What do you wish you did?

Every day we open our eyes, every morning we are gifted with another opportunity to start a new. To remember to take in a bit more sunshine, or a bit less, to speak more lovingly to ourselves or our loved ones, or to strangers. To focus a bit more at work, or more on life and less on work… we get a chance to do as we see fit. Even if we think we can’t do what we want, we are choosing the steps and direction we are headed towards.  We may think that life chooses for us, but if it does, we let it.  I keep saying I want to get this website redone and fixed, and I want to keep writing every day, but when it comes down to it, it feels like there is a sea of other priorities, so how strong is my desire to accomplish this and other passions if I’ve allowed myself to get pulled in all these other directions?

I have written children’s books, one of them is illustrated (not yet published) and I just need to tweak a few things and it will be finished and this is literally a life long goal. I would be so thrilled to have it finished, and while yes, I am not the only hold up in completing this and sharing it with the world… I also haven’t pursued it with an insatiable, unstopable passion. Or maybe at times I have and then something derails it, or life. Even though it’s been my dream since I was little to be a writer and to write children’s stories. I used to write stories about my dog Moses… ‘It’s a bird…it’s a plane… it’s Moses?’ A story about my dog gaining magical powers and becoming my partner in exploring the world and making it better one adventure at a time. I think that was also kind of my dream, a desire to see the world and make it a better place…and who doesn’t want a dog that basically serves as a flying horse yet fluffy like the  ‘never ending story’?? Not quite as dramatic and sad as that and more modern day aligned. I loved writing and sharing these stories and I know I’d love to keep at it, but life happened. Or art, I’ve wanted to get better at art or playing the Ukulele…I say I want to do these things, but there is no lack of my having an interest in things I want to do.  Art is a whole story of it’s own as there were deep seeded ideas of being imperfect and unworthy and a super critical art teacher, but I’ve gotten passed much of that, I think and the desire to be expressive is so strong. Yes so is the desire to keep providing a stable life for my son.

I try consistently to make my child aware that now that he’s young and has time after school and someone else is keeping a roof over his head…Now is the time to explore and find out what he loves and what he’s good at, and what he wants to be good at, try things, practice, fail, try again…and mostly he wants to chill, hang with friends or play roblox. Which is totally normal, but also if living and looking back on life gives you any sort of insight… I definitely wish I would have built more skills while younger or while I was newly married…while I was newly married I stressed myself out quite a bit. I was still young, 24 and wanted to contributing significantly financially, but also wanted to suddenly be a perfect ‘home maker’, but didn’t have the skills necessary for either really, man did I stress myself about that. I couldn’t even tell you if I could have done it differently during that time. I was immobilzed by a feeling of never being good enough because I wasn’t figuring out how to fold  things right or that I didn’t instantly have it all together and figured out. I didn’t realize it was still ok to be figuring it out back then. Shame and judgement are crippling, so that’s not what this post is about, well, writing is how I process and clear, so it’s about that, but also….it’s about realizing that how we spend our days, is how we spend our lives, and it’s about getting in alignment with what we say we want, what we say we want to do and the steps we are actually taking to get there….what steps? Are we? Or are we doing the opposite?

Becoming who we want to be, taking the steps to get there, is hard enough to explain to an adult, let alone a child. I recently opened up this topic on Facebook, as we all want what’s best for our children and we can only observe and make educated and intuitive guesses on what is best for our kids. I’ve heard a lot about music helping developing brains, and coordination and people appreciating later in life when they stuck with learning an instrument. So I sent Skyler to a few guitar lessons. He picked it up super quickly and seemed to enjoy, but wasn’t into practicing, he could memorize the number associated with the string and then have an entire song memorized from the number pattern alone. But he wasn’t so into it and didn’t want to continue lessons, so I let him take a break, I’d mention it here and there, but he didn’t bite and I wondered would his future self wish that he had learned to be a skilled guitar player? Or a different instrument? There are plenty of adults that wish they had…but why didn’t they continue once they became adults?  Actually I was quite grateful for all the responses I received, mostly stating not to force, but still saying if they kept with an instrument it had given them so much, opportunity, scholarships, travel, confidence, meditation, routine. etc. Really it’s amazing what it can do…gosh with all these interests and passions, who has time for work, lol.  What would your day look like if you spent it doing all the things you always wanted to learn or do? Like rock climbing and fencing and canoe trips and writing, painting, yoga, acro yoga and dancing and then randomly trying something totally new each day. Oh and eating healthy and enjoying a yummy baked good.

I am definitely not singling out adults that say they wished they learned an instrument as a kid but haven’t pursued it as an adult, because life gets in the way…because I am am just as guilty.  I wanted to learn guitar, didn’t know anyone closely that played growing up, and heard it’s best to first learn piano, I had a lesson or two on the piano and my teacher was not living his best life and became incarcerated (unrelated to me), so piano lessons stopped short and guitar lessons didn’t happen.  At some point I realized guitar fingers get calluses and callused fingers and massage don’t really go together, so it never fully made sense to pick up guitar.

Massage was the calling I did allow myself to hear, and I pursued learning massage, and I am so grateful that I did. It’s been an amazing gift to be able to share my gift of touch with countless souls over the last 20+yrs. Although I think I allowed myself to pursue it because I thought it made sense and it was something I wasn’t afraid to fail at. I felt I was more likely that I would be paid for my work. And it seems like so few succeed when pursing lofty dreams… I realized however that a large guitar was difficult for my small frame to hold and hard for my soft and sensitive fingertips to press the strings on, so finally I decided because I’m small the baritone ukulele made more sense. Still hurt my fingers, so I wore little finger cots on my fingers and tried to teach myself…that hasn’t gone great and then well, as everyone says and as this blog has mentioned…life happened…so how do we find our balance?

In those 20yrs I’ve been growing as a massage therapist, as a headhunter, a mother and trying to give this boy his best life…each generation we try to set the next generation up better, right? So I showed Skyler all the posts about people and their music. One I particuarlly liked was to expose a child to really talented musicians and see if they are inspired to practice…but Skyler hasn’t been grabbed so much by music. Mostly he’s into video games these days, and I don’t know if I should let him dive in and maybe that will go some where, or if it will rob him of all these other things and potential interests. Perhaps a lot of parents question this…

Through it all, we are all just doing our best each day and need to also give ourselves grace it’s ok that we aren’t perfect, maybe that is perfect. And tomorrow is another day to get up again and do it all over groundhogs day style. Before your day ends, take inventory of what you really want to do, and are you taking steps each day to get closer to where you want to be?  What steps can you take? What do you really want to do and be.  Life isn’t always about big drastic changes, sometimes it’s about showing up each day to practice that instrument and then years later you look back and realize all the opportunities you’ve enjoyed from consistently showing up for yourself.  Granted as many of us throw ourselves into our work and family we don’t always feel we have a lot of time, but maybe we can do something about that too…maybe we can build our lives to support ourselves in a different way. Maybe that’s ok, maybe we don’t have to always do and be all, maybe there are seasons.
Life is long and wide and beautiful.
Pura Vida.

Love Always,

Cheryl Adams