It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

~Matt Haig

something is shifting under the sweet ways of being….

inquiry for today~ you notice and then it really begins…..

familiar ways

We can do hard things. We can live our lives in uncertainty. We can grieve while living and live while grieving.

We can live while we live into what is to become and what will someday be. We do this together.

We can celebrate this world and all that it holds while also caring for a world

that is in great need of loving care and tenderness.

~Julie Daley