My friend Frankie knows I LOVE Avatar. My car is even named Appa, just like the Avatar's flying bison.
He sent me this picture over social media the other day.
A plushie Appa is flying through a house, held aloft by a bunch of white, helium filled balloons. This is an excellent idea.
I really love my friends.
I don't know why, but my boycat Yang has really been up in my grill lately. He's all over me! I'll come home from work, and lay on the couch, and he just sort of insinuates himself upon me. He will lay down on my arm, or my chest, and shove his face in mine and just send crazy amounts of cat-love-beams right at me.
Yo, it's time to love me!
I'm not complaining, it's awesome. I love him!
No, this isn't health and exercise advice. It's a video. A really smart, poignant, funny, sad, amazing video.
Also, you'll have to watch it to find out what step 4 is. Because it kind of is health and exercise advice after all. And it's awesome.
So last year my old company, HYPERMEGAGIANTCONCERNGLOBAL, kind of screwed me over. They had crap benefits, shoddy HR, and policies that generally favored the corporate office folks, and left the out-in-the-field guys to twist in the wind.
Without getting into the ugly details of exactly how they let me down, I wound up owing a nice big tax bill.
So Missy and I (but especially me) were quite nervous on Saturday when we went to get our taxes done. Our taxes are complex as it is, between my royalties, being a life coach, and my day job.
But it all worked out just fine, and we're getting a refund.
Whew! Glad that's over with.
I've been learning a lot of new things at work lately. Some of it's been really challenging. It's been easy (and tempting) to get swept up in a lot of "What the #)@#*!! is that" and "I'll never learn this!" and "I just want to go home, watch the Flash and maybe eat some orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream with a spoonful of peanut butter on top of it."
(Hey, if you think that's gross, then you go eat something else and write about it in your blog, okay? Geez!)
Anyhow, I've been talking to friends of mine a lot lately about something I learned from Pema Chodron, in her audio lecture Getting Unstuck. It's the profound power of just staying.
By staying she means not running away frorm our feelings, or pain, or fears, but just calmly being present for them, and moving through them.
Here, she talks about it way better than I can.
So the other day I was in the middle of one of those I-want-to-just-run moments when I consciously chose to stay. Eventually, I worked through my unease, and got my work done, and felt really good about it. It didn't mean that that panicky-wtf-feeling was now somehow enjoyable. It wasn't. But when I turned to stare it in the face, I saw I was spinning myself up, and making it far worse than it was.
Good stuff.
