transformation

Your Personality . . . & the Glory of the Choice

/ Kennedy Farr / Leave a comment

Vision Board 058Your personality . . . what is it exactly?  Aside from the usual adjectives of fun or moody or sunny or temperamental or intense or Type A or laid back or . . . what exactly? What does it really mean to be assigned a personality type?

We’ve all pondered the big debate of Nature vs. Nurture . . . how the spark of life is blessed/cursed/or combination-therein by congenital behavior . . . or wait!  Is it actually shaped by environmental and emotional factors?  And then these is all of the vice-versa stuff that leads one to accept and embrace both and then not think much about it.

Fascinating research points to many interesting findings that help us to understand Who We Really Are, our emotional and social intelligence, and our perception of positive and negative influences.  Nature or Nurture?  It is an enormous question that no one can really answer with total authority.  Take the story of the two children — identical twins, actually — standing on the ocean shore.  They are enjoying themselves while the salt water is gently lapping at their toes.  Suddenly, a rogue wave washes over the top of them.  The same wave, the same temperature of water, the same element of surprise.  One of the twins starts to cry and scream and run from the water. The other twin splashes back at the wave while laughing.   While this story would neither withstand nor support the rigors of a research study focused on Nature vs. Nurture, I like it nonetheless.  It gives me pause: Why not laugh?  It’s a heck of a lot more fun than crying and screaming.

And in the midst of all of this wondering and debating and agreeing, I do believe that there is much to be said for the concept of timshel — the Hebrew word for thou mayest.

When I think on topics of this sort, my mind wanders back to a Time of Great Impressionability in my life, and I was reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  What a book!  Well, “the story bit deeply into me,” and Lee’s treatise on timshel has stayed with me all of these curious years later — a testimony to the notion that life is one great impressionable moment after another.

It is my hope that sharing this gem of Steinbeck’s brilliance and wisdom will not act as any sort of spoiler.  The book is brilliant and one worth reading.  Like life, Steinbeck’s writing is intense and provocative and profound.  He writes the sort of story that stays with you throughout the years.  I thank Mr. Steinbeck for opening my eyes, my mind, my heart, my soul, and my sense of wonder to the notion of thou mayest: “the glory of the choice.”

Last week, I came across this quite lovely Personality Test online.  I normally don’t click on these tests, expecting some sort of hook to be set before you receive your “results,” but something prompted me to go ahead and try this one.  Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the link and visualize your responses to the prompts.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliapugachevsky/this-cube-personality-test-will-absolutely-blow-your-mind?utm_term=.onK9zJNbz&sub=4259074_8744597

All done?

What do you think?  How much of the explanation of your visuals did you feel was accurate?  At the very least, I felt that I was given a sideways glimpse into me — parts of me that are actually true that I generally don’t consciously associate with my “personality.”  I think about Steinbeck’s artistic weaving of timshel into East of Eden . . . and I am reminded that thou mayest carries with it a personal(-ity) responsibility of creative and paradigm-shifting mindfulness that requires daily cultivation, acknowledgement, and celebration on my part.

Personality assessment aside . . . overall, we need not be so hard on ourselves.  I think we sometimes embrace the opinions of  people — people who truly don’t know us — with far too much zeal, and we assign too much authority to the editorializing that is done by others.  We have a proclivity toward jumping into the sinkhole: a morass of self-blame, regret, and guilt that we assign to nature- and nurture-defining personality quirks . . . epic actions that play with our hearts and attempt to define how we choose to forge present moments into future goals and dreams.  Or . . . is this just my personality?

I used to have a quote taped up in every room of my house: Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen.  In the midst of one particularly Challenging Time, I was re-reading the quote, and I realized that I needed to make an edit.  I crossed out about to happen and scribbled in happening right now:

Always believe that something wonderful is happening right now.  

The current paradigm of Overwhelm in that moment screeched to a halt, and life felt like it took a gentler curve toward heart-healing and happiness.  When I realized that I had a choice to become someone new on the inside, my whole life shifted.  This epiphany didn’t segue into some neat and tidy story-book ending, but it did nudge me into a new place, such that I could get back into a timshel state of mind: “the glory of the choice.”

toaster ovenI leave you today with the prayer, the wish, the hope, and the thought that today is a good day for you.  A truly good day.  One of gratitude and filled with micro moments that tell you that Now is Now and life is evolving, constantly evolving, as something that is wonderful.  If this moment isn’t all that great, just wait for the next one.  It will be here before you know it — full of promise and full of timshel.  With some refining, life really can be borne from “the glory of the choice:  . . . keeping “the way open.”

Click on the highlighted link below to download today’s free journaling exercise.  Have fun journaling and putting a new spin on perceptions and keeping your way open!

The Glory of the Choice. A Different Spin. journaling prompt

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A reminder that gifts of beauty await when we keep our hearts open.  So lovely.

 

[P.S. Here is the real Spoiler Alert: To read a longer excerpt that discusses timshel in greater detail from East of Eden, click here.  If you are planning to read the book . . . do not click here.]

What’s Up?

/ Kennedy Farr / 3 Comments

” . . . and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination . . .”

This is such a great song.  What is hope?  What does it mean?  What does it instill in our soul?  What does it provide in the ways of forward motion?

Do we equate success with hope . . . is success in some way proportional to hope?

After all, what is life without hope?

I remember talking with a friend whose girlfriend had experienced a critical and heartbreaking rock-climbing accident.  I remember not knowing exactly what to ask or to say to my friend, as his girlfriend was an Olympic-quality athlete and was enduring the painful realization that life would not be in any state of re-dial in the ways of movement and in the ways of time.

We talked and I asked how life was healing and evolving.  His response: “Well, where there is life, there is hope.”

I remember this conversation well.  It struck me that this was all there really was left to say in the aftermath of a life-changing tragedy.

I think of this song by the 4 Non Blondes and I realize that hope can feel like “that great big hill.”  We worry and we fret.  We despair and we want to give up.  We want to crawl into a shell.  We want to try something entirely different — even when it means walking away from an epic life-dream.

But hope tugs at us and gets us up in the morning.  We want time to stand still for even a fractional moment.  But it doesn’t.  It simply doesn’t.  There are days when the merry-go-round is moving too fast to factor Hope into its revolution but we still manage to catch a glimpse of something that spells b-e-t-t-e-r.

“And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What’s going on?”

So, we keep breathing and we tell ourselves that life can get better.  That different is not always bad.  That sometimes different opens new windows and doors that we could never have imagined as being so beautiful and loving and perfect.  That we worry too readily.  That there are days when we want to scream at the top of our lungs: “What’s going on?”  But there are also days when we say, “I never could have imagined this.  It is so perfect.”toaster oven

We make our plans and we project our timeline.  We map out our SMART goals and we think we know our destination, but we don’t.  Which is a blessing on the good days.  And a blessing on the bad days.  I remember being at a retreat and listening to a woman telling a group of us about the challenging things that had been taking place in her life.  She said that she had been feeling sorry for herself until she talked to someone who had challenged her in a big way.  This person asked her: “If you were in a large group of people and everyone were to put their biggest problem in a brown paper sack . . . would you be willing to reach into that sack and take on whatever problem that you pulled out of the sack?”

She posed the question to all of us at the retreat.  There was silence.  “Exactly,” this woman said.  “No one feels capable of taking on different.  We are all somehow amazingly prepared to deal with what it is we given to deal with.”

You can see why this story has stuck with me all these years.  I lost track of every artist from this retreat, but I still thank this woman for both sharing her heartbreaking situation AND for the healing challenge that she posed to all of us.

So when I ask myself or my loved ones or the Universe: “What’s going on?” . . .  I remember this story and “I take a deep breath and I get real high” and I move toward something that feeds my soul at the Table of Hope.

It sometimes takes courage to realize that I do not know “what’s going on,” but I want to opt for staying “high” and keeping my eye on “a destination.”

seed crack growth

Try Something New: Enforced Restfulness

/ Kennedy Farr / 2 Comments

My Try Something New today: contentment in enforced restfulness.

If you light a lamp quote

The story of my past few days has allowed for some enforced restfulness.  What I have learned is that as much as I say I want a peaceful and quiet and tranquil life in the midst of my self-made chaos . . . there is another part of me that craves the hub-bub, the drama, the go-go-go, the challenges at work, the randomness of just wandering with no projected outcomes, the movement that gives me inspiration to create and to laugh and to love.

This enforced restfulness has given me time to just be with me.  And it has been nice.  And it has also been not so nice.  The nice parts have given me an opportunity to observe and take note of what runs through my mind when I am not thinking of what I am going to do next.  I am just being in the Now.  Just chilling and petting the cat and figuring out inversions on the  piano and stir-frying onions and garlic with asparagus and having long conversations on the phone with my sisters . . . this sort of thing.  I have been focusing on the simple and important things that get nudged aside or that get squeezed into the day.

The thing that has been rather bittersweet has been realizing truly how little time I create for being with me.  I find that I often am so busy projecting my light outward, I don’t replenish the source of this light within.  Again, not necessarily a bad thing . . . but  the words of my mum come to mind: Moderation in everything.  I think I have been putting too much time into outward and not into inward.

In high school art class, I was given a calligraphy assignment.  I was to find a proverb or quote and write it using the calligraphy style of my choice.  Wanting it to be perfect and vintage-y, I procrastinated and I remember spending more time ultimately looking for a short quote that would satisfy the assignment than I did practicing my lettering.   The quote was short, but compelling.  I knew it had a lot to say, even though I wasn’t quite certain what it exactly meant at the time.  It reads: “Contentment is the absence of selfish ambition.”  Quite the dose of profundity in only seven words.  No wonder it befuddled my teen-aged mind.  It still sort of does.

What this enforced restfulness has done is it has slowed me to a place of seeking contentment.  By replenishing, I have refilled the lamp, trimmed the wick, and polished up the chimney.  How is my little light going to shine if I don’t take the time to fill the lamp?

I also know that this time to myself has created deep appreciation for all of those people who shine their light my way — for their “absence of selfish ambition” — for sharing who they are with me so selflessly.

Am I committed to take more time to just think and to be and to not be doing all of the time?  Yes. Am I ready to resume my days at the speed of light?  Yes.   But this has been good.  Good for realizing that I am paying attention and wanting a life with a balance of contentment that generates and receives light and that puts a smile back into my soul and that not just enforces restfulness but embraces it as well.

 

Intentional Acts of Kindness

/ Kennedy Farr / 2 Comments

No-Act-of-KindnessI l-o-v-e this!

Kindness.  None of it is ever wasted.  It all contributes to something that is so much greater than the sum of its whole.  So much greater than who we are.  We have every little opportunity to bestow a kindness.  Certain circumstances sometimes rob us of an incentive to do so.  When this happens, if I power past what feels like an obstacle — an I’m-not-feeling-this-in-the-least, it always feels very powerful.  Like I nudged a benevolent particle in the Universe.

Being kind to people we love is easy.  Being kind to those who irritate us or who create chaos in our lives is more challenging.  When I make a conscious choice to act in favor of kindness, I am doing this for the Universe.  For my daughters to have access to a kinder world.  For my sisters, my brother, my friends.  A conscious choice sets the ripples into broader universes.  How cool is all this?

Random acts of kindness are lovely beyond amazing . . . but what about that intentional act of kindness when we aren’t reallykindness golden and fawn feeling it?  This has immense power and reward within the doing.  This is not to advocate for supporting negativity from a damaging relationship. Rather it is for those times when our soul whispers to us to let go of the battle in favor of some inner peace.

I don’t use the word edifying very often, but this is what kindness is.  Merriam Webster defines the verb edify as a way to teach in such a way that someone’s mind or character is improved.  What is one thing you can do today to help someone learn in such an amazing way that their mind or character is improved?  I don’t know about you, but this really humbles me.  What a responsibility it is to go forth into the world every day, knowing that we have the power to improve someone else’s “mind or character.”  


kindness.smile quoteKindness.  When I used to  think of this word, I would think of synonyms such as gentleness, humility, quietude, peacefulness . . . but I am rearranging my perception of it.  It is roars like a daisy and is powerful beyond measure with the amazing ability to transform and to improve another’s character.  Wow!  This inspires me to want to do my utmost to make a difference as I go into the day and act in terms of kindness.    

 

It only takes one person to change your life: you, beautiful you

/ Kennedy Farr / 5 Comments

it only takes one personChange.  What does it mean?  When we change we transform something, someone, ourselves into something or someone different.

Whew.  This is quite the mouthful of limitless profundity.  Change, glorious change.  And it all starts with you.

Change is transformation.  It indicates movement and growth.  Spirals and pinwheels and vortices.  A maelstrom of tilt-a-swirl.  Sometimes, change means contributing beyond yourself.  Other times, change means discovering something really surprising about yourself.  We experience change when we laugh and when we cry. When we offer our seat to someone else on the bus.  When we say hello to the lone kite flyer in the park.  When we sell our house and try the nomadic life on for a time.  When we say yes to Adventure.  When we say no to Adventure.

No matter our perceptions of the moment, change takes us to where we are right now.

A question: Do you take change for granted?  I realize that it would be metacognitively implosive to cultivate enough mindfulness in order to keep track of all of the changes in your life, but what is your awareness of the many changes that take place in a week, a day, an hour, a snippet of a moment?  Am I paying attention to the changes in my universe?  Should I be writing them down?  Mapping them forward on life’s path?  Am I over-thinking all of this?     

One last question: Where do you want to go?  What small, sustainable change might you make today to take you where you want to go?

Wait, one last question: What is holding you back?  What is keeping you from making that change?  “It only takes one person to change your life ~ YOU.”  Have fun today appreciating the changes that you are creating and experiencing and fulfilling.

You are a beautiful person.