Advice comes from everywhere: friends, parents, acquaintances, talk show hosts, etc., etc. But good advice is a bit harder to come by. I’m very fortunate that I have a handful of wonderful people in my life that offer good, sturdy advice and I try very hard to listen to what I’m told and more importantly to practise it.
That being said, I’ll also acknowledge that sometimes the lessons are just not learned the first 100 times and you’ve just got to keep going over it until it’s completely grokked (definition of “to grok” here). This goes for the advice seeker as well as the advice giver.
Which is the rub. As an advice giver (the ratio of giving to asking for is about 10:1), it’s my lesson to learn that I cannot do anything more than offer verbal advice. I am a Jewish Mother and I worry about the people I care about. I can’t help it. I want them to be happy and healthy and to create lovely serene spaces for themselves. I want them to rid themselves of chaos and drama and “friends” who keep them in the chaos and drama loop, dragging them down. But I can’t do it for them. And often my words are simply redundant and ultimately useless.
This is a very hard lesson for me to learn.
Thanks to a friend for pointing this out and helping me to learn to back off and not feel inadequate because of it. You are a very wise woman and I’m beginning to realise just how much you have to teach me – as well as how much I need to learn. I hope I’m up to the task. :-) This is yet another example of “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.