Archives for posts with tag: be the change
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Oooh, Shiny!

July 30, 2016 //
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Yesterday was lovely, end to end, in spite of the short, restless, night before. It was a pleasant day of healing self-care, relaxation, and mindful attention to the woman in the mirror…

…[It was pleasant] after having a deeply intimate discussion with my traveling partner during which I revealed to myself (and him) that I’ve been quietly struggling with feeling beat down and dismal, fighting off feelings of being irrelevant, “expired”, no longer useful in the world…because I’ve tended (all my life that I recall) to define myself (in the context of relationships) based on my sexuality and sexual availability (and skill), and my ability to reliably bring in an adequate steady income. Sex and money. I’d convinced myself at some distant point that what I bring to a relationship that has any real value is sex and money, just those. I literally don’t have a good understanding of what else I may offer a partner that has “real value”. No wonder I lost my shit the other night, feeling criticized in some implied way over the housekeeping, my weight/fitness, or my current state of non-employment (outside the home); I felt worthless. Yikes. I have some things to think about, and I definitely need to ease up on the woman in the mirror. She’s doing her best, and it is enough.

A walking meditation on a sparkling summer morning.

A walking meditation on a sparkling summer morning.

I spent the day after that feeling rather tender toward myself. I have the sense that I treat myself generally well, day-to-day, these days and it came as a surprise that I’d snuck in such a hurtful bit of messaging, playing more or less continuously on repeat in the background of my consciousness. I was feeling unwanted – but not saying so. I was feeling “out of date” and “superseded” and worthless – and wasn’t even giving myself the courtesy of hearing it, murmured so quietly, so deeply within.  Acknowledging these feelings came with a measure of awkward sad embarrassment, because I was holding on to the assumption that I “know better” now, and would not choose such a thing willfully with my eyes open… only… I did. It was buried in the fine print on the choices day-to-day made to ease the social tension that sometimes develops around my rather intense emotional life; if I choose to disregard my emotional life in order to be polite, to be practical, to be “grown up”, and then fail to follow-up with myself later to make room for my feelings and deal with my needs and hurts, I am going to pay for it, and so will everyone dealing with me when it finally goes down. I do not always make the wiser choice. I’m very human.

It’s the weekend, and it won’t be quite so hot today if the forecast is accurate. (Remember terrible inaccurate weather forecasts? Is that still a thing at all?) Today is a good day to treat the woman in the mirror well… It’s going to take some practice. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

Well That Was Weird

July 29, 2016 //
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I didn’t sleep well, and woke too early. I feel generally okay, and it was nice to open up the patio door, and do my ‘sunrise yoga’ as the sun actually rose. I make a point of acknowledging and embracing gains in strength, flexibility, and overall fitness, hoping to limit the discouragement that can so easily creep in when progress feels so slow.

Begin again.

Begin again.

I’ll admit I face the new day earnestly reaching for a new beginning; the evening ending awkwardly, after some difficult moments there toward the end of the evening. I won’t berate myself and insist it was “all me”, that would be inaccurate, although perhaps in many circumstances involving my emotions, it likely wasn’t a 50-50 thing. I tend to keep a tight grip [too tight?] on my emotions when my traveling partner is with me… It’s not a value add, at this point, and I don’t do myself any favors to keep it up… but we so easily find ourselves mired in my bullshit, even now, over some momentary shitstorm of strong emotion that it’s more than tempting to try to ‘keep things in check’ minute to minute, and it’s not really something that works. I probably don’t have to explain that trying to hold back emotions by force of will has a pretty common outcome of unexpectedly strong emotions spilling all over the damned place, spreading across small issues, creating large issues, complicating communication; the signal quickly becomes the noise.  When my TBI-related challenges cross paths with my PTSD symptoms… well… it’s not pretty, and I’m frankly not at my best, and it is a thing that has everything in the world to do with me living alone. I don’t know how else to ‘protect’ the people I love most, but of course… there’s this. What a fucked up mess.

Love matters most.

Love matters most.

We found our way, more or less, by the time I made my way to bed. My partner moved the fan into a window, and tweaked things to keep air moving during the night, and ensured the apartment was secure. I didn’t have to ask, and it’s lovely to be able to count on him for small things that feel urgently important to me (whether they are important ‘in real life’ or not).

My restless night didn’t continue to distress me after I woke, and my “nightmares” weren’t terrifying; it was just my brain finishing up the day’s processing, reconsidering this and that, and shoving new information into long-term storage, I guess. No noteworthy content. I woke to birdsong, and a small amount of lingering bitterness that I suck so hard at managing my issues in the company of a human being with whom [for me] it matters most to do so.  I’m frustrated with myself. I’ll keep practicing. I’ll keep taking care of me. I’ll keep learning more about loving well. Then… I’ll keep right on being quite human. Awkward.

Anyway – the weekend is here. I get a fresh start with each new dawn. There’s nothing on my calendar for the weekend except love and loving. Today is a good day to dust off The Four Agreements, and begin again. 🙂

Stick with the basics - it's a great place to start.

Stick with the basics – it’s a great place to start.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Hormone Hell, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, War and News of War, Words

A Different Shade of Blue

July 28, 2016 //
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Yesterday, in the heat of late afternoon, I took a dip in the pool. Not a big deal; some people swim every day. I went to the pool to beat the heat and the smooth clear surface looked so refreshing… and still. The pool was entirely empty. I looked at the sign on the fence “Do Not Swim Alone”. That’s good practical advice… and on some other day I might have trudged back to my apartment and postponed my dip in the pool for another day. Yesterday, I disregarded the sign – after making eye contact with the landlady on her patio, who smiled and waved a ‘go ahead’ my way. Well… second best, I supposed, someone knows I’m here.

Some people jump into a swimming pool. Some people wade in slowly. Some people only wade. Some people swim quite well, with good attention to form. Some people are splashers. Some people just drift lazily by on rafts or tubes. I happen to be the sort who wades in slowly, and enjoys the water fairly gently. I am cautious about joining in water games, and don’t prefer to be dunked “playfully”. Chaos and damage, even in the pool. Yesterday, though, there was no one there but me. No one to tease, or nag, or splash me, just me – surrounded by cool clear water, and blue sky over head. I stepped into the water, and slowly walked deeper, feeling the water rise around me, cooling me. I continued to slowly step deeper, until I was poised on my toes, swaying with the current of the filtration, and my own movement, water lapping at my chin. I was refreshed, cooled, and buoyed, rocking and swaying, effortless, weightless… it was quite lovely and peaceful. I paddled several times from one end to the other – no one giving me crap over preferring to keep my face from actually being under water. (I can’t breathe it, so I’d prefer generally not to be immersed entirely in it, just saying.) I floated endlessly, on my back, watching the sky turn. Confident in my buoyancy, just floating. I watched the ripples shift and change in the pool as I moved through the water. I watched the lattice of light and shape on the bottom of the pool shift and rearrange itself. Eventually, completely cooled down and refreshed, I returned home.

I’ve not had the chance to just utterly relax and enjoy a swimming pool entirely to myself before. It was lovely. So relaxed and peaceful. I’m definitely going to do that again – and the result of doing so once is that I feel considerably less hesitant to use the pool, generally, and less reluctant to enjoy it ‘my way’.

Tonight is ‘date night’… perhaps my traveling partner would enjoy beating the heat of late afternoon in the pool with me? (No pool where he lives.) That could be fun. Ah, but if he doesn’t care to do so, it isn’t going to stop me going back some other day, another time, and whiling away more of the summer heat in the cool blue water under hot blue sky. 🙂

Beginning again.

Beginning again.

Sometimes, the things that seem most healing in the moment are not very fancy at all. 🙂 Today is a good day to enjoy summer. Today is a good day to “be like water“. Today is a good day to float.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being

The Power of Repetition

July 27, 2016 //
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It’s a gentle seeming morning, expected to become a live action display of how a broiler works, later today. I’m cooling the apartment down now (no A/C; the windows in this unit are too small for the AC my traveling partner got me for my birthday last year), and if I do so skillfully, it will just be getting really uncomfortable inside at about the point I can open up the windows again, and exchange cooler outside air, for indoor air that has grown stifling over hours. As plans go, it’s adequate on all but the hottest days… of which today is anticipated to be one. No stress over it; I’ll get by. It will be a pleasant evening for cold showers, tall glasses of iced tea, and indulging in relaxed activities like reading this book, or watching that movie. 🙂

I take similar steps each summer day, intended to keep the apartment comfortable. Each day that I do, I become slightly more skillful through action, observation of outcome, and adjusting my actions based on what I learned. It’s a repeating cycle – and refinement of what works, into what works better over time, is one of the great powers of repetition.

One of the other great powers of repetition is learning. Simply that. If we do something enough, we learn it. If we hear it enough, we believe it to be true – no kidding, we lose all perspective on ‘facts’ if we hear a slogan often enough, spoken with conviction. There’s science behind that. It’s something to be mindful of…and it’s one of those qualities of mind that can be harnessed and utilized in my favor, or left unattended to turn against me unexpectedly. It’s also a characteristic leveraged by advertisers, campaigning politicians, and quite a few other organizations that touch our lives via slogan (teams, schools, government agencies…) Thought-provoking. How will I put this information to work on life’s journey? How can it benefit the woman in the mirror to understand how the mind works, just a bit more than I did? (More verbs? More verbs.)

Taking a closer look for greater perspective.

Taking a closer look for greater perspective; if nothing else, the journey is scenic.

Today is a good day to explore the world – and the workings of my own mind. Maybe I change something, maybe I don’t, there sure is a lot to learn, either way.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being

Something Different Sort Of

July 26, 2016 //
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This morning I slept a bit later than usual, and the sun was making her way into the sky and spilling like gold into the living room, through the open patio door. I’d been up much earlier, very briefly, and only long enough to remember to open the patio door to cool pre-dawn breezes, before returning to sleep. I’m glad I did, and not so much because it’s going to be a hot day, but more because it was a moment of great delight to see the very air around me transformed into gold, when I woke later. Beautiful!

The golden dawn enticed me out onto the lawn to meditate. It was still quite early, and there was neither foot traffic, nor sounds of neighbors starting their own days; it was entirely quiet but for the sounds of distant traffic and birdsong. Dew tickled my toes. A chorus of small birds landed in the tops of the tall meadow grass separating the community from the park and trees beyond.  A cat stalked slowly along the edge of the grass. A large blue jay landed nearby and walked toward me, curiously, cocking his head from side to side and checking me out thoroughly before taking off. I wasn’t facing the playground and didn’t see it begin to fill with children and early morning parenting, although I heard the laughter. Meditation ended when I was tumbled from my cushion by something fairly large, hairy, and playful; someone’s “puppy” got away from them and took off across the meadow. A rather large puppy. A Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, according the to panting Mom who’d sprinted behind him (I assume; she arrived almost on top of him, breathless) yelling “he’s friendly! he’s friendly!”. She was apologetic for breaking the peace of my morning, I was all laughter, as I’d somehow ended up with a lapful of large puppy, as well as a toddler and another somewhat older child, who arrived shortly after pup and mother, all childlike eagerness to share tales of their puppies adventures, and to assure me he’s friendly. lol No regrets here; how else does one pack so much laughter and pure unreserved joy into less than 10 minutes? 🙂 (I’m grateful I’ve entered this later stage of life appearing approachably friendly, instead of landing on ‘mean lady down the block’ – it was a legitimate risk, frankly. 🙂 )

There was still time to water the patio garden before the sun begins to beat down on it. Time to water the vegetable garden. I took out the trash. The recycling went to the bin, too. I cleaned the bathroom, humming a happy tune. I had just finished thoroughly (contentedly, happily) vacuuming the apartment, contemplating “Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?“, which I am reading, when I realized it’s not even 7 am… and I haven’t had my coffee. lol Are puppies and children all it takes to completely wreck what there is to my morning routine? I laugh at myself, and feel a moment of greater understanding (and sympathy) for what unruly lives full-time parents must have, and double-check that I remembered to take morning medication. I still haven’t had my coffee…

Mmmm... Life is good.

Mmmm… Life is good.

I hadn’t expected to spend yesterday evening with my traveling partner, until the moment he said he’d be over later. It was a lovely evening, well-spent in every way. The time spent in the company of shared friends felt warm and nurturing. The time spent alone was close, connected, intimate and easy. It was so nearly the perfect evening, the ideal moment spent wrapped in love, that I can’t even complain about how beastly hot it was; I don’t remember it that way. Love matters more.

So, I start the day routine already in tatters, unconcerned about any of that so long as I am able to take care of the woman in the mirror with some skill, and enjoy my experience without creating chaos or misery in the world. I’m okay with that – over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten more skilled at spontaneity. 🙂  It’s not so scary.

A new day like an anticipated gift; I may know it's coming, but I don't know what's in it until it arrives.

A new day like an anticipated gift; I may know it’s coming, but I don’t know what’s in it until it arrives.

I’ve no idea what today holds, beyond the morning so far… and I don’t feel any urgency driving a need to know more sooner; I’m cool with gently coasting from moment to moment, living life, experiencing experiences, and converting life time into memories. I haven’t taken much time of this extraordinary quality over a lifetime. I sit contentedly sipping my coffee, grateful to have taken the opportunity, and appreciating having the partnership that allows me to comfortably do so. Until I took the time for myself, I didn’t understand how badly I needed it, or what value it would have to have given this gift to myself; a healing journey takes some time, and it’s slow going when progress is saved for long weekends, the rare quiet evening solo, and ‘vacations’. This has been a worthwhile choice.

I became more aware (yesterday? a day or two ago?) recently that I feel actually ready to return to work. It’s an interesting feeling. I also find that I have new respect (and appreciation) for businesses that specifically give employees a hiatus from work on occasion. It makes sense, and strikes me now as a really beautiful way to prevent/heal burn out, or ensure valued employees actually do have some life to experience outside the workplace, for real. This morning, I sit down to job search tasks with contentment and enthusiasm. It feels good – and different. It makes sense to get back to work at the end of the summer… Funny how that rhythm of life left behind in childhood still lingers in my sense of what makes sense to me as an adult. 🙂

Today is a good day for being… and becoming.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, Words
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