NOVEMBER 7, 2025: “Put Me In, Coach!” …
Tag: The Four Agreements
NOVEMBER 7, 2024: “Impeccable!” …
I can end life.
I can give life.
I bring truth.
I bring lies.
I am heard … but not seen.
Who am I?
I AM WORDS!
(King Louis to William of Orange)
And so, with that—and in the spirit of celebrating the anniversary of the epic Toltec wisdom found in “The Four Agreements”—BE IMPECCABLE WITH YOUR WORDS! And, for God’s actual sake, SAY THEM ALL! You just never know who needs to hear them!
JANUARY 7, 2024: “Qué Será, Será!” …
Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you REALLY want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of The Universe. It’s your mission on Earth.
{Paulo Coelho … “The Alchemist“}
Now I have children of my own. They ask their mother, what will I be? Will I be handsome? Will I be rich? I tell them tenderly … Qué será, será. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see.
{Doris Day … “Qué Será, Será“}
Some people when they hear a groove shake their head, ’cause they just can’t approve. Well, I turn up the music ’til it’s shakin the sky! There’s nights you wanna yell for help, but you can’t fly when you’re standing still! THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH RAISING SOME HELL!
{Kenny Loggins w/ Steve Perry}
Are you getting my drift here, people? There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING you can do to avoid your destiny. It was written in the stars EONS before your mommy met your daddy, and the blueprints for your journey were drawn and discussed in rooms you’ll never know about by powers that are above our mortal comprehension and pay grade:
If I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that the only semblance of “order” I can count on is … OH, that’s right … there isn’t one! So, I just let all the pieces show up in their perfect timing and let them fall in place.
{“F8“}
In the meantime, just keep rollin’ with all them punches and even raising a little hell while you’re duking it out with that ole devil! I mean, fight it, but DON’T FIGHT IT, ’cause it’s only ever gonna be what it’s gonna be and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. Just live by the Fourth Agreement, “Always Do Your Best,” and you’re gonna be alright! Actually, now that I think of it, just live by ALL the Agreements, as they will always only serve you well.
By the way, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Kenny Loggins! Not only have I been rocking to your music for years, but you also share a birthday with one of my favorite “raise some hell while you’re fighting it” music alchemists of all, Ivan Moody! Gotta love it!
NOVEMBER 7, 2023: “FOUR A Better Life!” …
Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, The Four Agreements, was published TWENTY-SIX years ago today! Well, put it this way: “November 7th” is the clearest publication date I’ve found, so I’ve always rolled with it, celebrated it, and honored it on this day.
It was in 2010, while I was in the fledgling stages of crawling out of the beautiful wreckage of my nervous breakdown and the accompanying stay at that, err, “spa” I love to LOVE so much in Wickenburg, Arizona—”The Meadows“—that a dear friend and mentor of mine, whom I’d hired as a life coach for a few months, introduced me to it. Lol, I walked into my weekly session that Friday, sat down, and she handed me the book and said:
Okay, little one. Time’s up! Your session is over, and by the way I’m not even charging you for today. Just take this with you, read it ALL, and I’ll see you back here next Friday.
No, literally, those were her EXACT “impeccable words,” and that conversation is tattooed on my heart with the most powerful branding iron of all: LOVE! (NOTE: She had me at “little one”!) All I can tell you is that this SHORT and SWEET ‘lil book of ancient Toltec life nugget wisdom changed the entire trajectory of my formerly broken mind and perspective. If you’ve never read it, I cannot recommend it enough. It really IS “short and sweet,” and you can get through it in less than a day.
Oh, and BY the way …
How fricking EPIC is it that I can pair this post with a Toltec serenade of sorts by one of my most beloved musician wizards, Bruce Dickinson? God, how I love my “divinely punctuated” life … AND I love this book! You don’t have to be “broken” or “FORMERLY broken” to benefit from its wisdom.
“The Atlantean Figures”
NOVEMBER 7, 2022: “Those Little Toy Guns!” …
I saw a question posted on my Quora forum recently that asked:
How can imprisonment for insults be justified, considering no one has ever been killed by words, and no words can force somebody else to choose to do harm?
With that, and in honor of the anniversary of “The Four Agreements” I love so much having first been published on this day in 1997, let’s go over “words” by reading through my response to that question:
Oh, but you couldn’t be more wrong, my friend. Someone “ever” HAS been killed by words, let me assure you of that. While words themselves cannot physically force someone to choose to do harm, they can, indeed, incite it. Both the spoken and written word are the womb from which good things are born, and the sword upon which many tragic tales have fallen. This is why every “word” should be chosen impeccably, and why, yes, some insults are, indeed, deserving of imprisonment. If the words one speaks can metaphorically imprison the person receiving them in internal turmoil and ACTUAL hell, and thus potentially even cause their death, so, too, should the person who speaks such words be imprisoned. Long story short? Be sure to watch your mouth, lest you end up choking on the very same poison you spew into the atmosphere. By the way, this is especially important when it comes to the words we speak into the ears of children, whether they are our own children or someone else’s. Many are the children whose bodies physically grew into adulthood, but whose hearts, minds, spirits, and fledgling wings were physically MANGLED at the receiving end of careless “words”. How do I know this? I AM ONE OF THEM!
{“The Real Cat Williamson on Quora“}
The song I’ve paired with this entry is from the perspective of a child who hid in closets while their mom and dad were not just murdering each other with “words”, BUT THEM AS WELL! Been there. Done that. Yes, it’s true, and I am brave enough to admit that not only was I, too, that kid hiding in the closet from sparring parents, but I later grew up to be one of those parents who ashamedly subjected my babies to the war of words between their dad and me. So, whereas my Quora answer is about the danger of not speaking impeccably in general, children can likewise be SHATTERED in the presence and crossfire of “words”. Are we clear now, people? Good enough, then! In the meantime, make it a powerful “Four Agreements” kind of day, and for God’s sake PLEASE be impeccable with your words. They are not … I repeat – NOT just “little toy guns”. They may not draw blood, but they can, indeed, wound a human soul ireparably.
LITTLE TOY GUNS
In between the coats in the closet, she held on to that heart shaped locket. Staring at a family flawless … but it ain’t a pretty picture tonight. Mom and daddy just won’t stop it. Fightin’ at the drop of the faucet. Cuts through the walls catastrophic. She’s caught in the crossfire. Puts her hands over her ears … starts talking through the tears … she’s saying … she’s praying. I wish words were like little toy guns. No sting, no hurt no one. Just a bang bang rolling off your tongue. (I wish words were like little toy guns.) Yeah. No smoke. No bullets. No kick from the trigger when you pull it. No pain. No damage done. (I wish words were like little toy guns.) Wish there was a white flag waving, or that they were both just faking, and it was just a game they were playing, like shoot’em up cowboys. Leave the plastic pistols in the front yard, throw away the score card, and just turn off all the noise. I wish words were like little toy guns. Oh, I wish they didn’t cut like a knife. I wish they didn’t break you inside. I wish they didn’t bang bang make you wanna run, yeah. {Carrie Underwood}
JANUARY 9, 2019: “Agreement One” …
… and yet another lightbulb moment! Or rather, should I say, lightning bolt moment? While scrolling social media this morning, I stumbled across this illustration (ownership unknown). Upon closer inspection, I all but jumped out of my skin as I headed frantically to an old box of drawings I’d sketched throughout my late teens and early twenties, which for those of you who didn’t already know, was the beginning of my outward struggle with a debilitating mental illness. As I scrambled through that dusty box, the memories literally flooded me. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d sketched something hauntingly similar to the image I’d just seen on the feed. Then? BAM! There it was at the bottom of the box …
I’ve given birth to three babies in this lifetime. First, there was my Christian, “the other pea in my pod“, to wit it’s no big secret to the handful of people who know us both well that we are actually one in the same. Born into similar worlds of transactional relationships where our overall human value was merely as good as we could ever be. No deeds, words, behaviors, or actions were ever quite good enough for any consistent or unconditional favor, and both forgiveness and grace had to be earned. We have the same shattered hearts, same missing pieces, and have the same less than optimal words from our fathers echoing in our ears, creating the sick, dark, lonely chasms deeply engrained within each of our souls. On the surface? Both Christian and I appeared to have it all and to have been given everything we could have needed for success in our seemingly picture-perfect childhoods and adolescences. If only that were true. It’s not as easy as you would think to get out there and fly with mangled wings.
Next, there was the tiny one who passed go but never collected the $200 before her little feet hit the board. She was both the greatest gift and tragedy of my life, wrapped softly in a yellow blanket and sent straight back Home in angel’s wings. Still, even with an often daily struggle with the hole in my heart that belongs to her, I must admit that there have been days that I’ve thanked God that He took her out of here before the pain and struggle of simply “existing” became her any longer than the few short hours she spent here.
Then, there was my Gia. The pièce de ré·sis·tance light of my life, and the very reason I finally found the courage some ten plus years ago to begin the arduous task of ripping the infamous Venom suit desperately off my sick and worn out mind and body once and for all.
My point being this:
My two living children have been raised in virtually polar opposite environments. Well, for the most part. As was the case for me, my son spent what were supposed to be the most innocent and carefree years of his life with a malignant array of “little toy guns” filled with hate, shame, anger, guilt and rage all but spat directly into his once unscarred and trusting heart and cemented permanently into his psyche. My daughter, on the other hand, once finally removed from the cyclically toxic environment I bore her to, has, for the most part, had two healthy parents in the home in which we’ve dwelled since Zack came into our lives. No hate. No shame. No anger. No guilt. No rage being spewed into the depths of her heart. At least not on our watch! In this home, there are not one, not two, but three human beings who are cherished. Human lives that are treasured. Precious emotions, feelings, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and differences that are validated, if not celebrated when possible.
With that, although the ultimate damage and survival reports are yet to be determined, it does appear that Gia is faring much better thus far as a result of the healthy words and ideals that are filling her mind through the driving forces in her life. Emotional and verbal assaults from parent to child can contribute to lasting emotional and psychological wounds in adulthood, and from what I can tell you from my own experience watching two different children being raised in two totally different environments? Children do learn what they live! So please, if you are reading this, be careful what you are spewing into your babies’ ears. You only get one shot to fill those precious minds of theirs with hope, optimism and the potential for a lifetime of grace—not just for others, but for themselves as well.
AGREEMENT 1:
Be Impeccable With Your Word!
Can you guess what the saddest part of this drawing of mine from 29 years ago is? It looks like I clearly had all this information within me before I even realized it, and yet I wasn’t ready to heed my inner voice LONG before I finally did. Thankfully, because of my daughter AND my son, I finally found the courage to walk away from a childhood filled with “all the words I never needed to hear” and, likewise, a former marriage filled with the same. In true phoenix style, I took hold of my little girl and lifted her out of not only my endless sea of madness and mountains of ashes, but as many future ashes of her own as I could possibly foresee. Here’s hoping my Gia will be the first emotionally wealthy person to grow from the twisted branches she came from and find an equally healthy man to fill both hers and their children’s ears with only the most beautiful “words”.
MAY 27, 2017: “Let The Bodies Hit The Floor” …
Every now and then, I will hear or see certain words strung together that hit me like a ton of bricks. And by that, I mean words that really strike me so hard that I just know I’ll be repeating them for the remainder of my life and, hopefully, passing them down through my kids.
Your Crazy Grandma Cat used to say …
Take, for instance, the day someone showed me those “Four Agreements.” Now, those were some impeccable words. I live, breathe, and will die by them, by the way, and sometimes even make a mockery of them. Regardless of how far I’ve come thus far in my mental wealth and growth journey, I’m still just an extremely perfectly flawed human after all.
Well, today, IT HAPPENED! A friend and I were watching our daughters play volleyball and talking about that good ol’ Devil’s boomerang called karma. Of course, we both pointed out the painfully obvious: “What goes around comes around … blah, blah, blah.” But then she said this:
People only think of karma in the form of bad things coming after bad, but I believe that karma also works in reverse. Good will always come after good given time.
I have long believed that perspective is everything, and today, my lifelong perspective on karma took a turn for the best—EVER! Karma can curse you … but karma can also bless you. It is my hope that karma will continue to bless me, mine, and any of you who are reading this.
MAY 26, 2017: “God Grant Me The Serenity” …
… and to accept selfish, disrespectful, ungrateful people for who and what they are, the courage NOT to become bitter, and the wisdom NOT to let it happen again!
This morning was a SUPER early day for me, as most Fridays usually are for a full-time mother, full-time housewife, and full-time real estate agent. Since Fridays are, in essence, my “Mondays,” my alarm goes off at 4:30 a.m. I pop up like a Jack-In-The-Box, hop out of bed, start the coffee and spin around like a manic robot getting everything and everyone ready and dealt with ahead of what are usually very hectic weekends in our household. Trust me when I say that I am not complaining, because I thoroughly love every one of my jobs and am blessed beyond words to have them! My adoring husband is ever so appreciative that I’ve somehow found a way to balance my career and our family in such a way that everything runs smoothly, and I’ve created a peaceful environment for them to come home to despite my organized chaos. I am also desperately hoping that I am, in all things, showing my daughter that yes, she can have and do it all if she so chooses, and this is how: Eat, sleep, pray, breathe, cry a little, laugh a lot, sing loud in the car, smile as much as possible, participate when you can, don’t bite off more than you can chew, LEARN TO SAY NO WHEN NECESSARY and thank God for everything all the while. (Being grateful eight days a week, 366 days a year is my other full-time job hee hee!) For the most part I am a very happy girl with a kind, patient, loving heart filled with enough “everything” for everyone in my atmosphere. I live my life by “The Four Agreements” and this is how I roll.
Every Friday for the last eight years, we have faithfully patronized a small, family-owned dry-cleaning business on the far southeast side of the town that we live in because they are fairly priced and do a good job, but even more so because we are just loyal that way. Meanwhile, once a week I pull through the window and go out of my way to be kind to this woman who is usually wearing a scowl, throwing or slamming stuff around, or barking out orders to the others that are behind the counter. And so, I watch. And think. And wonder. “Hmmm, maybe I’ll kill her with kindness today”, or “maybe she’s had a rough morning”, or “maybe she’s not a morning person at all”, or “maybe she’s really stressed-out Cat, so tell her to have a good day and go on about your business! AGREEMENT NO. 2: DON’T TAKE ANYTHING PERSONALLY! Her nasty attitude is about HER, not YOU!” But today something changed, and my otherwise patient demeanor snapped and took a turn for the worse!
I have always taken the time to untangle, organize and neatly twist-tie the hangers then place them at the bottom of the basket for return with the next week’s clothes, a practice I started many years ago when I had actually gone inside their store rather than using the drive-through on a morning I was bringing comforters in. On that particular day I’d been standing and waiting while watching one of the girls at the counter feverishly detangling the massive pile of hangers others had returned as well, so with that I thought it would be a nice gesture to organize mine ahead of time. This morning, however, was the first time in years that I didn’t take the time to do that, which I actually felt bad about for a split second. But today of all days was slated to be straight from Hell, so I just shoved everything in the bag as quickly as I could and loaded the car for whatever the day might possibly bring.
You see, there is a little stress in our home these last couple of months. Nothing we won’t get through of course, because God IS so good, but stress nonetheless there is. Let’s see, I have a deeply hurting if not troubled child that I am desperately trying to keep from falling into his own oblivion, an uncle in Florida just days away from meeting The Maker, eleven live real estate transactions going at once, a husband with DOZENS of live real estate transactions going at once and a jacked up knee that needs surgery, a dog that won’t stop peeing on everything, a Bad Cat that keeps running away, a Good Cat who won’t stop crying and starving herself when the other is gone, a very socially active daughter wrapping up her last weeks of elementary school who is also playing volleyball, a house to keep up with, four people’s laundry to do, 300 miles a week of driving, my physical fitness to keep up with, and oh yes – this particular Memorial Day weekend marks the 19th anniversary of the night a man I was supposed to marry met HIS Maker by running his Harley through a brick wall going 90mph with no helmet. Yah, I’d say I am really kind of sad and emotional this week. I haven’t slept much, am functioning on pretty much coffee and faith alone, and I have an anxiety stomachache nearly all the time because I’m so afraid to let one of the 27 balls I currently have in the air fall on the ground and thus me right along with it (and also maybe because of the coffee)!
Dear Dry-Cleaning Lady:
I, too, was in a foul mood this morning! But guess what? I still managed to smile at you and took the time to ask how you were?
Who wants to know what she said to me when I asked the question, “Good morning dear, how are you?” She literally BARKED back at me, “Well thanks for not untangling the hangers for me!” And nope, it wasn’t friendly banter! She was literally mad that I didn’t untangle the hangers. Now what?
Well, I’ll tell you “now what”. I’m so done with not only that dry cleaner lady but likewise anyone in my life who does not treat me or mine with the same kindness and respect with which I treat them. These last few months have been a reckoning of my soul, my strength, my will, and the personal boundaries I need to keep firmly in place going forward if I am going to survive without bitterness. I will not be spoken to harshly. I will not be treated rudely. I will not be disregarded, or unappreciated, or taken for granted. No more. Never again! “We treat and value others as we wish to be treated and valued or we lose them.” When I drove away from the window I kept my calm, and simply said to her, “See you next Tuesday, dear!” Only she won’t be seeing any of these Williamsons again, and I’m damned sure she didn’t understand the horribly cryptic message I was sending.
As My Cousin Vinny once said, “I’M DONE WITH THAT GUY”! And yup, I’m so done with all those guys (and girls). Life is too short to spend my good energy or precious time in the BULLSHIT company of miserable, toxic people. – The End
