No unimportant days

"Your days are your life in miniature. As you live your days, so you craft your life. What you do today is actually creating your future. The words you speak, the thoughts you think, the food you eat and the actions you take are defining your destiny – shaping who you are becoming and what your life will stand for. There’s no such thing as an unimportant day." Robin Sharma

I was browsing facebook enjoying lovely pictures and fun posts when I read this one posted by a friend.  This really struck me as a significant key to my unrest and frustration with my days right now.  My past does not define me.  My future is in my hands but it is my day to day choices that are shaping my life either consciously or unconsciously.  Empowerment to me is becoming conscious of my decisions.  To achieve this I need to be self-aware, self-critical, and self-praising.  I received a comment a while ago asking how one becomes self-aware.  Observing an infant at a certain time they become aware that they have hands.  They stare at their hands, wiggly their fingers, and attempt to eat them.  At some point, they become aware that if they touch something pokey or hot they get hurt.  This awakening spreads to their feet then to every part of their body.  A two year old is usually aware of themselves and able to do many things until they become automatic.  By three they are no longer thinking constantly about how to take a step.  They climb and jump and roll and enjoy doing many things.  I believe from my observations that children are self-aware but then taught to ignore or become distracted with so many other things going on in the world.  I say we are taught to ignore I refer to the times parents contradict their child's self observations.  A child screams at their parent, "I hate you," after being told no.  The parent corrects them and says that no they don't.  Or a child says that they feel sick, again some parents will deny this too.  A child is crying and the parent tells them to suck it up or stop exaggerating or any number of things that denies their child how they feel.  In some families it becomes a flood of denial for the child until finally the child believes that they don't know how they feel and must wait for someone outside themselves to tell them how they feel.  Enough brutal experiences a child can learn to stop feeling all together.  The other way is children get busy with doing something, ever watch teenagers play video games, they don't eat, they don't sleep, they basically ignore themselves completely immersed in the immediacies of the game.  By the time people become adults, many are completely clueless about what they feel, why they do what they do, or sometimes even what they believe.  In the 60's emphasis turned back to exploring who you are.  When I was in high school, one of my classes was "Search for Identity."  We read the book  Daphne du Maurier The Scapegoat.  I read the book in one weekend then spent the next 9 weeks discussing it with the teacher.  People try any number of avenues to find themselves, some methods are more successful than others.  I worked at becoming more aware of myself.  I used journals to become conscious of why I do what I do.  I stopped as my life become busier and busier with each child joining our family.  I became totally absorbed in day to day functioning without much thought of what about me.  This I believe had a negative impact for my family.  I didn't take care of me until finally I couldn't take care of anyone else either.  I ended up in a deep dark pit of unrelenting debilitating depression and I didn't even enlist a doctor for help.  My kids suffered the most from my self-neglect.  I was forced into learning to be aware of myself and change how I lived or live in a twilight world more dead than alive.  I chose to fight back the darkness.  I first tackled my physical health problems.  Like an infant I started to become aware of how my body felt.  What caused my body to feel better?  What did I do that made me feel worse?  I explored food, herbs, essential oils, positive thinking, almost anything I could get my hands on to find answers.  I went looking.  Interesting thing about looking for yourself is you are right there in the mirror everyday but sometimes painful to see yourself fully.  I finally ended up in counseling because I kept coming up with  more questions then answers.  KavinCoach guided me through very painful self-awakening of all myselves and finally integration.  Learning to accept the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is not an easy task.  Much easier to drown myself in business and not explore the inner workings of my mind.  One exercise I did in the search for identity class was to set the timer for 3 minutes and simply right anything and everything that popped into my mind...no editing...no rereading...just write as fast as I could go.  You may feel the need choose a topic and center your writing on that one area.  My assignment from MyCounselor is one such topic.  Getting to know myself was one of the hardiest and most rewarding challenges I ever did.