The writing of Acronyming POWER Your Life!

After thirteen years of what I had considered to be a good marriage, I came home one day to be told, "I want a divorce." Monotone voice, flat expression. Where did that come from? One wife, two children, a thriving business, property, and possessions, I could see problems here.

At first I tried to fight it, but quickly saw that doing that was just creating more resentment. Yet being a builder for twenty-five years had made me very interested in practicality. Don't put the roof on before the foundation is in. Very practical. Okay, I had to let go. Goodbye to tucking my kids in every night, goodbye to the property, goodbye to the possessions. It was the only way to avoid the drama and fighting. I left.

Alone in a new house that seemed cold and empty, I could feel the despondency creeping in, and not too slowly either. Another crossroad. From past experience I knew there were just three directions I could go in, and balance didn't seem likely.

Up or down then? I'd seen enough down for one lifetime, thank you, so I chose up. Good. The choice was made. But how do you manifest the thing you're committed to having, when you haven't got an inkling of how to go about doing that? What work do you do to make yourself happy? How was I going to learn how to do that? I went looking for answers.

I spent many an hour in the self-help sections of local bookstores, only to find that after reading a few hundred of those books, each helpful in their own way, I didn't seem to be motivated to go back and re-read any of them. They worked for the time I was reading them, but they all seemed to be the fast track to success, while I was on the slow road to healing. I needed something that would take me from minute to minute, capable of a real response to events happening in my life, in a way that would take care of me, and in turn, take care of the kids.

I remembered how words from songs seemed to stick in my head, turning over and over again with one message. If the song was good, I felt better. If the song was sad, I felt sad. Maybe I was onto something here. What other means and methods would work to uplift me when I needed it? What would be useful? The key was in finding out what to repeat, so I could proceed from there.

Key phrases began to run over and over in my mind, then formed into acronyms that seemed to be an easier way to remember whole messages that were positive. The litmus test came when my kids were yelling at each other, fighting over some sacred toy. Nobody around but me and them, and I used the acronyming practice of LIGHT! Let It Go Here Too! By shifting my attention onto the acronyming practice and its message, rather than the situation, it disrupted my "normal" reactions so clearly that I was immediately detached from being angry! Now I could open to the next step, into doing what would actually defuse the situation. It worked!

After that, you couldn't have stopped my continual creation of new and different acronyming practices if you had been in a freight train coming right at me. All of a sudden I was being more patient with the kids, and for the most part feeling much better.

Yes, of course there was time spent in sheer grief and anguish. But it isn't necessary to stay there. The funny thing was, I found out that by allowing myself to grieve when I grieved, and then to practice my acronyming every other moment I could, the grief became much more a temporary phenomenon. I went up, I went down, but in the long run, through my acronyming practice, I found balance.

There were so many acronyms that I wrote them all down, and eventually created a book. When I look back on it, the pressure of being separated, and then divorced, caused a need in me that just couldn't be fulfilled by any self-help method out there, so I created one of my own. They say that you end up teaching what you most need to learn, and I obviously did.

Even now I go back and remind myself of the many messages that came through when I was writing down those paragraphs related to each acronyming practice. For me, true wisdom doesn't diminish over time. I'm even completing a second book. Clearly, I still have a lot to learn!

TB Wright author of Acronyming POWER Your Life!
available at www.onepennymillionaire.com