Stop blaming. Start dancing.

​Someone asked me recently if I am an over-thinker.

I said I am not. Then, I jokingly said, I think the problem is the rest of the world just doesn't think enough. 🤷‍♂️

Okay, maybe I wasn't joking.

I do confess to processing the hell out of life. But I think the reason I do that has shifted over the last several years.

It's been a good shift, I think.

I used to process life because I wanted to know who was to blame for where I am. I've never been particularly content with this place known as where I am, so I wanted someone to blame for that.

And the truth is, I'd usually end up blaming me.

About blame - once you figure out who's to blame, you're still exactly where you were when you had no idea who was to blame.

Blame is a brake on life. It stops it you.

Or worse, blame is quicksand. It slowly sinks you.

There have been days when I've woken up, decades into my life, more than well down the road of this journey, feeling like I've gone nowhere at all.

How do you live for so many years, yet some days feel like you've never lived at all?

Blame. That's how.

Lately, I've come to accept that no matter whether you're to blame or I'm to blame or everyone is to blame for where I am, I am where I am.

And I am WHO I am.

Because that's the other evil side of blame. While you're trying to figure out who's to blame for WHERE you are, you lose total track of WHO you are.

You become a complete unknown in a place you have no idea how you got to. Maybe that's the definition of discontent?

The last several years I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I got here. How, without blame and without judgment and without verdict.

Just simply, how.

And in the how I've come to know me much better. I've come to know the events that shaped me and the events that I shaped. And I've come to better understand how they all came together to create this shape named me.

I am not the other side of fault. I am just me.

There's a beautiful thing that happens when you get to I am just me.

Life's brake releases. Life reaches down and pulls you from the quicksand. And you begin to dance with this life you've been given.

No matter who gave it to you.

In the dance, you begin to experience hope and possibility. You begin to imagine future.

Isn't that the dance we all long to be born into, to carry out, the dance of hope and possibility and future.

If you're not dancing that dance today, I'd encourage you to take a look at your dance floor. Quit trying to figure out whose fault it is that THIS is your dance floor.

And just dance.

Don't dance with blame, dance with you.

Maybe the opposite of blame is discovering what a beautiful dance partner you've had available to you all along.

You.

So, no more blame.

Dance.