Could Cleaning My Room Make My Dreams Come True
I hated cleaning my room. My mom would ask me. Of course I’d have to do it. So I’d pick the same standard strategy every time: use the bed. Didn’t matter if I had to squish it and squeeze it so tight something might linger underneath the bed skirt. I’d shove it all under there with some power and I’d do it fast. If I didn’t do it fast, I’d get sucked in to all the neat little toys I’d forgotten about because:
1) my room was too messy to find them, and
As I grew older, I cleaned my room by sorting. I sorted my stuff into stacks and piles and lined them up on my desk or around a dark corner near the dresser. These stacks would get so tall, they’d shake. I’d have to lean them against the wall. Sometimes they’d fall, but not all the time.
There was one certainty to my strategy of cleaning my room: mom would get so mad she’d go in my room and clean it all up herself. Then I couldn’t find anything.
So here is my thought: What if the way we cleaned our rooms when we were little says something about the way we handle our dreams. They’re both about goals: Cleaning a room vs. chasing a dream. Strategies for one could easily define the strategies in the other.
So how do we reach our goals? How do I figure out how to clean my room? The first step is to slow down and decide if I want to be marginal, or do I want to make this goal really worth something.
I decide I’m sick of marginal. So I take a good look around the room. I compartmentalize—sort –and I get rid of the things I don’t use or need. I decide what amount of time I have and I focus. I might listen to a few favorite tunes as I go, but that’s what I call motivation.
In any case, the main idea here is this: I have to want to really clean up my room; I can’t push it under the bed like I used to. Sounds a lot like chasing dreams to me…
Just a girl in love with every summer night
Spiders, Snakes, and Sharks, Oh My!
What is the one thing you hate? The one thing that draws an immediate race of shivers down your spine? The one thing that has you running screaming from the room and drives you high up to a chair or the kitchen counter when you see it? For me, definitely deep water and being up close with a giant crazy fish way bigger than me. I’d never go deep sea diving. Too scared that I might not be able to breathe and hyperventilate. I know I’m missing out on a huge thrill, rush, experience of something great, but I don’t know if I can ever overcome that sort of anxiety.In any case, I’m thinking about the power of phobias today. Where do they come from? How do they get implanted into our giant human brains?
This question comes up from a song one of my favorite bands sings: Fear, by OneRepublic.
The lyrics go something like this…
When we were children we’d play
Out in the streets just dipped in fate
When we were children we’d say
We don’t know the meaning of
Fear, Fear, Fear
…wish I didn’t know the meaning of…
Do we get our phobias as children? Or are we born with some physiological predisposition? I’ll be researching these questions this week and I’m curious what you think. And if you have any answers I’d love to hear them…
Peace, Love and Pleasant Thoughts,
~Erika
Loving More
I heard these words in church yesterday. Talk about feeling a cupid’s cross arrow blast right into your heart—I was overwhelmed with emotion all at once. I didn’t know if I should cry out of joy, sing or just sit there and think awhile in reflection over my dreams, those I love, or the fear—the possibility of more risk and hurt and having another rejection letter sent back to my inbox.
Then I stopped wondering what to do and I smiled.
All of these emotions were generated inside of me because the truth hurts sometimes. The truth brings out all sorts of human feelings I don’t always want to deal with. But then again, what happens if I run?
Love is the most powerful choice and feeling in the human body, heart and soul. More powerful than hate. Why? Because hate allows you to funnel everything bad into that one thought, person, action whatever you’re so ticked off about—you can block it out with a black marker. You can even run away because you hate so much.
But Love? It’s a risk that never ends. It’s a bond you keep throwing out there like a fishing line that screams out, “Take my bait! I love me enough to want this!”
Love asks you to hurt again.
So thank you. Thank you for this quote. Thank you for making me write harder everyday, love more of myself and my friends and my family everyday. I’ll take the hurt. I’ll kill it with kindness. Why? Because love is a beautiful thing and dreams are about loving yourself enough to know what you want and to know you have to work hard for them.
Choose to love this week…and thanks for letting me scream a little…
Erika
Cloud Nine Girl 