Harvest Your Story

Here we are in the hot, steamy month of August. Harvest Season is upon us and this is my birthday month. This year I greet 72 with enormous joy while learning to harvest my own story. I will explain what I mean.

We all try to harvest a full and productive life story. We build relationships that sometimes fall apart or get lost in our stories of loss. We work jobs we love or we hate and we make decisions along the way to change careers,get a degree, get another degree, move up, move over or move out. Our stories are filled with drama, boredom, challenge, successes and one thing we know for sure: our story always holds CHANGE.

We plan and we hope for the best but we often hear little voices (or loud ones) that caution us to stop taking risks, be afraid, worry more,remember regrets and slow down or speed up because “you are doing something in life wrong.”  We try to eat healthy, exercise, see our doctor for our regular physical but the unpredictability of health finds us.

Illness knocks on our door and we try to not answer but if we do not, then the knock gets louder. It causes greater worry and fear to surface.  And all this convinces us more than ever that we are NOT in control of our story!

Or are we?

I work with clients who are aging.  I am aging. We all are aging everyday.

Our bodies change and we fight the slow decline we feel. We fight the memory that causes us to rewind why we walked into a room looking for something we utterly forget we needed.

But what we should accept as we complain and feel miserable is this:  aging strikes us all. No one can avoid it and the way we face aging, our attitude, and our narrative around aging is what either makes us stronger or shatters our spirit and confidence.

When you harvest your story you are harvesting the rebirth of what you grew inside you. Just as a farmer harvests crops they planted, tended to and grew, you can harvest your own story.  Will it hold unpredictable chapters?  

Of course it will.

No farmer harvests a totally expected crop. There are insects, predators, wind, rain and climate damage. Yet what gets harvested is what was intended not by the farmer but by the force much bigger and stronger. The universal energy that shapes the uncertainty that lives around us is what we as humans must adapt to.

Uncertainty becomes celebrated not feared,

And we learn lessons for the next harvest.

Every year as I approach August and my next trip around the sun, I reflect, find my quiet space, and celebrate my wins and I celebrate my losses and screw ups. I know that what I learned from my screw ups was more important for my story than any success.

And now I am looking deeper into my life story: I realize why I was afraid to try something new at 20 and why I made certain decisions I did at 50. I feel kinder to myself. I forgive myself.  I also know that what I face in my years ahead can be mapped out and deliberate and it will also be me adapting to what the universe hands me.

I invite you to harvest your story. Take stock and look at the challenges, losses and screw ups in a way that you can learn and celebrate them. Of course, celebrate the wins, too.

You are a Winner!  

You might feel like life is cruel and unfair but if you shift that attitude to this: life teaches me a new lesson everyday!  I guarantee you will rebound from your losses and restart your life even at 99.

I am amazed at clients who tell me tragic stories of loss and suffering or trauma at young ages in life and they take those stories and harvest them to be transformative experiences. When I hear those stories I ask questions: What was different in those lives from the people who suffered trauma and tragedy and could NEVER get over it?

I still ask those questions.

And it is why I do the work I do and continue to search for meaning. As should you.

Harvest your story. Share it. Speak it. And write the next chapter.

Just let me know if you need any help. :)

kumari patricia