Inner Peace

Every week Alicia posts a topic for the Group Blogging Experience & tons of us roll with it. This weeks' topic is Inner Peace.

Inner peace. Sometimes it feels as elusive as a white elephant. Chasing the impossible. You feel calm and like you can actually just be for awhile when BAM life drops another anvil on your head. It always happens and as long as we are all human, expect those anvils to keep falling from the sky. It's not supposed to be easy we just want it to be. I know I do. I want to coast on a rainbow and love every second of every day but damn the negative things that always seem to get in my way.

It took me until I was well into my 30's to really get that life is supposed to be filled with pot holes & that those would be more common than smooth patches. I also realized something amazing once I stopped being so fixated on the bad: There is ALWAYS good. Always. It is easy to be tangled in drama, crap, stress & bull shit. It is easy not to allow all the bits of good in every day to have equal importance. There's calm in the good. There is a sense of peace that accompanies the positivity. I just needed to be willing to see it. I then had to be open to continue seeing it.

I also went on a mission to cut out as much drama from my life as possible. I took control of what I could and made it a personal rule never to say anything behind someones back that I won't say to their face. I'm at peace knowing that my words won't really come back to bite me too badly & that my friends know that this is how I live.

Remember when you were 18 and you were pretty sure you'd know what your life would look like in 10 years? It's almost like we're conditioned to have built in expectations for what our lives will look like and very often they just don't. I've known a lot of women that had their marriage, first & second children mapped out years in advance only to not have those things in the designated time.

What happened to living in the present? Doing the very best that you can do, living the most productive and healthy life possible and seeing the good in that? Why does being healthy and having a good job and good friends amount to nothing if you aren't as married by 28 as you thought you'd be?

I ditched a lot of my silly expectations and started making a mental list of what I have instead accomplished. Seeing my life realistically has brought me peace even when the waters are choppy. There are always options to make things better. There are usually happy kids. Friends are always a phone call away. I should feel a sense of peace by now. It's a journey and one that I've been on for a long time. I should see enough good to be able to laugh in spite of the bad. I should live in and enjoy the present because it brings comfort at least part of the time. Comfort that I've earned. Peace that I need because even a small dose carries me far.