The New Year Resolution

She stared at the blank page—willing herself to write—but quickly got up instead.

One..., two..., three. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, she completed a routine.

"How come it took me the whole night thinking about it, half an hour just doing it?" she thought, "works every time."

So, she remembers.

"Don't wait until everything is just right. It'll never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles & less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you'll grow stronger & stronger, more & more skilled, more & more self-confident & more & more successful." ~MV Hansen

Life Skills #7: Humility

Charles Spurgeon once noted, “Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self,” and it struck a chord with me.

No one is invincible. We all fall down at some point in our lives. We all break down.

Only the strong at heart will transcend their human frailty over and over again. Yes, they will bow in defeat with grace. And they will never whine nor complain—not even if— but, especially when the odds are against them. They will give credit to whom credit is due.

Humility is a strength of the heart.

It is the ability to accept and correct one's own failings and not pass the buck to someone else just because one can. It is always making a conscious effort to believe the best in everyone, considering others better than one's self. You bet it's hard work. It can be painful, too.

But it works in the most unexpected ways. Let's all learn it. Because the world needs it.

 "It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels." ~St. Augustine

Seeing Good in Every Pain

It feels so much like fear. The sensation, that is. You simply can’t tell one from another. Pain is inevitable, even, necessary. And we cannot just explain it away.

I’m not writing because I have figured out the “why’s” of my own pains. Rather, I have come to find more questions. Still, I do not count myself worthy nor would I dare question His ways. Not again. As the thought still haunts me.. "Who am I, anyway, that God should explain Himself to me?" And so, I’d rather keep my peace. I have chosen to grapple with the questions in silence. For there, they all seem to make sense... somehow. I've come to understand my own frailty —the temporariness of it all.

But, I believe there’s always something good in everything we go through. Even pain. Especially pain. Really. There’s something good in everything, we just have to look for it. But that is not without the usual, or perhaps even the expected struggles attached to it. All you need is an attitude of gratitude to winnow the good from the pains. It takes time.

The best thing we need to realize —pain reminds us all that we’re not invincible. Or has ever been. It is the one truth that finds us all in equal bearing. Pain. It exempts no one. Our fleeting glories can never shield any of us from this human experience.

And we can rest from the struggles if we only learn to endure.

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”  ~Lance Armstrong

The Touch

Lying face-down slowly to relieve the tingling pain in her back, she willed herself to sleep.

When she felt those oil-damped palms again weakly massaging from her shoulder down...

Her mother had staggered to her bedside.

Soothed, she buried her face deeper into the tear-stained pillow and drifted in that touch.

The best conversations with mothers always take place in silence, when only the heart speaks. ~C. Latet

Finding peace through rough waters

There will always be times when fate would seem so unkind —pulling the rug from under your feet, leaving you sprawling squarely down to the ground, falling flat on your face..

I know. I've had some of those times.

We all have our own shares of troubles and it’s nothing unusual to feel over-burdened most of the time. Because these days, we all live stressful lives. We just go on barely meeting life's demands each day. Hardly coping.

I’ve met a few who have that enviable ability to rock with the boat, just keeping still and remaining calm until it sails on quieter waters. But, they too, have fallen flat on their faces at one time or another. Fate exempts no one, really.

I’ve had my boat rocked to its core and capsized so many times already. Yet, I never got used to all the rocking, until now. Life can be anything but boring, I can assure you..

What gives? We all crave for certainty and that ever elusive sense of security. So, we'd panic at the slightest tilt of the boat. Some would freak out at the mere sight of the waves.

Because our confidence is in the boat. We often forget we can stay afloat, or swim.

And that realization hit me lately. Struggling with his own share of rough waters, M. Scott Peck on one of his bestsellers, In Search of Stones, wrote:

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we're feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

It's a conscious choice to always look at the brighter side of everything we'll go through in life. That's how we find peace. For it's not despite of, but because of the times we've been through rough waters that we learn how to handle the worst times yet to come.

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."  ~Vaclav Havel