I love when Daylight Saving Time ends.

1. The kids keep the same time so they are in bed earlier and are more rested the next day. This lasted for almost the whole winter last year.
2. I think my body very much appreciates the time changing. I tend to stay up late and wake late but the shift of the hour pushes me to finish the night sooner and wake up having caught more z’s. Gaining that extra hour fills in some sort of time gap and I am good to go.
   

The whole things reminds me that time is a human-made concept. We have the power to shift the concept to work for us. We create our own reality.

Growing up, I had many responsibilities and as I got older, I assumed more and more.

Assuming responsibility means to step forward and take charge without being asked. I literally assumed I was responsible for many things. And when no one, particularly an adult, said they would take those responsibilities, there place was cementedm.

Responsibility comes with so much baggage. And the baggage feels necessary, familiar and permanently attached well into adulthood. Releasing that baggage has been and continues to be part of reclaiming my inspired life.

Tonight, I am reading and falling asleep and waking only wanting to read more even as my eyes droop and burn. This doesn’t happen with those dry non-fiction books, at least for me. I wonder who does react that way to non-fiction books?

Humans are drawn to stories. We are always making up stories about our own lives and of those we know. Reading a book gives us an opportunity to get out of our own stories, a welcome break, and into the stories of other people. When it’s stories of lives unlived or stories of people wildly different than us, it gives our brains ideas of how to reconnect our own stories.

Getting lost in a good book serves our imagination and our healing.

I was in a funk the last couple of weeks, brought on by the reality of parenting one adult short in my house. It felt like I had a grayish green haze surrounding me within a 10 ft radius. My usually positive and cheerful outlook was weighed down with additional responsibilities and overwhelm, and the world looked different. 

Today, I experienced a lifting of that haze. I had pessimistic expectations of a conversation, and it surprisingly didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. That surprise disrupted the stream of negative thoughts – it showed my brain a different path to take not only for this conversation but also for everything else going on in my life. 

I have gotten to a point where I can recognize these periods while I am in them. However, being positive isn’t something that one’s brain can conjure up during these funks. This experience has shown me that maybe instead of gaslighting myself and trying to fake positivity, I can welcome the element of surprise instead.

It feels a little funny coming back to writing after the month off. While part of it feels natural like hopping back on a bike, another part feels a little awkward as if my legs have grown but the bike has stayed the same.

While legs grow as they do whether you ride a bike or not, I wouldn’t have grown/changed the same if I stayed and continued writing. I wonder how that version of me would have grown/changed if she continued writing everyday.