This morning is a routine Monday morning. It seemed to start too early. It feels utterly ordinary in every possible way. I’m on my “second coffee”, but only because I made the first one, and as I turned to walk to my desk, it slipped from my hand, spilling everywhere. Quite a bit of it into the sink that was near me as I turned, a bit on the carpet, a bit on my jeans. Just spilled coffee. I mopped up and made a fresh cup. I was sitting down before I really noticed that nothing about the experience caused me any particular alarm or distress. I’m fine. The morning is fine. The coffee I ended up with… also fine. Just a Monday morning, nothing to see here.
…There’s something to be learned from this…
I glance over the industry-related news linked in a feed in a work channel. I just skim the headlines for anything properly “new”. Nothing to see here; it’s all retreads and updates. Click bait. I look over my list of tasks, projects, and work activities. Pretty routine. In a very real sense, “nothing to see here” either. I breathe. Sip my coffee. Put on some music in the background that I promptly stop paying any attention to.
A pounding rain begins to fall on the skylights overhead. It sounds like thunderous applause. lol I grin, enjoying the thought of thunderous applause over an ordinary Monday morning coffee. The notion is ridiculous and this delights me. My mind wanders through thoughts of heroes and villains, and paintings yet unpainted. My Traveling Partner pings me a good morning emoji and my morning feels somehow completed by that.
I remind myself of a couple errands that need to be run, and then I begin again.
I’m sipping on a class of cold clean filtered drinking water. It’s pleasantly refreshing. I’ve been drinking a lot more water this year (so far). Pro-tip for the women in the post-menopause set; it’s incredibly helpful to stay adequately hydrated if you’re hoping to continue to enjoy an active sex life that may – at least sometimes – include natural vaginal lubrication. lol Lesson learned. Drink enough water, People – we’re made of the stuff!
…Coffee #2 a little later…
It’s a relaxed Sunday. My “to-do list” is relatively short and utterly commonplace. I’ll do some laundry, empty the dishwasher, tidy up here and there. Clean the bathroom. Ordinary stuff. I could resist, resent the practical workload needed to support our quality of life, bitch about it endlessly as I drag myself through these tasks… but… doing so represents rather a lot of wasted effort, doesn’t it? I mean, compared to just going about getting the things done that need doing, with a certain… accepting merriment? I’m feeling both accepting and merry, so I know which approach I am taking today.
Things are quite lovely with my Traveling Partner and I lately. Like, since we had our rather painful conversation “the other day” (more than a week ago?). Feels like we turned a corner on an important understanding of each other. I feel loved. He seems to also feel loved. We’re enjoying a lot more intimacy (and also more sex). We’re having a better time together day-to-day, and taking each other’s humanity less personally. It has proven entirely useful to have had that conversation… so I’m glad we did. I still have to work at some things, as a person dealing with another person. I think we both tend to take each other “personally” now and then over petty bullshit that isn’t personal at all… more to do with quirks in the way we each communicate and express emotion. Taking shit like that personally is a recipe for heartache. So… don’t do that. 🙂
“Inspiration” 24″ x 36″, acrylic mixed-media w/glow and ceramic details, 2010
Right now the two books on my shelf I find having the most day-to-day value in guiding my skill at self-care, and my ability to communicate with, and nurture, my partner, are proving to the The Four Agreements and surprisingly, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***. It’s not that these two slim volumes are somehow “more correct” than some of the weightier tomes in my reading list (like Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn), which are certainly worth reading, it’s more to do with immediate practical utility and perspective. There are books that teach us deeply, and there are books that give us quick useful insights that we can apply right now with great results, and upon continued reflection continue to teach us.
…I won’t kid you about The Four Agreements, it has a loose sort of “ancient wisdom” style framework that very practical people may be inclined to approach dismissively. Do you. I’m not here to foist a religion off on you or suggest magical thinking. I simply find enormous value in the very basics of the four agreements discussed, specifically, and also the basic understanding of how our life and culture program us for certain problematic thinking or behaviors that we’d do well to at least understand more deeply (if not change outright). So… with that in mind, yes, I’m a huge fan of The Four Agreements. It “works” for me – I still have to “do the verbs” myself, and it’s not a given that my results are reliably awesome; sometimes it very much matters what folks around me are also doing, thinking, and believing (we’re all in this together, each having our own experience) – but it’s a helpful way to look upon the world. It was The Four Agreements that taught me the most about the importance of not taking shit personally.
The modernity and mildly humorous cynicism of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** is different; it points out some seriously obvious things about why mindfulness does work – and how it doesn’t work (and why). It points out how very individual we each feel, and how “special” we are truly not (as individuals). Each of us having our own experience, and nonetheless all of us quite human, with all the baggage and bullshit that implies. It reminds me to take myself – and the world – a bit less seriously, at least now and then, and re-engages my attention on some of the paradoxes of living well and enjoying that experience.
I mention them both this morning because time and again I come back to them, where this is not the case with some of the other books on my list (which have tended to be “read twice and move on” experiences that provide value, but don’t gain more value with additional readings). In every case, though, I think of the books on my shelf less as “self-help” and more as “self-education”, and it’s with that in mind that I make my selections. It’s not necessarily helpful to just gobble up library books desperately seeking answers – that’s not how these came to sit on my shelf. It’s more to do with learning specific things about how my brain works, how emotions function, and how I can make use of what I learn about those things. Then I move on, working to practice the practices I’ve learned over time that help me build resilience, communicate more clearly, and treat others (and myself) well. Just tools in my toolbox. I’ve still got to do the work.
…Books that don’t demonstrate real value and worthiness don’t end up on my shelf; I just read those and then donate them (or return them to the library they came from).
I finish my water, and wonder “where this path leads?” I’m enjoying the journey. It’s nice to feel this way.
It’s a lovely relaxed Sunday. Maybe I’ll spend some time in my freshly tidied up studio…? It’s definitely time to begin again. 🙂
Sunshine and a clean work surface – like a blank page.
I’m sipping an especially delicious hot cup of tea. It’s made from a deeply smoky Lapsang Souchong black tea, steeped with a bit of lemon zest, and lightly sweetened with a bit of palm sugar. I made a point of setting a timer, and steeped the tea for just 3 minutes, the result being a lightly brewed cup of tea with a hint of citrus and a mild sweetness that I am finding quite lovely. I made my cup of tea in a humble plain white porcelain mug that fits neatly in my hands, cupped around it to enjoy the warmth. I slow myself down and enjoy the moment, the tea, and my thoughts.
My Traveling Partner and I began the morning over coffee together, and this evolved into a discussion of trunnions, trivets, and things to do in the shop. It’s an ordinary enough Sunday morning. I’d already started a load of laundry, and done the dishes. Nothing feels rushed this morning. I feel relaxed. The morning thus far is pleasant.
…Nothing fancy about any of this, so why go on and on about it? Well, here’s the thing; we put a lot of time, energy, and effort into pissing and moaning about the shit that goes wrong in life, the stressful moments, the crap we see on the news that distresses or angers us. When we don’t invest similarly in the things that go well, the things we enjoy, and life’s pleasant moments, over time we build an implicit understanding of life and the world that tends to be skewed in the direction of disaster, chaos, and unpleasantness – and although those things may be “real”, and even (far too) commonplace, giving them all of our attention every day throws off our ability to bounce back from stress, and reduces our ability to maintain balanced perspective on events (both internal and external). Just saying; I find value in giving my attention to what is working, a lot. Often. So, I take time to observe these pleasant moments in detail. I write down my thoughts on some of them, as I might with things that distress me. I seek to be as likely to discuss what I am enjoying as I am to bring up something that troubles me. I savor my joys – even attempting to put more effort and time into that than I do with giving any attention to my sorrows.
I’m not saying suppressing one’s emotions is a good thing. That’s not the point at all. Neither am I suggesting there is value in bullshit positivity that is inauthentic and forced. There little value in that, either. (It’s actually potentially pretty toxic.) I am saying pay attention to the pleasant moments in your life. Enjoy those. Explicitly and deliberately give yourself time with what you enjoy.
So, this morning? I am enjoying this cup of tea, and appreciating the time I took to tidy up my studio and “move back into it properly” after my Traveling Partner built me a new (better) desk. It’s quite a lovely change. Order from chaos. I can “feel myself think”, undistracted by clutter and shit left without attention for too long. I smile with some amusement; some of the order came at the cost of shifting some portion of the clutter to a different room, which now needs attention and tidying up. lol It’s a process. I’m okay with that. There’s more to be done, and this is generally true (in my life) day-to-day, so… nothing to see here. 🙂
I sip my tea and think my thoughts. Soon enough it will be time to begin again. Again. 🙂
It’s been 10 years since I started this blog, and this journey. I mean, I suppose I could choose a lot of dates and say “I took my first step here”, but starting this blog and returning to therapy during a very dark time in my life was more significant than I knew at the time, and I’ve come farther, faster, I think, than I otherwise might have if I hadn’t taken those steps.
I lived in a different place, with different views.
10 years ago. I could measure that in jobs… it was 5 jobs ago. I could measure it in moves… it was 4 moves ago. I could count it off in hours, which is an impressive 87660. A little daunting if I think too long about how still needs doing. I could count it off in blog posts… 2512, an average of 20.9 per month, and more than 1 million words.
My first post was just an brief introduction. My second? It was about perspective. 10 years later to the day, and I’m still writing about how much perspective matters, and how to shift it in a more positive direction.
The first book my new therapist recommended to me, and an important step on a profoundly healing journey.
10 years ago I started reading, and building my reading list. I turned 50. I started keeping an aquarium (which I kept going until just last year). I began an intensely creative period as an artist. I bought new hiking boots and started walking a lot more, and I started making solo trips to the coast to make time for healthy self-reflection.
The beginnings of a piece on the theme of perspective.
I was in a rough place emotionally when I started this blog 10 years ago. At the same time I started this blog, I started an art project on the theme of perspective and experience, and the subjective nature of memory vs lived experience. I used two large glass containers, and into one I dropped dark stones, black glass “pebbles” and mementos of sorrow or grief, and small amounts of black glitter representative of darker moods. Into the other, I dropped light colored glass “pebbles”, glow glitter, and things reminiscent of joy and day-to-day moments of pleasure. Not so much “good vs bad” as pleasant vs unpleasant. I wanted to gauge “how bad is it really?” in some visible way. I kept it going until I was ready to create “Perspective” on canvas, some 6 months later.
“Perspective” acrylic mixed-media on canvas, 16″ x 36″, 2013
As difficult as my day-to-day experience sometimes felt, and as much as I often struggled with my experience, emotions, or circumstances, it was clear that even with “my thumb on the scale”, things were more often pleasant than unpleasant. The ratio wasn’t even close. There was more light than darkness, more joy than pain – and this is true even now. (I say that because it’s been quite a difficult morning and was a weirdly challenging weekend emotionally, and I’m definitely feeling that.) This particular art project opened my eyes to the importance of perspective in building and maintaining good mental and emotional health; if my lived experience felt unpleasant but was objectively better than I was feeling it to be, I figured there had to be a way to correct for that. I mean… I wear glasses because I’m near-sighted. What could I be doing to correct my sense of perspective on my own life? This became an important focus for me from then on.
…As it turns out, there are a number of different ways to gain or restore perspective… You could read Viktor Frankl… or take up meditation… or get therapy… I did all those things and found them each helpful in their own way. There are a lot of other things a person can do to shift perspective.
This morning I am sipping my coffee and thinking about the weird weekend from the perspective of having had a restless night, and being abruptly wakened (too early) by my Traveling Partner’s frustrated plea that I please work in the office today so he could get some sleep, himself. (I don’t doubt my snoring was keeping him awake, which sucks, and my office is adjacent to our bedroom and this manual keyboard is noisy, and my typing tends to reflect my emotions… I get it.) I was seriously looking forward to working from home this morning. I wasn’t set up to leave for the office at all. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant “wake up call”. I didn’t sleep well, myself so I just got up immediately, dressed, and “left for work” – hours before my work day even begins. I thought about just parking somewhere and napping in the car. I wasn’t actually properly awake when I left the house and possibly should not even have been driving (I was pretty groggy, hadn’t yet had my coffee, and was functioning on “auto pilot”, and feeling hurt to be asked to leave). I was feeling pretty “unwelcome in my life” – which is a shitty perspective to take on one’s own experience, honestly, and skewed hard away from the demonstrably positive real life experience I actually live day-to-day. I started the morning moody and emotional, and vexed with my partner. Bleh. I feel rather fortunate that I happened upon the awareness that this blog is now 10 years old, almost to the day (yesterday was the actual date of my actual first post). It’s given me new perspective on my perspective and a chance to write about perspective, generally, which tends to shift my focus from my own perspective to… perspective as its own thing. lol
The tl;dr is that perspective matters – and you can change yours. (Your results may vary.)
…I’m not “in a better mood” or any more well-rested than I would have been without the opportunity to reflect on and write about perspective, but it is much harder to just wallow in a shitty mood over the crappy start to my day once I take the time to slow down and reflect on some positives. I feel myself starting to let that shit go.
The weekend was actually pretty wonderful. We got some things done. Celebrated some achievements. Loved each other thoroughly. We also found ourselves dealing with a couple unexpected moments of strife. Predictable. Human primates are emotional creatures, and barely domesticated. I try not to get hung up on those, although now and then such moments find me reconsidering my life choices, if only for a moment. :-\
I stare into my coffee lost in my thoughts. Often.
10 years. This year I’ll be 60. Another opportunity to begin again.
Here we are, a new year. Today is my first day back to work after the New Year’s holiday. I sip my coffee and wonder what sort of year this one might be…
The weekend was filled with year-end sorts of things, including the massive journal-disposal project that I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and honestly didn’t expect to sit down, start, and finish so… “soon” isn’t the right word. “Unexpectedly” also missed the mark. I just… I guess I’m glad it is behind me. Surprised I pulled it off, perhaps. 🙂 After wandering through many hundreds of thousands of words across something like 15,000 pages, I’m glad to be done with it and free from the storage and “document security” headaches that went along with keeping those journals all these years. There were some worthy observations of life in those pages, for sure, and some beautiful, poignant, or insightful turns of phrase, and I’m glad I took a look back. Those details were sparse compared to the tedium, the tantrums, the madness, and the committing-to-paper of details that generally do best lived-in-the-moment and not written down for later review. I mean… damn I was angry a lot. Bitter. Disappointed. Frustrated. Lusty. Struggling. Did I mention the lustiness? Yeah… I could have made a career writing pornography, I’m sure. LOL
…In some sense the hardest part about letting go of these journals and the years of writing was discovering that I already had…
It was interesting to see the change in my writing at the point at which my Traveling Partner and I had gotten together. Before we were lovers we were friends, and it was at that point I also began tapering off the various psych meds I was on at that time, (in part due to his encouragement and fueled by his astonishment at what I was taking and at what dosages). I really couldn’t write easily (or paint) on those meds; my creativity was severely impaired. To get that back, I had to go off the meds I was on (and it would be until very recently that I stayed wholly off all those medications, generally). My partner was very supportive of my painting and writing and my wellness.
At my most heavily medicated, I wrote very little.
My Traveling Partner and I had met many many years earlier – we resumed our friendship when we reconnected, working for the same employer in 2009, but didn’t start hanging out until early in 2010. By March that year we were nearly inseparable friends, jovially sharing our commute on public transit each day.
I was tapering off the psych meds, and both my writing and my painting were becoming a bigger part of my experience.
In October, after we each/both broke things off with other relationships, we moved in together. By May 2011 we’d gotten married. My writing exploded in an environment in which I felt emotionally safe to just write, to just fucking be. It wasn’t always comfortable; there were times when my Traveling Partner would actually choose to leave rather than be around me while I was writing or painting. There was so much “bottled up inside me” that finally “had a voice”. It was an intensely creative period.
2011 used a lot of pages!
When I think back on that time, and I think specifically about how much my current partnership has both inspired and supported me creatively… I’m astonished, and filled with love and gratitude. My Traveling Partner, as much as any one person ever could claim to be, has been my muse. My inspiration. My day-to-day “driving force” – for change, for momentum, for growth and progress, for continuing to begin again. Love makes it all matter so very much. He is also more uniquely capable than any one other human being of hurting my feelings in an instant, moving my heart, pissing me off, and being part of my journey. Fuck I love this guy. I could say more… but I think I’ve said it all at some point… I mean, just based on the amount I’d already written down since we got together…
My partner’s presence felt in every volume. Inspired by love.
I’m not sure…, but it could be that this post is sort of a love letter to a human being who played an important part in freeing me to truly work on becoming the woman I most want to be… finally. That can’t be an easy part to play in this messy life of mine.
If I could have easily done just one additional thing with all those journals it would have been to run the entirety of the content through some sort of algorithm that could reduce it down to just the unique observations – removing the duplicates, the mad spirals, and the redundancy, leaving behind only the things I said, wrote, and observed, each just the once. I wonder how much would actually be left? What wisdom have I gained (and lost) over time? I sip my coffee and think about that… and the way redirecting my writing to this space, this practice, has improved the quality of my writing. (It’s easy to see, having taken the opportunity to compare those volumes to these posts more or less “side by side”.)
I actually “write more” these days. It’s not always obvious; no clutter to measure by. lol I’m also much happier – and it was clear flipping through those pages that the deeply conflicted, traumatized, chronically unhappy woman I once was has been transformed over time. I still have challenges. I still have work to do. I’ve still got an eye on my mental health – and probably always will. I’m also doing pretty splendidly most of the time, by most measures. It’s a good place to be, and I’m grateful to my partner for sharing this journey with me. He’s a hell of a good “traveling companion” for a trip like this. lol I gotta remember to say thank you. 😀
In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just begin again… again. 😀 I wonder where this path leads…
Evening Light 