Begin again
“Revolution begins in the self and with the self”
Toni Cade Morrison
You made it to my second post. Thank you and welcome. Have your favorite cup of tea and make yourselves quite at home. I hope to see more of you around here. Again, thank you for joining me as we traverse the unknown.
As for me, I’m beginning again, and I will do so again and again so that I may enjoy this beautiful gift of life. In the previous post I spoke about being honest with myself. This was no easy feat as I had to remind myself that my shortcomings can be addressed with the decision to change them. Conversely, this was after I berated myself for the same. One of my decisions, as we would all have different decisions based on self-reflection, was to treat myself in the exact manner I wished to be treated. This new concept had me at war and I was on the losing side. But I begin again and again to be gentle with myself. I believe social media has now coined it the soft girl era, and by this I don’t mean expensive body oils, high-end vacations and luxury clothing. I simply mean examining myself and identifying the changes I need to create the life I want.
I started a personal inventory which I will share with you later. In colloquial terms we Trinis say, “take stock of yuhself”. So, after years of self-neglect and abandonment, I also took stock of the resources that I accumulated over the years. Ironically hours before I wrote this post a dear friend of mine, who was cleaning up her mom’s home as she prepared to relocate her mom owing to her growing inability to live alone introduced the term death cleaning to my vocabulary. Although this term refers to the task of ridding yourself of unnecessary items so that your loved ones would not be daunted by the task, I likened it to shedding the unnecessary things in preparation for the era of my life I’ve entered. And as I begin again and again, I will do an inventory and restock my resources as needed to ensure that I’m living the life I am destined for.
After this initial inventory came the more difficult part for me. This may vary from person to person as we all have different variables. For me, however, it was making the decisions. Should I keep it or should I Iet it go, relative to myself and my environment. By now I hope you know I still have my miscellaneous box because I haven’t fully decided to get rid of the stuff in there. Hey, I’m learning to be gentle with myself and part of it is accepting who I am, where I’m at and what a life well lived looks like for me. I am getting better at making decisions. Not only am I now making decisions but I am also able to stand by my decisions.
I hope you find the courage to begin again and again…