My Wild and Precious Life

I was recently asked to answer a prompt as to what I was doing with my wild and precious life and I have to be honest and say that it took me a while to answer the prompt because my inner mean girl picked up on the word precious and started berating me for wasting my precious life.  She reminded me that there were people who had sold best sellers at 24, people who’d started their own businesses and became millionaires in their 30s, and people who are well known spiritual leaders who are much younger than me.  She sneered and me and reminded me that I was wasting my precious life.

It took me a few days to regain my balance and shut the inner mean girl up. I had to take a few breaths and realize that everything we do is sacred and precious. If binge watching NCIS is what I need to do to relax, so be it. If sleeping late is what I need to do to heal my body, so be it. Every breath I take is sacred, but that doesn’t mean I have to waste my life in constant busyness. I have to love and accept my life for what it is.

I also had to remind myself that every step and misstep I took happened for a reason and was a learning experience.  If I hadn’t experimented with alcohol in college and gone to AA, I wouldn’t have found my way to Al-Anon after my divorce when I was in a codependent spiral.  If I hadn’t married my abusive husband, I wouldn’t have had my two amazing kids.  If I hadn’t said yes to working for the Air Force, I might not have gotten to live in Okinawa for three years.  Every decision I made led me someplace and helped make me into the person I am today.

All that time I spent wallowing after my divorce when I was in so much emotional pain that I couldn’t see straight made me stronger and helped me to be empathetic when my daughter was diagnosed with bipolar and ended up in the hospital.  Being emotionally torn apart by my divorce, helped me to learn to open my heart and be vulnerable with other people.  Do I wish that I could have learned those lessons without the pain, yes, but I know that sometimes you have to be brought to your knees and humbled in order to truly live.

Stepping back and truly looking at what I’ve done with my life, I realize that for the most part I’ve lived a life I’m proud of.   I’ve raised two wonderful kids. I survived an abusive marriage that I struggled to make work longer than I should have because I’m not a quitter. I lived in Japan for 3 years. I’ve traveled to Europe and Asia. I picked myself up after a divorce, am making skads more money than when I was married, and I bought a house on my own.  I’ve also helped thousands of people learn SAP and deal with major changes at their companies.

We create our wild and precious lives through our steps, our missteps, our good decisions, and our not so good decisions.  However, I have learned to not beat myself up when I make a “mistake,” because it is often that misstep that leads me exactly where I need to go in life or teaches me a lesson that I couldn’t learn any other way.

The next step for me in my amazing, wild, and precious life is to create a community to help other people through transitions in their lives and to share the lessons I’ve learned in my journey through life.