Sweet ’16

2016 has definitely been sweet so far.  I wrote about my birthday trip to London and Paris earlier.  While that currently is the highlight of my year, I have other experiences to be thankful for, including:

• Ringing in the new year in Los Angeles
  

  

  
• More productions at the performing arts center: Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, and Mamma Mia
• Macklemore and Ryan Lewis at the Grand Ole Opry

• Country Music Hall of Fame                                                 
• Tedx Nashville

    

• A Floral Centerpiece Design Class

• Way Late Play Date at the Adventure Science Center – Dystopian Worlds

    

• New haircut (the shortest I’ve had it since early childhood)

  

I continue to explore Nashville, try new restaurants, learn new things, and meet new people.  Upcoming events I’m looking forward to are a production of If/Then, playing the Escape Game, trips to Orlando/Disney World, Seattle, Vancouver, and LA, seeing Beyonce and Adele, and my sister’s wedding (in which I’m a bridesmaid and the wedding coordinator).  Here’s to life only getting sweeter!

Better Late Than Never

As I mentioned in my previous post, I neglected this blog last year (and looking at my archives, the year before that too).  I let life and laziness take over, but just because I didn’t write about it, it doesn’t mean nothing happened.  2015 was full of many blessings and adventures, and although we’re more than a quarter into 2016, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on and express gratitude for 2015.

THANK YOU for:

Theatre: As a volunteer for the performing arts center, I’ve seen numerous productions – Once, Camelot, Book of Mormon, La Boheme, Kinky Boots, Pippin, Dirty Dancing, Nutcracker, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Going Local (Exploring Nashville): Belle Meade Mansion, Christmas at Cheekwood, Nashville Zoo, East Nashville, Bicentennial Mall, Jellystone Lights

                   

Concerts: Janet Jackson, Ed Sheeran, New Kids on the Block with Nelly and TLC

   

  

  

Education and Inspiration: Cooking Homemade Pasta, Wine Tasting and Pairing, Creative Mornings, Painting

     

Family: Sister getting her Doctorate and planning her graduation party, attending a wedding convention with another sister, my mom retiring

Career: Getting a raise and then my own office and an assistant

Health & Fitness: New gym membership, completing a 3 day juice cleanse

Travel: Jack Daniels Distillery, Smoky Mountains, Memphis, Boston

  

            

 

Halftime Show

Time flies.  It doesn’t feel like that long ago when I started my 30s Rock Project.  Now here I am halfway through my 30s.  It hasn’t always been easy, even during this ‘reset’ period of mine.  I continue to take two step forwards and one step back.

Life’s been crazy – in both the good and bad sense – since I last posted almost a year ago.  To be honest, I basically forgot about this blog last year.  If I wasn’t busy enjoying life, I was depressed over it.  The wonderful times outweighed the bad of course, but there was a long period in the fall when I was really in a funk.  Life became a monotonous routine again, and I CHOSE not do anything about it.

Then  October 2015 rolled around – 4 months until my 35th birthday. I knew I had to get it together and get back on track.  I needed to be excited about life again and continue checking things off my bucket list, especially the major items.  So I decided to visit London and Paris for my 35th birthday.

I originally planned to visit London and Paris on my own, but one of my sisters decided to join me.  We went to London first, and then Paris – started my birthday having champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower and ended it with a dinner cruise along the Seine.  The trip wasn’t perfect (I wasn’t expecting it to be), but overall, we had a FABULOUS time.  The sites, food, history, architecture, culture…just amazing.  Words cannot properly express my feelings as I walked through the streets of these two iconic cities.

Some highlights (in no particular order):

 

 

Listen to Your Elders

Something I saw on Facebook:

Written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of Cleveland, Ohio

To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 42 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I’ve ever written.

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short – enjoy it..

4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don’t have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.

7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

8. Save for retirement starting with your first pay check.

9. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

10. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

11. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.

12. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

13. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

14 Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

15. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.

16. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

17. It’s never too late to be happy. But it’s all up to you and no one else.

18. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

19. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

20. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

21. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

22. The most important sex organ is the brain.

23. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

24. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ‘In five years, will this matter?’

25. Always choose life.

26. Forgive but don’t forget.

27. What other people think of you is none of your business.

28. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

29. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

30. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does..

31. Believe in miracles.

32. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

33. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.

34. Your children get only one childhood.

35. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

36. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

37. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.

38. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have not what you need.

39. The best is yet to come…

40. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

41. Yield.

42. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.”

20 Iconic Quotes On Failure That Will Inspire You To Succeed

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1. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

2. “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

3. “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.” – Henry Ford

4. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” – Confucious

5. “In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.” – Bill Cosby

6. “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” – Dale Carnegie

7. “Failure is success if we learn from it.” – Malcolm Forbes

8. “I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustrations were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.” – Tony Robbins

9. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell

10. “It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates

11. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of a greater or equal benefit.” – Napoleon Hill

12. “Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.” – W. Clement Stone

13. “The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.” – Buddha

14. “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.” – Abraham Lincoln

15. “Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It’s ok to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.” – H. Stanley Judd

16. “Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failing is another steppingstone to greatness.” – Oprah Winfrey

17. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” – Zig Ziglar

18. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” – George Eliot

19. “Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.” – J.K. Rowling

20. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

Pinot’s Palette

I love wine and art/creativity so spending last Sunday afternoon painting while drinking was fun.  I’ve taken a sketching class with champagne before, but this was my first time taking a wine and painting class.  I opted for slightly different colors than the instructor’s piece, and it’s not perfect, but I’m happy with it.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

When I was in middle school and high school, I had a handful of penpals from New Jersey to Florida to the Philippines among others.  I had fun with various stationary and stickers and sometimes included colored doodles with my letters.  I could write pages and pages.  Receiving a letter in the mailbox from another part of the country or world was such a treat, especially during middle school when my introverted self had few close friends.  It felt great mattering to someone outside my immediate circles.

With email, texting, and social media overload, sending a letter or card via the post office has lost its appeal.  Someone I used to work with told me his daughter’s elementary school stopped teaching cursive handwriting because the administrators didn’t see the necessity.  I find that a shame, and one of my resolutions this year is to make a better effort to brighten someone’s mailbox instead of their inbox.  It may take more time, money, and effort, but it warms my heart knowing I made someone feel like they were worth all that.

 

New Years Message from Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

I read this today, and it really spoke to me.  I hope it strikes a chord with you as well.

Source

Today is the dawn of the New Year. So you’re probably working on a list of things that you’d like to get done in 2015. Well, I’d like to ask you to forget about making these resolutions. Forget about deciding on the first day of January how you will be conducting your life in September, some nine months later. Any resolution that involves making decisions about future behaviors is a waste of time. It also reinforces the self-defeating notion of living in the future.

For 2015, wouldn’t you rather live in the present moment?

This day that you’re living right now is the only day you get. Period. You can resolve to be skinny when next July rolls around, or to quit smoking next month, or to write that book you’ve been meaning to, or to embark on your overdue exercise program by the end of this year. You can go about resolving until the cows come home, and you still have to live your life just like everyone else on the planet: One day at a time.

You can only live minute to minute. You can certainly use up your present moments thinking about what you’ll be doing in the future, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can only live in the now. The important question to be asking yourself is:

How am I going to live in the present moment this year?

Will I waste these moments reviewing the way I used to behave? Will I waste these moments reviewing how I would like to behave in the future rather than resolving to live each day to the fullest?

The New Year is a good time to initiate a plan so you can make some changes and help live your life to the fullest. See if you can practice thinking differently. Decide very specifically what it is that you would like to change about yourself in 2015. If you have some goals in mind, vow to work on them day by day rather than making them a year-long project.

When you set up day-to-day goals for yourself, you can begin living this way for the rest of your life. Remember this little piece of advice, which will be extremely helpful to you if you can incorporate it into your life: When you go for one entire day without eating sugar (or not smoking, or being assertive, or any other new behavior), you are a totally different person at the end of that day. What you must learn to do is let that totally different person decide on the second day whether to do it again on this new day, rather than letting the same old person decide today that it is going to be difficult in a couple of days anyhow, so what’s the use. Always let the New You make the decision, and then you’ll be living your present moments.

Remember, you are in control of all thoughts in your head. When you are using up your present moments to worry about the future, constantly reviewing the past to come up with how you should have done it differently, or contemplating disaster, remind yourself that you are wasting this particular present moment.

Practice cancelling out negative thoughts for a few minutes at a time. Vow to enjoy the next five minutes regardless of what has previously transpired or what you think is about to happen. Remind yourself of the folly of wasting your present moments on mental activity that focuses exclusively on your past or imagined future. All of your thoughts about what you should have done, or how terrible things were in the past will not change one tiny slice of the past.

As you celebrate this New Year and each precious present moment, here are 10 reminders to help you live in the Now:

1. Remember that habits are changed by practicing new behavior. By practicing new thinking every five minutes, you’ll soon begin to master the art of present-moment living.
2. Do an honest assessment of your “problems.” You’ll very likely discover that almost all of your problems are really in your head and not located in reality.
3. Take time to be mindful of everything around you. Begin to look at your entire surroundings in a new light. Observe every detail on every face, every building and every object. If you do this often enough it will become a habit that will facilitate your being alive in every moment of the year.
4. Change your attitude. Begin an attitude-redevelopment plan. That means practice enjoying everything you do.
5. Be specific about what you want and take action. Decide on one thing that you would like to work on and do it today. Work at it daily, rather than making it a long-range objective.
6. Create a self-improvement agenda for yourself. Put on your agenda whatever activities you’ve always thought about but never had time to do. Do them now.
7. Rid yourself of mundane chores that are not really that important. Spend more time making your life a pleasure.
8. Eliminate procrastination as a lifestyle. Instead of talking to yourself about what you are going to do next week or even tomorrow, use this time to start a new task.
9. Don’t give up control of your life to others. You cannot enjoy the present moment if you are busy trying to make everyone else like you. People respect you more when you operate from a position of strength and self-reliance.
10. Feel good about yourself. You are a magnificent human being. Always feel good about that self that you are always with.

For 2015, as I have for many other years, I vow to be fully alive and see the world the way Walt Whitman described it to be many years ago: “To me…every cubic inch of space is a miracle.” I really believe that.

I wish you a New Year filled with many miracles. May you live a long and productive life—one present moment at a time.

Love,
I AM,
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Happy New Year!

  

It’s been over a year since I relocated to Nashville from Los Angeles and began my life reset, and I am grateful for all the wonderful progress I have made and for the greater things that lie ahead.  I have made some professional and personal strides, including working as an assistant coordinator for a wedding planner and becoming healthier (physically, mentally, and spiritually).  I’ve reconnected with family and old friends and have established new relationships.  I’ve experienced a lot of Nashville’s cuisine, culture, history, and entertainment (and there’s so much more to explore). I am still a work in progress and rather than worry about when this reset will be complete and I can move back to Los Angeles (if I really choose to do so), I am taking things one day at a time and enjoying this journey.

20 Things I Wish I’d Known In My 20s

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1. Don’t be afraid when reality doesn’t match what you thought it would look like.

2. Don’t focus so much on the future that you ignore what’s in front of you.

3. Courage is a decision.

4. You aren’t too old for a career change.

5. You are going to change.

6. Nobody’s opinion is more important than your own.

7. Nobody is good at life. We’re all learning.

8. You don’t need to know what you want.

9. You can figure anything out.

10. It’s OK that you’re single.

11. Be aware of what you’re really upset about.

12. Communicate as your best self.

13. Other people’s baggage is theirs to deal with.

14. Don’t try to change people.

15. Acknowledge that this moment won’t last forever (even if it feels like it will).

16. You don’t need to settle.

17. Forgive yourself for past screw-ups.

18. Find gratitude for the good, the bad and the straight up ugly.

19. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

20. Find your tribe.

They say that your 20s are for defining and your 30s are for refining.  No matter where you are, it’s never too late to learn from your past and embrace your potential.