Passionate Mondays

I was with my mother for the last five days in Santa Barbara. She is not doing well and we are all struggling in learning how to take care of her, help her, preserve her dignity and hopefully making it possible for her to live out her remaining time pain-free. However, taking care of her is not the biggest challenge. The most difficult thing to learn to do well is to take care of oneself while taking care of another. It is so easy to give your all to someone you love, and have nothing left over to nourish yourself. I have been preaching about this to my father for the last six years as he has cared for her, and now that I am spending more time with her, it is my turn to practice what I preach. Ha! It's not easy.

So, Saturday, a particularly demanding day, I took a walk, which is a daily practice for me. It was not my usual fast-paced walk in which my goal is to raise my heart rate and break a sweat. This one was a walk to unwind, give my body and mind some space and nourishment in the fresh air. I let myself notice the details around me, the smell of the breeze, the beauty of the Spanish style houses, the amazing diversity of flowers and plants. On my walk I realized that my "Passionate Monday" post was only two days away. I thought to myself, "how can I possibly feel passionate in the middle of all this? How am I going to post something when I don't feel it?"

Ah-Ha! The light bulb came on. The fact that I was finding the subject of passion difficult is exactly why I needed to post something about it. Whether it is a rotten Monday at work, your kids are late for school and screaming, your puppy messed on the floor, your having a fight with your boyfriend, or you are taking care of your dying mother, we can all find a way to put passion into our day. If we can succeed in making ourselves more passionate about life in general, life on this earth, then even on those difficult days we can find some peace, gratitude and reason to smile. As I have written before, I believe that life is full of suffering for all of us. It is precisely what we do with the suffering, with those lessons, that gives us quality in life and our opportunity to learn and grow.

As my walk continued up toward the Santa Barbara Mission, I decided to sit and contemplate on the beauty of the earth. In front of the Mission is a rose garden. It is at least an acre or two of as many varieties of roses as you could imagine. It is also a place that holds special meaning to me not only for its beauty, but it is where my husband and I were married. I reflected on our love, a very strong and deep love. I reflected on how the people that I am most drawn to in life are those that, like me, take joy in the little details of life and this earth. Many of those people are writers, photographers, cooks, who are instinctively drawn to the little treasures that life has to offer. They get passionate about a food ingredient, a bug on a sidewalk, a four leaf clover, a statue in a garden or dew on the grass.

Here are a few of those small details that I saw on my walk, most of which I would have missed would I have been doing my "exercise walk":

On this Monday (or Tuesday for my friends in Europe or points east), find your passion by noticing the little details around you and finding joy in them. It is precisely those small doses of beauty that make up the big, mysterious, magnificent, brilliant picture and that keep us going when times get tough.

Have a Passionate Monday!