Give a little or a lot

The idea for my blog title came from something I wrote about my mother in her eulogy. My mother lived out loud. One of my favourite memories of her is that she loved to sing. SHE. LOVED. IT. She would sing while she worked, sometimes the song didn’t have real words, or it would be words she made up but it was a song nonetheless. She sang out loud and lustily in church so much so, sometimes it got downright embarrassing and many times I thought she was singing her troubles away.

I cant sing very well but I do want to live out loud.

Recently though, I’ve been restless. It kept coming back to me. This cannot be it. This is not the life you are meant to be leading. Over and over. Unrest, sleepless nights. I reasoned it away, thinking it’s my hormones, maybe they’re out of whack, maybe I need vitamins or I need to do more yoga. Yes I do need to take vitamins and definitely do more yoga but that was not the reason behind this overwhelming feeling that there more, that I was more than this. I am more than this job. I am more than this desk I am more than this building…this uniform. And the fact that I look at what I do every day as simply a job and nothing more…is not the way I want to live this life. As my friend put it, I was waiting for the “jump off to be sure” before I leapt. But sadly that’s not how it works. Change is always a risk, but the alternative: stagnation is unbearable. I’m going to have to leap soon…

I want to live. I don’t want to merely exist, which is how I feel between the hours of 8-4 everyday. I feel alive, when I’m doing everything else but what I currently get paid to do. Time for change.

What is it you enjoy doing? Then that’s what you should be doing. It really is that simple.

I decided to do the 29 days of giving not just to free up some energy in my life and to turn my focus outward, get out of my head and maybe out of my own way for a bit. But also as a way to commit to writing about this journey for 29 days. I’m about to embark on this adventure in giving just in time for a new year of life. My hope is that a year from now I’d look back on this “excited by possibility yet afraid of the unknown” phase as the beginning of the rest of a life truly lived.

You feel me?

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