You Can’t Have It All


You can’t have it all, but you can have some of it. Choose carefully and you will come out okay. What you want or need depends on your moment by moment circumstances. Life is tailor-made for that.

When I was a caregiver, all I wanted was for the suffering to go away, but it couldn’t. I had to ride it out. But I did have the choice to practice self-care at certain times. Usually this was in the evenings. I could seclude myself for a stretch of silence and self-attention. My own needs had been put on the back burner, but at night I could manage to work in some me-time. I had to choose to make it a priority.

Now I am able to practice self-care intensively. Time to nurture myself is still seen as a great luxury and a total necessity.

We are candles with a certain amount of burn time and the future never arrives!

I am more or less finished with book-knowledge; it is time to know myself and I need no books for that.

I cherish stillness and silence. Often I have trouble getting into it; that is how it goes. We often have to go through a resistance to finding our own inner peace.

Finally I settle down. I rest in my nest, my wings folded with no plans to fly for now.

Soon enough, something will put me into action and I will forget the silence.

Life is circular, whole and perfectly complete. There are no missing pieces. We just can’t have them all at the same time.

Vicki Woodyard

6 Comments

  1. Love this so much, Vicki. Self-care is the key no matter what our circumstances are. And the reward is stillness and solitude which seems like such a gift. We can’t be of any use to our loved ones or the world until we are coming from the calm center which we are all so easily knocked out of my the external world. I love the picture you used for this post. Is this your daughter?

    Reply

    1. Yes, self-care is the beginning, the middle and the end. The photo is just one I found online. I don’t have a scanner to use family photos.

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