).

Part of maturity is accepting the things in life that you cannot change.  It doesn't mean you have to like it.  It means that you look at a situation, and decide that even though you can't change it, and you can't get away from it, you will make the best of it.  If you can get away from it, then do that.  But if you can't, then accept it.

Life is filled with difficult, often painful, experiences.  That's just part of living.  Do you really want to be the person that other avoid because all they do is complain about how bad things are?  Is it really that much worse for you than for the people who aren't complaining?  Maybe the difference is in how you choose to deal with it.

Here's my advice.  Stop wishing that everything would somehow start going the way you want it to.  Life doesn't work that way.  Look around your life, and figure out what you can change, and what you can't change.  Set a course of action to change the things you can.  Accept that you have to live with the things you cannot change.  I mean, really accept it.  No sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, secretly hoping it will change.  It won't.  There is good and bad in life.  This is the bad.

Now choose to redirect your focus on the things that you are changing.  If you're working at it, then some things should be getting better.  Be proud of yourself.  Be happy about those things.

You'll find that if you choose to accept the hard stuff, and focus on the positive stuff, all of a sudden you life will seem better.  It's still the same life, but it's better.  Wouldn't you like to have a better life?  Give it a try.

There's not enough time

There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything.  So how do you prioritize?  How do you decide what really matters, and what just seems important right now?  We have jobs, relationships, kids, extended family, exercise, and more that we have to try to figure out how to fit into our lives.

As you grow up, most of the things you do are assigned for you.  You may choose to join a team, but the practices and games are all scheduled, and you show up when you have to.  As you get older, you have to make more choices about how to allocate the time in your life.  But typically no one ever shows you how to do this.

First, think about what it really important to you, and why.  Really think about the "why" part.  Is it really important to you, or is that baggage from your parents or from a previous relationship?  What truly matters to you?  Imagine yourself 30 years from now, looking back at your life.  Did you choose the things that mattered, or did you choose the things that seemed important at the time, but didn't have a lasting impact?

For me, family time and relationship time are at the top of my list.  Those are far more important to me than money.  I would not choose to work more hours, even for vastly more money, because those hours would take away from my family time and relationship time.  Those are the lasting memories that I want to create for myself and the people I love.  I'm not saying I couldn't find a use for more money, but the trade-off isn't worth it for me.  I quit a good-paying job to start my business, in large part because I wanted to make sure that I didn't miss my girls growing up.

Once you've evaluated what is important to you, now look at how you spend the hours in your day.  Does the allocation of your time match what you value?  If you work more than 40 or 50 hours a week, is that what you want?  Why?  If long work hours take away from family and relationship time, think about a change.  Would it be worth it to make less money, but have more family time, or more walking the dog time?  Would you be willing to move into a smaller house, and drive a less expensive car?  Again, picture yourself looking back in 30 years.  Are you proud of your choices?

If spending time with the people you care about, or getting in shape, are priorities, but you feel like there isn't time, look closely at how you spend your time when you're not at work.  Do you watch TV?  How many hours a day?  Do you waste hours on the internet?  Could this time be re-allocated?  I unplugged my TV 15 years ago, and my life is better for it.

It's so easy to get into habits of how you spend your time, then feel locked into them.  It's also easy to "golden handcuff" yourself, where you work harder and harder to maintain your lifestyle, at the expense of your life.  What good is a big home if you're too tired to enjoy it?

It may not feel like it, but you really are in control of your life.  Or, at least, you could be.  Choose the life you want, then live it.  Make some hard choices if you need to.  Think about the legacy you want to leave with the people you love.  Are you working towards that?  Are you willing to?

I overdid it

We all do it sometimes.  We bite off more than we can chew.  I did it, and now I'm making the adjustments to get my life back to a manageable level.  So it got me thinking, how do you know when you go from "enough" to "too much?"  How do you decide not only when it's time to cut back, but also what you need to cut back?

I overextended myself this year.  I was extremely ambitious when I started the year.  I was taking guitar classes twice a week.  I decided to volunteer one day a week at the food bank.  I started this blog.  I signed up for my first triathlon.  And, of course, I still had a company to run.

I thought I was keeping it together pretty well.  I was wrong.  One of the great things about having a healthy relationship is that your partner can constructively tell you when you're doing something wrong.  Leah pointed out to me that I had not been affectionate with her, and that I had not really paid much attention to her for the past couple months.  In looking back, I realized that she was right.  But while I was in the middle of it, I was so focused on everything that I was doing, I didn't realize the affect it was having on her.  I can only assume that it had the same affect on the girls.

I decided to take a hiatus from guitar class.  I took a break for a couple weeks from the blog, and I think that I'll scale back from six posts a week to three.  The hard part is lowering my mental intensity level surrounding the triathlon.  I still need to train, but I need to find a place mentally where I can remain at the same level of commitment, but not stress out about it.

Everything that I was doing was positive, healthy stuff.  But all of it put together turned into something negative, and mentally unhealthy.  I think that is where the lesson lies.  Even if everything you're doing is positive, doing too much of it can become something negative.

I will be more careful when I add to my schedule.  It makes more sense to only add one new thing at a time, then adjust your life to that before adding anything else.  I learned my lesson, I think.

It's broken

Sometimes you can damage a relationship so badly that it can't be fixed.  I've written before about how anger and communication don't go together, and especially anger and writing or emailing.  But betrayals of trust can be just as damaging.

We all learned growing up that if you apologize for what you did wrong, the other person is supposed to say that it's okay, and forgive you for it.  As children, this is true.  Of course, as children, things that require an apology usually involve an infraction involving sharing, or maybe an accidental collision.

As we get older, and relationships get more complicated, there are more and more ways that you can hurt someone.  And as these increase, so do the chances that you can hurt someone so badly that you cannot apologize it away.  Even if you feel that what you did should be forgiven, it may not be.  Or, the other person may forgive you, and you move forward with your relationship, but the relationship will never be what it was before.

Trust is a powerful thing.  It can take years to build it up, and only seconds to destroy it.  Don't ever forget this.  If you betray someone's trust, your relationship with them may never be the same.  Even if you do it thinking that you're doing the right thing, or thinking that you're helping somehow, a betrayal of trust can never be undone.

Are you fat?

Who says you're fat?  When you look in the mirror, do you see your body the way it really looks, or the way that society and the popular media have trained you to see it?

I was talking with the girls tonight about a topic we've covered many times; body image.  From the time that they were too little to understand what I was talking about, I started showing them the cover pictures on magazines at the store.  I would explain to them that when you see those images of extremely skinny women, day after day, year after year, the idea slowly seeps into your brain that that is what a woman should look like.

As they got older, I would show them the magazine covers and ask them to think about every woman they have ever met.  Do they know anyone with that body?  Have they ever even seen a woman with a body like that?  How many women have you seen in your life who look like that?  We've just recently started to talk about how the images are airbrushed.

These images are not realistic portrayals of what a woman looks like.  But the problem gets worse.  Not only do women see these images and start to think that they should look like a cover model, but men see them too.  Boys grow up seeing these pictures, and thinking that a woman should look like that.  Then they call girls fat if they have a normal, healthy body, and the girl believes it because she's been looking at the same images.

There is no doubt that we have an epidemic of obesity in this country, and I am by no means suggesting that you should allow your body to be unhealthy.  But healthy does not mean having ribs that show through your shirt.  Healthy women have some curves on them.  You know if you're healthy or not.  You know if you're in shape or not.  You know if you exercise, if you watch what you eat, if you drink enough water and get enough sleep.  These are the things that make a healthy body.

The next time you look in the mirror, and you think there's a fat girl looking back at you, look again.  What do you really see?  Is that a healthy female body?  Decide for yourself.  Make the choice to not automatically believe the images you've been seeing your whole life.  You'll feel better about yourself if you do.

Don't type angry

Have you ever tried to un-send an email?  You haven't, because there's no such thing.  Once you click "send" it's gone and there is no getting it back.  This is the reason for the rule; don't type angry.

For that matter, speaking when angry doesn't work out all that well either.  You say things that are coming from your anger, not from the feelings where you normally live.  And although your words won't be in writing like an email, they can still cause damage that you can't take back.

The bottom line this; is anger and communication do not go together.  The point of communication between us is to improve our lives; to help each other; to solve problems.  None of these things can be accomplished if we are angry.  When someone is speaking to you in an angry way, can you really hear what they are saying?  You can't hear them, because all you can hear is their anger.  We know this about others, but we forget about it when it comes to ourselves.

The next time you find yourself mad about something, try to not speak about it.  And absolutely don't email about it.  Let it simmer, and wait until your emotions have subsided.  You'll be able to think about it in a more rational way, and you won't risk saying something that you'll have to apologize for later.

It's not personal

Someone was mean to you.  Someone did something selfish that was hard for you.  You feel like it has something to do with you.  It doesn't.  Not only is it not personal, it actually has nothing to do with you.

It's easy to feel like the actions of other people has something to do with us, especially when their actions affect us.  The fact is, when people are being mean or selfish, their actions are usually so self-centered that they never think for a moment how their actions are affecting other people.

If someone is having a bad day (or a bad life) they will frequently express their frustrations by being mean others.  We all interact with them.  Maybe it's the cashier at the store, or a co-worker, or it could even be someone you love.  When people are acting out in an unkind way towards you, try to remember that while their  negativity is coming in your direction, it is actually only a symptom of their own unhappiness.

When a person is selfish, they will frequently hurt the people close to them by being insensitive to their feelings.  Again, this has nothing to do with you.  They haven't thought of you because they are selfish, which is about them, not about you.  Selfish people are selfish because of themselves, not because of you.  The next time the selfish person in your life is being totally insensitive to what you need, try to remember that they treat everyone this way because they're selfish.  It has nothing to do with you.  Selfish people can never be truly happy, because if you truly believe that you are the most important person there is, you can never be satisfied.

It's hard to remember this when you're feeling the pain from someone else's actions, but try it.  Remind yourself that it isn't about you.  It isn't personal.  You may even feel some sympathy for a person who is so selfish or hurtful that they are preventing their own happiness.