ONE
I was whining with a friend, asking “What do I want to do?” about my writing and she responded, “How about we ask ‘What do I REALLY want?'”
TWO
I have been watching a dear, dear friend regain her Self after years and years of serving everyone. She has been living through the most intense circumstances: years of caring for her ailing mother, in-laws dying within months of each other, and most recently, nursing her husband with cancer (really, if I told you her whole story, you wouldn’t believe it). . Now the emergencies are over. The dust is settling and little by little she is finding the courage to ask, “What have I been doing because I thought I was supposed to and what have I been doing because I really wanted to?” wow girl!
THREE
My youngest daughter rarely spends her money: she’s as strict as bark on her green things. But she wanted a new Barbie in a big way. (Even when I make comments under my breath like, “Look at the size of Barbie’s waist. Do you know that if she were a real woman, she would suffocate because there wouldn’t be enough room for her lungs in that tiny waist? And what about those breasts? Did you know…”) So we made the long trip off-island to ToysRUs; we asked where the Barbies were; We turned the corner and gasped! We are up against a wall of at least 100,000 different Barbies (okay, maybe 100). After about 50 hours (during which I displayed particularly good parenting skills), Lilly decided she liked the COA (real what?) Collector’s Movie Star Barbie. The sticker price: $50. My mother-in-law and husband were with us and Chris said, “I think it’s absurd to spend that much on a Barbie.” With visions of starving children languishing in my head, I said, “How many of us spend our lives buying things on sale that we don’t want and never get what we really want?” Chris’s 74-year-old mother grabbed her purse and said quietly: “I’ve spent my whole life doing that.”
KILN
I wonder if the moral fabric of our world is weakening when we settle for less than what we really want, and I’m not just talking about material things, I’m talking about relationships, goals, even dreams. Settling leads to more settling, which can lead to forgetting what we value, and when we don’t know what we value, we can become quite careless with our choices. So I ask you, is that why Jason Alexander is doing Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials? (Subscribers in other countries, please excuse this reference to American popular culture.)
FIVE
Reminder: What you really want always honors your true responsibilities.
SIX
What do you really want to do now?
What do you really want to do today?
What do you really want to do this week?
Why not pause right now and find out?