Who’s big but is getting in your way?

A colleague of mine wrote about her big but getting in the way of her success.

It got me thinking about my big but:  How it snuck up on me, why it’s holding me back, and what the heck I need to do to get rid of it.

I remember clearly when it was my Mother's big but that got in my way - when I left home, I found I had my own big but to maneuver around.  How could this have happened? 

It happened because my BUT was bigger than my WHY.

Growing up, my Mother said things like "Lifting weights is good, but you're a girl", "Traveling is a great idea, but you're not old enough to drive alone".

In these cases, her but's became the why I did certain things and the way I did them:  I lifted weights and I tried lifting more weight each time.  I didn't just fly across the country, I took my two young kids to prove I can take care of me and them, too.

I used my Mother's but's as motivation to accomplish things I may not have otherwise.  It's given me strength, experience, and independence. 

Her but isn't enough anymore, though.  These days, I need to have more value.  I choose based on what is important to me, now.  In doing so, I've found my own why's:  I lift weights to relieve the pain from accidents;  I travel with my kids to spend holidays with grandparents and cousins.

I am grateful for the big but's that were once my Mother's.  If she didn't have them, I wouldn't be aware of the really big but in my life right now.  It's been there for a long long time.  This one, oooh, it's a doozy.  This is the Biggest But and it should have been obvious to me, but wasn't - probably because it's the one I believed the most.   It's been driving my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions every single day.

I've been thinking small.  I've been living small.  It's time to get this big but out of my way!

What big but has gotten in your way?  Create a bigger why and watch your but melt away!

I ate dinosaur tongue!

Over the holidays I stayed with my sister.  She invited a friend over on New Years for hors d’oeuvres.  This friend told me she would never eat shrimp and explained to me that it was 'dirty' and shouldn’t be consumed.

I leaned over to inspect the plate of shrimp between us.  It was deveined, rinsed, and organized in a circle around the horseradish sauce - all in all, it looked pretty clean to me.

I didn’t understand what she was really getting at so she described how shrimp are ground feeders, eating all the ‘garbage’ on the ocean floor.  Because she did not want garbage in her body, she would never eat shrimp.

Taking a big bite of shrimp, I just had to laugh.  That 'trash' tasted pretty good.  If she remembered anything about the most basic and fundamental law of physics,  Conservation of Energy, she would probably starve.

Basically, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that in an isolated system (the earth in this case) energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  Our total energy remains constant, it’s conserved.

It can move within the system and appear in a different form, but the energy itself remains constant over time.  For example, a worm eats the compost from my kitchen scraps.  The compost is turned into worm castings (essentially worm poop) which is the dark, rich soil that I use in the vegetable garden.  The seeds that I plant use the minerals and energy from the castings to produce roots, stems, flowers, and pollen.  The pollen, along with nectar, is taken by a bee back to it’s hive and is turned into honey (essentially bee vomit). 

This honey is harvested by a neighbor who sells it to me at QFC and I mix it in my herbal tea.

So really, we are constantly using energy that has been here all the time.  It is a gift to transform energy into other forms like tears of joy or breast milk for a child.  This is the natural order of things in the world.  The cycling of energy is necessary for our very existence.

When I think about it, I’m quite happy that the shrimp eat all the garbage on the ocean floor - if not, it would get pretty ugly down there.

So where does the dinosaur come into the picture, you ask?  Well, my herbal tea was harvested from special mountains in Japan.  The dirt that the plants grew in came from a decomposed Stegosaurus who was gleefully chewing shrubs just before a volcanic eruption...


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