My friend Katie has been playing with the concept, “What’s your excuse?” using her big mind. She asks:

What’s your “excuse” for making real the compassionate/wildly loving/identity changing/unrealistically abundant goals and dreams you have?

It seems we can all easily access lots of excuses for why we are the way we are (poor me), why others are the way they are (poor them), why we failed at something, why we’re not living at our full potential and capacity. Bad parents, childhood trauma, family history, DNA, born that way, hard-wired, didn’t know any better, lacking something.

Not that those experiences have no consequence, but how far is that bad parents excuse going to take you? How long will it last? What will it take for you to stop making it?

What if those bad parents provided exactly the life experience you needed to discern parenting skill levels in others and perhaps even become an awesome parent yourself?

What if your childhood trauma provided you with the exact amount of suffering you needed to develop a highly compassionate heart?

What if that trauma prompted you later to try to find out who you would have been had that trauma not occurred?

What if you realized the trauma had moved you in a direction you would not otherwise have taken, and the full glory of your existence included trauma and recovery?

What are your excuses for your misfortunes and for your good fortunes?

Katie responded to her own question thusly:

 Here are some of my excuses for greatness/expansion: Having the three best parents imaginable, seeing the green flash on the ocean as a teenager, my best friends, standing on top of Haleakala at sunrise and sunset 3 days in a row, the existence of the book The Structure of Delight, Spider Joe’s celestial spider pictures, the fact that I could go on and on 🙂

We have a mutual friend who “blames” her wonderfulness on the fact that she was energetically zapped by 12 Peruvian shamans! I like that one a lot.

I enjoy believing that all of you wonderful friends (and friends I haven’t met yet) have created a wonderful world just for me to live in and appreciate.

In fact, there’s so much to appreciate, I currently narrow it down to just the miraculous blue sky of this planet, and all the wonders it holds — stars, constellations, meteor showers, the Milky Way, cloudscapes, thunderstorms, lightning, sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, rainbows, green flashes, oh yeah. And space, spaciousness, the spaces between things.

Thank you, my friends, for showing this to me, for creating it, for letting me play.

Here’s an experiment. Every time you notice yourself blaming something or someone and feel the contractiveness associated with that activity, pause. Take a moment. Breathe. Tell yourself:

This is a story I made up.

Then find a more creative story, a funnier story, a fresher story.

No one owns “the truth,” but you own your truth. Life is more delicious with really good stories.