Used to fear that reaching thirty is too old. Now that I have come to that age I feel like I’m having the best time of my life. More freedom from society’s norms and being comfortable with yourself. It’s discovering and exploring from a different perspective.
Do you ever wonder what life could have been if you have done things differently? Honestly, yes. I imagine the outcome of the could have beens and the what ifs that constantly linger in my mind.
Before my mother got sick, I was young then, everything was blurry. Of course I can remember fun, happy memories and bad ones too but there wasn’t any purpose to why you live life the way it was. All you ever cared about was yourself, school, exams, deadlines, gigs, never questioning your purpose and existence in this world.
After my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer everything changed. She was given a time frame of only six months but miraculously get to have two meaningful years more.
You know when something serious like cancer happen in your life you question a lot of things. Tons of questions why this had to happen in your own family, your own mother who was a very strong woman, still young at forty. Then there’s that untouched topic of death. I haven’t in my life experienced such dreadful thing until that moment came. All those questions of how it will happen have finally been answered.
Grief came knocking and it sucks the life out of you. Anger, denial, frustration it was the easiest to feel because it was the most shallow ground that lets you continue everyday without really ‘feeling’. When you feel, all emotions cloud your mind and heart.
One realization led to another. What hurts the most were the could haves and the should haves. “I should’ve followed my mother when she said this.. I could’ve taken care of her more..”. That’s the irony of life, we only realize the importance of someone/something until that someone is gone. We can only sulk in our misery of regrets and that is only how far we can reach to remember the past. There’s nothing we can do about it.
Living with regrets is a road to self- destruction. One way of overcoming that is acceptance. Accepting the truth that you cannot change the events of the past and though it hurts, you have to face and deal with it. There must also be forgiveness. Forgiving yourself for the mistakes, for not giving too much of yourself in a situation. They say it’s easier to forgive others than yourself.
We are only human; we are not perfect. We have to focus on resiliency and what we have learned through that difficult experience. Focus on healing, in self-improvement, expression.
It was a hard road for me then but there is the NOW that we have to live. As much as possible, I try to do things that will not make me regret tomorrow. If I made a mistake, learn from it and never do it again. It is always never too late while we are still here.
Every so often we get caught in the hustle and bustle of daily life. We wake up in the morning and rush to fix ourselves, get coffee and commute to work. But in the flow of accomplishing these tasks, we sometimes find ourselves losing contact in the present moment resulting in being unaware of our feelings, emotional, mental and physical well-being. Continue reading
I’m sitting here on our dining table having leftover chocolate cake and green tea while nursing a new year headache. Everybody’s out and I’m home alone with the beagles frolicking on the lawn. Finally some peace and quiet after the festivities and a great way to tone down the holiday high. As I browse through photos in my Facebook account, I can’t help but reminisce the memories of 2015. A wave of emotions of certain events reminds me of the not so good times which holds me back to move on to 2016. I feel that my time has been cut short to put everything in perspective, but I guess the whole purpose of having a new year is to give us that chance to set everything straight again. To learn from the mistakes, to stand up and change the wrong and most importantly to grow in mind, heart and spirit. 2015 is beyond now and I feel so blessed with all that has happened good or bad. Continue reading
But there was a special kind of gift that came with embracing the chaos, even if I cursed most of the way. I’m convinced that, when everything is wiped blank, it’s life ‘s way of forcing you to become acquainted with and aware of who you are now, who you can become. What is the fulfillment of your soul? Jennifer DeLucy
I am a photography enthusiast and a shameless hoarder of memories from keepsakes with handwritten notes and of course pictures! Continue reading
One of the most poignant letters i read from philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the importance of cultivating a rich inner life.
“Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.”
The Joy Explore 