Bee’s Musings

The world is full of mean people. Its full of people who unknowingly will sap your happiness, your inner glow, your purpose, and leave you wanting. There are people who will stand in your way, knock you down, and take everything and anything you have to give.

But sometimes, there are people who surprise you. Even if they’re not being said to you, its nice to know that there are still people out there saying nice things. I just ran across a whole community dedicated to the nicest things on LiveJournal.

Read it. Be happy. Say The Nicest Things to someone today.

In the vein of Let It Go, is Hack Yourself.

Go read it. Seriously.

And read it every day, until you’ve ripped out your demon and dance in the street.

While I was reading my post about emotional baggage and luggage, it got me to thinking about how we carry our pasts with us. We all talk about how our hearts have been broken and left scarred.

I have a new proposition to make. Instead of counting those as scars, lets look at our hearts as passports that allow us to travel through this life, and experience all it has to offer. Your heart allows you to feel love, joy, passion, sadness, and pain. Without any one of these things, life wouldn’t be complete.

Sure, we don’t always want to experience those things, but they are the things we need to.

And for every life experience, we get another stamp in our passport. Rather than seeing these as flaws, we should treasure them for the marks of passage that they truly are. Display them proudly - every story has highlights of goodness, and fleeting moments of sadness. So does every trip.

I’ve been thinking about relationships a lot lately. Maybe its because most of the strangers I encounter seem to feel the need to comment on my relationship status. I’ve gotten a lot of “Your boyfriend must have so much fun with you!” or “He’s a lucky guy” comments. Even the guy in the Sonic drive-thru one day commented on it.

So, of course, lots of thinking about relationships leads to lots of talking about relationships. With every relationship comes baggage. And I don’t mean the cute kind that you proudly take through the airport while you’re going to Bora Bora on your dream vacation. I’m talking about the kind that weighs you down and makes you feel like if you were really going to Bora Bora that they’d have to build another island just for all the “stuff” you’re going to take with you.
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My uncle died last Wednesday. He was 80. I didn’t know until I read his obituary that his middle name was Dee. I do know that the last time I saw him he was in the hospital, and he hated the hospital food - so I went to the gift shop and bought him jelly beans.

None of the family called us right away to tell us that he died. My aunt called on Sunday when she felt up to it - she was in the hospital herself. The funeral is tomorrow (Tuesday). So, being the kind of family that Mom and I are, we drove up to see my aunt and go to the funeral.

Its a funny thing about death. I usually think that it brings families together as they share the memories of their loved one. In this case, its not doing that. The family is still divided over some feud that nobody knows exactly what it is. Its got to be something silly that has just been blown out of proportion. The truth is, I’m not much into funerals. I prefer to remember the person as they were when they were alive. Funerals aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living. Most of the time it seems like its a competition to see who can be the saddest, even when the person who is gone is truly in a better place.

I think I’ll always think of Uncle John when I think of Jelly Beans.

“People give up when the world seems to be against them, but that’s the point when you should push,” said James Dyson.

This seems so intuitive for the world we live in today - but we often forget. We choose to lay down in defeat, to fall off the horse and walk away, to allow the forces which could push us to be better to instead just simply push us over. It seems easier that way. We’re tired of the risks and tired of being hurt. Sometimes we’re just tired of the drama that swirls around us when we try to find something better rather than just settling.

After the experiences of the last couple of weeks, it renewed my determination to fight. I’m not going to be complacent, just taking what’s handed to me. I’m not going to keep things around that don’t enhance my life, whether that be music I don’t like, or people who don’t inspire me to be a better person. Its not because they don’t have value - its because we all do have value, and we deserve to explore that value.

Its my life - I’m not ready to give it up just because I’m tired.

I’m not an anthropologist. Nor am I a sociologist, or a psychologist. I do, however, enjoy learning more about how people work - individually and as members of society. One of my favorite things to do is sit and watch people at a “cultural” event. Another is to read different blogs from across the blogosphere. Some are insightful, some are sad, and some make me want that 5 minutes back that I just spent on reading their blog. Read more

In yoga, we talk a lot about prana, or breath. Working with your breath can help you get deeper into postures, and can help you maintain a difficult posture longer. It also can affect how you react to stressful situations, and maintain body temperature.

As it happens, most Americans breathe “wrong.” For most of us, when we inhale, our shoulders raise, and our belly sucks in. Then when we exhale, our shoulders drop, but only slightly. If we’re truly using our diaphragm and lungs to breathe the way we should, our bellies should rise with an inhalation, as we bring air into the very bottom of our lungs, and it should lower as we exhale, constricting our diaphragm and pushing air out of our lungs. I’ve been trying to breathe correctly, to see if I can actually feel a difference in my body.

What made me write this is simple: while I was working on my other website, I looked down to see one of my cats sleeping next to the chair. I realized that she breathes correctly - and it made me a little sad that our society teaches us to breathe in such a way that we “stay skinny” and tighten our shoulders up around our ears. At least, we can still find instances of breathing correctly, and with some practice, we can bring our shoulders down, and our bellies out, and learn to use our lungs again.

As much as you believe that there are things in your life that you can never forget, you do. People, moments, thoughts… they can all fade away as new people and moments fill their spaces.

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As I’ve been getting ready the last several mornings, the song “Life is a Highway” keeps coming on the radio. I’m sure that most of you probably think that my radio station is rather behind the times, but its not. They just seem to have some affinity for that song.

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