Tag: challenges

Home > ArchivesTag: challenges

WHO KNEW THAT A PAIR OF RED SHOES COULD…

December 20, 2018 by Meriam Wilhelm in category A Bit of Magic by Meriam Wilhelm tagged as 65 and counting, challenges, goals, Lists, red shoes, riding camels, writing

Who knew that owning a pair of red shoes could create such magic – inspiring happiness, a feeling of gay abandon and a total fashion reawakening.

But that’s just what they did!

My quickly approaching sixty-fifth birthday motivated me to take on several life changing challenges. Challenges designed to force me to try something new, tackle a problem or simply focus more energy on self-improvement. And silly me, in order to keep myself honest, I chose to share my journey with all of you in my blog, Please Don’t Make Me Have To Learn How To Ride A Camel.

I set several personal goals to meet before lighting up my sixty-five B-Day candles and the clock has continued to click. My face gets red and my heart quickens with anxiety every time I think how soon April will be upon us. I’ve partially met some challenges, made progress on others, and with the purchase of my red shoes, I’ve completed two of the challenge, which included:

Walk thirty minutes a day at least five days a week – Doing better every week towards meeting this goal.
Finish writing my book, The Witch of Bergen – 80% done with the rewrites.
Read Paul Arden’s best seller – It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be. Ding, Ding, Ding! Read it and blogged about it last month!
Lose twenty pounds. Tortuously slow – only 4 pounds down.
Buy a pair of flashy red shoes. Ding, Ding, Ding! Did it!

And what a thrill, this proved to be. As much as I longed to slip my feet into a pair of flashy Jimmy Choo’s, I just couldn’t muster the courage to spend $2,695.00 on a pair of red beaded stilettos. To be completely truthful, I’m not sure if I was more afraid of the price of the shoes or of tumbling off the glittering stilettos. Either way, I had to pass them by.

However, having taken on this challenge, I refused to back down. I didn’t give in and buy any old run-of-the-mill red pumps, nor did I give up and buy a pair of red Converse tennis shoes either. No way! I bought myself a pair of bright red boots. And to seal the deal, I wore them out to a formal Christmas dinner party and felt wonderful. Perhaps a bit over the top, but none the less eye catching, I danced around the room, kicking up my heels with my glass of Pinot Grigio in hand. Of course their bright color stood out against my black slacks and black velvet top, but what the heck – I took a chance and felt all the better for it.

And here’s the funny part, as I looked around the room, I recognized that I had become a member of the over sixty sisterhood of red shoes. I counted at least ten other women my age proudly sporting red footwear. High heels, low heels, sandals, tennis shoes and even a pair of red clogs all joined in celebrating the night with me and my boots.

Now the writer in me wanted to go around the room and ask why these women had chosen to wear red footwear, but the realist recognized it for what it was. We were all searching for a fun way to celebrate life… and that’s just what we did in our playful red footwear. I’m sure that there was more than one envious woman who left the party anxious to hurry out to buy their own red boots. How could they resist?

I’ve still got sixteen pounds to go, more time walking required and a book to finish editing before April comes. Fingers crossed, I’ll make it! In the mean time, I’m partying away in my red boots. You should try it too!

Happy Holidays to you all!

Meriam

1 0 Read more

STUMPED

August 15, 2017 by Rebecca Forster in category The Write Life by Rebecca Forster, Writing tagged as building, challenges, inspiration, write life, Writer, writing

The other day I came home to find the men I hired to build my patio sitting in my backyard looking at a stump. This was not a normal stump. This was a giant. Paul Bunyan, Big John kind of stump. I sat down with them and I, too, considered the stump.

“George had to get his chain saw for that sucker,” one of them finally said.

“Took two hours to get it out,” another offered.

“I think it broke George’s saw,” the first chimed in.

“Why didn’t you leave it in the ground,” I asked. “You know, pour the cement around it?”

“We thought about it,” the third said. “It wouldn’t have been right.”

They told me that they had managed to cut it up into the piece we were looking at but that it had been twice as big and buried deep in the ground; a remnant of a primordial tree. Their task had been Herculean. They told me that if they poured the cement over the stump, the darn thing could rot and my steps would fall in, and I would be upset with them because they had poured cement over a stump the size of San Francisco.

“It looks petrified,” I said. “How many years do you think it would take to rot?”

The first guy shrugged, “Twenty. Thirty years.”

I shrugged back. I would probably be dead by the time the stump rotted and my stairs fell in. I guess it was the principal of the thing. They would have known the stump was there.

We sat in the hot sun a while longer. Someone suggested carving the stump into the likeness of the contractor. I liked that idea but no one knew how to carve. I thought we could make it into a table. Eventually, we all stopped looking at the stump. The men moved it out of the way and started work again; I went inside to make dinner.

That stump has now been in my backyard for months. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. But, like all things that are hard to get rid of, it eventually served a purpose. It taught me a few lessons:

1) Everybody has a stump. It might be in your real backyard, your professional backyard or your personal backyard, but it is undoubtedly there.

2) What you do with your stump will tell you a lot about yourself. Either you will dig it up and deal with it, or you will leave it to rot.

3) If you’re stumped and need help there is always someone willing to work hard with you to take care of it as long as you work as hard as they do.

4) You can never go through a stump but don’t panic. You can go around them, over them and sometimes even under them but that takes the longest.

5) Sometimes stumps are not as big as they look and sometimes they are bigger. Size doesn’t matter. Stumped is stumped.

6) Removing a stump but choosing to keep it as a reminder of what stood in your way is a good thing. When you look at it, you will always know that when it came to you against the stump, you won.