Choose Must

For the last month I’ve been telling anyone who will listen about The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion, a book by Elle Luna. In it, Elle encourages those who feel a deep sense of discontent to start choosing the musts in their lives and being more aware of the shoulds; the expectations that you feel from society, family, even friends.

As a typical oldest, must-please-everyone child (now adult), I’ve let the shoulds have a lot of control over my life: I should always have a job, I should be a good student, I should have a tidy home, I should be successful (society’s definition, not mine), I should know what I want to do with my life, I should make decent money, I should be the best wife/friend/daughter that ever existed, I should have a lot of friends, I should want X, Y and Z. Saying them out loud, I realize how silly they sound. But they are incredibly powerful–don’t be fooled.

In the books’s intro, Elle writes:

All too often, we feel that we are not living the fullness of our lives because we are not expressing the fullness of our gifts.

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#WiseWords

“The trouble is, you think you have time.” – Buddha

There is a not-so-distant time of my life where these words would have put me into a panic to do more, not less.

I would have tried to make it all happen at once. I would have gone on a “doing” spree. But luckily these words came into my life at a time where my body and my mind were both telling me to slow the “F” down, and all the doing was making me miserable.

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#BeWell: The Simple Things

#BeWell is a weekly roundup of inspiring, thought-provoking, and fun articles to help/inspire/motivate you to cultivate the well in your life. I am a compulsive email checker in recovery. There is nothing that important or urgent happening in my life that I need to check my email every five minutes. If something urgent does happen, I’ll assume… Continue reading