2021-06-01 — Bed Ready

Hola, y buenas noches! 😊

Happy Tuesday to you. 🙂

I’ve been reminded today just how much my mental health depends on my willingness to focus on the positive instead dwell on the negative. Yes, it’s true, that some of the deepest desires of my heart have have already been lost. The hope for others is fading. But… the two deepest desires of my whole soul are still available to me.

I can still become the very best person I’m capable of being, and every moment of every day is filled with opportunities to do just that. No second is a waste unless I choose to waste it. And I can still give my whole life to lifting the world.

So… with my tippy top desires still available to me, gosh, why get dragged down because I won’t ever be able to have all my deepest desires? I’ll lose everything if that’s all I can see. I don’t want to be the type of person who can drown in mere inches of water because I’m always face down. I want to be the one who’s indomitable. Who’s unfailingly positive. Who’s life is a sea filled with the best of the best things, because I choose to be grateful for everything. I choose to see all of life as a glorious opportunity because… it is!

I thought about that today. I went to bed some time after 8:00 a.m. this morning. I was utterly exhausted, and I think by that time, I was resigned to the fact that there was no way I was going to get the rest of the assessment work done before closing time today, so I chose to sleep a few hours and just send in a partial assessment that I’ll need to amend later.

So I slept for a few hours, organized the 2020 and 2021 assessment data that I had completed to that point, I got the 1099 NEC stuff turned in that I forgot to turn in, and that was that.

😬 I’m just realizing that I think I forgot to check an important box on the 1099 form. Oops.

Oh well. Life will go on. And if it doesn’t… well then I won’t care what happens to the form anyway! 😁

Aaaaaanyway, so I’m grateful today. The wee hours were rough. I think the lack of sleep did number on my emotional and spiritual positivity, especially already being smack dab in the middle of an extremely challenging circumstance for me personally that appears to be taking a monumental turn to an even more extreme level of challenging. 🙃

(Bring it on)

With all that as the backdrop, that lack of sleep… made it a lot easier to sink into discouragement. After a handful of hours of sinking slowly deeper and deeper, I crawled into bed to get at least a few hours of sleep before I had to pound the keys again.

After waking up around 11:30ish, I battled the same cloud for for only a few more hours before it finally started to lift, and I began to feel lighter. I think the more I woke up, the more positive I began to feel.

I certainly had a few moments during the day where I let myself slip into unhappiness, mourning those desires among my deepest desires that I’ve not been able to realize, but by evening, I had managed to get myself focusing on positive, uplifting things. 🙂

It was wonderful.

I managed to get all the dark clouds burned off and was able to see the sunshine that was always there above the clouds. It was nice. I cooked food, ate dinner, sang hymns, listened to and read through gospel stuff, shared some of what I was studying with a friend, and now here I am. 🙂 I’m happy, upbeat, and… very tired. 🙃

Sleep, as y’all reminded me, soooooo important.

#1. I’m grateful that my mom was willing and able to help me by taking some forms to the post office that I needed to mail out for the feds.

#2. I’m grateful that the wait at the DMV wasn’t all that long and that I was able to get so. much. done there! I got my new van registered, so it’s now able to be used as my work vehicle. I got my truck registration renewed, my terrain registration renewed, I got my (incomplete, but at least on time) assessment stuff turned in. I got my trailer assessed and registered, and… there you go! Very productive visit to the DMV.

#3. I’m grateful for the beautiful misty rain. I would have loved to have spent time out in it today, but I was so swamped that the only time I got to “enjoy” it was while trying to fix Liz’s weed eater (which unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fix. She has the same model as I have, and both of ours have the same problem, just won’t stay running. Like it’s not getting enough fuel or something. I cleaned out the carburetor, and there was a bunch of crap in it, but that didn’t fix it. Not sure what the deal was.

#4. I’m grateful that we’re getting through the last of the meat. I can’t wait until it’s gone. I just… yeah. I smiled when I opened our freezer today, and there just bag upon bag upon bag of bright-colored, frozen fruits and vegetables. I like being a veggie. So many benefits, the most important for myself personally, is reducing the number of little critters who’s lives are sacrificed for me.

#5. I’m grateful to be heading to bed. I need to figure out how to get my journal to take less time. It’s 9:48 p.m., and I started writing about 9. It goes slowly, but I’ve been reminded multiple times over the last few days just how grateful I am that I kept a journal the times I did. The last four years have been crappy journal wise, even this blog isn’t sufficient, but it’s better than nothing.

Daily Accountability:

The Positive

1. I’m really proud of myself for digging in and trying to focus on the positive today, but honestly, it felt like I had outside help, so I probably can’t take much credit there.
2. Chalk another day free from addictions. 🙂
3. I’m seeing myself choose to be grateful in the face of experiences that are quite challenging for me. And that’s who I want to be. I want to be the person who smiles through the hardest of things, but the only way to get there is to have hard things happen, so I can practice choosing to be happy and upbeat through those experiences.
4. I have been choosing to keep at quite a ways away from me the media and entertainment that I was running to as an escape. With my hungry to learn and become attitude right now, my passion for becoming, such things are… distractions at best, and positive hindrances (in my mind) to becoming who I truly with all my heart want to be, and I’m grateful to have them not even tempt me in the least right now. I just don’t have time for that stuff and don’t want it. Yay!!!! I’m so excited to be getting back to the person I used to be. Well, I’ve grown. I’m different than I used to be. I’m just grateful to be getting back to those things, in the midst of being a different person altogether, if that makes sense.

The Needs Improvement

1. Still that pesky bed time…
2. I did choose to get frustrated a bit with the weed eater. It just had a mind of its own. Sometimes it’d work, but sometimes it wouldn’t.

So… it’s almost 10, but that’s better than 8:30ish a.m. 🙃

Time to chat with the Biggest Cheese, drink a little, offer one last sacrifice to the porcelain gods (maybe even complete with incense), and crawl into bed.

Loves to all y’all. 🙂

Lift the World.

~ stephen