I woke far too early, but wasn’t awake for long. Well, sort of. I woke coughing, almost choking, “on dust”. My throat was dry and scratchy. I looked at the clock, it was 3 am, one of those difficult to call bits of timing… Stay up? Go back to sleep? I took my morning medication and gave going back to sleep a try, pretty certain I’d be up in a few minutes. I may or may not have been asleep when the alarm went off; it came as no surprise, and did not startle me. I feel rested, I woke quite easily, if I was actually sleep. It’s sometimes hard to tell with me – I sometimes dream I am awake. lol

My traveling partner beat me to wakefulness this morning. His greeting was waiting for me when I picked up my phone. It was a lovely few minutes of conversation to share and start my morning, once I had replied.

I refrain from looking at the news; it has become a cesspool of hate, deceit, treachery, disappointment, and did I mention the hate? Ick. I’m also generally staying away from Facebook, even making a practice of logging out if I do access it at all. I removed it from my phone; I have to make a specific effort to check it, which includes reinstalling it, and logging in. This is not a “head in the sand” manuever; I am taking care of myself, and the surge in hatefulness is hard to bear witness to with regularity. So. Less of that. Less of all of that.

I’m not ignoring the hate, I really can’t. It’s not okay at all. I just make my stand quite publicly in everyday situations, every day. Giving up my seat on the bus to the pregnant woman who the other commuters are making an obvious point of ignoring. Saying out loud “Ma’am, would you like to take this seat? I see that the younger commuters don’t realize how difficult maintaining your balance would be, pregnant on a moving train” or sitting down next to a young woman who some creepy dude is intruding on, and making light conversation until he moves away, or gets off the train, or intervening in creep-tacular moments of weird with a firm “hey, that’s not okay, and it needs to stop” out loud, quite audibly, and no nonsense, directly to the person being objectionable, eye-contact free of charge. No heroics, I’m just pretty fed up with hateful bullshit, and at a point in life where I am fairly fearless about calling it out.

In the simplest terms, I’m no “bystander” – this is my life. If I don’t like hateful bullshit, it’s important to explicitly object to it. Every time. Tolerance is not an appropriate reaction to the mistreatment of others.

Just a reminder how pointless it really is to blame the incoming individual (for the role of president) for all the hate and rudeness in the land. He may have given it branding and explicit approval, but he’s not the cause; all the same things that cause it everywhere else cause it in him as well. We make it right by making it right. We right the wrongs by righting the wrongs. We end our silence by speaking up. It’s a very good time to practice treating others well, and learning that treating ourselves can’t be at the expense of others. Attempting to treat oneself well at the expense of others, or at the expense of the world, rather misses the point of treating anything well at all.

I’ll make a point to stop to appreciate beauty; it is one way I treat myself well, and also very much worth doing. So many verbs!

I’ll spend the rest of the morning preparing for the day, meditating on loving kindness, practicing the practices that improve my quality of life in each moment, building a more resilient, emotionally intelligent woman to face in the mirror each morning. It’s a good morning for that. It’s a good day for kindness. It’s a good day to be the change I want to see in the world.