Shifting Space by Desserae Shepston is a community-supported newsletter. I am so grateful to you for stopping by and taking the time to read. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
April is my birthday month! Not to mention the heart of spring and the month we (officially) celebrate Earth Day. To celebrate, I’ve set up a 20% subscription discount, available for the whole month. The discounted annual rate is $40. Once you sign up at this rate, you’ll maintain it as long as you subscribe. I’m donating 20% of all new subscriptions to the Nature Conservancy.
Also, please consider downloading the Substack app to join the conversation and participate in the community. If this post resonates, feel free to share!
Today (April 15th) is my birthday. Over this past week or so, as the day approached, I started thinking about what I know to be true after living in this human form, on this blue planet, zipping around a giant star, in a minuscule corner of this particular universe.
I wondered if I could get to 54 things to represent one understanding for each year of the life I’m leading.
Though I thought about it over the past week, I didn’t write anything down, so as I compose this entry, I don’t know how close I’ll get to 54. Isn’t it funny to think that I don’t know if I have that many things that I can say I know for sure?
In naming what I know to be true, I want to acknowledge and recognize the understandings that mean something to me, that contribute to how I live in this world, that give me a framework. The understandings that I’ve grown into through 54 years of experience and exploration.
So, here goes:
1. Love is the most important feeling, but it can be both the easiest and hardest to open yourself up to. The hardest to admit. I love my pet: easy. I love my parents and brothers: easy. I love my friends: easy to admit to myself, sometimes hard to voice to them. I love myself: easy(ish) now but wasn’t always. I love the people who’ve hurt me: hard. I love those whose perspectives are in opposition to my own: hard.
2. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is a show of strength.
3. Wisdom comes with the acknowledgment that there is so much we don’t know. When I was young and not-so-young but a (little) younger than I am now, I was afraid of being wrong and thought that I shouldn’t voice my ideas or opinions because others were so much more knowledgeable than me. And then I got an education, through life, through travel, and through three graduate degrees. And somehow, the realization that I don’t know everything became freeing because I realized how much I don’t know and can never know. But sometimes, I’m still afraid to be wrong.
4. Getting out in nature is healing, rejuvenating, and calming. Paying attention to your surroundings instead of being lost in the constant stream of everyday thoughts, the endless tapes playing on repeat amplifies nature’s benefits.
5. Breathing is good. Deep breaths that involve the belly are better.
6. We can learn something from anyone we interact with if we take the time to listen to what they have to say.
7. Along those same lines: If we all took the time to talk to (not argue with) and listen (instead of thinking about the next thing we’re going to say), we’d find out we have more in common as human beings than the factors or characteristics that separate us.
8. You appreciate spring so much more after a hard winter.
9. It’s ok to feel your heart break open, to sit with exquisite pain, to acknowledge the feelings, no matter the cause of the heartbreak. It’s ok to feel it.
10. Sometimes, you can witness something so beautiful it hurts. This, too, is the heart breaking open. It’s ok to feel it.
11. Nothing lasts forever and yet everything does. Because energy cannot be created or destroyed; it just changes form. And everything is energy.
12. Everything is energy, from our thoughts and emotions to rocks and air.
13. Accepting you don’t and can’t know everything gives you the freedom to mentally explore the far reaches of your imagination, and then some. It allows you to think of the fantastical, and then imagine that it could be true, somewhere. It gives you the courage to try something new because you just might succeed.
14. We are all creative beings. Existing in this world is a creative act, with every moment of every day a new expression. We can choose to add shape, color, form, and flair at any time. We can start over with a blank canvas, though what we’ve painted before influences each new work. And it’s all art.
15. Pets are family. And they show us what it means to live in the moment, to live love, to rest with glorious abandon, to play with equal abandon, to soak up the sun’s rays.
16. Non-human animals are more intelligent than we give them credit for. We just don’t always recognize their intelligence because it doesn’t look like ours.
17. We are all stronger than we think.
18. We are all infinite potential and possibility.
19. We are all perfectly imperfect and imperfectly perfect.
20. There is more to us than flesh and bones but defining that something else isn’t easy.
21. Though there are definite untruths and those who intentionally mislead and misdirect others, truth is harder to define than we like to admit. Acknowledging that what’s true for ourselves isn’t necessarily true for others is uncomfortable. That even the truth revealed through scientific discovery grows and changes, sometimes dramatically so. After all, the basis for the scientific method, for hypotheses and theories, is that they must be falsifiable.
22. There isn’t a scientific test for everything but just because we can’t test it (yet) doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
23. We have the ability to know without thinking, but most of us are out of touch with the gut. The gut brain is highly intelligent. But like our head brains, our gut brains are crowded and reactive to pains and past trauma, inhibiting our ability to recognize a true gut knowing from a false one. It isn’t a coincidence that we often feel our fears of the future and failure in our gut.
24. Words have power but only the power we give them. As speakers, we put energy into words with our thoughts, intentions, and emotions. As receptors, we allow (or not) another’s words to impact us because we accept the energy they send forth in their words.
25. The more we connect with positive words, the more power we give them. The less we connect with negative words, the less power they have. What words do you use when you talk to or about yourself?
26. Change is inevitable, but intentionally changing something about how you express yourself, your thoughts about yourself, or your life is hard. The challenge is a worthy one if it moves you closer to you, to your dreams, to the life you want to live.
27. Laughter is good for the body, heart, and soul.
28. Most of us take ourselves too seriously.
29. Most of us take life too seriously and forget to be silly, spontaneous, and light.
30. Whatever we give most of our energy and focus to is what we feed and what grows, on personal, group, community, national, and global levels. Nurturing our humanity boosts humanity and the natural world.
31. Hugging a tree, walking barefoot in the grass or sand, dangling your feet in the flow of a stream, the ocean, or a lake grounds and soothes the mind and body.
32. You never know when a smile or kind word might turn another person’s day around.
33. Someone else’s unkind words or actions aren’t always about you, even when they’re directed at you. It’s often about them. Yet, we often take these things personally, reacting from hurt rather than understanding with empathy.
34. Sometimes we just need to listen, to others, to our hearts, to the sounds of silence.
35. Traveling to other countries and truly experiencing them is more than just an adventure (though it is that, for sure!). It opens minds and hearts to the beautiful diversity in this world. It broadens perspectives and allows space for the otherness that exists outside of our personal bubbles.
36. Movement is a good thing: in the body, in life. It keeps us flexible and strong.
37. But resting and sitting in stillness are also good. They give our minds and bodies much-deserved breaks.
38. Sleep is a beautiful thing.
39. Food — real food, whole food — is fuel and medicine.
40. Giving ourselves permission to mess up, to fail, to be imperfect is the only way to truly grow into the person we want to be, to come back to ourselves, to expand our consciousness.
41. As much as we all share in this human experience and have more in common than we like to think, we will never know exactly what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. But we can try. We can try to see things from their perspective. Try to understand that others have wounds we can’t see, triumphs we don’t recognize, insecurities that get expressed in false bravado and certainty, secret dreams and desires they’re afraid to express.
42. Kindness matters.
43. Noticing beauty, finding something to be grateful for in every day— including the tough ones — changes your perspective. When you begin connecting with feelings of gratitude, your world begins to brighten, your energy lifts, and you move through the rocky patches with a little more ease and grace.
44. Forgiveness isn’t for the other person; it’s for ourselves. When we forgive someone else, we release the grip and control our emotions about the person or event have had on us.
45. Forgiveness isn’t about normalizing hurtful behavior or excusing it. But sometimes it allows us to recognize that the other person’s actions are a result of their own pains and traumas. The broken human person who still has a need to heal.
46. We can forgive and love someone while acknowledging that a relationship with the other person is not healthy for us.
47. Setting boundaries is healthy, even with the people we love the most.
48. The most important person we need to speak our truth to is ourselves. But sometimes it’s important to speak our truth to others. There is wisdom in knowing when it’s necessary and when to stay quiet.
49. It can take time to recognize our own voices. To clear away the chatter and clutter of a lifetime of taking in the thoughts, opinions, and ideas of everyone else and discover our own beliefs, likes, dislikes, opinions, and ideas.
50. We’re never too old to change, never too old to try something new, never too old to make a difference to someone else, to this world.
51. We are all going to die. Accepting the fact without dwelling on it helps us to live life to its fullest.
52. Now is all that we’re ever guaranteed. If you are here now, you have this moment and every now moment you are granted to be present in your life. Whatever we know or think we know about what happens after death, it won’t be the same as this human life we have right now.
53. Though we all have a finite time in this experience, age is at least somewhat relative, and our perspectives, thoughts, and behaviors influence how the years impact our bodies and minds.
54. We always have a choice about how we approach our lives, how we respond in any situation, how we treat others, and how we see ourselves.
And here’s my one to grow on: We can choose love above all else, kindness above all else, grace above all else, and gratitude above all else. When the balance weighs in favor of these for more people than not, the world will shift, tilting in favor of peace, harmony, and a healthy planet.
Do I think it’s possible? Yes, anything is possible. And I would love to be alive to see it.
Whether I am or not, I hope we get there because I think this human experience can be amazing and this world exquisitely beautiful.
After living a half century plus four, I’m more in love with life than I think I have ever been, and not because it’s perfect but because it’s perfectly imperfect. And I embrace it, and I embrace myself, with all my imperfections.
I made it to 54! In life and in the things I know to be true, or at least as true as I can know them to be.
How about you? What do you know to be true, or at least as true as you can know them to be?
Peace and love.
Desserae
Shifting Space by Desserae Shepston is a community-supported newsletter. I am so grateful to you for stopping by and taking the time to read. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
April is my birthday month! Not to mention the heart of spring and the month we (officially) celebrate Earth Day. To celebrate, I’ve set up a 20% subscription discount, available for the whole month. The discounted annual rate is $40. Once you sign up at this rate, you’ll maintain it as long as you subscribe. I’m donating 20% of all new subscriptions to the Nature Conservancy.
Also, please consider downloading the Substack app to join the conversation and participate in the community. If this post resonates, feel free to share!
:-)