Archives for category: Metaphors
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Headaches and Harmony

March 31, 2013 //
11
No lack of harmony in the garden.

No lack of harmony in the garden.

I’m thinking about relationships today, and love, and harmony. It may not be my best choice of subject matter with this killer headache, but I needed a break from learning Baldur’s Gate , which is what gave me the headache!  Video games in any format tend to be really tough for me to learn, and I don’t get pleasure out of pushing my frustration level higher, so until pretty recently I did not bother with video games; too hard for me to learn, no fun.

The TBI changes my perspective on a number of things, and learning games, or building any skills that are impaired to the point of pushing me to the point of real frustration when I try to do things I’m not good at, seems really important now…  Changes in perspective, choices, and mindfulness (even in games), make a huge difference for my enjoyment of difficult things.  Relationships, though, are not games… still plenty of skill building potential, but even when delightful and harmonious, game-playing is not to be encouraged. lol.  The tutorial got me thinking, though, about the basic building blocks to learn a game, the prerequisite skills and concepts that are a necessity before I could even attempt game play… I know people who game ‘straight out of the box’, never bothering with the tutorials, never risking plot spoilers by reading the back stories, or doing any research.  Some of them are amazing gamers.  I also know gamers who carefully read the reviews before buying a game, read the ‘rules’ and back stories, watch some video walk-throughs of tougher sections of game play, maybe even watch someone else play before they take it on (and many of them play the game on ‘easy’ the first time). (Damn, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an ‘easy setting’ we could use for’ our first relationships?) Some of those gamers are also quite amazing.  Is there a right way?

Well, hoping to avoid taking a metaphor too far, but with relationships, I don’t think there are short cuts that are worth taking…but I’m only talking about my own experience, realistically.  I do need to hone my basic skills, and knowing that, it seems  important to figure out just what I think those basics are… not the fancy stuff; I mean the absolute ground level must-have approach, skill, or method for me, as an individual – the one I actually am – to succeed in my relationships.  It meshes nicely, as thinking goes, with approaching my relationships mindfully, as well as the general requirement to ‘take care of me’.  (Ah, adulthood…complex, exciting, frustrating, rewarding, and… ongoing.   Still, ‘ongoing’ certainly tends to imply there’s time to work on this stuff…although I’ve already muddled through 49 years without a clear ‘success story’.)  Most of my relationships are… challenging.  For me, for sure… for people daring to love me…I can barely imagine the sort of committment that requires, or how difficult that must be.

Building blocks… basics… it isn’t likely to be the same for other people, but I know what my own ‘big 5’ are… qualities, characteristics, or skills that I think are an absolute must for a healthy long-term relationship:

That’s it.  I think mastering these makes it a pretty good bet that a relationship based on those fundamentals will do well.   Sure there are other things that are important – communication, an essential, is the first thing that comes to mind – but I am finding, lately, that mutual respect,  reciprocity, consideration, compassion and openness generally result in good communication (or require learning good communication skills to achieve in the first place).  I could also note that having basically compatible values is pretty critical, but I think the ‘big 5’ I listed would likely prevent me investing heavily in a relationship with someone with seriously incompatible values, and the process of finding that out would be less painful than some other tried and true methods I’ve explored (like wishing, guessing, assuming, or playing make-believe about someone else’s values).

My current partners, and our exciting, wonderful, rich, affectionate, complicated, sometimes challenging, nurturing, mysterious, entangled, sweet, inviting, and evolving relationship(s) are certainly one of my most important sources of ‘life curriculum’! I could perhaps call it ‘my home room class in the school of life and love’ – no hyperbole required.  😀

No matter who the teacher is, we have to do our own homework.

No matter who the teacher is, we have to do our own homework.

…in spite of my headache, and occasional subtly unharmonious moments that quickly become part of the past, it’s a lovely spring day.  I’m not making a big deal about either the headache, or the sometime momentary lack of harmony.   I’m studiously maintaining my personal balance by practicing mindfulness, enjoying the sunny garden, and taking care of me by honing my skills on my ‘big 5’.   No matter what life throws my way, those are 5 qualities I value, personally, and cultivating them is worth my time and focus.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Spring, The Big 5, Turning 50, women, Words

My Heart, My History

March 27, 2013 //
1

I’m in love. Have I mentioned that? It’s true.  Strangely, it hasn’t been a long-term state of affairs for me, but very little has. I’ve been in love for a couple of years, and I have partners who are beyond worthy of that affection.  Funny it has been such a short time in my life.  Consider this rose:

IMAG0341

Nozomi, (Onodera, Japan, 1968)

Not a great picture of her, but it’s early in the spring and there isn’t much going on with roses just yet.  This is Nozomi, a pale pink bud that opens white on a rambling, low ground-cover miniature type bush. She’s quite lovely in bloom, covered with pink buds, then white single blooms of 5 petals. She is also one of my longest ‘relationships’. lol. No kidding – I’ve had this rose since 1993. I purchased her as a young rooted cutting from Ralph Moore‘s Sequoia Nursery in Visalia, California at a very different time and place in my life. 20 years. I have no relationships with lovers, partners, or spouses with that kind of longevity, so far. I have very few friends who have been part of my experience for that long, and even family members with whom I am close have experienced vast stretches of lifetime without hearing from me at all.  Connecting is sometimes difficult for me, and I suspect I have not done justice to the efforts of those who have tried to love me…but somehow I have managed to drag this rose through 7 moves, 2, states, 4 career changes, 3 long-term relationships, 3 in-ground locations, 5 different pots, 3 balcony gardens, a community garden and 20 years…there’s a lesson or a metaphor there, I’m just sure of it. lol.

Yesterday was a festival of pain until quite late in the evening.  This morning feels like a different world.  I watched the spring closely as I walked in to the office this morning. I listened to birds singing. I smelled the fragrances of early blossoms opening along well manicured, landscaped walkways. I contemplated the impermanence of things, the passage of time, and what has remained of all the things that have been and wondered why so much of what I have clung to for so long has been all those things that hurt the most, instead of so many wonderful things that seem, instead, so fleeting.  I thought about spaces and moments I have loved most deeply, both for the relationships, and for the settings.  Some of my happiest moments have been in shared conversation with people dear to me, or interesting strangers. Connections. Words.

At home, I am creating a space for sharing conversations, and folding into it the understanding that being in a serene space often opens our hearts to being more vulnerable in our relationships, more candid in our conversations.  There are roses, and a ton of flowers, and a small bistro table and chairs for two, and every day I bring my loving heart to this space to consider what is next. I am eager to be there, sitting with a friend or lover, sharing a latte and a moment of quiet conversation, building my history out of happier building blocks; mindful, serene, and compassionate.

A quiet spot for conversation

A quiet spot for conversation

I’m more than a little embarrassed to realize that ‘the way I feel’ in the garden, that ‘different something’ that I’ve noticed all along…is mindfulness. Damn. How did I not understand to take it out of the garden and into my life? Well, no reason to be annoyed with myself about it now, it’s beyond me to alter what already exists in my history.  I am, however, eager to feel spring warm to summer and find myself with an iced coffee on the table, and next to me someone I love, sharing thoughts, and words, and continuing our history together.

As I said, I’m in love – and this morning, in my now, that feeling entirely includes how I feel about myself, my own heart, my own experience. I am an imperfect fragile vessel, and you will find my loving heart in the spring garden.

In the spring garden

In the spring garden

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

The Spring in My Step

March 20, 2013 //
1

Welcome to Spring!

Spring Flowers

Spring Flowers

The rain fell more aggressively this morning than I expected from the gentle patter on the skylights before dawn.  I enjoyed the life lesson as I walked to work; a lesson about raincoats, freewill, and adulthood.   It was delivered wrapped in a memory, a delightful enough gift, on a spring morning.

I walked in the rain, frustratedly fussing with the hood of my raincoat, and irritably noting with some amusement that somehow the designer had failed to understand that a hood might be more effective if it were to stay up over my head when a breeze comes up.  Each time I tugged it back up, something nagged my consciousness until a wee crystal clear memory of actual childhood reached my awareness – to my great delight (I don’t have many).  I recalled a rainy morning, leaving home – specifically the glass vestibule of an apartment building – to walk to the bus stop to go to school.  My hood fell down, I pulled it up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Then the clear recollection of my thought in the moment; a sort of ‘When I’m a grown up, I will not wear a hood at all!’ kind of thought.  I grinned to myself at the recollection of petulant childhood frustration with a world that seemed then to seriously favor ‘grown ups’.  Being ‘a grown up’ myself now, more or less, I understand that the reality of it has often failed to live up to my childhood expectations…and I walked on considering that.

When I was younger than adult, I lived with a fantasy that someday, when I was ‘a grown up’, I would live my life based on my own will alone. I would choose my apartment, my job, my friends, my life style – I would live entirely based on my own values, my own desires, and my free will to choose.  It sounded beyond exciting – it also sounded like the only possible outcome.  Adulthood and I did reach some sort of wary meeting place, at about 18 years for me, and my ‘menu’ of choices seemed immediately to be unexpectedly limited by my resources, my opportunities, choices I had already made, and a whole assortment of ‘have to’ ‘supposed to’ and ‘need to’ things that I didn’t anticipate being obstacles.  The whole mess was frustrating and vaguely disappointing.  This morning, though, it flooded back to me with the Spring rain – the promise inherent in becoming adult, the potential in the very real opportunities of choice, itself, and of free will.  I laughed out loud, and let the breeze blow back my hood. I grinned into the dawn through rain spattered glasses, and my stride relaxed and became natural and free; and I gave myself the further gift – and respect – of choosing to live up to my own values and pleasures, and disregarded the rain, the hood, and any sense of propriety or decorum regarding ‘keeping my clothes nice’.  My walk to work stopped being an internal list of reminders about work, life,  or concern about damp socks, damp hair, or rain drops tickling the back of my neck, and became the pure joy of experiencing a beautiful, rainy, spring morning – and here I am.  For the moment, whole and happy and content to be human, content to be female, and content to be ‘a grown up’, all of which seems quite simple and natural having remembered that now that I’m an adult, I do get to live my life based on my own values, on my own choices, and that those choices are only limited by the limits I acknowledge and accept for myself.  A nice reminder – some internal spring cleaning, of a sort, and a welcome re-assessment of small frustrations in life.

So, here I am on a Wednesday, on the Vernal Equinox; damp socks, damp hair, and for the time being an unbeatably buoyant feeling of contentment with this fragile vessel, and it’s precious contents.

Welcome to Spring, indeed.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, Turning 50, women

The Parable of Poison

March 18, 2013 //
9

A Person comes to a Friend bereft because a Loved One offered poison to drink, and having consumed it, this Person was in terrible pain and agony. The Person and the Friend commiserate at length the nature of the crime, the motive to offer poison, the sort of poison it was and how agonizing the pain. For days they spoke and there was no relief from the agony. The Person and the Friend went to the Law to address this grievance, and the Law spoke at length on the punishment suitable to the crime, depending on the sort of crime it could be determined to be. For days the Law spoke and there was no relief from the agony. The Person went far and wide with the pain and the agony, speaking at length with other persons, looking for agreement that a crime had been committed. The Person railed at and against the Loved One, demanding redress, acknowledgement, change and even vengeance, and shared the anger and pain and terrible agony far and wide with many other Persons.

One day, the Person met a Wiser Person and related the tale and the pain and agony of having been given poison by a Loved One. The Wiser Person listened carefully, and asked “Why did you drink it?”

Hmm…

I read something recently that gave me some clarity around the emotion of anger, but differentiating clearly between the emotional experience (‘the feeling’) of anger, and how it moves us to behave (‘the expression’) being called hostility, instead of also calling that anger. Nice wordsmithing, actually, because that actually gave me a foothold on greater understanding of a complicated piece of my experience.  Anger isn’t pleasant, but the emotional experience is pretty personal, and limited to the individual experiencing it – until they share it with another, in the form of hostility, and it isn’t all that different from offering someone poison… but if I am offered poison, in theory, I don’t have to drink it. 😀

Yesterday I woke in a good mood, but considerably sicker than the day before, and drained, exhausted, and suffering a pretty horrible headache, too. The morning went sideways when my limited emotional reserves met real-life unexpectedly – and it really was as if someone I love had walked right up and handed me a cup saying ‘here’s this poison, I made it myself, have some?’ and sure enough – I drank it right down. lol. Learning compassion and practicing mindfulness haven’t put me beyond the realm of human experience, for sure, and I not only took the whole mess quite personally, I over-reacted more than a little. As sick as I was, my supply of good decision-making was also diminished and I found myself out in the world, walking and crying like a madwoman, and under-dressed for the weather, which was a dumb choice since I was already ill. All too human, right? lol. I sort of ‘forced myself’ to make some better choices; to go home, to have some calories, to rest, to let the small stuff go, and sure enough things sorted themselves out – because it wasn’t my experience that had me wound around the axles in the first place, and I didn’t really have to drink that poison.  I am hoping to learn how to politely say ‘thank you, no’ when I find myself ‘offered poison’ in the form of someone else’s anger being directed into my experience as hostility…

Other ‘cups of poison’ being handed round recently include a variety of news articles about rape and rapists, after the news about the Steubenville rapists being convicted.  Another blogger really ‘gets it’; being sympathetic to the convicted rapists rather than to the victim is more than inappropriate, it is offensive. They said it better than I would have, and it’s definitely a share-worthy message.  I’m glad I’m not reading/watching media news right now – the heinous insensitivity of the talking heads on parade could easily have triggered my PTSD for weeks, and I just don’t need it.

It’s a good Monday, in spite of being sick, and I am eager to be well and able to enjoy spring.

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Categories Anxiety, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, women

Troubleshooting My Connectivity

March 14, 2013 //
2

“Thank you for calling technical support…”

Today I am contemplating all the times in my life I have endeavored, with limited success, to ‘troubleshoot my connectivity’ in relationships.  This year I finally recognized I was not sufficiently skilled, knowledgeable, or experienced with what makes connecting emotionally with another human being work, to successfully complete troubleshooting my challenges with building healthy relationships.  I certainly didn’t have the right tools to fix glitches, programming errors, or resolve the issues I have regularly found myself facing. This year I ‘called technical support’.

Before I say more about that, I’d like to say something about the way our choices in language, even grammar, can influence our thinking.  Consider the sentence “I learned X about relationship building.” It implies, fairly specifically, that the learning is completed, and in the past, and that something is now known – and tends to limit change and additional growth, by expressing the gained knowledge as a static thing. On the other hand, the sentence “I am learning X about relationship building.” equally clearly implies that learning is ongoing, making it subject to additional potential for change and growth. I rather like change and growth; it is taking me new and wonderful places in life. I am discontinuing the practice of referring to learning in the past tense, since I don’t think I can conclusively show that any one thing I have learned is truly static and unchanging (except, perhaps, Euclidean geometry, but even there – I just don’t know everything!). So, onward to the future, hopefully always learning.

So…I called technical support, metaphorically speaking, and got some help with ‘troubleshooting my connectivity’. I am learning some important things about healthy relationships, and building and sustaining close connected relationships. I am learning:

  • that mindful listening is not about preparing a reply, waiting for my turn to talk, or ‘getting a word in edgewise’. Mindful listening requires my entire devoted attention to the person talking, hearing their words, and giving my attention to understanding their full intended meaning.
  • that hearing words is different than listening, and often results in urgent replies, or interruptions that are not relevant to the key point being communicated. Listening is about meaning, and may require clarifying questions before a response to the communicated points is appropriate. ‘Communication’ is about the meaning, not the words.
  • that when I am immersed in my own emotional experience, and stray from being mindful-in-the-moment, I find it difficult to listen to someone else, to be compassionate, and to connect with them.  (That experience is not about whether or not they – or I – want to connect, but more whether or not we each allow and accept that connection.)
  • that compassionate observation of others’ experiences with connecting with each other is a valuable ‘blackboard’ at the front of the classroom of life, and as with any other classroom, in front of any other teacher, if I am passing notes or daydreaming I may miss something important – and every day of life is a learning experience, but every day is also a pop quiz – being mindful results in a much better experience. 😀

Thursday… and it was a short night, but I woke in a good place in spite of that. I’m feeling a bit under the weather, but my health through the winter has been good, so I guess I’m overdue for a sore throat. lol. It’s hardly worth mentioning, although if I end up quite ill, I probably won’t write for a couple days. It still looks to be a lovely day.

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Categories Anxiety, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, women
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