Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. ~Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball, you say?
She, actually, was a heck of a woman, especially for the time she lived in. T used to work at Paramount, and I found out when I started dating him that, since she was a workaholic, she designed a small courtyard outside her office at Paramount Studios to look like her back yard. She'd have her children come to work with her and play there. She also had the front to one of the buildings made up to look exactly like one of her houses. Because of these things, she#1) felt more at home, which is nice when you work a lot (hence my candle warmer here)
#2) could do photo shoots and record media messages from right outside her office, but seem like she was at home, perfectly balancing all the things involved in being a working mother, and taking wonderful care of her children.
Smarty pants, that one.
But back to the quote.
Every day I pick quotes that speak to me and that (sometimes I hear), end up speaking to the people who walk by my office every day. That's nice. But, to be 100% honest, the quotes are only up for selfish reasons. So, today, as I was trying to avoid getting dry-erase dust on my white sweater while I wrote this one out, I did a little mental check.
Do I love myself? ...I think so. Yeah. Sure I do. Hmm. What's the catch? Um, I need to drink more water. Okay, I'll drink more water today. And I need to work on more positive thinking. And I need to get my website up. And I need to remember to run those errands this afternoon.
...and before I knew it my mind had sprinted into to-do list mode, which later, after I realized what I'd done, showed me that I've run into the same pitfall that I think a lot of young professional women (and at-home women. And not so young women. And men) fall into. And that's measuring our own opinion of ourself - our effectiveness, worthwhile contribution to the world, basically right to be living and be loved, even by ourselves, by how much we accomplish.
There's something wrong with that. My Reiki teacher once gave me a huge lecture on how, especially for women, so much thought is given to, and weight is put on, being "enough". Doing enough. Saying enough. Cooking enough. Making enough money. Giving enough love to those we love. Being interesting enough.
She said that, sooner or later, you have to be able to just sit, quietly, calmly, and smile and say, with an appreciative and relaxed sigh, I am enough.
And I nodded, perplexed, because I really had no idea what she was talking about and I was halfway listening with the other half of my mind thinking about how I had to stop by the store on the way home and calls I had to make and homework I had to finish and a flight I had to book for the holidays and how I'd schedule out time to visit both my family and friends and how I needed to take something out of the freezer to thaw it for dinner and the new wall treatment I was working on and how I needed to update my AIM info (yes that was back in the days of AIM) and what I was going to do that weekend and.....
-and now, years later, after I've grown and changed and seen babies born and loved them and massaged their little feet, and after I've had my heart broken a couple times and seen that, even when someone DOES seem to do enough, if it's true that they're NOT enough (not really, not for me), then it doesn't matter.
And now I have some new friends and some old ones and a new(ish) love that has shown me that, if you love the core of someone, what they do, today, doesn't matter at all, because it doesn't define you - so you can love someone even if, tomorrow, they choose to go to clown school or something and derail all you thought that they were going to do...
So shouldn't that count for yourself too? The love at the core, for all that you have the ability and potential to do, moreso than what's checked off of that to-do list?
Seems to make sense. Now, just to do it.....
Just sayin. Thoughts?
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