It’s My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To! - by Tom Wells

Do you ever wonder what makes life work?  Like, what makes everything just click and seem right on time, right on the mark?  With you, feeling good...maybe even feeling really good!??

It may not be the mystery we sometimes make it out to be.  What if it was all based on our attitude, and what if our attitude was constantly open for tweaking, for adjusting?  What if what we call “reality” was a constantly morphing phenomenon?  And guess who’s got the remote in their hands??  You guessed it...each of us, me, and you.  We can change the channel, and it can be as easy as pushing the button.

No, I haven’t always experienced this as true, and sometimes still, I feel a bit trapped in my own skin, trapped in a feeling of heaviness, or fear, or sadness, or self-doubt.  But you know, I’m getting better and better at realizing that my mood IS in my control.

There’s a line from an old best-selling pop hit, “It’s my party, and I'll cry if I want to”.  And lots of times in my life, I’ve felt that it’s good to own my own sadness, and let it rip.  But when it hamstrings me in having the life I really want to have, I realize I don’t want to feel like I’m at the mercy of feelings that seem to be overwhelming me.  After all, it’s a party for God’s sake, if you go along with the song title analogy anyway.

My life has been quite a “never-ending journey” of learning how to give myself a break.  I mean, who really makes it hard on me?  Who really?  I am so much the only one in my head, in control, in the driver's seat.  That has been such a huge and on-going revelation for me.  No one else can ever encroach even a fraction of an inch into my head-space (unless of course I imagine I’ve let them in.)  But are they really there?  No, it’s always me, here alone with me, telling myself things, all day long.

So what if I took more control of what I tell myself?  What if I listened more to what I AM telling myself, just noticing for a while what I hear myself saying, what I see myself imagining in pictures.  What I’ve come to see so much lately is how much of my life I haven’t really been a true observer of all this inner dialogue and pictures and movies.  And the crazy thing is, this stuff is what’s determining my moment-to-moment experience of life!  You may have heard the old saying:  “As a man thinks, so he is”.  Well, yeah, how true it is!

What if we accepted that we are the combined writer, producer, director and actor in our very own movie, called our One Precious Life, (this one anyway, whether there are other lives we’ve lived or will yet live)?  I mean, isn’t that cool?!!

So many of us just love to spend so much time in our lives watching movies and maybe even TV, and it has struck me so poignantly for so many years now, just how ironic it seems that we watch these amazing actors act out these amazing stories and dramas and comedies and it’s all so absorbing and engaging, yet do most of us live lives that we find as wonderful, or interesting, or as funny, or as tragic as what we see on the screen? Maybe some of us do, and maybe some of us don’t.  

Of course, I wouldn’t want to live out most of the tragedies I see in movies or on TV, or so I think, but the rest of it can be pretty interesting or exciting or at the least, often “bigger than life”, that is, perhaps grander and more spellbinding than the life I’m living day in and day out.  And, I suppose, the on-screen tragedies may serve many useful functions of touching our hearts in ways they often need to be touched.  So many people point out that “without the darkness and the pain, how would we be able to so profoundly appreciate the light and the happiness?”

Still, the contrast that is definitely the stuff of dramas and tragedies has always been something I wanted to be taught GENTLY by.  Devastation does happen, or rather, we attract it into our lives sometimes, but if I can learn my awesome life lessons through kindness, ease and compassion, I choose that method.  I think lately our modern society has gotten a bit addicted to tragedy and drama as a principal default assumption of “just how it is” that many of us subscribe to. 

But my point is, what if you were told you were the complete team needed to create your own unique and extremely good movie, called “My Life”, or whatever much better title you might be inspired to name it?  Are you up for it??

The Hens Of Aging - By Tom Wells

It was sometime in my late 20’s, (actually on my 29th birthday), when I started to realize I was aging.  It seems almost comical now to think that I would even bother to call it “aging” at that young age.  But I guess it was some kind of existential realization that I was no longer going to be “endlessly young”.  Finally, I was an “adult”, whatever that was. I remember taking on some sort of added weight, or responsibility, and it was a bit sobering, but no big deal.

Since then, my milestones of aging have been many and frequent, always weighing how I was feeling against the number of years I had reached.  These days, in my late 60’s, I feel it’s as if the many chickens of aging have come home to roost. Feeling “old” is still present in my awareness, but it has calmed down quite a bit, and there’s a lot of new, fresh eggs gently dropping. The once clucking chickens sit quietly now, on their eggs of possibilities, content to allow the process of ongoing life to silently and slowly incubate and hatch into eternal life.  

I’m letting aging be an afterthought.  Oh well, aging happens.  But Life, with a capital “L”, now that’s where the juice lies!  My frontiers of exploration lie in the fertile valley’s of what may now be revealed, imagined, chosen, embraced.  I hold myself with careful tenderness, relying increasingly on my relationship with what IS eternal to guide and inform me.  I’m not interested in putting any obstacles in my path, but rather in clearing as many supposed obstacles as possible, all the while being as gentle with myself as I can.  After all, I have eternity to enjoy this incubation and the raising of my newly hatched small chicks of realization and enjoyment.

Just knowing that what I have always called “Me” is never going to die, never going to cease to exist in beauty and passion and fun and happiness, gives me ample faith and trust to take on the raising of so many young, fragile ones, all my hopes and dreams and ideas and beginnings of learnings, of apprenticing, of spreading my little almost non-existent wings to take on my fresh career aspirations, my excitement to learn to play other musical instruments, to learn to be an accomplished partner dancer, to commit to speaking Spanish or Portuguese or both, to begin a new relationship to a delicious new lover and friend, even if I’m still a novice at it all at  twenty years from now.

Knowing that I will never really get it all done, and that I can never really get it wrong, is so reassuring, and still something I am learning to embrace.  There is a lot of freedom in being an Infinite Being, and in accepting that the Universe is fully benevolent and fully benign, though at times it may be hard to see it all as so very beautiful.  But it is.  I know that, I trust that, I believe that, I love that, and I’m learning to LIVE that a little more every day.

In fact, that may well be the most stimulating and exciting part of my whole journey these days.  Accepting that I am just now really beginning to wake up to how profoundly beautifully all of this is orchestrated by Source.  I feel now that all my exciting learning is on this very creative leading-edge of peering into the realm of the Divine.  Beginning to glimpse the magnificent halls and palaces and “Shangri-La” valleys of a perfectly functioning universe, where trillions of cells comprising the bodies of humans, plants, animals, and all Beings of every sort, from stars and planets, to black holes and bacteria, atoms, waves and quarks, caterpillars and sparrows, all function with such precision and amazing synchronicity that we could never grasp it all. 

Or could we? Consider how we conscious beings peering into it all, engaging with it all, have the opportunity, the chance, the privilege, to witness it all from a seat of ever deepening appreciation, gratitude, love and excitement, as we gently let go of fear and worry and mistrust, and begin to see through the eyes of our Source Self. 

 It’s too much fun, isn’t it!