Whether you are tired or wide awake,
Whether your insides are sunny or stormy,
Whether you are thriving or doing everything it takes to survive.
Let's inhale,
Exhale,
Inhale,
And exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
A cliché is a phrase that tries to capture something,
But it's usually lost its impact because of overuse.
Some of the most common clichés are,
Actions speak louder than words,
You can't judge a book by its cover,
And what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Clichés are usually true.
Actions often do say more than words can.
By looking at someone's outside,
We usually have no clue what's going on inside.
And when you are challenged and not dead yet,
As they say in Monty Python,
Why then,
Often you do get stronger.
But these sayings can become so familiar that they're dead,
We no longer pay attention to them.
It's like those things your mom always said,
You tune them out.
Uh huh,
Yep,
Whatever.
Inhale,
Exhale.
Clichés are one of the ways we can become mindless.
But there's another way language relates to mindlessness.
What words do we use to talk about things?
These might be so common and familiar to us that we can't even answer the question,
And yet we probably all have very familiar language choices.
But the thing is,
They are so embedded in our everyday speech that we might not even be aware that they are there.
This just happened to me.
As I've been writing my last few meditations,
I realized that I use the words hard and work all of the time.
I searched my scripts,
And in my meditations I have used the word hard 83 times.
I've used the word work 87 times.
I've said,
Adulting is hard work.
Telling that harpy in our head to shut up is hard work.
Now just like clichés are true,
These language habits of ours can be true,
But they can also be insidious.
And by that I mean they can shape our lives in ways that we are not even aware of.
If you continually consider life as hard work,
What does that make manifest in your life?
Well,
You see life as toiling,
As burdensome,
Onerous.
Using the lens of hard work makes life a slog full of toil,
Travail,
And trouble.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I don't know about you,
But that is not how I want my daily existence to be.
Can life be challenging and throw difficulties our way?
Do I even need to answer that question?
No,
I think not,
Because we all know that's what life can do.
But the question is,
What will we do in response to life?
How will we talk about it?
How will we name it?
Because names matter.
The name Brock brings to mind a very different character than Lulu.
Thus,
Hard work as our go-to phrase for living names and creates a certain kind of existence.
We might,
If we name it hard work,
Grit our teeth and muscle our way through our days.
Believe me,
There are some days where we do,
In fact,
Need to just do that.
And yet,
If we always frame life as hard work,
We miss an opportunity.
And that's a word you might consider using to frame life.
All you have to do is look at a thesaurus to see what a difference that might make.
The alternatives for opportunity include freedom,
Hope,
A moment,
A space,
Some time,
Liberty,
Opening,
Prayer,
Relief,
Room.
How do you frame life?
What phrases do you often say?
And how might they be shaping the rest of your life?
Inhale.
Exhale.
Notice if you slip into the hard work mindset of life and you might say,
Oh,
You delightful sprite.
I know why you might be using that language,
But we agreed.
The kind of life we want to be living is an opportunity.
So let's see what we can do to create more freedom and hope,
Space and relief.
Life is an opening.
Let's step into it and see what happens next.
Namaste.
