Posts Tagged ‘perseverence’

Out Pictured

People call it making plans, ambitious people call it making goals, and Mystics call it what you’re conscious of being brought to Life by your subconscious. However, whatever you call it, it is at its most basic level the Life you are currently leading. The problem with making plans is that plans can change, you may fail to reach your goal, and ultimately no one has a handle on it all. Personally speaking I’m a goal setting and  achieving type of person. However, what happens when a near death experience( in my case)  throws those set goals out of whack and lays waste to your carefully set path?  What do you do? How can you cope with the inevitable bad feelings?  Well, save for  inventing a time machine, you’ve got to figure it out. Here’s  something I’ve concluded after  years of therapy, multiple self help books under my belt, and  rebuilding my path. It is not in the quantity of the stuff you have, or the years you’ve got to live. It’s in the QUALITY  of them. I now put real time and effort into everything I do. I’d rather get to know someone deeply than just on a surface level, I consider what the impact is  of everything I eat or purchase on  others, and the Earth. Because it’s not always about you. In fact, most people are pre-occupied with themselves. Funnily enough, the less you think only about yourself and more about others you are the one who will benefit!  Having  faced immense difficulties I don’t  consider  the loss, I focus on the gains. Rather than have perished  from the stroke at 28, I’ve lived another ten years. That’s 3,650 days where I opened my eyes, breathed in, made plans, and felt the warmth of the sun  brush across my skin. At one very scary point in time those days could’ve been considered borrowed. Therefore, it is not lost on me to slow down and really soak in the days I have. Time is our most precious and unrenewable resource, so consider carefully how you spend it. Choose  the things which bring you light rather than darkness, the things that bring others closer rather than push them away, and give, give, give! I promise you  it will always come back to you double. So, don’t fear giving from your heart in order to fill it.

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Collide.

This is a tale of  four people(although imagined)  with four separate lives that somehow  streamed  into one river, before branching off into different  directions. It’s funny how  a complete stranger wrote a show that so often  mirrors the spirit (and content) of my Life in New York City as a 20’s something Girl. Discovering not only  what the five Boroughs of New York  could offer me  during my  burgeoning Adulthood, but navigating  the  sometimes complicated relationships too! Just as a  comet speeds through space colliding with other objects and leaving pieces of itself behind, so do we as people. Each relationship, meaningful interaction,  successes, and failures have either built me up or broke me down. However, unlike Hannah Horvath, I never got to have a “goodbye tour,”  of my  Life and neighborhood  in New York. Rather I fast forwarded through what I expected to be my fourth year in the city; instead waking up in a rehab hospital in Michigan. Which, needless to say was a shock to my system. Not  fully grasping what had happened to me( I was unconscious for most of it after all)  I just wanted to be back  in New York. A place where completing even the most mundane or trivial of tasks, makes you feel like a champion. A place that is as difficult to succeed in, as the concrete is hard.   I chose to live there, for it’s electric energy, for the massive amounts of opportunities, and to fulfill my teenage dream. As a  fresh out of college  25 year old  graduate it was the perfect place for me. Why?  Because as I navigate stroke recovery and Life after a near Death experience, New York gave me guts. Not the kind you see in a horror movie, but real guts. The kind that helps you to fake it til’ you make it and go after what you want with no apologies. Do you find that behavior rude?  Ladder climbing? Well, that’s just Life in the city babe. Where I once cursed the contrast of the Michigan trees to skyscrapers, the suburban sprawl to city streets, and  the slow pace to  the city’s efficiency; now I am thankful for it. Just as I found myself in NY at the right time and place, my recovery is    happening at the right time and in the right place as well. I have run long and hard, but now it’s time to learn how to walk again.   

         -XO BLEU

keep pushing

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I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

-Thomas A. Edison

 
high

If a little seedling  can manage to grow through cement, why can’t you do the same with your difficult  circumstances? The world worships at the feet of the God of success, but what do we do with failure and catastrophe? Rather than meet these challenges with a smile, We crumble and fade from them. When you’re going through a hard time keep smiling. Make people wonder where  that smile came from, and how it got there. Meet life dancing with your hand in the air rather than lying down. Imagine what you’d do if the floor was pulled out from beneath you, because that’s what happened to me actually! In one fell swoop, I lost my high paying job, my apartment, a significant other, and my left arm and leg were paralyzed. I went to bed expecting to go to work and then home to New York City, but instead woke up in a Hospital back where I started with even less than I had   as a child. In this situation you can either give  up  and fall into the arms of a suicidal depression or   get up  even when you don’t feel like it. Despite my desire to bury myself under the covers in my bed,  I  forced myself  to get up and go to rehab every week. Because, regardless of how I felt, life wasn’t going to hand  progress over to me  I had to push back to achieve it. I can assure you , that if I can  do it, so can you! Just as trout swim miles upstream to spawn, sometimes  we find ourselves swimming upstream as well.  Perhaps  we aren’t swimming upstream to spawn, but  our reasons are not so different from the trouts. That reason is simple,  both of us are swimming towards  Life and not away.

God speed!

bleu