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A Walk in the Park

October 30, 2015 //
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Friday could not come soon enough, although peculiarly, and as anxious as I’ve been in the office, it’s never been actually straight up bad, and often quite a bit less bothersome than I seemed to have set myself up to expect. I’d say it’s weird, but the truth is simply that we are each having our own experience, each possessing free will, each making different assumptions, and communicating from ever so slightly different dictionaries than each other moment-to-moment – and to make things just that much more fun, if we’re all seeking growth, and investing in what we want of the future, we show up each day as a very slightly completely different person than we were the day before – and don’t really realize it, and it doesn’t necessarily show to anyone else, either. How odd. The week ended rather suddenly and without much fuss.

As I left the building, peering into sodden gray skies likely to drip a few drops on me as I walked home, I recalled a team-mate commenting that the park bridge is open again, and that I would be able to “take the shortcut through the park” (it’s not a shortcut – it’s a longer walk, but more scenic, and definitely feels shorter). I took a deep breath, and walked on.

I pause at the top of the hill, excited to cross the new bridge. Is it silly to be excited about something so mundane?

I pause at the top of the hill, excited to cross the new bridge. Is it silly to be excited about something so mundane?

I take my time approaching the bridge, savoring the experience of the excitement and anticipation, and filling my senses with the prolonged yearning I had been experiencing in the background every day, waiting to resume my pleasant walks through the park each day. I make a point of lingering in this positive moment, and really feeling the joy of it.

As with much of Oregon these days, the bridge is higher.

As with much of Oregon these days, the bridge is higher.

I approach the bridge, eager to see the changes. The bridge has been elevated, which is a very good thing since many prior years the creek rose enough to swamp the bridge and make it impassable. I will be walking over this bridge all winter. I notice the very sturdy sides and rails, the closely spaced deck, and that the deck is not actually wood – some sort of durable plastic or composite material, it seems to shed water, and is not slick to walk upon even in the rain. Nice.

I cross the bridge; it feels like a moment.

I cross the bridge; it feels like a moment with significance.

I walk over the bridge, stand awhile in the center watching the water flow by sluggishly. This is not a fast-moving creek; there are many snags and places where nutria or beavers have felled trees and dammed the flow. I hear frogs peeping, and ducks quacking. I find myself wondering why “quacking” exactly? I don’t hear ‘quack’… I hear something more like… ‘gronk’. lol I walk over the bridge and startle a very auburn squirrel who was preparing to cross in the other direction. I reach the intersection of paths that decides whether this is a ‘short cut’ or not – turning right, and it shaves about 7 minutes off my walk, compared to taking the main road, but if I turn left (my preference) it takes me wandering through the park for about the same distance as the walk already was – definitely not a shortcut in miles, but how do I communicate that it feels like a shortcut… to my sanity?

Of course I turn left.

Of course I turn left…just up there…

Where does the path lead? Through the park, and into the evening, relaxed at home, and comfortable – and not even a little bit mad about seeing every square foot of sidewalk along the front of my building entirely inaccessible (having been torn out, replaced, and recently finished, it is not available for foot traffic yet). Nope, doesn’t matter. I carefully pick my way through the mud to the mailbox, and then back to the apartment, and taking my muddy shoes off before I step onto the carpet. I’m home.

I don’t know how or why it would make so much difference just to lose the walk through the park, but getting it back definitely made my evening, tonight. Dinner is cooking, and it seems a fine evening for something fun – a favorite animation, perhaps, or some game time? A movie? Fun and games matter too. It’s Friday night, and I’m taking care of me. It’s enough. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Autumn Evening

October 29, 2015 //
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I’d like this to be a lovely bit of prose, whimsical and poetic, about autumn and about evening. It isn’t at all. I’m not sure what it is yet, other than distracted and interrupted…but it is autumn, it is evening, and I am distracted and interrupted by the noise and conversation of the concrete finishing crew working immediately outside my front door at this very minute, shortly before 6:00 pm.

I dislike how near to the world, exposed, and vulnerable I feel with the workers so incredibly close that I can clearly hear their conversation and see their movement through the front blinds. I feel less safe, and less private. I know that I am adequately safe, and adequately private in my day-to-day experience. I know that when the work is finished this will once again be a quiet home. Right now? Right now this is nothing that can be described as quiet and I am annoyed to have to pay rent – when I feel, fairly often, that the most important thing to be paying for with the rent is the fucking privacy and quiet. Well, if nothing else, I have learned how very much I need my home to be a quiet place – surely the knowledge will stop me from buying a place that isn’t. (I can hope.)

A leisurely shower, dinner in the oven, unhurried yoga, a few minutes writing… it is a thoroughly pleasant evening when I am able to forget, however briefly, about the noisy workmen, or at least refrain from becoming emotionally invested in moments of annoyance or resentment. It’s worth maintaining perspective; the work being done benefits the entire community, and matters to me as well. The workmen are aware of me, and there has been sufficient communication that they are – when they think to be – making efforts to minimize how disrupting this is for me (and for my neighbors). They are quite a polite and considerate construction crew, generally – it’s still work, there are still verbs – and communication – involved. No way around it, some of this shit is disruptive; it’s not a personal attack. 🙂

A lovely autumn evening; little annoyances don't have to matter. I let them fall like leaves.

A lovely autumn evening; little annoyances don’t have to matter. I let them fall like leaves.

So here I am now. Relaxed. Content. Taking time for me, making room in my heart for awareness, perspective, and compassion, and generally enjoying my evening in spite of the noise, in spite of the disruptions, in spite of the shadows just behind the window blinds. It’s a pleasant evening, and there’s really nothing ‘extra’ that I need right now. This is enough. 🙂

 

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Categories Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Small Differences Matter

October 25, 2015 //
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I feel anxious. Well, no…actually, I don’t feel anxious at all from the perspective of emotion. What I feel feels like the emotion I call anxiety (and maybe it is, in some fashion), but there is nothing in my experience of the day to support such a feeling – or to cause it. What there is, though, is noise.

I woke up in tremendous pain this morning, and feeling quite stiff. I did all the usual things to cope with that physical experience, and looked forward to a relaxed day, contentedly doing laundry and watching the rain fall.  I’ve had that, so in that sense the day delivered well on its promise; the chainsaws were unnecessary, and unexpected. Yep. Chainsaws. Chainsaws and a pneumatic log splitter and an air compressor. It is not anything like a quiet Sunday, now. Today the landlady and her husband are cutting the lumber from the recently felled trees down to size and stacking it. I am unfortunate that the wood was piled directly in front of my apartment when the trees came down. The woodpile on which the newly cut wood is being stacked is on the other side of my apartment. The split logs are being carried via wheel barrow – quite possibly the noisiest one ever – around my apartment, along the sidewalk just outside the long west wall, currently strewn with small gravel rocks and mud, so making a rather horrible grinding noise as the wheelbarrow is dragged along on what sound like triangular wheels. I am surrounded by the sounds of work on a fucking Sunday. I don’t know how to communicate to people that getting some quiet actually matters for my physical health as well as my emotional health. There just isn’t any way for someone to understand what they don’t understand. It is unlikely that my landlady has any real awareness of what the persisting noise does to my consciousness; saying that it ‘affects my mood’ doesn’t adequately explain things – it would affect anyone’s ‘mood’. It does.

I wait it out. It will be over sooner or later. I can’t meditate. I can’t focus to read. I can’t write with any ease – even masking the noise with other noise isn’t helpful, I feel cross and aggressive. I certainly wouldn’t be able to nap, and I’d very much like to. I can’t paint or draw. I feel frustrated and on the edge of anger – and I know that it isn’t really about any of these emotions; this is a physical reaction to very irritating stimuli. I go through the steps of meditation even though my consciousness feels raw and irritated; I breathe, and I breathe again. I let go of the aggravation and relax – and I do it again. I just keep repeating gentle practices and processes. I find myself frustrated and help myself over it. I start feeling angry and aggressive, and I take a few more deep breaths, and remember the landlady’s face; she wasn’t enjoying doing this work on a Sunday, herself – it certainly wasn’t ever ‘about’ me. That small moment of compassion and sympathy matters, too; taking the time to view another person as fundamentally human also, and equal in the value of their experience compared to mine makes me far less likely to be inclined to place blame, make demands, or lash out in anger. It’s a worthwhile pause for consideration.

The way ahead is sometimes obscured with fallen leaves.

The way ahead may sometimes be obscured with fallen leaves.

Eventually the laundry is done, and a nice casserole for supper (and tomorrow’s lunch) is made. The house is generally tidy, and the bed remade with fresh linens. I see the sun peek through gray skies for the first time today. It’s finally quiet, too. A lovely hot cup of tea might be nice… or a bubble bath… a short nap might be quite pleasant… I breathe in the quiet, and feel myself relax as the quiet becomes more real minute by minute. I am pleased that I didn’t let the noise get to me, today; there’s still so much of the day left to enjoy. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Easier in the Abstract

October 24, 2015 //
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It’s been a very comfortable pleasant day. I slept in, and slept deeply. I walked to the farmer’s market, and assembled a very nice picnic lunch, and loaded it into my pack. I headed into the trees for a few more miles and hours of autumn leaves and birdsong.

Autumn rose hips along the trail.

Autumn rose hips along the trail.

Yesterday was okay, too. I did some great work, but had had so little rest I was more or less a zombie analyst, and didn’t notice the day go by, and don’t really remember that much about it. I got home shortly before 6 pm, and was crashed out not long after that. I was up again around 9, and stayed up some little while before returning to bed, and to a deep sleep rich with surreal dreams. Stress reaches this point where it both disrupts my sleep and requires ever so much more than usual amounts of rest to recover from it. I slept a lot last night. I napped this afternoon after my hike – one of those sudden urgent naps when sleep simply overcomes me and I must succumb to it.

Tonight is gentle and easy. The deep consciousness encompassing sleep of my nap this afternoon left me wrapped in drowsiness. I’ll probably go to bed early again tonight. No reason not to; one of the perks of adulthood is the opportunity to choose rest. That great boon is sometimes forgotten in the fuss and bother of all the other sorts of things I think I ‘have to’ get done; choosing rest, real rest, is sometimes the best thing I can do for myself – or my partners.

I am okay. I’ve still got work to do – this fragile vessel isn’t going to heal itself without some practices and some verbs. This broken brain needs a little support, structure, and patience to find some better ways to handle small challenges. Sometimes I am going to fall short of my expectations – or fail to meet my own needs in some important way. I’ll begin again. One step at a time, one practice at a time, one moment at a time – I can begin again.

It may not be the shortest path - but this journey isn't a race, or a contest - I'll just keep walking.

It may not be the shortest path – but this journey isn’t a race, or a contest – I’ll just keep walking.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

Shadows, Nightmares, Twists of Fate

October 19, 2015 //
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It’s a quiet evening, and I am alone with my headache and my arthritis, by choice. By mid-afternoon, my pain was just too much to find the thought of spending time with anyone else particularly enticing, and I asked my traveling partner for a rain check – as eager as we are to see each other, to cuddle, to laugh together, I am sometimes a bit of a lost soul when I hurt this much. Spreading that poison around is not a gesture of love.

Be love.

Be love.

I walked home thinking about the many ways that lovers communicate, and wondering how it is than anyone can ever justify being vile and inconsiderate to someone they love. Think it over for a moment – and just about at that moment when you’re at the edge of excusing some bit of heinous nastiness you may have recently visited upon someone you love by saying you didn’t mean to, or couldn’t help it – think about how many times you’ve shown greater self-restraint and not said something you felt was justified… because it could cost you your job. A job. I walked and wondered. How often have I – even with the little self-restraint as I can sometimes muster at all – how often have I held myself back from some angry remark  for a fucking job – but shown so little courtesy to a lover, or partner, that I would allow myself to say something that might be intentionally hurtful, diminish their value to me, or threaten their security in the relationship itself? Even once is too often! Even once is entirely incomprehensibly inappropriate between lovers. Seriously. Those sorts of words, those sorts of moments of unrestrained hostility are not love. Not only are they not love – they are not even adult. The anger of hurt children. Well…yeah. I do have this injury…  but… I don’t really find that my injury excuses treating someone I love worse than I treat my coworkers –  and I can do so much better, I mean, this is love we’re talking about! If I can generally and with exceptional reliability refrain from most bad behavior at work – how can I ever ever say to someone I love that I couldn’t do better in the way I treat them at home? It does take practice, but how is that not entirely acceptable, and needful? Isn’t love of far greater value than a job? Isn’t love worth practicing?

We choose our path, our words, our actions.

We choose our path, our words, our actions.

I’m not sure why I was thinking about all that, specifically, as I walked home. It’s been a very long time since I have had to deal with any of that. Shadows of old baggage. Remnants of nightmares. Maybe some relief that I’m not still ‘there, then’ with relationships that were a profound source of new pain. Relief that I am so much less heavily invested in old pain, too. Tonight I hurt – but it is only the more manageable hurt of headaches and back pain. Feeling my heart break hearing angry words is on an entirely other level of hurting, and there are no pills or prescriptions for heart breaks – and I am grateful to love and be loved by someone who recognizes the value of being love.

Perspective. What matters most?

Perspective. What matters most?

Attachment is a funny thing; I get so hung up on some detail that I earnestly want to be very real, and find myself unable to have the beautiful thing that is, or I fail to recognize what works for me because I am too busy struggling with what I’ve lost or can’t have. We are such complicated fucking monkeys. lol

Undisturbed by solitude.

Undisturbed by solitude.

I am enjoying the evening with myself. Listening to music I love. Feeling valued and respected by a man I value and respect in turn. Feeling valued and respected by the woman in the mirror. Content and unshaken. It has taken some hours to write even 683 words, and I wonder about that, too; I seem to write using fewer words when I write in the evenings, but it generally takes me much longer – and I’m not as certain that I’ve said what I thought I meant to… or anything worth reading significant, or insightful. I’m not bitching. I’m not feeling particularly critical on any point. It’s more the emotion that goes along with the funny face, head cocked to the side, of something I can’t quite fathom… “quizzical” is a word that comes to mind…only…it’s the wrong word for the moment. lol (…And here we quite possibly see the effect of fatigue on my injury as I begin to struggle to find words. Often. It is a source of ongoing frustration for me, but I don’t gloss over it anymore, or try to fake my way out of it; vulnerable frankness is a better fit for me. Your results may vary.)

I am tired. I still hurt. I am happily grooving to favorite tunes I’ve never heard before as I write. Think. Write some more. This is my life…at least…this is part of it, and it’s a really good part that I enjoy find meaningful. In this moment I can comfortably say ‘this is a really good part of my experience’ and it feels secure, safe, and comfortable; unthreatened. I don’t need this moment to also be the next moment. I am not regretting some other moment. No forever. No expectations of some moment beyond this one; I am so much more comfortable enjoying this one right now, just as it is. I have a slow back and forth conversation with my partner in the background while I write. It’s not an interruption; the conversation is paced to the things we are each doing, where we are.

Just in time to sit, quietly, to be still, and to listen...

Just in time to sit, quietly, to be still, and to listen…

The evening winds down slowly. Tomorrow I can begin again. 🙂

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words
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