|
I know what you are thinking!!! I’ve finally lost it and am now caught up with angels and fairy’s and everything pink and fluffy but this christmas month I wanted to talk a bit about tough decisions that we make in our lives. Recently I worked with a client who had a very difficult choice to make. They knew what the right decision was but they didn’t feel like they had the guts to make it. As I helped them with this decision, they came to a point of strength where they decided and they faced the consequences with the strength of character.
Sometimes the hard thing to do is that which you most need to do. In the world we live in there are often decisions to make that are right and true but they usually can hurt like hell. The decision not to do something which could make you a lot of money simply because it’s not the right thing to do. The decision to live true to what you believe in despite what other people think of you. The decision to walk away from something because it is the wrong thing to do. Each of these decisions are examples of the kinds of choices those with strong character make. Often such choices can bring us great pain and hurt but they allow us to be free and strong.
The choices we make are often selfish choices yet a certain liberation comes when we act as we believe in the right way for ourselves and others. Such actions have been recorded in history as brilliant acts of humanity: selflessly sacrificing our selves for others. On a more minor scale, our simple acts of morality might be forgotten or unknown by everybody except ourselves. We often look to our behaviours to determine who we are.
When we can look to the behaviours we have engaged in which have been tough but just, we will become proud of our selves and what kind of person we are. We will know we have shown character and that will be a deeply powerful experience to have. We will have been true to ourselves. Being true to yourself is about acting as you believe to be correct regardless of the difficulties inherent in the act.
What has angels and mist got to do with all of this I hear you ask? To me, there are plenty examples of people who act selfishly and are not true to themselves or others. They act for profit, prestige, fame or money. They use people and make their decisions based on what works for them. I call them ‘Villains’.
I believe that there are also angels. Angels are those in our lives that help us, guide us and support us. They are the strangers we meet that put a smile on our face, our loved ones that make us feel like we are worth something deep down or a special friend who teaches us how wonderful a person we truly are. The world is full of villains and angels and all those in between.
What’s crucial is that we begin to open our eyes, awareness and appreciation to these angels as they come into our lives and affect us. They will all be there for a certain amount of time. Some will stay and some will go. Some times a villain will appear as an angel for a while and sometimes an angel will appear as a villain. Sometimes they won’t be acting either: it will be that their true nature changed.
If we could only appreciate these angels in our lives it would help us enormously in making the right decisions and helping us deal with those decisions with more strength. We often don’t do so because we find it hard to spot them. The mist of everyday problems, the mist of our negative states, the mist of our biases and prejudices and pre-set beliefs about people, the mist of our limited thinking clouds our judgement all get in our way and the moments of beauty these angels bring in fail to reach us or connect with us. Some of us look to the magical angels from above and we get caught in the clouds of our own imagination.
But we can open our eyes in an instant once we look at those people who are there for us in our lives. They might be there for us at our toughest times or simply be a really nice person we meet once on a train but in one moment they make us feel really good. We connect and that connection is one of the nicest parts of being human. Sometimes angels can turn out to be villans and villans can turn out to be angels. Regardless, we always learn from every experience no matter how tough it is.
Angels can allow you to be yourself and love you for who you are. Angels often will not judge you, and may not even know you but they make you feel like you are valuable yourself. Angels may let you realise that no matter what anybody else does, says or thinks, that you are a 'legend in your own life' and that you are capable of so much you wouldn't believe. Angels are a lot more obvious to us than the spiritual beings we sometimes wish upon. They are the people who enter our lives and make them better.
In this special time of year, we can recognise each one of them and ask ourselves the question “HOW LUCKY AM I TO HAVE THEM EXISTING OR HAVING HAD THEM EXISTING IN MY LIFE?” The answer to that question allows you to see angels in the mist and explore a world with more hope, more humanity and more decisions worth making.
|
