A Little Room to Breathe

I tend to get wound up pretty tight due to my need to have everything around me "just so". I see this as an unwelcome side effect to my sincere belief that

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt

I operate out of the paradigm that if I can envision what I want and I put all my energy towards that then inherently I start moving closer and closer to the end result and will eventually realize my dreams. I run around with snapshots of how I believe things should be and all these little snapshots come together to reveal the vision I have for my life. In order to realize all these little snapshots I spend alot of time controlling everything around me.

I put alot of pressure on myself.

My extremely insightful and patient husband noted the other day that when I think I'm not doing enough in an area and I observe someone else doing what I think I should be doing more of I project on them judgement of my perceived inadequacy. When really I am judging myself.

Unfortunately there has been alot of that lately and it may have something to do with the fact that a year ago one of my most precious dreams came crashing down around me and there was nothing, nothing I could do to control my world and realize my snapshot. It was too much to bear and I broke down; I couldn't breathe.

This month I've been reflecting on that time period and the subsequent growth and perhaps I've been projecting some of those old hurts on my world today. The bottom line is I've been feeling like I can't breathe again. So, this week I took a day with my son and an evening with my little family to breathe. In these moments I had no agenda, no snapshot, no pressure. It was just what I needed to ground myself.

This fresh breathe allowed me to see the beauty in something I was ready to discard as imperfect and was going to redo.

Here is my first attempt at a knotted pearl necklace last weekend.

I was going to discard this because it wasn't "just so". Apparently the knots are supposed to be very close to the pearls and as you can see mine are not. The pearls are free to move about within reason.

Look below. Do you see that one fuzzy knot? That is where I was so intent on getting my knot "just so" that I broke the string and it had to be patched. Had I been content with just a little room to breathe I would not have broken the string.

The beauty of this necklace is that it serves as tangible reminder that we all need a little room to breathe and sometimes if we push to hard we will break but even that can be mended.

One of the beautiful things about this lovely blogging world is to know we are not alone and we are all struggling with something (read into the labyrinth).

Do me a favor - take some time to breathe.

lovemon