NaturallyResilient

About

Today is my birthday. No I am not giving my age.

What do I want for my birthday? I have most everything I want; a loving family, a roof over my head, and food on the table. Yes these are wants but these are also needs. What about some true wants? Something I don’t have to have but would like? This is a hard one as it is asking me to negate years of conditioning and upbringing where I was taught to suppress my wants and desires. I think many of us are like that. We have learned to ignore ourselves. But what good is that? In ignoring ourselves, we end up requiring others to pay attention to us and our needs. We run ourselves into the ground so that someone else has to come along and take care of us.

I had a co-worker once who thought he had strep-throat but did not want to go to the doctor. Here he was at work, possibly infecting the rest of us. I overheard a conversation between him and one of the other workers. John said we use to not go to the doctor for every little thing. Jim rebutted, “yes, but we also only lived to about 40.” Jim went on to explain how strep can get down to the heart and weaken that vital muscle. John decided to go to the doctor.

Another co-worker had a brother who was in his late twenties. This brother suddenly died. He had gotten so sick with pneumonia that he could barely stagger into the emergency room where he collapsed and died. Why had this happened? He had ignored a need. Maybe he had labeled a need with a want, a want to feel better not a need to feel better. Sometimes it takes some one else to look at our situation and label it correctly as a want or a need.

These may be cases of ignoring our needs not our wants. But isn’t ignoring our wants, just one step away from ignoring our needs? I don’t want to end up like either of the two people mentioned above. So what do I want? Those Mini Convertibles sure are cute.