"Take Care"

"Take care of yourself." It is probably my favorite salutation... if one can have favorite salutations! In my life, I don't find that coming to mind very often. See ya, Later, even Love you come up much more often. When I get a "take care" I feel as though that person has taken special time to think about how they choose to say goodbye. I feel as though they are wishing me well in the best of ways. It always causes me to take pause, because how many of us can say we truly take care of ourselves?

How would you define taking care of yourself? Some might say, I go to the gym, or I run every day, I eat only organic food. And while those things are incredibly commendable, is that taking care of you? How do you define yourself? A mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, maybe a painter, a writer, a singer... but only after all of those pontential definitions would you say a size 6. So, while taking care of yourself can mean body, I'm talking here about the soul.

Over the past few months, I have not been taking care. I've been caught up in whatever else I can be. Work. Family. My house. My primary relationship. And at the end of the day I fall into bed. Falling spent if the day was hard, accomplished if enough got checked off of my to-do list, or even happy if I had encounters with friends. But each day was like an X on the calendar. There were no times that I was stopping to take stock of myself. I realized this while talking to a friend about someone else. As he is telling the story of asking someone what their focus in life is, I am thinking, oh my gosh, what is my focus??

So I started going to church, and I joined a yoga class, and I started calling up and reconnecting with old friends. And while all of this was great, oddly enough, a few weeks in I was feeling just as depleted as before. So what now?

Tonight, as I was pouring my soul into my journal I was thinking about ways of doing something nice for myself every day. The concept was posed to me years ago, and I thought about buying lip gloss and taking bubble baths. (It's true, don't laugh. Ok, you can laugh a little...) But now I am older and sort of redefining what it means to take care of myself. It now seems to look more like allowing myself that good cry I have been holding in, or laughing at a mistake rather than ridiculing, or even just giving myself a smile in the mirror. All the same things I would do for a friend, but things that I haven't been doing for myself.

So today, I gave myself props for being able to start to embrace this evolving me a little more than before. And you know, I was extremely happy to receive my praise. Funny how that works.

So to those reading this, I say, take care.