Lately, I've been seeing many people who aren't happy with one or more aspects of their life. Maybe it's their weight, or a relationship, or their spiritual walk, or maybe they have figured out their life is a farce. When the revelation hits, they seem to freak out and do everything possible to wipe out their former life so they can begin a new one.
I know a few people who fit into this... for one reason or another, they aren't satisfied about something in their everyday existence. Instead of picking up the pieces of the life they feel is shattered, they throw it out the window and try to build it again from the ground up. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work. When you try to begin completely fresh, you still have remnants of the previous life or relationship you are running from. And if you haven't learned where the mistakes are, you just build them right back into the new person you are trying to become.
You can't run from your past. You need to have those pieces present each day so you can meet them head on and remember who you were and why you wanted to change. I'm not saying you have to take them out of their box and play with them every day. I'm saying you need to keep some of those memories so you don't fall back into the same patterns you are working so diligently to get away from.
Contrary to popular belief, this metamorphosis doesn't happen over night. You can't be a raving lunatic one day and wake up the next morning and say "I've changed, I'm not the horrible person I was when I went to bed last night." You can get up and say, "today I begin the work needed to transform myself into a person people want to have in their life". This is how you know you are honestly trying to make changes in your life.
Deleting your Facebook page, changing your email, creating a new blog for the umpteenth time, getting a new job, or moving for the third time in 6 months will not give you immediate results. Becoming a better person is not something you can go into blindly. You must have your eyes, ears and heart wide open in order to see, hear and feel the things around you that are working in your life to help you become a better person, friend and human being.
I am and always will be a work in progress. I learn from the mistakes I make, and I try with everything I have to not make those same mistakes again. Yes, I do repeat them, sometimes they can come to you in disguise of a different issue, but in fact are some of the same problems I've dealt with previously. Do I delete my life and frantically begin anew. NO! I have had the same Facebook page since I signed up on February 27, 2008, I have the same blog and I've kept the same name for it since I launched it back on March 24, 2008.
I *know* I've grown and changed. I don't need to throw away my previous life/mistakes and re create myself each time I screw something up. With 315 Facebook friends, over half who are actual face to face friends and not just internet buddies, 139 followers to this blog and 106 people who *Like* the Facebook page for Aoibheal's Lair, I gotta believe I'm doing something right.
My changes are daily, I don't shout them from the rooftops, I let them manifest and allow others to notice the differences. I don't run from my past, I don't throw my previous life away and declare I'm a changed person. I just keep growing, changing, evolving...
I don't try to re-invent myself... I am a work in progress.
