Confession Tuesday

Dear Reader,

It's been one full week since I last confessed.  The weather here is getting colder.  The leaves are getting wetter.  And the sky doesn't seem to know what it's doing.  Must be November, must be time to confess what I'm doing.  To the confessional--

I confess I have started a new morning routine that does not involve my laptop.

My New Routine:

I wake up, quickly check my email upstairs, have coffee, then I sit by the fire reading for 15 minutes.  I read something nurturing like The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp or Uncommon Genius.  Sometimes I read Victoria magazine or Art News.  I read anything I feel will help get me into a creative space or thinking about something new.

It's been a great change for me as it begins my day with something for me.  You could substitute writing for 15 minutes or meditation instead of reading.   But I had no idea how just taking 15 minutes for myself first thing in the morning could help me feel so good the rest of the day.

~

Email Purgatory--

I confess I've been thinking about email a lot and wondering what we did before it.  Did we just not talk to each other or keep in touch?  I know there were letters, but really, not that many of them.  Did we only hear from each other at Christmas?

I'm guessing we used the phone more or maybe we solved issues ourselves instead of emailing them away to someone else.

Some days I see my email box as someone dropping small pebbles on my head and asking me to pick them up one by one.  But when no one writes, I confess, I miss that too.

~

Mid-Week Crisis:

I confess I had some anxiety over a decision I was making and after talking to someone smarter than myself in the area of "feelings," I realized that some old-school thinking of mine had returned under a new cloud of worry.  It wasn't until I spoke with this person that I was able to figure out that it was "fear of loss" disguising itself as "valuable concern."

So much of my younger life had been based in the belief of scarcity vs. abundance.  My younger self would swear there was only so much 1) money  2) love  3) popularity  4) good things 5) ______fill in the blank   to go around and you better grab what you can and hold on tight.  My older self thought she had abandoned that belief, but I found it (fear of loss) trying to wedge its fat foot into my life.

Sometimes we think we've learned life's lessons, but there it comes again in another form. You have to watch for those feet trying to get into your room, listen for their footsteps every once in a while, and make sure they stay out of your hallways.

Amen.

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