Words can be beautiful. Words can lift us up, brighten our day and inspire our lives.
But words can also be cruel. Words can limit and torment us, degrade and destroy.
Words can help and they can harm, but they don’t have to define us forever.
We can change our words and our minds. We can change the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we choose to hear.
Just because someone says it, doesn’t make it true, even when it’s us 🙂
The truth is a slippery customer, shifting through time and space. A reflection of reality and the facts as we see them. Yet our reality can be distorted. And facts change, neither fixed nor constant, but fluid and in flux.
Even science evolves and changes as what was once deemed fact is proven wrong again and again as our understanding of the universe expands. Whatever the truth of the moment may be, it depends on our perspective, our mood and our experience.
What we choose to focus our attention on in any given moment is intensely personal and unique to us. We may feel certain that everyone else is thinking the same as us, it’s obvious, irrefutable, undeniable fact. But so often we see this isn’t the case at all.
The stories we choose to tell and re-tell help us make sense of particular moments. But seen from a different angle, through the eyes of another or with the benefit of hindsight and space for reflection, stories change. Updated, amended, re-worked or revoked.
There is an undeniable power in the words that we use to describe ourselves, and how we talk about our feelings, our relationships and the events of our lives can bring us comfort or pain.
Our words can shape our beliefs and our actions. A force for peace, for kindness and compassion. Or a barrier to restrict and to separate us from each other, to limit our vision and capacity for change.
Recognising our words have power brings so many opportunities. To change our minds and our hearts, to speak or be silent, to see alternatives and choices where once there seemed none.
Remembering that in each moment we have a chance and a choice, not only in how we respond, but in how we record and reflect on the events of our lives.
Make your story a kind one x