Most people who know me, know I love a good sunrise. But, I doubt they know why. I love sunrises because it is visual evidence that the night is becoming the day. The dark becoming the light. When I see that sun come up, in the words of Alexander Pope, “hope spring eternal.”
Starting each day with the sunrise, watching it arrive, is incompatible with a bad mood.
I like the renewal of the world demonstrated in the sunrise. Each day is a new opportunity. Each day is new. It can be the same as yesterday, or it can be different.
During August in Oklahoma, every day seems to be just like the one before. If hot and humid, dry and still is your idea of a perfect weather, then come visit us in late summer. You will get exactly that.
However, in the spring, my favorite season, the weather changes every day, sometimes hourly. It could be a torrential downpour one day, with flooding and never ending gray skies. The next day, more often than not, the sun will be shining, the birds chirping and the surviving daffodils nodding their yellow heads in a gentle breeze. A few hours later, Oklahomans could be running for cover while a tornado makes its way across the plain.
But, whatever the day becomes, it begins with that sunrise.
Similarly, I can decide to be like August weather in Oklahoma, and be the same with every sunrise, or I can be like the ever changing spring. I can grow like the flowers in May.
Today is January 4, 2020. A new year, a new decade, and most people are thinking about change or improvement.
It is currently popular in the personal development genre to pick a word for the year. A word that motivates and inspires, or is indicative of the resolutions one may have made. Last year, my word was “focus.” It served me well. I got focused on my goals, the biggest one being to change jobs so I didn’t have to walk into what felt like my own personal Hell every morning.
I focused on changes I needed to make. I focused on developing a new mindset, on developing new habits while eliminating those habits preventing me from becoming the person I truly want to be. I stopped drinking and took up a new daily walking regimen. I journal so much now I have tennis elbow. I focused on eliminating unnecessary stressors. Hint: All stressors are unnecessary.
2020 is the year I move from student to practitioner in all the things I’ve learned this 55 years. I know now that every struggle I went through, every tough situation, every bad relationship (yes, all of them), happened for me not to me. The sucky situations were there to encourage growth, like fertilizer. They made me uncomfortable, so I would move and become the person I want to be. I am grateful for every lesson I learned, no matter how painful.
This year, my word is “become.” I’ve done the work with full knowledge that the work is never really done. Taking a lesson from author, Brendan Burchard, I have made my list of DUMB Goals (Desire, Uplifting, Measurable, Brave), and it is written on freezer paper the wall of my studio. I know person I want to be, and what I need to do to become her.
It is time to become the person Heaven designed me to be. This year, my word is Become.
