Archives for posts with tag: don’t take anything personally
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When It’s Good

February 22, 2026 //
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Enjoy the moment.

Stormy but mild, the weather is what it is.

Yesterday was lovely. Oh, not without a brief moment that was less than ideally harmonious, but we are human primates after all, the emphasis being on “primates”. Sometimes communication is more difficult than we’d like it to be, and in any household that includes me, this is complicated by both PTSD and brain damage. Still, generally speaking it was a lovely day spent in my Traveling Partner’s good company, and the rare moment of irritation or discord resulted in a better connection and clearer understanding of each other. Useful.

I make it a practice to focus on the positive, to reframe conflict in terms that allow me to grow and become more the person I most want to be over time, and as a means of allowing me to appreciate each finite mortal moment with my beloved. We’re both quite human. There’s no doubt we love each other deeply, and it truly matters to both of us to to heal, to support each other, and to move on from moments of conflict. Yesterday didn’t require much effort in that regard; it was a lovely day in good company.

I spent a good while reading, yesterday, which I enjoy quite a lot. I spent time writing and enjoyed sorting the many stickers my beloved Traveling Partner had gifted to me. (So fun! So delightful!) He worked on a project nearby, and we hung out together, each contentedly doing our own thing, together.

Today begins well. I get to the trailhead at sunrise, feeling well rested and merry. The walk down the marsh trail is pleasant, if a bit “squishy” from prolonged recent rain. It is sprinkling this morning. I don’t really care about that. I do care about the pain in my left foot (which I have been thinking was a flare up of tendonitis or maybe plantar fasciitis), which slows me down a bit. It becomes obvious as I walk this morning that it may be something much more practical in nature; I think the heel in these boots has some kind of “air cushion” or similar design, and I think the left side has blown out from wear. I’m annoyed by this because these boots can’t be re-soled. Well shit. They’re three, maybe four years old, and I’m probably due to replace them. I don’t really feel like dealing with that, but the path ahead will need sturdy boots, eh? That’s not even a metaphor; good boots make a lot of difference in the quality of a walking experience. I mean, okay, it’s also a metaphor.

…But I guess either way, I need new boots…

I stop a little farther on from my “halfway point”. I’m in no rush. It begins to rain a little harder and lacking overhead cover from the trees, I walk to the photographer’s blind grateful to find it unlocked, and unoccupied. It is a good spot to write and to take shelter from the rain.

What about the day ahead? No idea, really. Yesterday was lovely. There is no shopping to do, no errands on my to-do list, nothing on my mind. I’ll walk, and maybe do a bit of boot shopping before I head home to do some routine housekeeping and such. Maybe bake some bread if I have the energy later? Seems a good day for it. Maybe chili for dinner? I remind myself to check that I have all the ingredients.

Life being lived. Nothing extravagant or fancy, all pretty ordinary stuff. Where it gets complicated is that it is too easy to become wound up and twisted over some moment of disharmony or disappointment, and overlook all the joy and contentment. Savor the joy! Be present for the moments! Appreciating the pleasant moments and the small joys with the same focus, commitment, and energy we seem to save for arguments creates emotional resilience and a more accurate implicit sense of who we are and the life we lead. It’s also simply a very nice way to experience life fully; be present for each moment. That’s a pretty useful practice.

The rain stops. My Traveling Partner pings me a good morning greeting as he wakes. A large flock of geese passes overhead. There are more storm clouds on the horizon. The sky is a homogeneous milky gray. I sit with my thoughts and this quiet feeling of joy, and prepare to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, joy, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, Words

Steps on a Path

February 18, 2026 //
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I reached the trailhead at daybreak. The days are getting longer, and dawn comes a little earlier. I also slept a little later, and got a later start. It all makes sense.

The tangle of oak branches against the gray winter sky manages to look a little eery, and the marsh trail is quiet. I have it to myself this morning. It is a Wednesday. I took off from work for a appointment later; I would have had trouble focusing on anything else. It’s to do with a fraud someone attempted to perpetrate against us back in the fall. It was massively stressful, and without my Traveling Partner’s calm support, I’d have probably lost my mind. It helped that there were clear steps to take to protect myself, my property, and safeguard my family, but it was also costly and vexing. I’m glad it is over.

… Human beings can be such bastards…

Taking time for this moment, now.

I get to my halfway point, and stop awhile to write and reflect. (This is me, now, doing that.) It’s a cold morning. Properly cold, at 31F (0.5C). After my walk, coffee with a friend (who is also a colleague), and on into the city for my appointment. It feels like a busy day, but it’s more that the events on my calendar are significant or important in some way, than truly being busy. I think about that awhile; how subjective our sense of time really is.

An enormous flock of geese takes to the sky from the marsh. It fills the sky overhead as it passes. There is a thin layer of ice over the marsh ponds. The meadow grass sparkles with frost. However long or short the moments feel, in a practical sense there’s really only “now” to work with.

I think about my Traveling Partner, hoping he is getting the rest he needs and that I managed to slip away without disturbing him. We’ve had a couple of difficult days together, which sucks, particularly considering how much we’re both obviously putting into having a better experience than we are. Shit gets real sometimes. We’re both going through some health stuff that complicates our shared experience. We’ll get past these challenges. We’ve gotten through worse.

I yawn and stretch. My fingers are getting cold. I look down the trail – “steps on a path”, I think to myself. Time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, winter, Words

Having My Own Experience

January 17, 2026 //
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I’m sitting at my halfway point on this local trail, before dawn.  Venus is bright above the western horizon. It is a clear, mild morning. The forecast suggested it would be near freezing this morning, but it is much warmer. 45°F (7.2°C). Pleasant, compared to freezing, and I am enjoying it. I am comfortable in the warm clothes I chose.

One by one the primroses are beginning to bloom in my garden.

I smile when I recall the primroses blooming in the flower beds along the front walk. They don’t understand that it is winter, they bloom in the mild Spring-like weather regardless what the calendar says. I think about that awhile, and the phrase “bloom where you are planted”. Like garden flowers, human beings also bloom at the time most right for them individually.

I watch Venus slowly sinking towards the horizon. I reflect on how peculiar it is that this appearance of movement is not what it seems. It isn’t Venus moving at all; it is the Earth rotating on her axis. I have no sense of that motion at all, as far as I can tell, I only observe the apparent movement of the stars. There’s something to learn there, about perspective and reality and truth.

My back aches fiercely. No headache yet, today. My tinnitus is loud in my ears. I sigh to myself, grateful for the mild morning and this walk. The air smells like Spring, already.

A beautiful young buck steps slowly out of the trees, watching me as he steps cautiously onto the trail and walks past, glancing my way as if verifying that I am not going to follow. He stops a short distance from me and steps into the grassy strip of meadow on the other side of the trail. I am watching him, and sitting very still. I don’t immediately see the two does who follow him out of the trees and down the path. They are abreast of me, almost close enough to touch, when I see them. They startle me, my movement startles them, and the herd of three quickly move further down the grassy strip beside the trail.

Today the Author arrives for a short visit. After my walk I’ll stop by the store and pick up a few things. My Traveling Partner hustled me and the Anxious Adventurer through a bunch of little changes and housekeeping tasks that had fallen a little behind, in order to restore order from chaos that had crept in while he was (far more) disabled (than he is now), and to prepare for company. The last of the holiday changes made to accommodate the Giftmas tree were returned to more typical placement, too. I was grateful to have help, and for the vision and encouragement provided by my beloved; sometimes the thought work or emotional labor is the most tiring part of some project, and I don’t have vast reserves available for either, lately.

I went to bed exhausted, aware that my fatigue was as much cognitive as physical. Lately I struggle to “find a quiet moment” at home, often turning my attention to a book or a show, only to face frequent interruptions from “noise”. Hyperacusis leaves me feeling as if I can’t get a moment of peace, but it is symptomatic and highly subjective. The coffee grinder isn’t louder than usual. The cupboard doors aren’t being slammed. Someone putting away the dishes isn’t an intentional assault on my senses. Stray remarks lobbed at me unaware of my attention being elsewhere are neither more frequent nor louder. The timing is not deliberate. It’s a “me thing”. The only real solution is the stillness of solitude. It’s a feeling that the literal only time my consciousness is fully my own is when I am alone with my device set on “do not disturb”. Definitely a “me thing”. It is an illusion, and a bit of madness, perhaps.

I breathe, exhale, and relax, and pull myself back to this present and quite solitary peaceful moment. These walks meet many needs, and a little solitude is one of them. I savor the stillness as daybreak comes. Venus is lower on the horizon now, barely above the dark smudgey silhouette of the treetops. The Earth keeps spinning. The wheel turns. The clock ticks on.

I check the time and sigh to myself. I fill my lungs with the cool morning air and exhale slowly. A new day, a familiar path, and I’m having my own experience. I remind myself to let small shit stay small, and to avoid taking things personally. I stretch as I stand. It’s time to begin again. I turn and face the sunrise and start down the trail.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, solo hiking, Spring, The Art of Being, winter, Words

And If You Get What You Want?

January 14, 2026 //
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What then? What turn does the path take once you’ve achieved your goal, or fulfilled some dream for your future, or completed some grand project, or obtained some wonder you long yearned for? What then? I’m sipping my coffee and thinking about that, no idea why; it was the thought in my head when I woke from a deep sleep, groggy and trembling, unprepared for the day. (At first, I wasn’t at all certain “what was wrong”, and it took me a moment to realize I was simply awake.)

The clock ticks on. The calendar turns another page. A new day begins and the path unwinds ahead of me.

…And I’ve got this cup of coffee…

…And also pain. This morning I woke to pain. Well, shit. It is winter, and the cold and damp definitely do worsen my arthritis pain. I sigh to myself, sit up straighter, and stretch. I guess it could be worse. What did the Chaotic Comic call it? “Radical acceptance.” I sip my coffee and reflect on that. It is a concept commonly associated with DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), an offshoot of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). Radical acceptance sound rather grand and impressive to me… I smile a crooked smile and sip my coffee. I just think of it as coping, and as refusing to let pain make my decisions in life, when I have a choice (which tends to be “most of the time”), particularly since it’s been hanging around since I was in my late 20s. There is work to do. There are moments to enjoy. There is a whole life to live. Pain doesn’t change that, it’s just a… complication. I do my best to keep it managed and in perspective. I’m not saying that’s easy. My results definitely vary. Some days are harder than others. I sigh to myself, and let my thoughts move on.

I frown for a moment, looking at the browser tab I used to find linkable resources for the terms “DBT”, “CBT” and “radical acceptance”. What a world; I scrolled through many pages of links to various costly “resources” (booksellers, clinics, specialists, merch) before I gave up and went directly to Wikipedia. A Google Search is just about pointless these days; the first page is an error-laden overly-simplistic AI overview I have no use for, followed by sponsored link after sponsored link to some bookseller, or costly clinic or specialist, dwindling to videos by various unknowns. Wikipedia? I scrolled all the way to page 5 before that turned up (in spite of it being one of my own most-visited resources). The continued enshittification of the internet is vexing. “Platform decay” is real, and “AI” is not an improvement. I sigh, and wish Google a silent “go fuck yourself” before moving on.

Wednesday. Right – today I take my car for an estimate on the repairs it needs following it’s mystery collision in a parking lot on the last day of 2025. Stress shoots through me at the recollection and my anxiety spikes, hard. I breathe, exhale, and relax, reminding myself the collision is in the past, the insurance coverage is already approved, this is just another step on the path. I unclench my jaw, and take another breathe, and a sip of coffee. The memory of the feeling when I first saw the unexpected damage to my parked car brings it back; the sorrow, the hurt feelings, the stress over the damage and the repair cost to come. The feeling now is as visceral as the feeling then. PTSD. I breathe, exhale, and let that go. Again. I repeat the exercise until my heart is beating in a normal and comfortable way, and the pressure in the pit of my stomach has dissipated.

It can be hilariously difficult to describe the experience of PTSD, what it is like to feel it, to go through it, to have a flare up of one symptom or another. The way it is portrayed in the movies isn’t particularly accurate. It’s not always some massive meltdown (or lost-in-the-past flashback) – sometimes it’s a physical re-experiencing of the stress of some moment that is not now, and little more (although surely that’s enough). Sometimes it manifests itself as a lack of perspective or ability to anchor to here and now, a struggle to recognize that this is not that moment, at all – whenever or whatever “that moment” was. For people suffering with Complex PTSD (not recognized in the US DSM-V, but recognized by WHO’s ICD 11), the moments have piled up one upon the next and made things that much worse for being compounded and complicated by each other.

I sip my coffee, reflecting on my life, and finding it maybe just a little bit marvelous that at 62, after years of therapy and practice, I can at long last let my consciousness gently touch some terrible moment of pain or trauma or horror (intentionally!) without immediately losing myself in that past moment, without tears or terror, without profound anxiety or seething latent rage surfacing (sometimes). I can even, if I choose, tenderly and compassionately support myself through processing some detail without falling apart over it (sometimes). Oh, it’s an unreliable skill, and still wants further practice and reinforcement, and it requires self-care and presence, and willingness to let it go and step back if I begin to feel swamped, but it’s surely progress worth a moment of acknowledgement. It took a long time to get here, and it’s a better place to be in my life – and I didn’t know, ever, if I could even make this journey and stand in this better place. My results have varied – a lot.

I silently wish my beloved Traveling Partner well, hoping he still sleeps. I’ve come so far – and for much of the journey he has been my companion through the ups and downs, and the new practices, and the moments lost to poor mental health, and the challenges of every day life, and all the work and the bullshit and baggage and chaos and damage. The therapy. The work. The love. Fuck, I am so grateful to love and be loved by this singular human being. My heart fills with gratitude and spills over as unexpected tears. Human beings are weird. lol I sigh to myself, and my inner voice mocks me kindly, understanding, “bitches always be trippin, y’all.” I laugh out loud. A barista calls to me merrily, “good joke?”. I reply “life!” and she laughs, too.

Once upon a time, I dreamed day and night about being “a regular person”, less “quirky”, more able to endure stress and able to heal from trauma. Less “plagued by misfortune”. I yearned for things I didn’t yet have an understanding of… resilience… emotional intelligence… and love. I wasn’t certain life was worth living. I had only the most limited sense of agency. I felt lost and crushed, pushed and pulled, and I seethed with the sort of buried rage that if exposed might erupt into something really terrible. I felt invisible, and unheard, and lacked a sense of worth or purpose. Tough times. It seems very far away now. I can’t claim to be “over it” or “cured” or so thoroughly mentally healthy as to set (or comply with) some standard of “a regular person”…but I am no longer an outsider in my own life. I’m no longer mired in despair and filled with a sense of futility. I’ve got better tools for coping with the reality of who I am. I’m grateful. I’m generally content with life. I’m grateful for love and friendship and good times. I’m okay for most values of okay, most days. G’damn that’s… wonderful. It’s been an interesting journey, and not an easy one. I smile to myself, when I try to pin down “when it started”. I don’t think that’s so easy…so many beginnings, so many steps on this path. The journey is the destination. “Are we there yet?” is not a question with a satisfying answer; we walk on.

I finish my coffee, still smiling. It is, after all, time to begin again. Again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, joy, Love, meditation, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Rape, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, turning 60, War and News of War, winter, women, Words

Friction

December 7, 2025 //
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The first hints of daybreak touch the sky as the rain starts again. I waited out the darkness, after getting to the trailhead early (so early). It was raining, then, and may be raining when I finally start walking. I don’t know. It’s not the most important detail.

Daybreak on a rainy autumn morning.

My mind is cluttered and full of chaos. I half-woke ridiculously early, to the sound of my aggravated Traveling Partner swearing about something (probably about being awake). Some brief time later, (minutes or seconds, I don’t know), he specifically wakes me to check on me. I get up to pee, just to be certain I could just go back to sleep and not have biology waking me prematurely in another hour or two. The next couple of hours pass restlessly; I’d fall asleep, be wakened by some noise or other, and drop off again. At some point I remember beginning, finally, to sink into a really deep sleep. “At last,” I remember thinking contentedly, “sleep. Real sleep.” I woke again, when my Traveling Partner went back to bed. Fuck. I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep, even as tired as I was. I could feel my brain getting going, preparing for a new day, and I was suddenly aware of an owl hooting loudly somewhere nearby. G’damn it. I went ahead and got up, dressed, and left the house.

… How the absolute fuck is my sleep this g’damned bad even after all these years and so much careful practice, good sleep hygiene, treating my apnea, adding a  noise masking device to my sleep space… Part of me wants to be really angry about this – but part of me recognizes that the anger itself only further impairs healthy rest (for me). I let it go, but resolve to ask my beloved to please just not wake me when I’m sleeping unless there is some emergency. I’ve got to get some fucking sleep (and I know he understands, as someone with sleep challenges, himself). I rarely have the opportunity to go back to bed later on, and get that lost rest. Working a full-time corporate job really limits that potential.

This morning I’m very tired, my head aches, and my eyes feel gritty. I have errands to run, and a business trip to prepare for.

I breathe, exhale, and relax. The morning is a bleak foreboding gray. I listen to the geese overhead, and the tinnitus in my ears. This morning the tinnitus is so annoying that if I thought pithing myself with an ice pick might be helpful in a practical way, I’d probably do it. (Do not do that!!) My tinnitus definitely gets worse and louder over time as I lose sleep. I remind myself that tonight is another night, tomorrow another day; this will pass.

I sip the hot (now only warm) coffee I picked up at the gas station on my way out of town after filling the gas tank. It’s a genuinely bad cup of coffee, acidic and somehow vaguely sludgy. It’s still coffee. Who the hell knows how long real coffee will still even be available? Instead of pouring it out wastefully because it’s terrible, I sip it slowly, letting the caffeine (and the ritual of morning coffee) do its work. I stay in the moment, present, aware, sipping this coffee and appreciating that I have it. Dawn comes. A new day. I’m cross and tired and vexed by physical pain. I look down the trail irritably, aware that I’ll likely feel better on the other side of my walk, in spite of the lack of sleep, and I’m stupidly also managing to be annoyed about that (which just makes no damned sense).

… I try not to dwell on this fucking headache or my arthritis pain…

I look back over my writing, checking for spelling mistakes and incoherence. (Huh. I bitch too much.) I sigh to myself, impatient with my very human limitations. I stretch and grab my cane and my rain poncho. All I can do is my best, and that path begins right here, now, in this moment. It’s time to begin again, again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Frustration, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words
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