Renewal

For a while there, I thought things were never going to get better. I had resigned myself to becoming a grumpy old woman. At fifty-one I believed I was too old to realize the dreams of my youth and early adulthood; dreams that I had put on the back burner because they seemed unfitting to my role as single mother, breadwinner and average person. But, now I need to add one word to all of the above – ALMOST.
And thank goodness there is such a word, such a concept. Because it was only ALMOST and not definite.
I am now fascinated by how quickly and completely such a believe can change. It is as though the limitations I had set for myself, the tight boundaries I had drawn, and within which I chose to live, though seeming to be concrete solid, dissolved, and melted, as though they were no more than ice, melting in the heat of the summer sun.
It took just one thought, one wonderful, inspirational thought, one phrase first formed in the mind, then spoken out loud and my faith was restored.
And what was that phrase, that kick start into a different future? What was the sun that melted away the icy boundaries?
Simple – IT IS NOT TRUE
It is not true that I am too old, not true that things would never get better, not true that I am doomed to become a grumpy old woman. It is only true for as long as I believe it to be so. For believing it, feeds it, and creates the mindset that makes it so.
It was while reading an interview by Wayne Dwyer that the shift in mindset began. He says, quite simply: ‘Change your thoughts - change your life’. And so my life change has begun, I choose to think new thoughts. I choose to look beyond the self made boundaries, I choose to challenge my limiting ideas about who I am and what I may become.
I choose renewal.
In my late twenties and thirties I wrote several novels. I even published one, The Cloths of Heaven, though had no idea how to market it adequately. Imagining I was not meant to earn my living as a novelist, and after I had completed my set of articles for Suite101, I stopped writing in 2004. I found myself an office job, and brick my mental brick and year by year I walled up the writer in me.
But the writer in me, the fundamental core of who I am, would not be silenced. It made itself heard in many peculiar ways. When I didn’t listen, it was the cause of my dissatisfaction with what I did on a daily basis. When I pushed it away it became the plethora of thoughts that crammed my consciousness.
It was the voice that nagged at me, gnawed at the structure of my mediocre life, like a rat on a trash heap, scavenging for something beneath the surface that will nourish and sustain. It was the unexplainable sadness, the melancholy that almost became my permanent frame of mind.
What can I say? It only takes a minute to think a new thought. An instant to recapture the essence of who you really are, who you were born to be!
And in an instant generic memory reminds you of who you really are.
Change your thoughts, change your life. One thought, I am a writer – it is who I am an who I choose to be. That thought brought me back from the half-light, the half-life. That thought encouraged me to sing along to the radio, to laugh out loud, to wake up grateful for a new day.
I haven’t quite figured out what the next novel will be. That doesn’t worry me, at all. I am in the mode, I have crept back into my true skin, so I know the novel will be written.
Besides, I have three other novels that need dusting down. Three valid pieces of work that ought to find their way to new readers. I have a responsibility to take them seriously, to respect them, and me for having written them.
And I will – starting today.