Archives for posts with tag: good self-care

Yesterday sorted of slipped past me. Spring. 🙂 I woke from a deeply restful night’s sleep, yesterday, slowly, gently, a day fully planned for hanging out with a friend and going out later. When I stood the headache just flattened me. I intended to take things easy, what with the headache, followed by a bit of dizziness and nausea, but shortly found myself… wandering around the house… kind of randomly and without purpose.

I honestly wasn’t sure what was up with me beyond the headache. I cancelled hang out plans first thing in favor of self-care.

…I didn’t make coffee. I have no idea why, but I just… didn’t. I got in the car, barely awake, and drove down the street to an excellent cafe (the storefront of a local coffee roaster I enjoy) and got coffee. I committed firmly to heading home…and spent 90 minutes driving around the countryside drinking coffee. It was a weird morning, lacking in stress – or purpose.

I found my way home, and sat awhile on my meditation cushion in the open patio doorway, listening the rain fall, and feeling the spring breezes. Definitely spring; there are signs of greenery, like a fine mist, all over the deciduous trees, and the roses are leafing out in shades of bright green and russet (the reddest of my roses always seem to have the deepest red new leaves and shoots, where the yellow, pink, or peach ones are often very bright light green shades). I watched squirrels play. I watched birds hop about. I definitely wanted to be in the garden.

As soon as I stood to head into the garden, my headache reminded me why I was taking it so easy. Then my eye reminded me that I would not be easily able to do the things I wanted to do in the container garden on the deck without a visit to the nursery or garden supply place nearby… and I hadn’t actually visited those last autumn after moving in. I happily got back in the car and drove around checking out the nearest garden suppliers, finding one that feels most “like my sort”, and spending quite a long while exploring there. I stopped for Turkish coffee along the way. I came home with soil and a handful of seeds. Yep. I could have gone just about anywhere for the things I actually returned home with. LOL

One lovely moment from a lovely day.

It was a weird day with the woman in the mirror.

Spring is here.

I spent the afternoon in the garden, and finished up out there aware that I was still headaching on this whole other “maybe you really need to take it easy” level when I careened into the door jamb clumsily. Okay, okay, so… maybe a night out on St Patrick’s Day to see a great band play in a local bar returning home further fatigued and faced with night driving would not be an ideal choice? I canceled those plans, too. I felt content with the decision-making, and unconcerned with the weirdness.

Later, I roasted a chicken on the smoker-grill on the patio; it sits under the eaves, just out of the rain, and the smell of it was wonderful. Cold chicken salad tonight – which also sounds quite nice.

It was a lovely Saturday, headache and all. I’m content to have enjoyed it, making the most of the day without regard to that headache, which, honestly, completely sucked all day long. I just really don’t want to waste more days on pain than I have to… I’m not sure how many I get, you know? 😉

Today, brunch with a friend, and a visit to a favorite market. The headache, for now, has eased somewhat. It’s a lovely morning to begin again.

Yesterday was lovely. I watched the sunny day unfold beyond the windows at the office and wondered at human foolishness. How is it we imagine that locking ourselves away to “earn a living” instead of being outside on a lovely day makes any damned sense at all? I looked around me any number of times yesterday, feeling fairly certain we’ve got this stuff all wrong.

The first flowers to open in the front border.

The commute home was easy, relaxed, and uneventful. It took the usual 50 or so minutes. I didn’t care about the time, because the time didn’t matter. I was simply enjoying the sunny day. I got home filled with good intentions about being productive around the house, but my inner Agent of Chaos had others ideas. I spent much of the evening meditating, and a great deal of time out on the deck, enjoying the breezes, and the sound of the wind chime. I could have put that time to “good use” in some way, perhaps pruning roses, or sweeping or tidying up the remains of winter, but no; I just enjoyed the feeling of spring. I’m not even complaining; there was nothing I needed to do more, really. 🙂

I woke with difficulty this morning; the time change will take me some days to adjust completely. Sluggish mornings ahead for a couple days, probably. Like this morning. Usually, my feet hit the floor as I turn off the alarm, or I take a moment to stretch before I rise, but alert and aware of myself, more or less. Not so this morning. This morning, I may have woken ahead of the alarm by some moments, but it wasn’t obvious one way or the other. It took me about seven and a half minutes to coax myself out of bed, and I was at risk of falling back to sleep the entire time. Convincing myself to get up was only the beginning. My routines are broken. I fumbled around for half an hour, then remembered to take my medication (usually my feet hit the floor, and it’s either meds then yoga or yoga then meds, but always those two things pretty immediately) sometime midway between turning on lights, and turning on the electric kettle to make coffee. Then I did yoga – and the kettle heated up, clicked off, and I would eventually have to start that all over again. The morning is as inefficient as yesterday evening, but for very different reasons. lol

So here I am. Another day ahead. Another journey in mind. Spring unfolding all around me. I guess it’s time to begin again. 🙂

I look back on the weekend and find myself smiling in spite of notes of discord and discontent in life’s song. Learning to recognize the difference between emotional climate and emotional weather has been useful. 🙂

I spent what felt like a deliciously long Sunday on leisurely self-care in the form of housekeeping, marveling at the quality of my time, having not spent the morning in a fury heading up the highway. The drive itself was leisurely and pleasant. I arrived home feeling more balanced and content to begin with, and I guess it makes sense that the day was therefore more easily a pleasant one.

Why do I find myself, even now, surprised when things work as intended? When a practice intended to improve emotional resilience does do that, why would I be amazed? Is it only because I fought so hard to achieve that result using means that could not be expected achieve it at all, and grew to believe it was therefore not achievable? We screw with our own thinking far too much for our general well-being, don’t we? That’s what I find myself thinking about this morning.

My thoughts began with a meme posted by a new friend. Some random obvious-seeming list of statements that bites at me and worms into my consciousness expecting my agreement – and since there is a list, it’s likely I may agree with one or more of the listed statements, but… why would I swallow a pill of unknown origins handed to me by a relative stranger, based on casual assumptions about the effects, and no real data or confirmation of what, precisely, is in that pill, and the effects will be?? I wouldn’t do that. I know not to do that. We do that with our thinking all the fucking time, though, without pausing to consider just how important our ability to reason clearly really is, and just how fragile the sanctity of our cognition and will really are. Memes that “go viral” could be understood, seriously, as “viral”, indeed. A kind of sickness. A kind of contagion. Maybe mild and mostly harmless, but some of them really dig down deep and foster a sort of cultural reprogramming – and it would be wise to really consider them in context, more fully, and insist that the content we shove into our brains to be included in our actual thinking and behavior be, at a minimum, factually accurate. Just saying; don’t take poison. Even well-meaning, or humorous, poison has consequences.

We become what we practice. We “know” what we hear repeated often (even if it is not, in fact, true). Don’t just trust me on this; do your homework. Test your assumptions regularly. Try hard to prove yourself wrong, regularly – because you are wrong, more often than you know.

Don’t share poison. Don’t take poison. Practice cognitive good hygiene and intellectual self-care with the same rigor, attention to detail, and concern for your health and well-being that you do with your physical care (do better, though).

Don’t feed the trolls.

Don’t take the bait.

Do the verbs.

Begin again.

 

I woke a bit early, showered, and made coffee. I caught up on Facebook, and disengaged as soon as I’d flipped through the posts of dear friends, because that’s all I was there to do. My weekend bag is packed for the weekend. I’m eager to the point of confusing excitement and anxiety, which also means – more, better, self-care, and closely managing behavior with an eye on the potential to reach that tipping point at which excitement might actually become anxiety, because that’s not a place I want to reach. 🙂

Every weekend that I go home – and it does, at this point, feel very much more like home there, than here – I promise myself I’ll write while I’m there. I don’t. It’s not a lack of inspiration, it’s more a lack of will to pull myself from those moments even long enough to write about them (or about anything else). It tends to point to the greater urgency to truly care for myself, and be present in my relationships, over sharing the tale of the moment with others. I’m sort of sorry for that – and sort of not. I don’t think I’ve spent any other portion of my life this emotionally well, and I feel generally pretty okay aside from the signs and symptoms of aging, and physical pain associated with such things (and other similar such things that have lasted far longer than any sense of age). It used to be that I could mock my physical pain because it was nothing compared to the chaos and damage, nothing compared to my emotional pain. Weird to actually notice how very different my experience is now.

Still, here it is Friday. Last week I drove down after work, after an appointment. This week… I’m so eager to get the weekend started I am seriously considering the drive down tonight, in spite of Friday evening commuter traffic being a definite thing for the first 18 miles or so, and likely taking about 90 minutes to get past that mess. I just want to go. I want to be there, more than I want to be here. The yearning makes my heart ache, and makes me breathless with excitement.

I’m so human, though. I remind myself that each journey in life, across distance, also represents – in living metaphors, if we’ll have them – our metaphysical journey through life’s experiences. My last trip down and back was ferociously hair-raising, and uncomfortably so. I’ve been working on the specifics of my emotional experience as a driver on American roads in my commuting. This is no different. I consider my intention. Get there safely. Get there without wrecking my emotional experience. Get there while also following traffic rules. Driving with the average speeding of traffic, neither slowing things down by being needlessly slow, nor screwing with the flow of things generally by aggressively insisting on going faster than the average speed of traffic. Considerate. Polite. Skillful. Safe. Purposeful. Alert. Aware. Unaggressive. Not taking things personally. Mindful we are each having our own experience. Arriving at my destination still happy I made the trip and feeling something other than profound relief to have arrived alive. 🙂 Gotta have goals. 😀 Committed to the journey, not the outcome. Not the time or the timing. Drive the drive, and enjoy that process first. Get there when I get there, and enjoy that then.

I’m so ready to begin again. Are you? Where will the journey take you?

I took the espresso machine down to the countryside this past weekend. I used the last k-cup for the Keurig, too. I woke this morning, and began again; I made a pour over. Rich, dark, delicious… the kitchen filled with the fragrance of freshly ground coffee, and I sipped it happily wondering how I strayed from this simple path?

This morning, I begin again. 🙂 Intent. Will. Choice. Action. Practice.

And again.

And still again, if necessary – and sometimes it will be quite necessary indeed. That’s okay too. There are steps. These are practices. There are verbs involved and my results vary.

I finish my very excellent cup of coffee with a smile and begin the day.