The grime of the day

I’m staying with a friend for the next few days to help her while she fosters a four month old baby over the festive season and a ten year old boy she is in the process of adopting. One thing I can say so far is, if you have ever had to deal with a constipated baby, you might appreciate your parents a lot more. It is tiring work, to the point when we actually cheered the baby on as he started to push.

Last week was just chaos and it seemed to have disappeared before it even began. It was the first week we had the baby, I had to help out while my friend finished up with business deals for the year, went to visit her ten year old son, seeing lawyers and going to court. I pretty much lived my week in three hour segments of changing nappies, baby feeding and getting the baby to sleep, while I caught up on sleep whenever I had the chance. As a result I wasn’t left with much time to get anything done, looking after a four month old baby truly is a twenty five hour job and I take my hat off to any parents out there who are able to do it.

I know how to look after children, I have two younger siblings and my mother has been a day-mother from time to time looking after other people’s children and I imagine that to an extent there’s a natural knowledge there. I will however admit that I don’t have the natural ‘drive’ to be a mother. I don’t have the need to reproduce and continue my genes. I’ve been told that one day I will, but even facing 30, I can honestly say, that my favourite type of child is the four pawed kind.

I have been wondering lately, even with looking after this cute, incredibly well behaved child, why do I still not feel the urge to be a mother? I know my sisters and brother would like to be parents, so why don’t I? Is it perhaps evolution? There are so many children without families and the world has billions of people in it.

I am appreciating the small moments I get, filled with giggles and smiles but I’m also really appreciating my moments of peace and quiet. I have though been missing my four legged furry children a lot and I’ve appreciated the time I’ve spent with them. Perhaps my gift this festive season is for me to learn to really enjoy the love I have for my cats (without trying to sound too much like a crazy lady).

I am using this experience as a way of looking at myself to see where my heart lies. We can all make a difference in this world and perhaps my work is more with animals than human beings.

So while I work through the next few days, not only will I be helping out a friend but I will also be finding a part of myself.

One thing I can say for sure is that right now, I’m grateful to be a single, cat crazy lady and have friends that I will be willing to do almost anything for. Even feel like a grimy single mother for a few days.

Stuff Matters

This morning I was pondering about mankind’s quest for happiness and how we are meant to find it, it seems to be some kind of mythical creature at times. I magical dragon everyone is in search of.

Of course, like many others, I did not find the be all and end all answer to everyone’s questions on happiness, but I did have a thought.

Not having all the things I would love to have in life does at times make me feel unhappy. So surely having them will make me happy, or at the very least help me to feel it. Surely happiness isn’t all about the inward search.

Having my car makes me feel happy, my pets make me feel happy, even having my computer makes me feel happy and having a comfortable bed definitely helps make me feel happy. The outward stuff does seem to help. It is why so many of us dream of winning the lotto and being super rich, not only do we get to help others but we get to eliminate financial worry and have stuff in our lives that we want.

Of course this is not the complete picture, we all still need to find that inner joy, but it is part of the picture, Yin and Yang.

We can’t expect all of our happiness to come from within. We are only human after all. It is about keeping a balance and bringing opposites together and merging them to create a whole.

So yes, outward things, circumstances and people won’t bring you all the happiness you desire but neither will the constant inner search for joy and love. We all need to be able to bring the two together and blend them into the pictures we want for our lives.

I realise I may be sounding controversial and a lot of people may argue with me about how inner happiness is important and all the outward stuff isn’t. I won’t say they are wrong as we all have our own belief systems that are right for us.

What I do know is that when I am worrying about something, such as money, my car or my home, that worry and that feeling of lack is robbing me of feelings of love, happiness and gratitude and when I don’t have the need to worry about these things, my life feels joyful and abundant.

I am not saying, go out and be greedy and grab all the things you can but take a moment and think about what you would like to have in your life that will take away your stress and worries and allow you to focus on what is important to you.

It is a delicate balance, too much or too little from one side can bring unease.

In our quests for love and happiness, I think we need to stop worrying about making the outer stuff too important and feeling guilty because we are not focusing on our inner joy enough.

Release any guilt associated with material things, they are a part of our lives and we should accept them as we embrace our inner selves.

Adapt or Die

This seems to be a theme that has been going around a lot lately and it sounds quite dramatic.

In the big picture of things, we are all like little ants scurrying across the surface of the earth. Each individual is fighting a personal struggle to survive. One life out of billions of lives on this planet seems like nothing. One person compared to many is unimportant, well at least to the general masses.

Yet our one life is important to ourselves. My life is important to me and I may seem selfish because of it.

When our lives change and the world around us changes we follow that innate human nature that urges us to adapt to that change. If it is a change we are not happy with, we will fight it and once there seems to be a final end result, we will adapt our lives according to it, whether or not we are happy with it.

I have been wondering about what drives people to give up and not adapt to change.

When Japan started to look at passing laws on waist size (yes it is true). There was an increase in suicide amongst fat people. This happened a long time before the earthquake and tsunami ravaged their country. If someone felt too hopeless at the thought of having to lose weight, then would they even have been able to find the strength to recover from the disaster that struck their country.

Greece is bankrupt, suicide rates have increased by 40%, especially amongst business men. Is money that important to them? So much so that instead of turning to their natural instinct of survival for themselves and their families, they will commit suicide, because of money.

Darwin is right in his theories of survival of the strongest, the fittest and the all round best of the species. Survival belongs to those who are able to adapt as life changes.

In order for us to survive as a species, it really is up to each individual person to be “selfish” enough over their own lives to want to survive.

What we may not realise is that all the hardships each of us incurs in our lifetimes really helps to evolve our species to its next point. The financial crisis the world has seen, the natural disasters faced, diseases being fought, all of it, yes even the loss of jobs and money is pushing us to evolve.

Sounds a little crazy, I know but it’s the Darwinian truth behind it. Where we are evolving towards, I don’t know but I’m sure that in a few years time we will be able to see very clearly. We adapted and evolved when we needed to create currency. Money seems to have lead us to some kind of madness. Scurrying around like little rats, grabbing as much of it as we possibly can, perhaps it is time for us to change and to start looking at something else, something more important than money.

I think it is time for us to all stop and have a look at our lives. The world appears to be in chaos right now but it is from this chaos that we are beginning to evolve into the next stage of our species. It is happening and I think that on some level we can all feel the change and the need to change within ourselves.

The question is, do we adapt or die?