Another lovely morning. I got through yesterday’s stressors and chaos with a bit of grace, and a lot of practice. There are no shortcuts, no magical cures “experts don’t want you to know about”, no means to an end that don’t require real effort… It’s all work and effort, and will, and practice. A lot of practice. My results vary. I make a point to appreciate the wins and celebrate moments of joy.
I’m grateful to see another sunrise.
I enjoyed my morning walk, and having the trail entirely to myself was a pleasant luxury. I slept well, and I feel good (aside from the usual amount of pain in the background, which I am mostly able to ignore so far). The fresh air fills my lungs and each breath feels truly life-giving in an interesting way. I think about love, as I walk, and when I stop for a moment to rest or take a picture.
“Hang in there,” my Traveling Partner’s doctor said yesterday, reassuring him that the healing process was going well, although uncomfortable (and yeah, painful sometimes). It felt like a long damned day to get to that moment. I felt pretty helpless and ineffective a lot of the time, but I did a good day’s work, and managed to “be there” for my partner when he needed me, even if only to provide comfort and love. I guess those things matter, too.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. Another day, another opportunity to begin again, to do better, to be my best self, to be a good friend, lover, and partner. To be. Awake and aware and filled with wonder. I take a moment to appreciate how far my journey has taken me. How far I have gone down this path. Content, mostly. Joyful, often. Even happy sometimes – more often than I ever understood could be possible. I’m fortunate. I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I sit with that thought awhile, just enjoying the mild summer morning for a few minutes before the work day begins.
I’m in a wretched vile mood, twisted with pain, angry with… humanity. Feeling pretty over “everyone’s” bullshit, greed, and negativity. It’s not my best look. This morning I would happily give the whole world a giant middle finger, a “fuck you” as a greeting, and pull up a chair to sit back and watch the world burn.
…Did you even know I had it in me?…
I woke fairly comfortably, feeling level-headed and mellow, in a good mood and not in much pain. I was barely dressed to head out for a pleasant morning walk when that all went screeching off course, abruptly veering into a seriously shitty mood, neck and back spasms, my headache roaring to its full potential, and just not in a good place at all. Does it matter why? Not really. Humans being human.
…And here I am…
I get to the trail after a drive that could have been quite pleasant if my head were in a different place. The sunrise was gorgeous. I saw it. Traffic was light. It’s a Saturday. I hit the trail without any lingering. It’s rather crowded this morning, and having to endure the presence of other people, and hear the sound of voices, grates on my nerves. Aggravating. I am feeling so fucking over humanity this morning. I don’t want to share the trail or the moment. My steps come down hard as I walk a more aggressive pace than usual. I’ll probably pay for that later.
There’s more to the moment than my emotions.
I walk on, trying to reset my experience and begin again. It’s not always easy. I am still seething. I breathe, exhale, and walk on… one step at a time, and trying to let go of my irritation each time I see someone on the trail or hear voices approaching. I’d very much like to be quite alone, right now, but that’s clearly not going to happen.
…Emotions are not facts…
…The plan is not the experience…
…The journey is the destination (and it has to begin where I actually am)…
…I can choose not to endure “second dart” suffering…
…There are verbs involved…
…My results vary…
…This will pass…
I breathe in the fresh Spring air. I exhale as a slow sigh. I’m “not there yet”, but I keep walking. Eventually I will get somewhere. One step at a time. Incremental change. Practicing the practices. Beginning again.
Our behavior in the world and in our relationships affects everyone we interact with. I reflect as I walk… How can I best process my experience without adversely affecting other people, including my Traveling Partner? How do I proceed by being the person I most want to be? If I were comfortably able to process my anger effectively without expressing it explosively or pushing a lot of negative energy into shared emotional space, what would that look like? How is that done? (It’d be nice to have a fucking “user’s guide” for managing emotional skillfully. )
I walk with my thoughts, making a point of being politely appreciative of pleasant greetings from passers-by and returning a wave or a smile. I don’t really want to deal with people, but shitty moods have an element of potential for “contagion” – we are social creatures – and I really don’t want to be a force for evil and negativity in the world, not even on a small scale. No one benefits from that; life is already difficult enough. So… I walk with my thoughts and work on getting past my bullshit, so I can enjoy the day.
I get to my halfway point and sit down to write a bit.
By the time I get to this paragraph, the sun is well up in the sky, warming my shoulders and back as I write. I feel some better. My emotions, at least, are tamed. I’m not seething with unexpressed anger, now. I’m not having to force myself to view the world through a positive lens by some act of will. I’m not immediately annoyed to see another human being on the trail. Aside from the physical pain, I’m mostly okay. “Fine”, for most values of fine.
I take my self-reflection further, and make room for gratitude; it’s a beautiful morning, and I will see a specialist this morning who reliably manages to alleviate a good portion of my pain, if only temporarily. It’s enough and I am grateful for the skilled care. I give a moment to soft feelings of love and care for my Traveling Partner, too. His day got off to a difficult start. We’ve each got our own challenges, each having our own experience, but there’s no shortage of deep and abiding love between us. He’s a worthy traveling companion on life’s journey.
I sigh, sitting in the sunshine, watching a chipmunk approaching me from the side, hesitantly. I watch, trying to avoid being obvious about it. She darts away when I move ever so slightly. “I get it”, I think to myself, “humans are the worst.”
…I breathe, exhale, and relax, and make the effort to let that feeling go…
I look at the time. If I timed this right, it’ll be time to head to my appointment, just as I get back to the car. It’s definitely time to head back down the trail, and begin again.
I slept poorly, last night, when I slept at all. It rained through the night, and I listened to it when I was awake, between restless naps. I figure the most likely cause of my restless night was having to abruptly discontinue several regular medications in preparation for a diagnostic procedure later today. I probably should have expected the difficult night.
I finally woke to stormy skies, and my Traveling Partner also (already, temporarily) awake. He was eager for me to get on out of the house for my walk and expressed hope that I would be gone “a long time “. It’s a work day, on top of a day with an appointment in it, and a day that follows a night of truly shitty “sleep”. I’ll plan to do my best to treat the hapless humans on my path with kindness and gentleness; they can’t know what I’m going through right now.
My head aches all sorts of ways. I find some limited comfort in an iced coffee (having already confirmed I would not have to give that up, too). My back aches (with my arthritis), on this rainy morning. My tinnitus is loud (so loud). Complicating all of these, my head is stuffy from not taking allergy medicine, my guts are all churned up (no idea what may have caused that) , my “sense of things” is just… off. I feel uncomfortable and irritable.
…It’s still a work day… my partner still also had a poor night of sleep…
I got a walk in, between rain showers. Now I’m contentedly sipping coffee in the car, watching the sky shift from ominous gray storm clouds to bands of blue sky peeking between clouds that hint at the chance of sunshine… but I see showers in the distance, moving across the horizon.
I start my work day from this pleasant spot, catching up my email and checking Slack channels. I pause for a moment of gratitude that this exists as an option. I can linger here pretty comfortably, and let my Traveling Partner sleep awhile longer before I take a seat in my office, and risk waking him with a meeting, or the sound of my typing.
As quickly as the sun broke through the storm clouds, it disappears again, and I see a rain shower approaching. I don’t much care, one way or the other; I can’t stop it from raining, and may as well enjoy the moment anyway. It’s just weather.
I sigh quietly to myself. I’m prepared for today to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and possibly a bit difficult, but so far things are okay. It’s enough and I feel pretty contented, generally. I breathe, exhale, and relax. I do my best to set myself up for success…
It’s time to end something in favor of beginning something else. New beginnings often follow some ending quite closely.
I’m sipping my coffee wondering for the first time in days “what’s going on in the world, I wonder?” I guess I will know later on. For now it’s me, this cup of coffee, and this quiet morning. Very few other people are awake yet, with the exception of some early risers heading to lake to fish. Camps are quiet. I ground my coffee yesterday, to avoid waking people to the sound of a portable burr grinder. This is a very good cup of coffee, and the morning chill doesn’t hurt the experience at all.
I fuss with a torn cuticle that developed yesterday, which is how I discovered there’s no nail kit in my backpack, my assorted other gear and gear boxes, nor is there one in my fucking handbag! Which, while I am on about oddities, why the hell did I even bring my damned handbag? It doesn’t belong in the woods. lol I make a mental note about ensuring there’s an easily accessible nail kit in my backpack. Definitely want to do that. So far I’ve managed to leave the torn cuticle alone. Didn’t know I had it in me to do that.
Coffee first… then tear down my camp, and repack and stow the gear for the trip home. If I do things correctly, I can stop by the storage unit on my way home and unload everything that isn’t kept at the house. Seems smart…
The moon lit the path, no headlamp required.
I got adequate rest, but of poor quality. I managed to wake up having to pee 3 times before the night was over. I definitely feel renewed appreciation for indoor plumbing and hot running water! I’ll be glad to be home (for a lot of reasons, including missing my Traveling Partner). It took more than two hours to get set up here. It’ll likely take about the same to tear down and repack, but mostly because I want to take the time to do it right, and make sure everything is put into the correct bin or box, and stowed safely for travel. I brought way more gear than I needed. More food, too, and although I never needed any of the freeze dried hiker meals, it was a secure feeling to have them available.
…Good coffee…
…Make breakfast, or just start packing…?
…Probably just start packing… but coffee first. Then I will begin again.
This morning the sun is shining in my eyes, though I’ve lowered the window shades to cut the glare. The season continues to evolve, Spring towards summer, and here I am with the sun in my eyes on a lovely Spring morning. I’m grateful. I don’t even mind the sun in my eyes. 😀
Small wins can make big differences. My appointment yesterday had a pleasant outcome; I don’t need surgery for a thing that seemed quite a big deal (to be something so small)… and as it turns out, it’s not something I need be worried about (at least for now, and maybe not at all). Win. I’ll take it. 😀 I sip my coffee with the sun shining in my eyes, feeling grateful. No surgery looming over me. Nice. I even had a very good experience with the medical care, and the physician, generally – I’m making a point to pause to appreciate that, because it hasn’t always been the case, at all, and I’m still dragging around some baggage over that.
I sigh and smile to myself. Feels like a good morning. It’s Friday, and it’s a short work day. I’ve got a manicure appointment at noon, and then home to start the weekend. Feels good. I sit with the good feelings awhile – there’s definitely value in staying with the good feelings for a little while. I think most of us don’t even notice the way we linger in our shittiest moments, reviving them for further scrutiny over and over again (as if that’s at all helpful), then just glossing over our moments of joy and contentment as though these fleeting moments somehow have less value than the shitty ones. (Maybe don’t do that, eh?) When I finally did learn how much value there is in lingering over my small joys and simple moments of contentment or delight, and learned to savor what is good in my life, the way my life felt overall changed a lot. Instead of a fairly miserable experience of existence pocked with occasional relief that felt both too-brief, and also likely to be “a trap” setting me up for future worse misery, my life became characterized by calm and contentment, with occasional experiences of sorrow, grief, frustration, or anger. Disappointment became… a moment. Anger became… transitory. Life began to feel pretty good, generally. I still have to make a point to practice “taking in the good” and savoring the best moments my experience has to offer. I don’t avoid or dodge life’s challenges, or pretend I can “manifest” them away from being what they are – but I can cope, because I know they are temporary. Incremental change over time – becoming what I practice – has meant that my life is, day-to-day, pretty good these days. It’s nice. (10 out of 10; do recommend. lol)
How does a person even begin to make this transformation? I think it starts simply enough; anger does not easily compete with gratitude. When I find myself beginning to feel angry, I deliberately pause and consider what I’m grateful for in the situation I find myself in or with regards to the person I am angry with. It helps “turn down the heat” in that moment, and gives me a chance to regain perspective. Similarly, with sorrow, with disappointment… gratitude is a great way to balance perspective. It’s not about “faking it”; there are often legitimate details in a challenging circumstance that we may feel grateful for, if we just take a moment to consider it from that perspective. Anxiety and fear work a little differently (for me), instead of gratitude, I reach for my curiosity, and my desire to know more and understand more deeply. The point, really, is to spin the difficulty such that I’m not mired in what is most difficult, so much as viewing it through the lens of other aspects of that experience – or making a point to deliberately consider something else altogether different, that brings other emotions into play, “unsticking me” from my hurt, my anger, or other similarly painful, harder to manage, emotional experiences.
…And “being emotional” is not an insult. The hidden win is to develop “emotional intelligence” and reliably good skill at appropriate emotional regulation (which can be developed… it takes practice).
I smile and sip my coffee. I take a moment to enjoy my breakfast salad (how did this so easily become “a thing”? Why haven’t I always done this? I feel so good in the mornings these days…). Another weekend already here… and that means another shot (Ozempic), another weigh-in, another opportunity to reflect on progress and become aware of slow steady change. I’m counting down the days to my camping trip, too… that’d be 9 days to go, now. 😀
What defines a luxury?
I make time for early morning conversation with my Traveling Partner. We talk about the deck (needs repairs) and the hot tub (older and super noisy), and the discussion quickly becomes the sort of productive strategy and planning conversation that really brings a new project to life… we decide to shut down the hot tub “permanently” (this one, at least), in favor of removing it and replacing it after the deck is repaired (rebuilt) with improved quality of life features in mind. These are things we’d talked about when we bought the house (4 years ago), but other things (reasonably) had to come first (like the roof). Homeownership has so many qualities I love over renting – “a place of my own” being top of my personal list there – and I do love the flexibility to change things as we’d like, but … damn… so much adulting required, and effort, and commitment, and time, and money… and… I’m okay with all of it. It’s exciting and satisfying, as each project begins and finishes. My Traveling Partner has great ideas and the skills needed to bring this to life. I’m eager to help, and see how things turn out. I’m definitely a fan of replacing the hot tub with a more energy efficient, quieter model. (I’ll bet the neighbors will be too; this old thing is super noisy!) Having a hot tub feels almost non-negotiable for me at this point, though… I get so much value out of it (pain relief, improvement mobility), now we’ve just got to sort out the details…
My thoughts wander from the here and now to a future I can see but can’t touch (yet). I feel hopeful – for a lot of reasons – and grateful. It’s a good feeling. I feel wrapped in love, and fortunate to have a really good partnership that enhances my life. I’m ready to begin again. 😀
Evening Light 