This Life I'm Livin'

Life is good, but then, it's life. LOL I said this to someone the other day. I wonder if it makes any sense at all to anyone but me. I mean to say I'm practicing the art of being content. Of refusing fear, embracing love. Of jumping into life with both feet. I'm just doing it.
At the same time, I want to get better and thinner and smarter and faster. I want to be perfect. It's not that I can't be. I believe with the proper energy at work in my life, that I can achieve a kind of perfection. The perfect ME if you will. But I want it NOW. And as we all know, it doesn't really work that way.
See, I'm not looking for a Kate Spade handbag. I don't want to be meeting with a plastic surgeon this time next year. I don't care what my hair looks like at least fifty percent of the time. Maybe more. I don't want a new car or a new life. I just want to feel like I am my authentic self. I don't want there to be that certain issue that chews on me. I don't want there to be that person at work that I find the fakest things come tumbling out of my giant pie hole whenever she walks by. Please.
I want to stop criticizing my family and start accepting them at face value more often than not. I want to go back to school again. I want to get to the heart of the issues that cause me to get so enmeshed with others. I want to feel in control of my household, responsible and mature but able to laugh about it as well. I want to be the model of grace, the poster child for civility and the duck off whom all water rolls. I want to cultivate an attitude that says I'm love in motion.
All good things are coming my way. Having this stuff as my focus will bring me closer to it, I believe. Faith and love are my most powerful allies. God wants me to succeed. I am surrounded by a loving, spiritual, amazing group of people. I am both blessed and lucky.
I am also willing and ready to do the hard work. I want to get down to the nitty gritty. I want to have all my lessons. I want to be open to change, to growth and even to the pain that comes along. I am ready to walk through that fire and be reborn on the other side of it. I just have to stay the course. I'm where I am because I spent a lot of years refusing to see, ducking when I should have been stepping up and beating my head against many a brick wall. I don't like change. It's uncomfortable for most people but I'm a Taurus. We are renowned for refusing to budge. Oy...
In retrospect, God has never let me down. The power in that is phenomenal if I can only train my mind to accept that that is the outcome I can count on. The mental shift happens when I see that the blessing is not better than the lesson. Then lesson is a blessing in it's own right. I am being blessed if I am being charged a bounced check fee or a late fee. The message is 'handle your money more wisely' and eventually I'll be able to do just that. I need to learn more lessons about the way that it makes people feel when they're criticized if I want to stop doing it. That means examining all the painful ways I have been judged by others, not seen for my own inherent value or blamed for other people's pain or anger. That hurts, but it's worth it. I want to be able to smile at my children and offer them loving guidance instead of harsh appraisal. So every day, I pray the Lord's Prayer and the Serenity Prayer. Thy will be done, and in the version of the Serenity Prayer I like : God, Grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can and the wisdom to see that that one is ME.
It's all about me, and not in the Brittney Spears way. In the Buddha way. Today, I stop saying I want and start saying I will....
Wish me love if you will. I'm having a tough time not being so hard on myself.