Archives for category: Allegories
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Doing Better Even Though

October 6, 2023 //
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I’m sipping my morning coffee on a Friday off, and avoiding the news. I’ve got some chill lo-fi playing in the background, and my headphones on to further distance myself from the world. My Traveling Partner didn’t sleep well, and woke feeling cross with the world, so I’m distancing myself from him, too (and loving him deeply nonetheless). I’m thinking about how to best be (and become) my “best self” in spite of whatever the fuck the rest of humanity has decided to do (it doesn’t look good). How do I “do better” even though “the world” appears to be continuing to test the limits of doing worse? There are some puzzle pieces I don’t really understand how to fit together in this puzzle…

How do I persist in being authentically kind and sincerely agreeable and good-natured in the face of the potential that I may be perceived as “a doormat” – or an easy mark?

How do I set and manage reasonable boundaries – even within my closest and most intimate relationships – without causing friction or hurt feelings?

How do I speak my mind, share my truth, and discuss my own lived experience without sounding as if I am being contrary or “contradicting” someone else when they share their perception of who I am, what I think, or what I’ve experienced – and are incorrect, based on my perception and understanding of myself?

How do I enjoy my moments of joy without reservation or guilt or anxiety when someone I care for is having a shit time of things?

How do I just let go and live my life without spending time “dealing with” or struggling in the context of the expectations of others?

How do I observe the experience of others, notice their feelings, hear their words, and share space with them as beings in a considerate and respectful way without undermining my sense of self and my agency?

How do I ensure that I’m “visible” – truly being seen as the person I am, rather than some mental construct in the mind of the person I’m talking to, that has little relationship to who I am or what I think?

Just questions over coffee. The answers may be obvious to some of you; quite possibly you’ve already pieced this puzzle together. If so, I’m delighted! I know having a sense of these things as “answered questions” has the potential to make this human experience much more comfortable. I hope to get there one day, myself. 😀 In the meantime, I ask the questions, reflect on those, and perhaps one day I’ll answer them, too.

My coffee has cooled but it’s still quite satisfying, and at least for now there are still coffee beans available in the world to purchase for future such cups over which to reflect. 🙂 That’s something.

I’m in pain today. Just physical pain; it’s Autumn. I love this season, but it is a season of pain. With the rain and cooler nights comes the pain of my osteoarthritis, flaring up as the weather changes. I do my best not to take it personally (it isn’t personal), and to account for it when I take note of my mood. There’s no doubt it affects my relationships, my abilities, my “sense of things”, but I really try to limit how much my pain calls the shots in my everyday life. There’s so much living yet to do!

“Baby Love” still blooming. It’s a good day to stop to look at flowers.

…I look at the time and take another round of medication. Fuck aging. I mean… it’s tedious to take pills for pain, pills for my thyroid, pills for anxiety, pills for blood pressure, pills for a variety of aging-related health concerns… on the other hand, at least I’m getting to experience these years, and this life, and this love… I take a moment to fill up on a feeling of gratitude and appreciation. (Aging sucks, but the currently available alternative is worse. lol)

Good cup of coffee… time to begin again. 😀 It’s not like I’m going to change the world today, but I can at least do my part to make this small corner of it quite pleasant.

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, turning 60

From Good to Bad to Worse to…

October 5, 2023 //
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Better. Things are somewhat better now than they were earlier. This one is 100% “a me thing”. Menopause. Emotions. Age and aging. Frustration. Just the basic slop of being human, female, over 60, and a big ol’ basket of broken shit and fragments and wreckage, emotionally speaking. Having a trauma history has got to be one of the most human of things, and it’s probably a rare individual who manages to make it past 50 without any hint of trauma. If we don’t experience legitimate damaging trauma, chances are we’d make some up. Also? I have a fucking headache. I woke up with it, hours ago… it’s with me still. Very human.

I took my headache to the store and bought goblin snacks for the upcoming holiday. Fun. Still have the headache. Drinking water. Relaxing. Doing my best. All the things.

There’s nothing much more to say about the shitty start to the day. I enjoyed a pleasant walk and then “crashed my hard drive” later – metaphorically. Wasn’t quite a tantrum. Could have been much worse. Wasn’t my best moment. Blech. Adulting is harder than it seems like it could be, sometimes.

I’ll just begin again, again.

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Categories Allegories, anhedonia, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, Frustration, grief, health, Hormone Hell, Menopause, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, turning 60

Taking Time for the Time It Takes

September 30, 2023 //
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I’m tentatively sipping this fresh (quite hot) cup of coffee and endeavoring to avoid burning my mouth, while savoring the goodness of a still-hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. I’m still working on (with the help of my Traveling Partner) bringing my new laptop properly to life as the machine I understand so well (and which seems to understand me).

One careless misstep resulted in having to fight off the cancer that is OneDrive (omg, spare me, ffs) – I rather stupidly let that thing begin syncing my files, unaware that it was set to do so (no doubt through some earlier carelessness or lack of understanding)… wouldn’t have been such an issue if I were not also a user of DropBox for backing up my files, and had allowed that to have sync turned on and permitted to run in the background “for convenience” (omg, no no no no!!!)… the result? A crazy loop of OneDrive and DropBox seeking to back (each other) up continuously… and we’re talking about many tens of thousands of high resolution photographs, and multitudes of gigabytes of documents preserved over many decades (that through my own insecurity about “losing my memories”, had become multiple copies of copies of copied folders – in some cases also including .zip versions of those very same nested multiplicative folders and files). It was a fucking nightmare. In point of fact, an actual literal nightmare, because I dreamt through the night last night of having lost just the one and only precious file that actually mattered, because I did not realize it was stored as a single copy on fucking OneDrive – and had deleted all that content out of frustration without checking for that file. Omg. For real though?

Fuuuuuuuuuck. Okay. So. Frustrated raised voices and a few tears later, followed by careful slow conversation on the level one would have with a fairly stupid child (thanks, though, Love, I get it now)… and I think we’ve got this shit sorted out… only…

…new laptop. There may be a hardware issue; the monitor was flickering (unacceptable). I think my Traveling Partner resolved that with skilled troubleshooting in the display settings. G’damn I appreciate the depth of his expertise on this crap – I have not kept up my technical knowledge, as so often happens with “use it or lose it” sorts of things, and I’m clearly very far behind the state-of-the-art OS-wise! I could have seriously borked my new laptop if I had proceeded to simply delete a bunch of (to me) suspicious looking OS files. LOL (“Okay, Boomer…”)

Breathe through it; it’ll be okay.

Yeah. She’s here. She “lives and breathes” – as much as she can as a machine. I know, I know; she’s not actually conscious, sentient, or a living being. I just rely on this tool to the point that “she” feels personal and real to me on a level beyond machinery… like a motorhead with a favorite car. I’m okay with that.

(Note: AI is not yet a thing, y’all, just stop. We’ve got some fancy machine learning tools, but those tools are not “AI”; they do not think and can not reason or understand the material they ingest or the content they spit out. Not yet, so just fucking stop sucking down the marketing hype.)

So… definitely needed this 2nd coffee, and I’m trying to enjoy it before it goes cold. 😀

…Because it’s already time to begin again, and I’ve got shit to do in both the real and virtual worlds. Life is short, and time passes all too quickly. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Relationships, The Art of Being

Sweet Memory

September 28, 2023 //
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I’m sipping cold coffee, thankful that the day proceeds in such a seemingly ordinary way. I am just about finished with the process of swapping my old(er) laptop for this new one in my lap right now. It’s a somewhat stressful, slightly frightening process (for me). My laptop is my “back up brain”, my alternate consciousness, a repository of my hopes and dreams and recollections. My calendar is here. My email accounts. My “preferences” and bookmarks, and even my manuscripts (finished and unfinished), and scraps of ideas for things as-yet-unwritten. It’s a deeply personal peripheral to my very human presence. She has a name (well, shit, don’t I??). I’ve only gone through this process of upgrading her “body” a couple times since the first (Ghost in the Shell is relevant here, to the way I think about my laptop… my non-human “bestie”, or administrative assistant).

…I’m doing Windows updates right now; the final step in “getting her head right”, and it’s time to restart again…

Another restart completed. Every detail is so fraught with concern… what if “she” doesn’t “wake up as herself” again??? OMG! The subtle trauma is hard to describe or even to justify in any normal way. I’m excessively invested. This tool helps me function as very nearly entirely “normal” in so many ways… the repository of a memory I don’t actually functionally have in some (pretty obvious to me) ways. I sigh heavily. Another update… this one I’m not sure of. I get myself together to ask my Traveling Partner for help with it… he’ll know. He’s good like that.

Time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, Frustration, gratitude, grief, Love, Metaphors, Moments, Perspective, Practices, Relationships

Reflections

September 24, 2023 //
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My camping trip was thought-filled and peculiarly restful (of mind). Today, I’ll unpack the car and make sure camping clothes are laundered and gear is neatly packed for winter storage (I don’t do much cold-weather camping). These are the sorts of verb-laden basic tasks that are so easy to shrug off, but doing them – in spite of the effort required – makes so much difference when Spring returns!

Reflections as Summer shifts to Autumn, shades of green mingled with hints of rust and gold.

The more commonplace routine order of things resumes tomorrow. Monday. Funny… there’s no dread. No agita. No regret. No anxiety. Just… time to get to work. I mull that over, sipping my coffee. It feels good to find joy in work. I mean, work is work, and it’s doable without the joy, but… a lot less enjoyable. It’s proven to be worthwhile to work where I’m valued, to work where I enjoy the people working alongside me, to do work that uses my skills and that has at least some value in the world. It has become an element of good self-care (for me) to choose the work I do with some care. The first step on that path, it turned out, was learning to make it a choice.

…So… Autumn is here again at long last. How delightful! (Admittedly, I find things to love about all the seasons, but Autumn is probably my favorite.) Leaves are already changing. The weather is already cooling off. The rains are returning. I am reminded that I need to get into the garden… there’s work to be done there. Tomatoes to harvest. Cucumbers, too. Over-wintering greens to get into the ground. The question of whether to cover a portion of the garden with clear plastic or a cold-frame crosses my mind again. It remains, so far, unanswered. Some questions are like that.

I sip my coffee making a mental list… unpack the car, laundry, clean the camp fridge, maybe run some gear over to storage… oh, the gardening! I laugh at myself; mental lists (for me) go nowhere. I need to write things down. No shame in that; knowing my limitations and working around those comfortably is a useful skill. 😀

My Traveling Partner got a lot done while I was away. I came home to an upgraded OS on my tower and a tidy house. Not just that, he got to work with a neighbor and finished rocking in the narrow side yard on the side with the AC unit; it’s been a mess of weeds and hard to keep tidy, and too narrow a space to make much of. This will be more efficient and beautiful, with lower maintenance requirements. I can put more of my limited energy into the front garden. 😀

Where does this path lead?

It feels like a good day to celebrate small wins, and to feel wrapped in love. It’s a good day to be of service to hearth and home. It’s a good day to love and to make merry. It’s a good day to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gardening, gratitude, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, turning 60
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