Tag Archives: A Better Life

Hail Mary’s

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I was traveling home by plane this week, and as these things go, my first flight was delayed enough that it looked like I would not make my connecting flight. That meant I was going to either spend the night, and all the next day, in Dallas waiting for an evening flight, or, I was going to get re-routed to DC, get put up in a hotel for a couple of hours, only to turn back around and catch an early flight.

As you might imagine, I didn’t want either one of these scenarios. So I decided that I would do the only thing I could do: I would place all of my focus, all of my attention, all of my energy, on what I actually wanted. Getting home that night.

Now, I’m not so naive as to not know that there are many, many factors beyond my personal focus at play in the Universe that would be influencing this outcome. I also know that the human mind and energy field is a powerful apparatus for creation. I decided that I would see what was possible if I kept my mind focused on what I wanted, versus what I didn’t want.

This is the opposite of what we usually do. Typically, we obsess about the outcomes we don’t want any part of. We make plans around what we don’t want, and then we make contingency plans based on that. All the while focusing (if you can call it that) on what we don’t want. And if you’ve ever paid attention to one of these moments, you know that while you are busy imagining all the worst case scenarios you don’t want any part of, you feel awful. Stressed. Chaotic. Angry. Anxious.

Which brings me to my next point. Staying focused on what I wanted kept me feeling calm, open and optimistic. Hopeful. Certainly in a much better mood. It also highlighted for me how often we don’t really go after what we want because we feel as though we will be disappointed. It feels like if we don’t really go for it, then It won’t be as painful if we don’t get it.

That night, I kept thinking about the football expression, “Hail Mary Pass.” How when it is all on the line in the final moments of a game, with nothing to lose by going for it, the quarterback will huck the ball as far as he can with all the players that can get free, making a beeline for the end zone. With the hope that someone may come up with the ball. A kind of all in, last ditch attempt. Exhilarating. And potentially, disappointing. But ultimately a no-holds-bar effort to go for what you want.

And so it was that I ran through the mega city airport of Dallas, going for my own Hail Mary, even with the great unlikelihood of making it as I was past the time of takeoff. As I came ripping around the corner to the gate I looked at the first stranger I saw and said, “Hartford?” to which he responded, “Delayed.”

I burst into tears.

Why the tears? Because in that moment, I was crystal clear that my efforts to go for it had been responded to in a big and beautiful way. This is something I yearn to live more and more connected to on a regular basis. And why not? The world is going to do what the world is going to do, and then, at some point, it will all be over.

Why not go for it? Why not align with all the invisible support available to us?

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Goodness

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For the past several months, in the weekly yoga class I attend, we have been working with something called The Mother’s Symbol. It represents various faces and powers of the Divine Feminine, as well as twelve qualities, or virtues, to cultivate in life.

The virtues include things like Sincerity, Humility, Gratitude and Perseverance. This past week, we focused on Goodness. In the exploration, the teacher quoted the words of a great sage who wrote of “goodness for the sake of goodness.” In other words, not being good to get something, or to appear a certain way to others, and certainly not to use being good as something to lord over others.

For the whole class, all I could think about was us as a collective. Us as a culture that has come to weaponize goodness. Current day ideologies that have taken what it means to be “good,” and narrowly defined it to fit an agenda which is then used to call out and convict those who do not measure up to a biased and destructive definition.

But if we come back to “goodness for the sake of goodness,” we would see that this is never a virtue to claim for an external reason; whether to look good to others, get something, or keep from being cancelled or attacked.

Instead, real goodness is cultivated from within for its own sake; transcending outside agendas and our own personal fears. Goodness from its purest perspective is only about our own evolutionary and spiritual progress. Only about our connection to Something Far Greater than us.

Only about a return to the Truth of who and what we are, and where it is that we come from. This is vastly different from the social agreements and ideologies we commit ourselves to, or are forced into.

If we really knew this, we would never, ever, use goodness as a weapon against ourselves or others. We would never, ever, use it to try and control our own behavior or that of another. For that would be in violation of, a desecration of, the most fundamental and sacred aspect of our very Nature. That being, the inherent Goodness that lives within.

I am left wondering, as I often do, if in the world of social media, extreme and polarizing ideologies and party politics, if we will be able to find our way into our own inherent goodness. I pray for all of our sakes that we can. For without experiencing the Goodness within, how will we be able to see that in another, or know the Truth of who we really are?

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Be Nice

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Two weeks ago, I saw a yard sign that read “Be Nice.” I let it go. Sort of. But then yesterday I saw it again on another lawn, and the rage that had started to simmer a few weeks ago, burst into full boil.

What’s the big deal you might be wondering? I mean come on, there are far worse things someone could post for all those driving by to see. Right? And I might agree. Except for one teeny, tiny problem.

I know better. More to the point, I have lived a great deal of my life under the oppressive rule of nice. As a woman, I know intimately the dark magic behind insisting that a girl be a “nice girl.” A deadly, suffocating and soul-sucking insistence that insinuates a kind of “be nice or else.” Or else what, you might ask?

You will be left, shamed, ostracized, attacked and ridiculed. Along the way you will be told that it is all your fault because you just didn’t behave nice enough. A deep-seated cultural, familial and relational “hidden curriculum” that makes it all but impossible to challenge what you are being conditioned to believe. Whether it is good for you, or not. Whether the request is valid, or not.

Because here’s the question that never gets asked inside the mind of that girl: “Nice” according to whom, and for what gain?

Talk to any woman who is willing to be honest with you, and she will tell you of the scars she still bears by being groomed in nice. She will tell you of the control and the manipulation that one little word inflicted on her life. She will tell you of how she turned against herself to stay nice in another’s eyes. Even when what they were insisting upon was harm-based. How she tolerated and allowed the worst of behaviors from another in order to keep anyone from thinking she wasn’t nice enough.

A moving target of being “nice” according to this person, then that person, and then that person… According to that system, that school, that community… An ever-vigilant effort on her part that she poured her very life force into to live up to what was being demanded of her. No matter the cost.

No matter that what she was being asked to live up to, was never right or true to begin with. How she would risk depression, anxiety, a loss of self-esteem, an obliteration of her truest Nature, an erosion of a kind and loving relationship with herself, a thwarting of her life-giving instincts and intuitions. All done to avoid the repercussions of being labeled not nice.

Being nice, when legislated by someone outside of you, is a form of slavery. It is a way to shut you up. A way to keep you quiet. A way to shame you into something that may not be in your best interests.

A way to keep you from questioning bad behavior from the powers that be. One little word with the power to keep you from being you and from questioning what is most decidedly, questionable.

I will not be nice if it means I must give over my life to something controlling and manipulative. This is too great of a price to pay. Do we need to find ways to be with each other in more respectful ways? We do. Are there certain character traits that lift up all of us and that we would be wise to cultivate in each other? Yes.

But how dare you use nice to enslave others to your will. How dare you add another brick to the growing social credit system we are heading towards where outside sources score you on how nice or not you are. And then decide what you get to have in life by way of movement though a culture based on whether or not they think you and your ways check the “nice” box.

We must learn to recognize when virtues are being co-opted and used against us. The very same sacred and life-affirming virtues that already exist within us, and need only trust, patience and encouragement to bring them forward. Otherwise, we are condemned to live as a culture of goody-goody’s wagging their fingers at each other; ready to rat out anyone who does not conform.

We have got a very big question before us as a world: Do we want to live with each other based on the very best in us, or do we want to live according to the smaller version of ourselves where we use distorted versions of human virtues to control one another?

P.S. When I looked up “nice” in the dictionary and the thesaurus, here’s what I found: foolish, wanton, silly, simple, trivial, old-maidish, persnickety.

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