Day 21

Name: Joy Peckham

Profession: Commercial financing

Location: Her home in Phoenix, Arizona [Phone interview]

Question: Why are you where you are?

Answer: My mantra

For Joy Peckham, it’s all in the name.

Peckham, an employee in Compliance and Audit at General Electric, hasn’t been happy with her job. Though this would irk some people or drive others into a monotonous, droning discontent, this optimistic lifelong learner doesn’t seem to be worried.

“Right now I’m just sort of meditating on it all, trying to figure out what it is that will really make me happy for the rest of my life, so I’m just kind of trying to ask for the signs and hope that they come to me,” she lauged. “They usually do. It usually happens. Usually the right thing comes to me when I ask for it to. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing: just asking that it will come to me eventually.

“…I just say, ‘This is what I want’ and—well, not ‘This is what I want,’ but ‘Bring me what is the best thing for me’—and just kind of put it out there to the Universe and then the Universe just kind of plops it into your life. You do with it what you’re going to do with it.

“…I woke up one day, and I’d been married twice and I realized that I couldn’t any longer blame the husbands for the break up, and I had to take responsibility for my actions and for my choices and so I kind of woke up one day and said, ‘Well, what’s next?’ and just started reading a lot and going through ‘What is it I’m doing wrong? Why is it all these things are not working?’ So I just started adopting that. And my third husband was my longest marriage, and I kind of got it closer to right. So that’s really important to me. I keep thinking, I can’t lose faith in the one thing that I’ve always wanted, which is a really stable, good relationship. And so I started working on it. And I started working on it with my job, too, and saying, if I’m unhappy with something, I can change it by saying, ‘This isn’t working for me right now. Bring me what I’m supposed to be doing next with my life.’ Whether it’s a relationship or a job or, you know…. And it can be any relationship, really. It can be a relationship with my kids, it can be a relationship with men or friends or whatever, and you just kind of put out there that it’s time for growth, right? So sometimes you’ll ask for growth and you’ll get pain, because there’s growth and pain as well as there’s growth and good. You just put it out there and sometimes you don’t necessarily get what you think you want, but you get what you need.

“I’ve been really focused on raising my daughter for the last four years, and I was like, ‘Okay. Well I’m kind of done with that.’ I mean, she’s eighteen, so it’s not like I’m done, it’s like I can move on to the next stage of my life. So I’m like, ‘Okay. I’m ready for a relationship.’ And I use to have a list of what I wanted in a man, and that just wasn’t happening. So I was chucking this list out the window and I said, ‘Okay. You know what’s good for me. You know what I like, so, you know, bring it on.’ And he walked into my door way. And in any way, shape, or form did I ever think that anything like that could have ever happened to me. And he just walked in my door.

“My friend invited him over and I didn’t even know he was coming. So he seriously just walked in my door without me knowing that it was happening. It’s turned into something that’s really amazing.

“[I write it down. I ask the Universe aloud. I think it.] It just depends. It depends on how focused I am on it and how important it is to me and now I don’t really like a lot of what I do at work, so that’s something I’m saying, ‘Show me what I’m supposed to be doing, you know, for my highest good. And how can I help change the world? How can I change my world? How can I make a difference? Is it going to be something to make me happy?’ So that’s kind of the next thing I’m working on. We’ll see what happens. And I just keep saying that. And every morning, I also go over little things that I’m thankful for or grateful for, and just kind of reinforce, ‘Thank you for this or thank you for that or thank you for the happiness of my kids and my friends and my family. And for the health and the happiness of everybody. And you know, help the people in Haiti.’ I’ll throw something in there for them if it’s something that’s touched me, I’ll throw that in there, so I try not to make it be just about me because that’s kind of not who I am or how I am. I’m not that kind of selfish, self-centered sort of person. I mean, there are a lot of them out there, but I just kind of try to remember my love and whatever else I can put out there for everyone else, too.

“…I mean, you could call it my spirituality, my belief system. My fundamental belief is that we all deserve something good. Nobody deserves heaps and heaps of bad stuff put on them, but I think sometimes they start feeling like that’s what they can expect from life, so that kind of compounds what they get. You kind of have to change what it is you expect. And so I really like to keep putting out there that I know that I deserve good things, just like I know my kids do, and I know everybody around me deserves good things to happen. So if you keep reinforcing, you know, you’re beliefs that your beliefs and the Spirit, whoever it is that brings all that to us, that we’re all born to have good things happen to us. You have to keep putting that out there and it just keeps coming at you. And then in turn, I have this deepest well of love for everything, so I just keep throwing my love out. And my love is pretty amazing. People seem to like it a lot.

“And it’s a hard thing to do. And it’s a hard thing to say, ‘I do deserve good,’ because I think people honestly believe they don’t deserve good things. I think some people are born to believe that they’re not worthy of good things, and so it’s kind of hard to step out of that, ‘I’m not worthy’ kind of thing and to say ‘I do deserve this’ and be thankful for the good things. It’s a very hard thing. It’s a hard mind set. I remember being your age and thinking, worrying all the time. Worry, worry, worry and fret, fret, fret, and just kind of be wound up and I kind of started believing that all the bad things that were happening to me where happening because I deserved them. But then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. How come this person has all sorts of good things happen to them? Why do they deserve it any more than I deserve less?’ It’s kind of like that old saying, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’ So, everything has to come and balance. Then you start to see, too, something you saw as a bad thing may not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s just something that you need to learn from. For example, my car is a classic example of this thing that people look at me all the time and say—. Right now it needs a transmission, and I’m like, ‘Well, okay. It is what it is.’ And I’ve thrown a ton of money into this car and it has all these issues, these silly little issues, and I’ve put tons and tons of money into it. I’m like, ‘It is what it is.’ Maybe my lesson was—. I’m still trying to figure that lesson out. Did I really need that car? Did I just rush into that transaction too quickly? Did I buy it with bitterness when my husband was—? My husband was a really, really negative personality, and he kind of still is. Was it that? Is it still left over from that? What is it I’m trying to learn here? What do I need to learn here? A lot of people look at me and say, ‘Well! This is just horrible! What are you going to do?’ I just say, ‘Pay the money and fix the transmission.’ Right? I mean, what else are you going to do. But I have a car, right? So on the other side of that coin is, I have a vehicle. I probably know a lot of people who don’t. I also have money to fix my car, where a lot of people don’t. You just kind of got to keep looking at it. Maybe that’s what my lesson is. I need to acknowledge that I do have the money to throw at this car and fix it and I do have a car and so maybe that’s my big lesson. Maybe it’s nothing more than that. You’ve just got to put it all in perspective. Like I said, I use to get really wound up with stress, and I realized there was nothing I could do it to change it other than what I was already doing, so I just really needed to change my mind set.”