Everyone holds an image somewhere within our individual psyches as to who we are and how we should act. While it’s wonderful to have a personal bar that we each hold high, it helps to remember these are our ideals that reflect who we want to be and how we want to behave and be perceived. Key word in that sentence being “ideals.”

Life is not always ideal. So, the problem with rigidly applying our ideals to our behavior and emotions is that sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough latitude for our humanity: We stretch our patience and strength too far when what we really need to do  is cut ourselves some slack because otherwise our daily ideal behavior isn’t likely to be ideal. And actually, I’m not a believer that perpetual ideal behavior it is even an achievable reality. 

While life is full of perfect appearances, we’re being very unkind to ourselves if we assume such ideal appearances are constants for anyone.

Stresses come daily in a variety of forms. Life guarantees this. Some days we rise to the challenges and other days people, circumstances and situations seem to fire up the worst in us. 

It happens. To you. To me. To everyone. 

The secret to experiencing a greater sense of peace is to own our good, bad and everything in between. Owning all of us — not just what we judge as “the good parts” — is the foundation of real personal growth and healthy relationships with others. By owning our humanity we become a lot more accepting of others and their humanity, too.

I’m @DianGriesel aka @SilverDisobedience — the author of The Silver Disobedience Playbook and TurboCharged: The SilverDisobedience Edition (available at amazon!) ✨ I’m a Perception Analyst who shares my Daily Meditations for other Ageless, Passionate & Curious People.  Modeling info at Wilhelmina Models New York —other info in my bio & on my websites.