Friday, June 21, 2013

Challenge Accepted!

Here I am 2 weeks after my initial blog post and that first post was a long time in the making because of my fear surrounding putting myself out there in blog form and then I did it and I didn't find it so bad. It was slightly scary but I love my friends and family because they have been super supportive and that helps a lot.

This week I would like to talk about a personal challenge to myself to become more of a minimalist. This includes living with less, pairing down the stuff I have and fighting the urge to accumulate more. I have been reading the signs from the universe and she has been very clear in illustrating that I need to stop shopping and stop spending my money recklessly. These signs have come in the form of me continually losing and/or breaking many of my things lately.

With inspiration and help from my best friend over at the Sarcastic Bystander,I have already paired down my closet. I donated, repurposed and/or threw-out about 170 pieces of clothing that I no longer wear or are inappropriate for various reasons including being worn out, wrong size, etc. I donated most of the pieces to Value Village and threw out anything that was too far gone. Here is a handy visual of all the clothes I purged from my closet:

                                                                        Picture used with permission from http://www.sarcasticbystander.com/

Before my closet demolition, I also helped her purge her closet in her quest to live a more healthy and minimalist life. Check out her purge I helped with!
We have also embarked on a challenge to not buy any more clothing for the rest of the summer. So far I have stuck to this challenge fairly well (minus a slip or 2). So in that vain and with inspiration from my best friend and her healthy lifestyle I am going to set myself an additional summer challenge.

The Summer Purge of 2013 (as I have so named it) will include the following:
  • In addition to buying no more clothing for the summer, I also commit to not buying any more accessories and purging the accessories I do have;
  • Purging of my books and bookshelf, including finishing the numerous books I have started and getting rid of those University textbooks I will never touch again;
  • Organizing and purging all the 'stuff' I have stored at my parents that I hope to use once I move out; and
  • I am a paper and sticker hoarder, so I think it is time to use, sell, donate & purge a lot of that stuff as well.
So this is my challenge to myself and one thing that has always been hard for me in sticking to challenges and commitments I make to myself is the follow-through. I can talk myself into or out of anything and I am great with the excuses. I hope that this public commitment to the challenge will help motivate me better than I've been able to motivate myself so far. I know a lot of you can relate to this so please help me out and keep me accountable. This will be the first of many challenges I set for myself that I will share with you that will hopefully lead to a healthier, happier and uncommon life. Challenge Accepted! :) 



Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Welcome to My Blog!


I have been struggling for weeks to find the perfect topic for my very first blog post. I had so many ideas floating around in my head but I was never really happy with any of them. Just now as I was lying in bed unable to sleep and contemplating my existence it came to me, in the same way that any good idea does, like a bolt of lighting that jolts you out of bed and into action. So here I am with my very first blog post about... but wait I need to give you a little background before I explain the premise of this post and the blog itself.

In the past few months of my life there have been a lot of weird things that have happened to me. It's funny how at the time one can look at their life and feel stagnated but in looking back with hindsight bias one can see the forest for the trees....too many analogies possibly in that one...? Anyways, what I am trying to say is that all these weird occurrences have added up and eventually led to this one glorious moment and the beginning of this blog!

It seems like all the bizarre occurrences of my life this past year have led to this one bizarre day a few weeks ago that I remember very well. So I will start with explaining that I was feeling like I had been stuck in a rut and going around in circles for a long time when it comes to my life and career path. I have been stagnated by my very own decision paralysis. I think a lot of people can relate to this state; it is a state of being in which you find yourself unable to move forward because of the inability to make a concrete decision and act on it. I have so many ideas, interests and possible avenues that I could focus my attention towards that it is hard for me to decide which one to choose. I am paralyzed by a fear that I will make the wrong choice AGAIN and then I will be stuck or in the same place as now or in an even worse situation. I also fear that if I choose one thing than by default I will have to give up the other things. This is tough for me because I know I need to make a decision in order to move forward and I really want to move forward with my life and start doing what I love.

The point being that this was never more evident than the day I went to a healthy living expo with my best friend. At said Expo, I meet a woman who was a holistic healer, working at a healing practice that specialized in various techniques, one that I had never heard about before was colour therapy. I was skeptical but curious about the idea and my friend was the courageous one that asked for an explanation. The woman explained that is was the use of a variety of coloured jars and asking someone what colours appealed to them the most and then an explanation of how this is related to their personality and life. So my friend ventures forward and points out some coloured jars she finds attractive and the woman starts in on a perfect explanation of my best friend's personality and her best traits, it was eerie. I then decided to try it as well, seeing how she was highly accurate with my friend. So I stepped forward and pointed to a bottle which was a mix of orange and purple. She then explained that the fact that I choose that particular bottle means that I am a healer, someone who has a lot of wisdom to share and is able to help people in the healing arts, however I have a lot of fear that surrounds these gifts and my wisdom. BAM! Wow, that was a life changing moment for me. Both my friend and I were blown away by the accuracy of this stranger's description of us based solely on the colours that appealed to us. It was a big wow moment for me and made me think...

For example, I have for most of my short life always been attracted to health care related jobs and I have known from an early age that I wanted to help people, no matter what I ended up choosing as a career and life path, it had to be something that contributed to overall society in a positive way. I started at an early age as a Lifeguard and I taught swimming lessons to children, I volunteered my time and qualifications as often as possible to first aid related causes. I went into university with the intention of going to Medical school and when that didn't pan out I tried out nursing but I didn't finish my degree and then I found myself employed as a 911 operator for ambulance services. It may seem that my choices have been related to my life and work experiences and expertise but I have also found myself drawn to these professions, but somehow feeling not fulfilled in them. I thought about going the complementary and alternative medicine route but that was something that also required a lot of time and money and little support from family, friends and society as a whole. So now I find myself working for the municipal government doing a job that leaves me unfulfilled.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I am afraid. I keep myself paralyzed and stuck because I am afraid of making a decision, I'm afraid of making the wrong one. So I don't make any decision and I stagnant. I have ideas but I don't start anything because I'm afraid I wont finish it, or I'm afraid I'll fail or even that I'm afraid I'll succeed. Most of all, I'm afraid of being vulnerable, of just totally being my true damaged, scared, horrific and beautiful self with another human being. So here I am at the corner of the rest of my life stuck scared and the rest of my life beautifully open and I find this blog. This lowly little blog can be that first step for me, it can be that place where I can safely try being vulnerable with the training wheels on. I want to share my life with the world, my trials and tribulations and the lessons I learn along the way so that others can learn and grow as well and maybe even get a little bit of entertainment out of it.

So on that fateful day this woman who I have never meet before and doesn't know me from Adam, has summed-up my entire life and existence in a couple sentences and with one dual-coloured bottle of liquid. My best friend and I both walked away from the experience feeling profoundly moved. What shot through me while I laid in bed this evening was that thought and those words from this woman; that I have a lot of wisdom to share and that I am afraid. I want to help people, I know that for a fact and I have always wanted to do that with my life, but I have struggled for a long time to figure out the right way for me to do that. I was hit tonight by the thought that this blog, this one right here, the one you are reading right now, can be that vehicle for me to help people. I know I am not the only person going through the things I am going through and I know I am learning and growing everyday and I really do want to share that journey with the world. If I can help one person's life be a little easier by learning from my mistakes instead of making their own then it will be worth it.

So welcome to my blog, Uncommon Wealth, the name of which comes from some distant memory from my youth. I think you can interrupt the title in whatever way seems fit for yourself but I know what it means to me. For me and in this context it refers to the richness that comes from a wonderful life, the wealth of happiness and prosperity that will never be found in monetary form. So here is to your uncommonly wealthy life! Cheers! :)