Red Faced And Re-writing

I made a very conscious decision to lighten up this year. There are very good reasons for this that I won't go into right now, but it is time I live my life as if this is the only moment. Am I ever struggling to do it!

It is hard for me to be spontaneous. I have spent so much of my life trying to do and be the correct person for my position of the moment and whether that was a corporate wife, or mother of a gifted child, or special child, or teacher, or musician, or newsletter editor, or member of alternative groups like centering prayer, or meditation, or dream groups, or bicycling, even some acting -- all across the board I tortured myself with guilt and fear that I might do it wrong.

Wrong! That horrible, terrible, lousy thing that I feared more than anything in the world. I might not be perfect. Well, I am perfectly not perfect! I grew up with people who used one hand to nail the other to the cross and then hung there in smug satisfaction that they were suffering for all the right reasons. I didn't do much better in many instances, but I did try. I still try and each moment I get a little bit better at it. It is just I have had so far to go. Still have quite a ways to go.

Now I try to act a little more impulsively, a little more intuitively, a little less like the world will end if I screw up, because no matter how much my ego believes it might -- it won't. So, as you might guess, I make a lot more mistakes, or maybe they really aren't mistakes, maybe they are just lower down on the learning curve than I like to think of myself being.

I still find myself replaying what I have done, like bad reruns that keep me awake when I should be dreaming of the beautiful fantasies that have graced my life lately. I still find myself red-faced and re-writing, in my head, email I have sent because I might have written it better, or better yet not sent it at all.

But I am getting better. Very slowly. My lessons are long ones, because my head always gets in the way, but still I am better. So, I apologize to everyone I have annoyed with my obsequious behaviors and assure you that they will probably continue on for quite some time. It is just such a part of who I am that it seeps out and takes on a life of its own when I am trying to be spontaneous.

What a paradox this year is going to be.