It's All About Me!

It seems like everywhere I looked, on bumper stickers, window stickers and T Shirts,
you would see the words "It's all about me."

I used to think it was a pretty self centered and a selfish thought to be projecting to others.

Now that I'm 52 and having raised 3 kids to adulthood, helped them all financially, the best I could, the 30 year old is married and moved to Australia, my daughter gave me a 2 and 6 year old to help her raise, since their dads are only part-time and I'm starting to take the "It's all about me" saying to heart.

At my age and giving so much to others, I am realizing now that making it "all about me" is more of a statement of self responsibility than a selfish act. If more people took responsibility for their own choices, this world could be a much different place.

Instead of us compiling a list of why everyone's problems are the result of someone else or something out of our own control and accepted that every action in our lives involves a number of choices. Choices that we made at that particular moment, we can then accept the responsibility for the situations our choices led us to.

I know that in looking back at my life, I have always had a choice in every situation, whether I wanted to believe it or not. How I made my choices were usually based on guilt, worrying over other peoples expectations of me and sometimes my own gut feelings, just to name a few.

I have found that the choices I made based on my own gut feelings, although not always easy choices, were usually the ones that turned out the best in the long run.


In many cases learning to say NO put the responsibility back on the other person and allowed them an
opportunity to grow or develop in some way.

My Parents had a big family of 7 kids and me being the middle child often put me into positions that my siblings didn't have to deal with.

So here I am with grown children and grand children and finally learning to quit trying to help or fix everyone else's problems.This realization of making it about me has finally led me to a new understanding of what I want in life.

I always had this gut feeling that I was being led through life by some sort of forces or universal path, but never understood it. Learning what it is I want out of life for myself has been a tough journey and it's still far from over, but each day I wake up and remind myself that I will have choices to make and that if I spend too much time trying to analyze them I end up doing nothing at all. Just making the best choice we can based on our gut feeling or instincts is at least doing something.

Regardless off the choices we make, we always have more choices that follow and allow us to fine tune the last ones.

Without getting too spiritual, if we have a soul, it doesn't care so much how we live our lives, but rather that it's our lives we are living.

Listening to poets such as David Whyte recite poems from the likes of Mary Oliver (some of my favorites) have helped me feel comfortable in living the life that is mine.

Today I had a number of things to accomplish and by prioritizing them and making choices that felt like they were coming directly from me. I am now sitting in my front yard on the Island of Maui, knowing most of what I set out to do from online work, errands to painting half of a bedroom are done.
I've even had time to write this up on my Blackberry.

I know I didn't finish everything I had on my list and tomorrow I go back to work a 10 hour day, but what I did I feel good about and what I didn't do, there's always another day.
If that day doesn't come, it won't really matter to me anymore.

When I go to bed tonight, I will be doing it with the feeling that tomorrow may just be the best one of my life.
I think that making it "All about me" just means that if we do our very best and take care of ourselves first,we will be much better examples to those around us.

That's my Manao (thoughts or advice in Hawaiian)