It’s now the day after the 4^th. Do you look over your house and see the remains of last night’s celebrating? Is the sink full of dishes? Does the lawn display the firework remnants? Does your waistband feel overly snug? Is your head full of visions of going back to work tomorrow?

“It is possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis.”

—  Margaret Wander Bonanno

Even the day after the 4^th of July.

It all starts in this moment. . . with you taking care of you.

Valerie Monroe writes in this week’s O Magazine, Why It’s Okay (Actually, Essential) to Put Yourself First:

“Taking on responsibilities that might be well or even better handled by others is one of the ways we begin to lose our balance and slide down the slippery slope from generosity to martyrdom. Because women are likely to be the primary caretakers for husbands and children as well as for aging parents, we have ample opportunity to fall into the pattern of serving the people we love before we serve ourselves.

But there are good reasons to be judicious about that. ‘If you always put someone else first, there’s a tendency for others to depreciate you, to lose respect, because respect comes from an understanding that that person has her own wishes, dreams, and desires,’ says Ethel S. Person, MD, author of Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power.”

Yehuda Berg writes in the July 4^th issue of the Weekly Kabbalah Tune Up:

“An amazing thing about the world in which we live is the random things that seem to happen aren’t ever really random. And these ‘random’ things don’t happen to us. They happen for us.

Yet we only see the hidden order in chaos after the fact. If only we could see it in the moment…

And this is what I’d like to charge you with this week: Practice seeing perfection in the moment. Sounds very Zen, I know, but there is a science, so-to-speak, behind it.

The instant we recognize there’s a design beneath disorder, we’re actually propelling ourselves towards clarity. We’re speeding up the process. We’re injecting Light into the darkness.”

So, how about this plan on the day after all the celebrating?

1) Take care of you first.

2) Recruit some help to clean up after last night’s celebrating.

3) Practice seeing perfection in the moment.

4) Live happily ever after –  on a day-to-day basis.

How about starting today?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.