Options - Moving forward - Choosing to be here

I have be doing some investigating about different options for living. If you are like me you feel trapped sometimes in a place where you think "this is it" your life has come to this place and you can't imagine there are options.  Our lizard brains constantly want us hiding in the same bushes day after day.  Something bad could be out there ready to eat us or maybe not. 

The trouble with this is we can prepare ourselves for every possible scenario except the one thing that wasn't on our list.  We stay in jobs or in relationships that just don't work anymore because our brain wants things to be less complicated. Telling us that this is all there is so deal with it.

I do think even the act of just seeing what is out there is a way to feel like you are moving forward. For me I am thinking in this market where my house is worth twice as much  maybe I should investigate the possibilities. 

Don't get me wrong I love my house but I am not the person I was when I bought it and my life doesn't require this much space. It is beautiful and at the time it was everything I ever dreamed of and I imagined the potential it had for gathering of friends and family. I did entertain for awhile and had regular group meditations on the porch but for the last few years it has been empty. 

I spend my free time working on maintaining it and I am not sure I want to keep doing this.  I had a long full week at work and felt physically exhausted but worked on the house yesterday. I worked inside today getting ready to go back to work tomorrow.

My sister thinks I am nuts she loves my house but never visits. I think she would love this house if it was where she lived. When I found this house I called it a God thing because it had everything on my wish list and both a friend and my realtor called me the same day about it. 

It was empty and needed somewhere to move my stuff.  The life I had known had ended abruptly and I needed a place to live.  The process was effortless this was all I could handle because I was in shock and could make decisions. I got a mortgage without having a job and a few short months later the stock market crashed and no one could get a mortgage.  

Timing is everything and I believe that when you are in the flow with life then the right things come to you at the right time.  If it is right then it all works and it feels good. 

We all have options and seeing what they are can make the life we have seem something we have chosen and not a place where we are stuck. I was forced out of my old life and it changed me for the better. I needed more than what I was being offered and I have found happiness and peace that I didn't know existed. 

Options - You can't trust your mind

 My close friends mother was on her way here for a month long visit when her nephew at 22 committed suicide. He scratched sorry on an envelop.

His dad found him after making the usual Saturday morning pancakes for him and his sister. He was out of work, sick with asthma and drinking the way most people do in their twenties.

My friends mom arrived here Tuesday night and they both left this morning for Chicago. I made dinner for everyone last night and he left his dog at my house until he returns. It is comforting to have a dog around again a silent companion even though when I left this morning she was howling in her crate.

I understand the idea of suicide. I can see why someone young would think it was a good solution to endless pain. You don't have enough life experience to realize that life is a cycle of ups and downs. Your mind sometimes with the help of drugs and alcohol tells you that you will feel bad forever so what's the point of living.

The mind wins again. I wish that there was a way to convince everyone to not listen to the voice in their head especially when it doesn't have anything good to say. In my early years it was a manic voice constantly narrating the situation and giving me advice filling in the blank spaces with needless commentary. I thought this was normal and that this was a voice of wisdom and reason. It was a sum of all that I had learned from life.

I turns out that it was just making up stuff filling the hours with ideas. Ideas about what someone else was thinking or the 99 different ways a given situation would turn out usually with me getting the shaft. I lived my life on the defense trying to avoid the perceived danger in my head. This was a lot of work and I was exhausted and sick most of the time.

Over the years I have made friends with the voice for the most part. I have spent a lot time, when I am fearful, analyzing what it is saying to me that is making me feel bad. Taking each blanket statement it makes like "you are a complete failure" or "nobody cares about you" and proving that these statements aren't true. The mind knows all those buried weaknesses of core beliefs you have about yourself. It knows what to say that will undermine all the progress you think you have made.

I don't imagine that this every stops for anyone I think maybe some people just take the voice more seriously than others. My friends nephew probably was one of them. The pain of living at that moment was too much for him and he chose to use the new gun that he had gotten for his birthday to take his own life.

I hope he found peace on the other side.