A counter-offensive on our social emphasis on feeling good and looking good at the expense of living good.*
Kirk Strosahl

Or perhaps it’s not the software or the hardware that needs tuning. Perhaps it’s our attitude, our approach to work, the way we deal with possibility…**
Seth Godin

I’m a spring and summer person.

I am suspicious of autumn, knowing that it’s trying to hide winter from me.

It’s not that I hate winter, but I am nevertheless arrested by Katherine May’s words:

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.^

I can’t change or avoid winter but I am able to change rather than avoid my attitude: I have the capacity to make a space for it in my life.

Who knows what might happen.

Maybe I’ll even start on that second book I have a mind to write and doodle.

When we make space through compassion and understanding for the more difficult things in life as well as those we welcome, life can open up in the ways we want it to.

Kirk Strosahl adds:

If we are pursuing what we want to in life we’re not going to be experiencing mental health problems.*

It’s a bold statement, but it aligns with the truth that trauma separates us from the things we really want to do, and we must reconnect with what is most important to us – so that we regain our integrity or oneness, our singleness.

As I’ve suggested on many occasions, journaling can be a way for us to retune ourselves to what matters most:

Julia Cameron’s morning pages help unlock something inside. Not the muse or a magical mystical power, but simply the truth of your chosen identity. If you can do something creative each day, you’re now a creative person. Not a blocked person, not a striving person, not an untalented person. A creative person.^^

*Kirk Strosahl, from Psychwire’s course: ACT as Brief Intervention;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Do you have a tuner;
^From Katherine May’s Wintering;
^^From Seth Godin’s The Practice.