Give Them Some GUF

Someone I love called me recently to tell me about a major change they had made in their life. They prefaced their recounting by asking me for flexibility, grace, and understanding. My brain immediately formed these words into the acronym GUF. This made me chuckle because giving someone guff is not usually a positive thing. What was being asked of me was. I listened. She told the tale of slogging through a difficult time where she realized how unhappy she was with a choice she had made in her life. She took time to feel all the different things she was feeling during that time. She also teased out from the tangle of her feelings exactly what about her current situation wasn’t working for her. Then the Universe met her. It made a space for a different choice, one that addressed what was missing in her original choice. She wasn’t just walking away from what wasn’t working but towards something else that would. I was so proud of her for making the journey. For not choosing to see herself as a victim. For not expecting someone else to magically make it better. She communicated her choice to those in her life who would also be affected by it. She still has a little undoing to do before she will be completely free of her original choice. She’s handling that. I was touched that she shared her new choice with me. I was even more delighted that she shared her journey and her process. It was easy to listen to her with GUF. There are so many ways to be happy in this life. It’s a beautiful thing when we can honor the healthy choices others make for themselves no matter whether we would make the same choice or not. The way I see it Grace is about taking in what is being said without judgment. Understanding is about really listening until you see what is being said from the speaker’s point of view. And finally, Flexibility is the ability to bend your own expectations out of the frame so they don’t cloud the other person’s picture. I’m grateful that thinking of these practices as a GUF response will help me to respond in these ways more often in the future.

Cinse Bonino
2024