LIFE Shaking Us AWAKE

I was responding to a friend asking me who was Baby Kaleb. As I wrote back I began to realize something, making me think back .....

(my response, and a picture of my own little Rat Pack at dinner)
He's a baby who was shaken by his baby sitter and has gone thru a lot...but now getting better.....chuckling to myself (as I started to make the following connection)....

.....just like all of us....we've all been shaken in some way...........and if we weren't shaken too hard and no permanent damage occurred, we can heal....
....and thinking very rarely does life shake up so hard that we become (permanently) broken....and maybe even that life shakes us when we're ignoring our inner guides/feelings/intuitions ......

......life shakes us awake, making us conscious, waking us up to consciousness.......ending relationships, careers, and other choices we've made that aren't right for us anymore (but can't see it)...

(and now my thinking back)
Not sure if this makes sense, but after I hit "send" I thought, "I should have saved that to remember later". After I clicked "save" I thought, "Why are you saving this? Either share this thought through a post now or expect it to get lost in that hidden Land of Narnia you call your computer".

It's still hard for me to believe that the thoughts I have make sense to, or are of interest to anyone other than, myself. I remember being so mentally jazzed by a movie called "Mind Walk" that on the drive home I couldn't stop talking about it. My first ex-wife couldn't stop looking at me with a blank stare and telling me I was talking too much.

She and I are good friends now, but after I write 90% of my thoughts I still think, why would anyone want to read this, and click the "save" button, keeping them locked away, forgotten and unshared with someone it might help or passed along to someone that it could.

I have an idea! Why not truly become great friends, even best friends, BEFORE marrying someone? If the great/best friend part doesn't happen, then maybe the marriage part shouldn't either. Brilliant! I bet no one's thought of that before...........They have?.........I'm the last one to realize this?...........Well, better late than never I suppose.

Having a sense of humor about yourself helps heal the bruises. And maybe the "bad" things that happened to us weren't really so bad. Maybe what we see as the "tragic" events of our lives was LIFE waking us up to things we couldn't see for ourselves.

I'm listening to the KanYe West song I put on my MySpace page, called "Stronger". That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Sometimes we wish it would kill us, because then the pain would stop. But if we can hold on, sometimes just one minute longer, we DO become stronger.

So even after two failed marriages, I'm strong enough to trust in another's love again.

Even though the second marriage put me in the hospital with a heart attack, I've come back to life and am healed from my being shaken.

Man, talk about life literally nearly shaking you to death like a rag doll and saying, "You want to love and value someone more than you love and value your own life? Fine! You want to work yourself to death trying to make something work that isn't supposed to? Alright, tough guy. Let me introduce you to a REAL Bad Ass - DEATH!"

So Yes! I'm strong enough to try love again......YES! Bring on the next Ex-Mrs. Stuart.......Ooops, I mean Mrs. Stuart............O.K. Maybe I'm not quite all the way healed yet in the trust department (totally laughing at myself right now :)-

But I do know I am strong enough to hold on, for one minute longer at a time, to the belief that my greatest strength, my greatest gift called LOVE, isn't also my greatest weakness, and the cause of my inevitable and impending demise the next time I allow myself to risk it all.....

I'm just a little worried that if I strike out a third time I might get thrown out of the game entirely, the umpire saying, "Get this idiot out of here. He doesn't deserve to play anymore."

So shaken and stirred, but not broken, I share this with you, NOT that you might feel sorry for me in any way. Feeling sorry for someone NEVER helps them get stronger. And why would you feel sorry for someone who has become healthier, happier and wiser? Yes it happened through pain, pain I wished would have killed me at times so it would stop hurting so deeply. But which has given me greater strength, greater power, greater happiness, and a greater vision of what it means to REALLY live!

I'm even MORE loving now, appreciating what a valuable treasure it is, and realizing that although we can't control what we get from others, we can control what we give. It's not about becoming hardened inside, just more insightful as to who you give yourself to.

So if anything, send vibes of healing my way, just as I do to all of you who have been shaken in some way. And thanks to a new friend request who has "Express what you feel, when you feel it" on their page.

It gives me the courage to express these thoughts I'm feeling right now. ....and seeing life's shaking as a way of waking us up to things we aren't seeing for ourselves.

We needn't be bitter by it, just heal FROM it, and be grateful FOR it.

Too many of us are living in a dream-like state, instead of consciously creating and living in a state of our greatest dreams.

Just don't shake a kid. Life, the next time you want to shake a kid, shake me. Someone like me has a better chance of surviving it. We've shown that. We've earned the right to risk trading our lives for that of a child's. If you're going to shake them, just shake em a little, you know, hide their bear or something. (All of my children have the look of their mother, thankfully. But all of them have my personality, or inner look, which I've "lived" to think is pretty damn good, and the only one that matters to me.)

Lose Sight of the Shore

My friend Georgia posted a picture of a broken heart, made from the repeated line, "If the heart is broken, shouldn't the pain run out?" I like her writes, and the only thing I could think of was something like, "The only response I can imagine is that the pain is needed for healing, once the broken-hearted decides they want the healing more than the hurting."

I have come to realize that life is often a reflection of choice; feeling like a victim or feeling enlightened, feeling poor and hopeless or feeling rich and empowered, and feeling heart-broken or believing you're learning how to attract only healthy relationships into your life.

This doesn't mean you have to run out and hand someone your heart, saying, "Go ahead. Stab it! It won't hurt me anymore." It just means learning how to identify the people that won't stab. And this may take more time for some and less for others. As passionate and risk-taking as I am, this is one area I'm in no hurry to put my heart into again.

So we're all in the same boat (boy I hope it's a big one or at least has a shower). While we're in it, lets have the courage to have faith in new oceans, ones we've yet to experience. Some of us may row faster and some slower, and that's OK. It's better than holding the oar in your hands and beating yourself over the head with it.

"You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."
- unknown

By the way, I was living with my best friend Brian Donovan after college. He was miserable in his marketing job, as was I in my sales job. I found the above quote and wrote it down for him. The next day he packed up and headed for Hollywood. He and his roommate struggled every day for about seven years.

Now his voice (very cool and one I use at times while teaching) is heard all over the country, and best known as the voice of JETIX on Cartoon Disney. His roommate, Molly Shannon, went on to SNL and movie fame.

Neither wallowed in the brokenness of their lives. Neither should we. As Mary Katherine Gallagher would say..........

"SUPERSTAR!"
"DARE TO DREAM"