Be The Change You Need

While it is very easy to be distracted by external factors on a daily basis, it is important to be able to remove or shut out the distractions that negatively impact your productivity so that you can optimize your time spent on the things that are most important to your present and for your future goals. Life has a way of constantly throwing us curve balls, and only the strong will rise above the distractions. It is very hard to go through life without experiencing something painful at possibly the most inconvenient times of our lives (because pain is never convenient), but it is how we navigate the obstacles to meet our obligations, pushing through the pain, that distinguishes who we are as individuals, and how we survive it.

While that is easy to say, it is much harder to do without practice. It’s amazing how little things can affect our psyche. As a mother who has lost a child, I have had many, many days where looking at a specific picture of my daughter who passed resulted in physical manifestations where I actually felt pains in my chest sometimes, in the region of my heart, that cast a cloud over my head for a good part of many mornings. Although I love her face, it felt better for me at times not to look at it. I have one of those pictures on my dresser in a 3-part frame that includes photos of my 2 other daughters. Something about her photo was disturbing me because every time I looked at it, I felt pain. I didn’t know it was the photo vs. the person at the time, because I was not able to separate the two, and I didn’t want to remove the photo because I feel that it would discredit my commitment to her as her mother; I will always have 3 daughters and I will always honor that.

One day I elected to take a major step and did something very simple which made a huge impact on how I feel when I approach my dresser in the mornings now. The top frame held the photo of my eldest who passed (it was taken 2 years before her passing, for her high-school graduation), the middle slot held my middle daughter’s 5th grade photo, and the bottom slot held my youngest daughter’s 3rd grade photo (they are now in 11th and 9th grade respectively). Looking at the photos every day reconfirmed my pain as such random thoughts raced through my mind as to how much my 2nd and 3rd daughters have changed since their photos were taken, and how much my 1st daughter’s photo will not, compounded by the reality that hers will eventually fade. That was always a very painful thought, and I had that thought just about every morning as I went to retrieve my clothes from the dresser drawers; until I decided to do something about it. I didn’t want to remove the photo, so I took it from the frame, moved up my middle daughter to 1st position, my youngest to 2nd and my daughter who passed, moved her photo to the bottom. The act of doing that was very painful. I felt as thought I was going to have a major heart attack from the force of the chest pains that I was feeling, and that I was being a bad mother as I was physically relegating my eldest from her position as such in the family and putting her where it may be viewed that I placed her in a position of lesser consequence or relevance now that she is gone. Funny thing, though, I never felt that way about my youngest being in that position - I actually looked at each slot equally prior to my eldest’s passing.

Regardless, I had decided that this was a necessary step for me to be able to look at the photos without feeling the anxiety. My hands shook when I put the frame back together, and I gently placed it back on my dresser and walked away.

Today when I walk towards the photos, I see my 2 younger daughters first, and my 1st is in a position where I see her light, and I am able to hold her in good memory versus as a tragedy that I have to live over and over again. It is amazing how the visual impacts both the physical and the mental! As I am a highly visual person, I was able to create inner peace just by making that simple change. I realize now too that the style of the photo quite likely had tremendous impact on my disquiet in the first place, as it is romantically old-fashioned, with the lighting somewhat muted.

Every day now I embrace my sunshine from within, and each day is filled with optimism vs. apprehension. My next step, when I am so inclined, is to replace the photo altogether with a more vibrant one!