Archives for category: Logic & Reason
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Time and Time Again

April 24, 2013 //
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...some metaphor about time...

…some metaphor about time…

There’s no time to waste…and no time like the present… It is, perhaps, time to consider the consequences of my actions, my choices, my words…because time marches on. Time weighs on my heart, sometimes, and at other moments time flies. Time is ‘flowing like a river’ and entirely arbitrary. Time passes, as do we all, as does ‘this too’…but when shall it pass? Do we have time to wait and see? Killing time sounds much worse than it often proves to be, once considered ‘in the fullness of time’…

I’m taking some time to have a bit of fun with you, at the expense of time itself…I don’t think any feelings will be hurt. 🙂

Speaking of hurt feelings…I think I’ll make some observations about hearts and emotions and love and… mean people.  If I could, I’d be tempted to take time out of my life to tell each person I could ‘don’t be mean’.  It’s something I wish were ‘obvious’ in some meaningful way;  I’m stunned by the number of people in the world that take refuge from their fears and insecurities, and who defend themselves from real or imagined personal attacks by being mean, by being derisive, or by using mockery or name calling.  It’s bad enough when it is an ‘us versus them’ scenario among relative strangers who feel entitled to make assumptions about one another…but I see it between people who ostensibly care for one another, even between friends, lovers, and family members.  It’s ugly. It’s hurtful. It’s quite extraordinarily poor communication being both underhanded, and passive-aggressive.  It ensures that the person making the attack will not be truly ‘heard’ – because whoever they are attacking is likely to be put on the defensive rather than being free to listen compassionately to something that matters.  It ensures the person being attacked, over time and without regard to how close or deep the relationship is at the start, will develop resentment and hostility toward the person making the attack – because people who find mockery, derision, name calling, and ‘general meanness’ acceptable once, are often prone to using it regularly.  It sucks, too. Mean is ugly. lol  The hottest, sexiest, funniest, most interesting, and sexually skilled, man or woman out there and as soon as I see or hear mean coming through, I lose interest in having anything more to do with them.  Mean always seems like a cheap shot to me – the tool of weakness and fear.  Maybe that’s just me? I don’t like mean, and I’m working on simply not doing it, at all.   I just don’t have time. 😀

To be clear… I think something like mockery, or derision, have a place in humor – in comedy – but I also think it is a ‘weapon best left in the hands of experts’, because mean is ugly.  It is the worst of who we are as people being given voice.   I’m not sure I was always in this place as a person… but I worked on giving up most sarcasm a while ago.  It is also an extension of mean, and certainly – it isn’t clear, frank communication.  I like genuine. Direct. Honest. OPEN. I like real. I like the woman I am, and I prefer to know the people I love in a real way.  Mean doesn’t feel good, and avoiding it seems like a nice idea.

It’s a Wednesday, a lovely one. It’s time to change.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, women, Words

Love Songs and Baggage

April 23, 2013 //
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Morning in the garden.

Morning in the garden.

I enjoy love songs. That wasn’t always true. There was a time – and it amounts to most of my adult life – when I thought love songs were at best saccharine nonsense, and at worst outright lies.  I dismissed them with cynical derision, frankly, often, and out loud.  I couldn’t connect with love songs – what did I know of love?  I really figured sex, and a basic mostly supportive sort of affection, were all that went into the matter of love, and all that one could get out of it.  I wasn’t lonely much, and because I enjoy solitude and can easily entertain myself for hours and days with the content of my own mind, I barely noticed how difficult it was to really ‘connect’.  I couldn’t feel the lack of what I didn’t know.

Lovers came and went (lol) and life did what life does. Time passed. I aged. I experienced events. I met people. I had relationships.  Eventually, long past the time I had given up on any notion of love as a profound connected emotional experience, I fell in love. I fell hard. I fell fast.  Initially, I struggled to understand – or even accept – my experience.  I treated it as lust – I was comfortable with that emotion.  At some point I began to understand it was truly new, and slowly let myself feel the raw power of it, to be open to it – all the way, heart and mind and soul.  ‘Powerful’ doesn’t describe it, really, and I have not yet experienced anything else quite like it.  I changed my lifestyle because love is too powerful to dismiss as a catalyst for change.  Again and again, I have revisited who I am; questions of values, of taste, of experience, of will, of intent became not only important, but seemingly truly urgent for the first time since I was a teenager… love is amazing stuff.   More than once since I fell into the warm embrace of love, I’ve found myself sitting with my lover and listening to love songs…laughing, crying, singing along, hearing precious heartfelt words being sung to me, souls connected.  It is simply the most precious and amazing feeling in all my experience… there really aren’t words to describe it, and no winning argument to convince someone who hasn’t experienced love that it is real.  In that regard, it is rather like mindfulness… and I’m finding that mindful love goes even beyond what I’ve already experienced, although I am so new to practicing mindfulness, I expect life will continue to unfold in amazing ways on a lot of levels. 🙂

Yeah…I’ve learned to appreciate love songs.

…But…love isn’t the every day experience in our lives, is it? Maybe for a rare or fortunate few, but for ‘everyone’? It doesn’t seem likely, although it does seem possible.  There’s just this one thing, though…what’s up with people treating each other so badly? Is it really necessary to bring emotional weaponry to every conversation, every moment of conflict resolution? Is the default assumption for most people that even their lovers, their families, their best friends are actually just waiting for an opportunity to fuck them over or hurt them? No? Then why do so many people behave as if that is their experience? What’s up with the defensiveness? What’s up with being mean to each other? What’s up with not taking a moment to hear that someone we love is hurting, and accepting that it is their experience, and offering our regret in a sincere way first, before leaping to our own defense to explain, deny, mitigate, deflect, or actually counter attack?  Seriously? How can any human being justify treating their loves less well than they treat the world?

We’ve all got baggage. Everyone has their turn hurting. Sooner or later even people we love may cause us pain or stress.  Does that mean we stop loving?  I don’t at all understand the lack of consideration and every day decency I see all around me.  What the hell, people? Is it that hard to treat one another truly well? Why do we lash out at the ones we love? I don’t have answers.  I am a simple student of life and love, and there is so much I do not know, or understand.

I’m very fortunate – I easily could have been someone who would never know love. I didn’t exactly make it easy for love to reach me through my walls, or find me midst my mountain of baggage.  I love, though, I love fiercely, and I love with my whole heart…and I want to master treating my loves well.  Turns out I will have to start with treating myself well, and as a result of that effort I am experiencing a love affair with a most amazing being with whom I have long been acquainted…myself.  I admit – that’s a love I never knew would also be profound.

 

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, women, Words

Again, The Brain Attacks

April 20, 2013 //
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Weird day, mostly made up of hormones, pain, and many less than delightful elements of my experience of life as a female person. I feel fatigued and stupid (you should see the typos). I feel like I am disconnected from my loved ones, and irritable.

“Does the mindfulness stuff help?” No, fuck no it doesn’t…well, not if by ‘help’I mean ‘makes it all better’. But I kept at it…simple breathing exercises in awareness, simply observing my experience, rather than analyzing it, and accepting my experience, and letting it be ok that it isn’t always ‘easy’.

I want more. There are other questions, and things I need to learn to talk about. There is so much to learn, and in spite of a lifetime of experience that tells me I am not in this alone, sometimes I feel very alone, anyway.

Tonight I guess I get to practice mindfulness, and compassion for myself as I withstand repeated hormonal attacks on my balance, by my own brain; every doubt, every instant of insecurity or fear, amplified and enhanced for no imaginable benefit.  I feel half mad with it every time.  Today has been no exception…except…it’s going to be fine, and I know that, and this is just a bad bit that will pass in a couple days.  That fairly comfortable, sustained, awareness is new.

More meditation, later sleep. I am pretty sure that third quad latte was a poor choice. I am tired, though, and I hurt; sleep will come, maybe soon, and tomorrow will be a new experience.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50

Excuse Me, Where Am I Going?

April 10, 2013 //
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Sometimes the path is clear.

Sometimes the path is clear.

I had an interesting dream last night.  I found myself before a big ornate door, dark and imposing, and I felt a sense of uncertainty about where I was, and where I was heading.  I knocked on the door and as it opened felt I was standing before ‘the heart of the universe’.  A woman answered the door; a woman of uncommon beauty and serenity, with laugh lines rather than wrinkles, and of an indeterminate age that only seemed ‘not young’. She radiated calm, compassion, and wisdom.  She smiled and sunshine broke through clouds I hadn’t even seen.  She wore my face, but seemed somehow unknown to me in the course of my own experience of life.  I felt her inquire in a questioning way, but wordlessly, and what I thought I heard was more an assurance than a question “I can help you with this.”  I replied simply “Where am I going?” and felt we were truly somehow saying the same thing – as though questions and answers are entirely interchangeable.

I was suddenly in a sunny meadow walking alone, only remembering her, and her words and a big map, with a convenient ‘You Are Here’ arrow. “If your focus is on just one element of the journey, how will you find your way?  Consider the method, the map, and the destination, or be lost aging, not growing.”  She pointed to the map, “You Are Here is where you are, not where you are going.  We don’t choose where we start, we start where we are – and choose our destination.”  I had wanted to ask her again, ‘Where am I going?’, but her compassionate smile stopped me.  She held the door for me then, gesturing to the world on the horizon, “I can’t be you, now, you are not here, yet.  Soon enough, if you follow your path…”   I shaded my eyes from the sun as I stepped into the bright light of day… and woke suddenly, in my dark room to the eager beeping of my alarm clock, and a new day.

It lingers with me even now… “We don’t choose where we start…”

Spring flowers along the way

Spring flowers along the way

I wonder what the journey will be like…who I will become over time… how life will change me… how I will change life around me… now where is that damned map… 😉

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Categories Allegories, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Roses, Spring, women, Words

Brute Force Mindfulness

April 9, 2013 //
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So…um…right… I am humbled in the face of my humanity, and admittedly ‘doing my best’ isn’t always…adequate? Suitable? Ideal? Perhaps not even functional. I am very human.  Not unexpectedly, practicing mindfulness throws me the occasional curve ball, or offers me an intellectual or cognitive challenge I didn’t anticipate.

A great morning to share a smile!

A great morning to share a smile!

Yesterday,  I took a walk on the wild side… ‘brute force mindfulness‘.  O.m.g… the humor of it buoys my general good spirits today, and I am still sort of scratching my head that the eventual outcome included a completely unexpected ‘thank you’ for ‘being there’… but I am not sure I was ‘being there’ the way I’d ideally like to be for people.  No fooling, I had hit a wall of frustration at one point that actually resulted in my yelling – literally yelling, in a rather unpleasantly commanding tone – directives that were borrowed directly from my mindfulness practices…but… how effective is it to shout orders to ‘Breathe!’ at someone who is losing their patience ?  Or to resort to angrily demanding that someone  ‘Be here!‘ when they seemed trapped in some other moment?  (That last was only a fragment of what I was moved to say, but the ludicrousness of shouting commands to be in some way more mindful got to me before I got more words out, and I forced myself to shut the hell up before I went further down the path of the ridiculous.)

Compassion wins out, this morning, and I accept that I was in enough pain last night to be pretty easily tested to my limits, even with people who matter to me a great deal.  I sure don’t feel like I was at my best for emotional resilience, respectfulness, or consideration – and as humorous as it still is that I snapped in that very odd way, I hope to build a lifetime of good skills and habits that allow me to bend as a reed in the wind, instead, and to be able to comfort rather than berate.  I’d throw the hormone card, but facing menopause on the horizon, that’s really too unpredictable to be certain, and this morning it sounds like a crutch or an excuse, more than a mitigating circumstance.

It’s still pretty funny. 😀

My quiet morning resulted in some whimsy about the whole thing, and I want to say simply this; I’m in an all or nothing place with mindfulness, tending my roses and my heart with care, showing myself and my loved ones mercy, and living the best way I know how.  If I have to, I know to tell haters to back up, and just keep practicing and taking care of me.  In the mean time, I’m going to give myself a chance to appreciate the humor of life, and lighten up a bit.  😀  It’s a lovely Tuesday…

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Categories Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Roses, Spring, Turning 50, women, Words
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