I love the first line – every moment and every event plants something in our soul.

I thought about the rest of the analogy of seeds being planted. In the gospels Jesus had the parable of the seeds, which landed on different types of soil and how some just shriveled and died, others sprang too life, but where withered by the sun, and finally some grew and prospered.

This matches up well with the thought that a person has to be in the right space or place for the knowledge and wisdom to be accepted. I think that many of us carry these seeds of wisdom in us, which are waiting for the right time to sprout.

I like to think that we carry all of these seeds of wisdom around with us waiting for the perfect time to bring them to life. I know that I have bought books, brought them home and put them on a shelf, because they drew my attention for some reason, but I wasn’t ready to read it. Then at some point in the future it was the perfect book that I needed with what I was dealing with at that time.

Our brains are full of everything that we have seen, read, or heard about in our life. All of these bits of information are seeds, which have come to rest in our minds. But I firmly believe that none of them are wasted, they are just waiting for the perfect mooment to spring forth with the wisdom that they contain.

I think that this is what the wisdom teachers mean when they say that we have all of the answers within. We have all of these seeds just waiting for us to be ready to grow. It is why it is so important to continue learning something everyday. You never know when you will come upon the one thing that will activate one of those seeds that has just been waiting to germinate and bring about tremendous positive change into our lives.

This is where the “overnight” success comes from. From the sprouting of those seeds. So get a little water and fertilizer and start sprouting some new ideas – who knows where they will lead you?

Walk to the edge.
Listen hard. Laugh. Play with abandon.
Practice wellness.
Continue to learn.
Choose with no regret.
Appreciate your friends.
Lead or follow a leader.
Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is.

If you would dream it – BEGIN it.
If you have an idea – OPEN it.
If there is a longing – ACKNOWLEDGE it
If there is a mission – COMMIT it.
If there is a daring – DO it.
If there is a love – SPEAK it.
If there is a resource – USE it.
If there is abundance – SHARE it.

Then comes the 2nd issue of belief. We find it so much easier to believe and support someone else with their goals, than we find in ourselves the same belief and support that we too can achieve our goals. Believe in yourself and that you can accomplish great things!

Then comes #3, the education and with that the action that needs to be taken once we understand how to start making progress with those same goals. Inside ourselves we have deep wells of talent and ability that are just waiting to be drawn up to the surface. When you draw up a bucket full of talent and ability, there only remains the reasons “why” you can get what you want.
Lastly comes the “passing it on”. Once we own that knowledge and “walk the talk” putting it into action, then comes the sharing of that knowledge with others. Just as the answers were inside of us, just waiting for the action to bring them to the surface, so it is with everyone. They just need to be shown how to access it.

Now, with Sarah and the kids living here, I get to laugh even more as I watch Sarah deal with teenagers and hormones and meltdowns. It is so much easier to stand back outside the drama and smile!

But laughter aside it is good to remember how hard those years were to live myself, and then how hard it was when my kids were teenagers. I find that I can spot early warning signs of behavior that a good conversation about now, will hopefully prevent the meltdowns of tomorrow (both for the grandkids and Sarah!).

It is part of the blessing that we have with a multi-generational household. While it has its trying moments, I love my grandkids being here and being such an intimate part of the their lives. I wish the others were closer too!

But we have a habit of thinking that I will do it tomorrow and we keep procrastinating and pretty soon it is not as easy to do – whether it is communicating in a relationship, or maintaining our vehicles, or doing a small repair. An oil change put off too long can become a major replacement of the engine. Not having an open flow of communication with our children when they are younger can turn into out of control teenagers. That small thing that we forgot to say we are sorry for can turn into a wall of hurt feelings that may take us years to tear down.

It all begins with a simple step, which to me is remembering to do what we know needs to be done. Make a list, set an alarm to remind you, send yourself a voice mail or text to alert you – just get some sort of system in place so that those small snowballs don’t turn into an avalanche that mow you down. It is a lot easier to move the mile carton away from the edge than it is to clean up the proverbial spilt milk!

It is the same with our dreams. When we are changing our dreams, we are improving upon them. As we start building our dream, we implement changes to it to improve upon it, not start a completely different dream, but finding a better way to express it.

The acorn seed grows an oak, however the oak can be changed by the soil it is grown in, by the terrain itself, by how many other oaks are close to it. It can be shaped by its environment, but it is still an oak.

Our dreams will be shaped by our environment, our knowledge, our skills, our abilities – but they are still our dreams of our own individualized possibilities. The seed is planted, all you have to do is tend to it and it will come true for you!

I love this last line “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”. I think that most of us wouldn’t think that we have something that the world is waiting for. We wouldn’t think that the wisdom that we have acquired through our life experience is something that would qualify us as a wisdom teacher.

Yet each of us has unique lessons/experiences that we bring to the table. And while you can read a biography or watch from a distance as someone celebrates their life or implodes it, there are things within that experience that we don’t see. So the more of us that look around us and see who else is in the river with us, the more that the wisdom of each one of us can be shared individually. That is truly something to celebrate.

We all hold some part of our life experience back, like the secret ingredient in your secret recipe. Sometimes because it is embarrasing, or maybe because then everyone would do it that way and we want to be special. But what we forget is that the details of the experience, what we were thinking, what judgments we held, what we ourselves missed when we made that decision – any one or combination of those things could be the most important part of the lesson that we have to pass on.

So look around you in this river of life that we all live in, push off from the shore (the shore is a false sense of security) and see who is next to you. Share of yourself and celebrate your lives together and remember “We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for!”

I don’t stay in this place 24/7. It is so intense I think that I would burn out. But I do visit it often.

I heard this song on the radio today and it got me thinking about how much we live life by sitting on the sidelines instead of dancing. We are afraid of so many things that we don’t acknowledge, because we are afraid of making them real. Once we admit to something, this we have to either do something about it or admit that we are cowards and afraid of making the needed changes.

It starts with something that is really small, that in our minds we have made large – like standing around at the Jr High School dance because we are afraid that the person we want to dance with will say no; or if we get asked we are afraid that we don’t know how to dance well enough and someone will make fun of us and life as we know it will be over.

As we get older more things get added to the list and pretty soon we have settled for the path of least resistance, because we just know that bad things will happen if step outside of the lines of the box that we created.

Take some little chances – I had never dyed my hair because I was afraid it might not turn out; I had never trusted a hair stylist to cut my hair and style it because what if I didn’t like it or my husband hated it; such little things to be afraid of that it is both sad and funny how we convince ourselves of things that really won’t be world ending. Most of what we are afraid of is totally out of proportion to what it really is.

The chances are worth taking! You grow and expand both inside and out. You can then laugh at yourself for being so afraid. You are then ready for the bigger chances that once you take them on, will have you dancing across the stage like your Ginger Rogers, showing Fred Astaire just how it is done!

We know we are not where we planned to be, but the truth is we (at least me anyway) really never had a true destination, we just followed the road where it was leading us.

So what do you do when you wake up? Plan something, anything and then implement it. I always liked Jack Canfields description of the headlights on the car driving down a dark road, you can only see so many feet in front of you at a time. Look at what you see and actually make a decision about it and then implement it. You may change directions once you get a ways down the road because you determine that this road will not take you where you want to go. U-turns are ok!

The important thing to remember is that later you will find that the road you went down will provide you with information that you needed, you just didn’t know it was part of your foundation. If you are like me, you may not know exactly what you are building, but it is fun, it is exciting, and you are learning great things along the way. Much better than just running on the hampster wheel!