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So Tired, So Much to Do

January 23, 2016 //
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I am enjoying another quiet morning, and the joy of spending more precious time with my traveling partner. We both sleep much more easily, more deeply, and generally better when we sleep alone, each for our own reasons. I have, over days, been getting less sleep than I need, and averaging only about 5 hours a night, and rarely more than 2 or three uninterrupted hours. My typing and spelling are affected; I can see that as I write. My emotional balance is taking the hit this morning, although it has not yet expressed itself in any noteworthy way. I feel it.

I'd rather be sleeping...

I’d rather be sleeping…

I’m so tired. I’ve got days of fairly intensive manual labor ahead of me for the move, and more critically still; i have days ahead requiring my planning, cognitive, and judgement making skills be at their best. I can’t really afford, logistically, to spend the weekend recreationally in its entirety, there is simply too much to be done. The more of it I can do myself, the less expensive the move is. The less expensive the move is, the more available funds I have to ensure the bedroom in the new place set aside for my traveling partner when he stays with me can be furnished nicely straight away.

I’m tired. Very tired. I have ‘that headache’ – it’s the TBI headache most common when I am deeply fatigued. I have to think through the headache. I have to work through the fatigue. I have to communicate through the cognitive challenges cropping up as I get more sleep deprived. Maintaining my emotional balance and self-sufficiency, and also managing to remain quite flexible to the constant changes of plans around me is becoming seriously difficult. In part, these challenges are inflicted by the lack of consideration or willingness to plan of a person not only not here in this lovely quiet place, but also not even actually part of my life. My traveling partner’s plans get messed with by his Other, and the ripple effect hits me. At this point I am sufficiently fatigued to be less civilized about that fairly irritating reality, and in an effort to address everything I could, I dragged my unable-to-sleep self out of bed far earlier than a Saturday demands and spent an hour meditating, before the anticipated time my traveling partner’s alarm would be due to go off. I personally find that while it is wholly understandable to be feeling uncivilized, I am not comfortable with behaving thusly; meditation helps tremendously, and I get my perspective back.

Sometime later, I check the clock. The sky is beginning to lighten up quite a bit. It’s not so early now – and definitely after the time I expected my partner up and about, preparing to be on his way. No alarm. FUCK – this hits one my oldest childhood triggers hard. Memories of my hungover alcoholic father passed out as his alarm rings, Mom unresponsive beside him, and my childish dread that something terrible will go wrong if Daddy doesn’t go to work, and reminders to “Be a good girl, Baby, if Daddy doesn’t wake up, you make sure I do.” Panic. Anxiety. But… My traveling partner is not my father. He’s a free will adult with an alarm clock of his own. I dither. I’m too tired to think clearly. What to do? Anything? Will he be annoyed if he oversleeps? Did I not understand his plans? Shit. I gently wake him and just let him know his alarm did not go off. He confirms he changed his mind about his plans. I mumble something I hope is reassuring and exit the bedroom, hoping he can at least get easily back to sleep and catch up on his own deficit; he wasn’t having an easy time of sleeping next to me last night, just as the night prior I struggled to sleep next to him.

I closed the door quietly behind me. Now what? I haven’t had as much uninterrupted leisure of late for writing, and sit down with my thoughts in my mind, and let the morning unfold. I have no idea what the day holds. Don’t know what my traveling partner will do. Don’t know whether I will also have to change my plans, and don’t even know whether I am frustrated, annoyed or disturbed by any of it… I’m just so tired… and there is so much to do. I may just wrap myself up in a cuddly bathrobe and crash out on the rug, and let fatigue-stress tears slide quietly down my cheeks until I manage to sleep…

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

Or… I could make coffee. It’s Saturday. There’s no rush; that’s harder to remember when I am so tired. Most of the timeline planning, and basic strategy around how my move is organized so far was planned before I went short of sleep. I can trust my skillful rested self to take care of my less skillful fatigued self – we’re good at this now! I check my earlier notes; Saturday is identified for reservation making, changing over services, doing basic housekeeping – and getting the rest I need for the week to come; I don’t start moving until Tuesday.

Some solutions are practical.

Some solutions are practical.

I could do without the headache. I decide to put self-care first today, and take the day as it comes. I start water for coffee, and push the morning forward a bit at a time. It will require kindness with myself, and regular reminders that I have reached certain limits that can’t be ignored without putting me at risk of having some unpleasant emotional experience. It’s been a while since I have been at such risk on this level. Life’s curriculum includes pop quizzes. Sometimes things we want, or enjoy, come with ‘strings attached’ – other things that must be managed, mastered, or endured. Before anything else, I remind myself that the beloved human being in the other room is also tired, and being twisted into unexpected disorder by yet another being with her own challenges and agenda. I remind myself that my traveling partner is – beyond any of that – someone I love greatly, and who means me no ill will whatever. It’s a lovely morning, so far. I think I’ve got this. 🙂

 

 

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, Words

Investing the Best

January 20, 2016 //
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There was a time in my life when I was pretty certain that I was so entirely broken, in some fashion or another, that any contribution I could possibly make in my relationships would be a material one – or sex. That was the limit of what I thought I had to offer the world, or a partner; if I couldn’t buy it, or provide the manual labor, or do the sex thing, what else was there, really? Well, art. There was art. I am hopeful that I don’t have to point out what an incredibly limiting – and self-fulfilling – perspective that was.

Be love.

Be love.

I say “be love” as though what I mean is obvious. Perhaps it isn’t, and maybe a gentle morning over a good coffee is a nice time to clarify? It isn’t as if “be love” is something I came up with – because, if  it were…first, what a tragic state for the world to discover love so late, and second… well, damn, what about all those love songs? So, yeah, not my original thoughts, and surely there are other people who have written more better words with greater clarity on the subject of love, generally. So…if you’re after more better words with great clarity about love, I suggest Thich Nhat Hanh, Leo Buscaglia, or, if you’re ‘not there yet’ any of a number of books on loving the person in the mirror, which does have to come first, as it turns out, to love another with any real skill…have you checked out my reading list? 😉

The love thing is a big deal. It drives a lot of marketing, and therefore a great deal of profit-making goes on associated with love (I’m looking your way Valentine’s Day!). It’s clearly something human primates favor. Are you ‘getting your share’? Are you still thinking of it in those terms? I spent a lot of years stuck on the idea that if love were ‘real’ – and I wasn’t convinced it might be until well past 30, and couldn’t seem to figure out ‘how to have it’ until I was well past 40 – if love were real at all, why wasn’t I ‘getting my share’?? Ouch. Well, in fairness, there’s so much media pressure on us all regarding love we easily succumb to the visions of love we see in advertising, on television and in movies – how can what we see at home compete or compare? We are each so human – and no one is providing us handy re-writes of our script; our best moments are at risk of going unnoticed because we are so busy looking for something very different. How suck is that? You see where this is headed, right?

Mindful love. Yep. I couldn’t fathom it for a while. Mindfulness… check. Meditation… check. Awareness… check. Present in the moment… check. Treating myself well… check. Each concept falling into place, building on each other, and more than once I returned to my therapists office with this question “how does mindful love work?” It sounds like a simple enough question, and I couldn’t quite answer it in words – however many books I read. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the part about mindfulness that I wasn’t fully grasping… it was love. 🙂

Now we’re getting somewhere! Is this the hot sexy part? With the tips for pleasing a lover? W00t!! Go sex!!

Oh… wait… nope. Sex is sex. Love is…

Love.

Love.

By moving into my own place, while also maintaining a romantic loving relationship with my traveling partner, I did something wonderful for me; I opened my eyes to some experiences about love that I hadn’t been able to understand so simply before. Some of the lessons have been complicated. Some of them have been so simple that they tripped me up while I sought to understand them as something more complicated than they were. Love matters so much that I figured I’d share some of the things I am learning – I expect that as with really first-rate self-care, learning to love well is likely a lifetime of practice, and similarly many of the practices themselves are so simple they mislead one into thinking they are also effortless – nope, in loving too there are verbs involved. Here come some verbs now…

Invest the best in your relationships that you have to offer. This is so simple and fundamental on the surface, but it is a rich deep practice that has kept me on my toes for months now, and until this past weekend, I didn’t have simple words to describe what I might mean by it. So here it is – invest the best in love. Kindness, a welcoming approach, listening deeply, and ensuring that the assumptions in my day-to-day thinking regarding my loving relationships are positive ones have nothing at all to do with money, with sex, or with material goods – without these things, though, no amount of money will buy me love.

An easy example, and common, if I am short-tempered with a loved one in a brief moment, surely it can be understood as part of being human, and an appropriate apology and making it right allows everyone to move on. If, however, my short-temperedness is a character trait that is recognizably ‘who I am’ it will likely undermine love over time. Other things work that way too; sarcasm, mockery, meanness, and cruelty have no role to play in love – defending their use by saying “it’s just who I am”, or by calling it a joke, may not be enough to stop love’s erosion over time, particularly if the user of such behaviors is unaware of the hurtful effect. (If the user is entirely aware of the hurtful effect of such things, and uses them for amusement or in anger without regard to the hurt they cause – that’s not love.)

This weekend, I mused with regret at some point that I don’t have money laying about in capital amounts with which to support my traveling partners endeavors – how wonderful it would be to be able to invest heavily in a solid business proposal, see it get off the ground, and watch his success and independence grow! I felt, ever so briefly, that I ‘don’t have enough to offer’. In material terms, that may be true (it also may not be true; ‘enough’ is a slippery concept). I realized as we talked through that particular conversation that what love asks of me has nothing whatever to do with money, and it’s never been money that was the strength of this relationship; emotions don’t work that way. Love is an emotion. Suddenly, I felt unsteady in my understanding of the world – I awoke to the vast riches I have to offer my relationships (and they are vast indeed).

If love isn’t looking for a cash investment, what is it looking for that I do have plentifully? How about – are you ready for this, because we’re all a lot wealthier than we realize, if we choose to be so – kindness. Yep. Day-to-day kindness and gentle words. Patience. Deep listening – really put myself on pause to hear what my partner is saying without ‘waiting for my turn to talk’. Hearing – really hearing my partner, the words, the intent, the meaning, the emotion – really ‘getting it’, because they matter, and it doesn’t cost a thing besides my good intentions, and a verb or two. Isn’t the basic willingness to do these things sort of implied when I say “I love you”? Making room in my experience to share the journey with another – graciously, generously, merrily – and making the good moments of greater value by savoring them, sharing them, exploring them, and giving them more of my precious mortal time, than I spend ruminating over some momentary misunderstanding, or hurt feelings over thoughtless words. How about vulnerability, too? Sharing life from the perspective that we are each very human, and being open to sharing our selves and experience in a raw and honest way – still being kind, still speaking gently, still listening deeply… it sounds easy. It’s worth practicing. It takes practice – invested, willful, engaged practice. And more of that, again and again.

Yelling, irritability, contentious disagreeable conversation, argument, fussing, insults, anger – not a bit of this is love. The love is in the quiet spaces in between, and in the laughter – and if we don’t invest the best we have to offer in the love we wish to enjoy, the love will slowly be squeezed out by thoughtlessness, negativity, anger, attachment to expectations, and disappointment when our assumption that love ‘should’ overlook our nastiness and bullshit doesn’t turn out to be true. Love isn’t a tantrum; it’s the long-term investment in what is best within ourselves.

Before we go too far, I want to be clear about one small detail – I don’t know of any way to actually ‘fake love’. This isn’t a ‘fake it until you make it’ sort of area of life, and a saccharine smile and a terse insincere “I’m fine” when that is clearly not the case isn’t love, either; it’s a lie. It is possible to speak honestly and sincerely – and also gently. (Listening helps with that.) Seriously. It is. Try it out sometime. It’s quite a lovely experience, I find. Yep. It does take practice. 🙂

Love is in the small things - strange for such a big deal.

Love is in the small things – strange for such a big deal.

Today is a good day to be love. Today is a good day to invest the best of what I have to offer in the relationships that matter most to me. Today is a good day to practice loving well. I’ll start with the woman in the mirror. Love can change the world.

 

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Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

I Could Be Counting Down the Days

January 10, 2016 //
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It’s true. I’m sipping my morning coffee, half-wondering if I need to adjust my process, or choose different beans…and gently discouraging myself from eagerly planning to move. I consider the move, I’ve organized my thoughts on it, and made some decisions about how it can best be handled – all in the abstract, aside from some exterior photos of the new unit, and a carefully examination of the floor plan. What I haven’t done is get a lot of boxes, and start filling those with books, small items, etc – I could be pre-packing, and I’m not. Not yet.

I’ve no doubt that I will make this move… except for just one small but important detail; price. The unit will be repriced after the remodel is entirely completed. If I can’t afford the price, I won’t be moving – at least not as soon. I’ve come so far with my traveling partner’s guidance, support, and skilled coaching, I will likely be buying a little place of my own within the next two years regardless; the comfortable near-certainty and lack of insecurity about the possibility feels very good. Stable. I have choices and, since choices to be made in the future are not ideally acted upon today, I chill and smile about the possible new apartment without taking further action in this moment. I continue to sip my coffee and let the morning unfold around my thoughts.

52 is late in the game to be buying a first home…and this won’t be my first. It will be my first unencumbered by domestic violence though, which is pretty huge… and it’s going to be the first that I’ll be wise to consider with retirement specifically in mind – I’d like to retire before I am 65, and the home I buy may be the last home I buy, when the time comes.  I want a place that is mine – that I can redecorate or rebuild, as suits me. A home in which replacing the carpets or flooring is entirely up to me, and in which I can freely replace all the light fixtures with whatever I choose without asking anyone at all, would be very nice. Comfort doesn’t have to be expensive, neither does luxury, but too often I find that I can’t ‘get permission’ for small changes that would be so wonderful while living in a rental, or as a housemate. Besides all that, I earnestly want to be able to leave this world knowing, when the time comes, that the choices I have made in life benefit my loves after my departure! I would feel considerable joy knowing that my traveling partner, although grieving, would be grieving his loss from a secure home, his home – unconcerned about going without and able to focus on healing his heart. “Feeling homeless” or displaced is something both he and I have endured far too often in life, already.

Be love.

Be love.

That gets me thinking about feeling secure in life – and in love – and how often people allow anger to cause them to say things to each other that specifically and directly undercut the emotional security of those they claim they love most. “I hate you!” “Get out!” “Why don’t you just go?!” “I don’t want you here!” I hope I live the entire remainder of my life not ever saying something so horrible and distancing to someone I love. How brutally unkind, how lacking in any compassion, how… mean, simply and frankly mean, to say such things to a loved one. How do you justify it (if you have said or done such things)? Isn’t the better choice to make note of our own suffering, and take care of ourselves before we lash out with pure uncensored nastiness toward someone we’ve claimed we love? Seriously? When I see that kind of thing unfolding, I nearly always find myself also wondering “How is it anyone sees this as being ‘love’ at all?”

One great relationship best practice I follow these days is; I don’t threaten the emotional security of my loved ones by withholding affecting, or being mean, when I am angry. I make the effort to replace emotional attacks with authenticity, vulnerability, and listening deeply. Just that. Surely if I love the person I am angry with, the better choice (versus attacking them) is to take care of my own emotional needs (put my own oxygen mask on first) – which really doesn’t leave time for attacking people – and then reaching out to my hurting loved one, connecting, talking, and reaching a comfortable mutual understanding – ideally with all hurts soothed, and the wreckage tidied up with hugs, kisses, and real affection, and because we started with love, why would we end anywhere else? 🙂 There are, of course, verbs involved, and The Big 5 (Respect, Reciprocity, Consideration, Compassion, and Openness) make an important appearance, too.

Treating our loves truly well requires awareness, the choice moment to moment to do so, and practice.  It also requires the basic assumption that our loves mean us no harm, hold us in high esteem, want the best for us in life, and are most specifically and earnestly not “trying to start shit”*. That by itself is pretty huge; if you go around all the time assuming your loved ones have it in for you, aren’t playing fair, don’t look out for your needs, don’t have you in mind at all… well… I gotta wonder first why you think that person loves you if those things are true – and if they aren’t true (or you haven’t made any effort to verify your suspicions clear-headedly in a fact-based way in the first place)… um… wtf is your problem? How do you call those feelings love, yourself? What is it, exactly, that you think love offers you? It definitely took me a while to sort that one out for myself. 🙂

Love.

Love.

My thoughts wind around slowly to values and value statements, generally. I find myself chuckling about the ‘company values’ at work; some of them are two or three sentences and include contradictory statements. I generally find that a ‘value’ can be stated quite simply, and most commonly with a single word. If it takes a sentence – or more – to state a value, it tends to communicate [to me] that the value being expressed is not well understood by the individual making the statement. Sometimes value statements are deliberately unclear, in some cases because the value is being hidden rather than expressed directly. The nature of values – and value statements – became much more important to me when I began, rather late in life, to re-explore my own values explicitly. My ‘Big 5‘ developed out of those conversations with myself.

The power of mindfulness practices to spark honest self-reflection and support self-awareness, as well as awareness generally, has been an important source of personal growth, and necessary for developing a sustainable condition of day-to-day contentment and joy (without needing to aspire to be anything other than entirely human). I don’t really need to count down the days until I move – I will or I won’t, and in time I’ll know which, and that will be plenty soon enough to start a countdown. I don’t really need to count down the days since the last time I hung out with my traveling partner – I’ll see him again, soon enough, and each visit is a lifetime of its own to be cherished, savored, and enjoyed, no counting or score-keeping required. There is so much less sensation of rushing, being rushed, urgency or panic these days. It is enough to enjoy the journey as it is. 🙂

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

 

 

*It should go without saying that if you mean someone ill, willfully treat them poorly, want them to suffer, and are regularly actually trying to provoke them into anger, fear, jealously or sorrow, you really seriously honestly just do not get to say you “love” that person – because love doesn’t behave that way. I can at least hope anyone treated thusly will have or gain the wisdom to understand they are not being loved!

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words

I Woke Anxious

January 7, 2016 //
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It’s true. This morning I woke well ahead of the alarm clock, but late enough that I initially figured I’d just go ahead and get up…I woke anxious. No obvious cause for the anxiety, at least in that waking moment that it was the thing owning my awareness. As I allowed myself to become conscious other things shifted into my awareness: my head was stuffy, and I had to pee. I got up to deal with those very practical matters, and as I did so I wondered if the source of my ‘anxiety’ was simply these biological experiences of being human – could I take a chance on returning to sleep? I might not sleep… I might sleep and wake up groggy… I could just cuddle up in the warm blankets awhile longer without worrying about sleep one way or the other – I felt ‘rested’, although I wasn’t convinced I wanted to be awake.

I pulled the covers around me, compromising on the sleep/no sleep dilemma by choosing meditation – in corpse pose, wrapped in blankets. lol I woke when the alarm went off, without any anxiety, and smiling. I noticed when I woke that the headache I had the night before was gone – suggesting perhaps it was not gone when I had awakened earlier. This would not be the first time I have beaten back anxiety by taking care of this fragile vessel in practical ways, and refraining from investing additional attention in the anxiety itself. I’m not sure it counts as a ‘practice’ and it’s not one of those ‘100% effective!’ things – there are definitely verbs involved, and a certain genial tolerance that it won’t always be so simple is definitely required.

How much of my anxiety used to be caused simply by treating myself poorly day-to-day, largely unaware of it, generally not paying any attention to my own needs until forced to by some emotional storm, or physical failure? How much anxiety was caused by simply not hearing myself, not giving myself the consideration and respect that I continued to seek in the world, and all the resentment that went along with not finding it anywhere?  I’m glad that things as simple (although not effortless) as meditation, good self-care, being considerate of my own needs and boundaries, and treating myself as well as I would ask others to treat me (and then some!) have so much power to reduce [my] anxiety. [Your results may vary.]

In spite of the headache and a trying day yesterday, I enjoyed hanging out with my traveling partner in the evening after work. It wasn’t a dinner date – we just hung out. It wasn’t a booty call. Seriously – we just hung out. We talked intimately, warmly, connecting on that heart & soul level so common to dear longtime friends – and often so rare in long-term romantic relationships of many years. We are not together ‘out of habit’, or ritual, or despair, or… He and I are together by choice. We enjoy each other greatly. We choose each other again and again. Literally ‘in sickness and in health’ – I am fortunate that my traveling partner on life’s journey is far more than a romantic partner – he’s a best friend, a partner in work and play, a cook in a shared kitchen, an adventurer with whom I can adventure, an adviser, a coach, a buddy, a wingman – and my dear love. I’m doubly fortunate that we are intellectual equals, have shared interests, and are similarly competent in very different areas of life – a hell of a partnership, honestly. 😀

Love.

Love.

This morning isn’t fancy or exciting, or extraordinary in any way. The anxiety is gone – no idea why it was there, or why it isn’t there now. Doesn’t matter, and I don’t plan to dig into it. It’s enough that the anxiety is gone, and a new day begins. I am sipping my coffee contentedly, listening to music. I’ll get some housework done before work, and when I get home I’ll have a quiet evening ahead of me – maybe a movie tonight? I lose interest almost immediately; I’m reading a book that really has my attention, and I’ll probably come home, make a cup of tea, put my feet up and read until evening fades to night.

When I was a kid still living at home, reading was my escape and my refuge from the drama of family life. When I became an adult, I lost that somehow – couldn’t read without some quiet, some stillness, fewer interruptions. Rather than find the quiet I needed, for many years I had mostly given up reading in favor of the condensed concentrated entertainment products available for video consumption. Easier. (Also a sharable experience – how many families endure their challenges by painting over them with a bland wash of media entertainment, rather than facing them and resolving them, talking together, using the verbs?) I began picking up books again at about the same time I begin writing this blog – the Reading List developed quickly as I gobbled up relevant books desperate to find my way out of The Nightmare City in which I seemed to be so trapped. I still read now, finding it intellectually nourishing, and a convenient way to continue to build on my understanding of life and the world, to keep my mind young, and the results are hard to argue with – learning does so much to keep life engaging and interesting!

My traveling partner asked me about the book in conversation. His gentle awareness of my injury is there in the background; he has learned to help out in so many little ways with my recovery, generally. He asks me about the book knowing I have trouble articulating material I am reading – answering the questions, as difficult as it can feel for me, is a way of solidifying new knowledge, and figuring out where I am not actually comprehending new material fully, for further review. I will come back to the book tonight eager to revisit ideas I tried – and failed – to share. The deeper understanding matters to continued growth. He listens patiently, and doesn’t press when I stumble – he knows I will come back to it with a deeper more complete understanding, having heard questions about the material that will help me build that deeper understanding, myself. There is so much power in partnership. The reciprocity is critical; I return the favor, listening deeply when he talks about his experience, too, asking questions, listening to the answers, feeling feelings, honoring experience – ‘being there’.

Be love.

Be love.

Maybe that’s really what makes a good partnership – the ‘being there’ in the moment, fully engaged in the interaction with that other person, no other agenda, not ‘waiting to talk’, no rush, no pressure – just together in a shared moment?

Today is a good day to share an experience with someone. Today is a good day to listen with my whole self, and give my undivided attention to someone’s words. Today is a good day to be, and to ‘be there’. Today is a good day to change the way I interact with the world. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, Words

Just Past This Headache

January 2, 2016 //
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I am having a very good day. It’s wintry and quite cold – literally freezing – and I built my day around a practical sort of errand that didn’t turn out as planned, and another that turned out quite precisely as planned, and in between I hung out with my traveling partner for a little while. A very good day, indeed.

What matters most?

What matters most?

The afternoon sunshine streams through the patio door, heating my wee apartment nicely; it’s a wasted effort if I forget to close the vertical blinds as the sun begins to dip low, because the heat gained is quickly lost through the glass on a cold day, once the sunshine is gone. There is a luxurious quality to the passive heat of sunshine on glass that my senses tell me differs from the heat of the heater, although I have no way to confirm that very subjective perception. I just enjoy the feeling of the sunshine reaching through the glass, across the room, and bathing me in light and warmth. It’s a lovely moment, in spite of this headache, which developed some short time ago, while I stood in the cold waiting for a bus. I suspect it will dissipate with continued comfort, warmth, and a nice cup of tea or coffee… It’s a bit late for coffee; I decide on tea and put on the kettle and some classical music. Baroque – light on the ears, gentle on the soul, it fills out the background with something more pleasant that the sound of the dishwasher.

What does this new year hold, I wonder? Beyond changes in healthcare, beyond moving into a somewhat bigger apartment very soon, beyond replanting the vegetable garden in spring or pruning the roses next fall, beyond the days and weeks of everyday chores and everyday fun, I know the year holds surprises and changes that I have not anticipated or planned for. I wonder what those will be? How convenient if I really could plan for those, too! I can’t plan for the unknown as fully as I might for what I deliberately undertake, but there are a lot of little ways I can keep myself ready, generally, for all manner of changes. Taking care of me is a pursuit with a lot of layers, and a lot of potential to support me through periods of change, or a real crisis. I took time to think over a lot of that yesterday, meditating on what demands on my resources and time the move will make, and how best to prepare for it without throwing my current quality of life into the trash. Ideally, no matter what changes come my way I will stay focused on my longer term goals, and my everyday taking-care-of-me needs by maintaining the good practices I have worked so hard to build.

Again and again, I find value in the concepts of ‘perspective’ and ‘sufficiency’; I can’t know everything another person is going through, but I can listen deeply and be compassionate, and there is little chance I can ‘have it all’ in life – the vast amount of wealth required remains out of reach for me – but ‘having‘ has proven to be rather irrelevant once basic needs are met. There is so much more to a rich life than expensive goods or exotic services. “Enough” matters more than ‘more’. My understanding of ‘quality of life’ has changed. The smile on my face matters more than ‘being right’, and contentment has proven easily achievable once I let go of expectations and assumptions about life’s entitlements, and stopped letting experiences other than my own have any weight in determining my path.

There are a lot of questions still to ask. The best answers I find tend to involve kindness, compassion, treating myself and others truly well, and being engaged and present in this moment right here, with the human being(s) physically in my company ‘in real life’ – and getting enough sleep. It’s probably not a coincidence that when I began taking a closer look at how I treated people and making changes in favor of treating people better (including me), people began to treat me better, too. It’s worth noticing. It doesn’t hurt to mention that when people do treat me poorly, I no longer internalize that experience, making it about me; people who treat others badly are making a statement about themselves, and although it is an unpleasant experience to have, it isn’t ‘about me’ at all. These are small things, each taken individually – but they have mattered so much! The Four Agreements was a good starting point on this journey. I smile, recalling the day my traveling partner recommended it to me, back in 2010. We have come so far together!

Soft music, the warmth of a fire, a pleasantly fragrant cup of tea, and quiet time in which to write...enough? So much more than enough.

Soft music, the warmth of a fire, a pleasantly fragrant cup of tea, and quiet time in which to write. Some of life’s riches don’t have a dollar value.

It’s another winter day. I have a headache, but so far it’s not affecting my mood. There is a fire crackling in the fireplace now, and an early dinner in the oven. I have no special plans, and no need for entertainment or distraction; the day is fine as it is. Quiet. I am content. This is enough. 🙂

 

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Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, women, Words
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