Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

Happy New Birth Year!

Usually people say Have a great day! Or Hope this next year is terrific! Or the usual host of innocuous well wishes.

This year, though, was very interesting. Joe and my dear friend Anne Wells separately took me out for a birthday lunch and asked the exact same question… in the exact same way.

Which I LOVED.

We sat down, ordered our meal, handed our menus back and looking at me with excited curiousity and endless roomy time asked:

What are you planning to do in this New Year?

They both celebrate that each and every new year (really new day) is an incredible opportunity to grow, to experience life in a deeper more vibrant way.

They assume there will be changes. They welcome it!

We undergo small and seismic shifts every day.

A birthday is a personalized annual occasion to look at where we are and where we want to be.

What does our soul want to leap to embrace? What challenges must we allow ourselves to be transformed by?

My birthday last week was spectacular.

However, the day before was a catastrophe. I was descending a flight of stairs and thought I had one more step that I didn’t. I jammed my ankle and could not place any weight on it without quite a bit of pain.

I thought I’d sprained it. And then the next day, my birthday, it was miraculously better. Such a gift, because exercising really helps me to clear my head.

So I took a Tabata gym class and expressed gratitude the whole time to for my ability to jump and squat and kick.

I also asked what the message was in what had happened because I believe strongly that, although we are usually running too fast to look for them, the universe and our lives are offering us messages all the time

It is a cooperative collective intelligence.

Just a matter of whether we cooperate.

The message, kind of embarrassingly obvious, I got was this: There is NOT always ANOTHER step.

If you keep reaching for more, looking for more work to be done, you will never land and cause yourself unnecessary pain along the way.

Brilliant.

I do tend to get a little OCD task oriented.

So my answer to new plans this year consisted of two hand gestures. Less fist-clenching. Less getting a grip.

Place your thumb and fingertips together touching and then slowly open them up until your hands extend wide open.

More letting go and letting in.