Are you a season?

Chances are, you've heard this saying:
"People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime."

Given some thought, this makes sense.  People that are part of our lives could be there for a transaction (reason), to offer some meaning (a season), or they may create a lasting impact (a lifetime).

How do you approach your interactions with others?  Sure, most people seem to be transaction related.  In any moment, we may have a need and the people we are interacting with satisfy that need.

In other instances, we may know people for a while.  They appear in our lives and they stay for a while.  We interact with them in many ways, perhaps mostly pleasant, perhaps sometimes unpleasant, and then, eventually, they drift away.  They can help us find meanings which can serve us into the future.

Finally, there are those who show up and never leave.  Even if they do physically leave us, their presence in our lives created such an impact, that we will never really forget them, beyond just some meaning.

How do you allow for others in your lives?  Do you allow them only to be reasons, or do you seek seasons, or are you open enough to let others be lifetimes, to you?

Now switch that around.  Do you live your life being a reason, a season, or a lifetime to others?  We can go about our time on this earth simply being reasons...  or we can choose to be lifetimes by impacting those we associate with.  Which would you rather?  And do you realize the impact you have on others, even if you simply wanted to be a reason?

We only have one life.  The more we choose to be and allow lifetimes, the more fulfilling a life we can live.

When to let go

"We practice letting go, and in the process, we find peace." - Leo Babauta

Letting go can be one of the hardest things a person can do.

Whether that is a pet project, a business, a goal, a lifestyle, or anything else.

When we set ourselves down a path, whether it was fully intentional, or something that presented itself as a seed of an idea, and we just went with it, we can become fully engaged.

As we progress towards a result, challenges present themselves, and we adjust to overcome those challenges. Sometimes, we don't recognize those challenges as signals to stop.  Some results are different than what we expect.

Our lives don't exist to follow a singular path.  Some paths are dead ends and worth the journey.  Some, are not.

When our current path begins to affect our physiology, making us stressed, perhaps causing stress related effects, it is possible it is time to let go.  When we start to lose ourselves in our goal, when we change against who we are, it is possible it is time to let go.

Always remember that letting go doesn't mean failure.  Letting go often means our health and our clarity.  And with our health and clarity, we can approach any new opportunity with complete engagement.  It can also mean we are more able to tend to the things that we forgot, on our way to our goal.

Aim lower... wait... what...??!

We have all heard that we should set our goals high.  If we set them low and achieve them, then with just a little more effort, we could have obtained an even bigger, more important goal.

When we understand what that means, we realize the higher we set our sites, the more likely we are to hit the target, which is at a lower elevation.  We could even say, if we aim higher, we may actually hit a target, higher than what we wanted.

So...  why would someone want to aim lower?