It's my birthday today and I want to take a moment to reflect on my age, the life I've lived until this point, what my life has become, and what I want my future to look like.
I'm 43 and I can't believe I'm so old in many respects, but I feel 25. Someone told me yesterday that 40 is the new 21. I'll take that. I feel as though in some ways my life is just begining, that I have so much more to do. Yet I have done and been through so much at this point.
I am especially thankful for my tribe, the people I have surrounded myself with. I think they are brilliant, funny, and kind. These are the type of people I have always wanted to be around and I finally found them. They inspire me each and every day.
I will not go into specifics but I will tell you that I have been through a lot of
I've been manic, I've been depressed, I've been everything in-between. The one thing I can say if I died today is that I lived with passion. I felt things. I allowed
Right now I'm trying to make a point to live mindfully, consciously, deliberately, and gratefully. I am trying to notice every moment and really live inside it. My relationships with people are the most important things in my life. I have great solid friends and a supportive and loving family. What else can a woman my age want?
But I still want. I am still looking for something more in the future. Not because I am not content with what I have, but because I think I could enhance it even more. I want a significant other. Maybe I would like to adopt children one day. I want to be a well-respected author in the writing world and I want to be a renowned professor.
But you know what I want the most? To be enlightened and to be able to inspire others on the path to enlightenment. I know that may sound a little hokey, like as if I want to be a saint or something. That is not the case at all. I just want to find my true inner self and connect with the larger self of all the souls around me.
Is that really so much to ask? I'm not sure if enlightenment is an experience in a moment that comes and goes, or an experience of a lifetime. I'm not even sure I truly know what it is. But I get this feeling I will know it when I feel it. I have felt it on occasion, but I don't know if my life consistently is the life of an enlightened soul.
So how do I get there? I think maybe there is nowhere to get to. That I have only to notice that I am already there. To notice the moment. To live in the eternal Now. Sure sometimes at six in the morning, like it is now, I feel a little tinge of loneliness and wish there was someone sitting next to me right now.
But in some ways, whoever you are, you are sitting right next to me, reading these words that I'm saying with my mind. You are my friend. You are my tribe. I truly believe we are all connected in a very solid way. That we are all One.
I am already One with you and One with
I am already what I want to be, I just have to recognize it. I am and have always been perfect, I again, have not realized it. Perhaps you too don't know your own perfection. Maybe you think, like I do, that you are so flawed that how could you ever be made out of perfection?
You and I may be flawed, we may even be tainted at times. But we are real, we are here, and we are alive. The real question is, are we really here when we are here? Where are you right now? Where is your mind really while you are reading this page? Where are you when you are living your life? Are you there, in it. Being it. Feeling it. Living it.
The point of life I have found is not to have everything work out in your favor. But the real meaning, it seems to me, is to evolve no matter what is happening around you. Good, bad or ugly, be real.
Be here.
Be Now.
nina