Hello and Happy first Motivation Monday of November! I have only one thing to say: UG! OK, I have more to say.
Where to start?! The election is ONE DAY AWAY, candy corn is the Devil, the big Thanksgiving I host every year is now going to be on Zoom. It was a full Blue Moon on Halloween night, Mercury is in retrograde, COVID numbers are rising and we have two more months before we can kick 2020's germy a** to the curb where it belongs, and as they say, don't let the door hit you on the way out!
On the upside, my blog has a new look and a new name! And this is my first post as Life In The Six O. I hope you like the new look! It's taking me a while to linkup all my social media and it's still a bit of a mess but I'm striving for progress not perfection. If you're getting this in your in box today click on the title to go to the full page so you can check out the new look.
And now for how I cope with all of the above, life in general, monkey wrenches that get thrown into our plans when we least expect them wreaking havoc, etc. And it's all in the sauce. My Secret Sauce. You may have heard the expression Secret Sauce before, I didn't coin it, but it's the perfect description for when you come up with your recipe of how life works best for you. So what does that mean? Well, I'm glad you asked. Your Secret Sauce is the thing that makes you tick, the rock on which you stand when your world is crumbing, the lighthouse in the storm when your boat is sinking, and your life raft when you feel abandoned at sea. Wow, that's a lot of metaphors, not sure why they all have to do with water lol.
My Secret Sauce is faith, not in a particular religious way, but a faith in the knowing that the Universe always has my back, that no matter what storm is raging around me, I know that I am safe and that I will be alright because, to quote Napolian Hill ~ With every adversity is the seed of equal or greater equivalent. I believe this to be the truth for me. I basically have a positive mental attitude about everything. I wasn't born with it, it's something I've developed and practiced and now it's my nature. If you complain to me that your car broke down I would tell you it probably saved you from being in an accident. My daughter says I shit rainbows. I didn't always think this way in fact when I was growing up I was a nervous kid, anything I had to do outside my comfort level gave me a stomach ache. My mother called me a nervous Hilalia, that's yiddish for nervous wreck. I worried about anything and everything. But when I was 21, I had a professor that on the first day of class said that before he taught us anything from the curriculum we would have to read a book called The Secret of The Ages by Robert Collier (not to be confused with The Secret, this is a different book). He said it contained the knowledge to be successful at anything and without it his class and any class would just be a waste of time.
That book became my Bible. It changed my thought process and I learned that we control our thoughts and that our thoughts control our actions and our actions control our lives. Ding, ding, ding! We really have control over our own mind and guess what else? You can change a thought in an instance, replace a negative thought with a positive one and your subconscious will believe everything you say so be careful what you say to yourself. People can label you and mess with you but if you do YOU and know what your Secret Sauce is, then you are immune to it all. No one can hurt you once you know yourself with a fierce loyalty that makes you unbreakable. That's not to say that we don't all have bad days, suffer loss, grief, pain, etc. But finding your Secret Sauce, the essence of who you really are, will get you though the rough times.
While I was working on this post I started reading the book The Gift, 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, by Edith Eger. Edith is a psychologist and Holicost survivor. And she wrote the book at 92 years young. I read the first chapter last night and the second sentance says "Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional". And that is exactly what I'm talking about. We get to choose the ingredients that go in our Secret Sauce!
So my question to you is what's your Secret Sauce? What calms you down when you find yourself in a crisis, big or small? Dig in, find it, mix it up because once you find it, it will never fail you. And how many things can you say that about?
Here's a few of my November favorites, my thing for pumpkins 🎃, favorite fall quote, a few pictures from this time last year in Ojai. Ojai is the place I've missed most during lockdown. And the morning sunrise on the trail by my house. Happy November!
