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Other Days

December 29, 2015 //
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Today isn’t a difficult one. I woke well-rested after crashing out quite early last night. I am in a pleasant mood and feel mostly physically comfortable, although I am very stiff and in some pain – it’s manageable. I am easily distracted this morning, and it took more than usual time to shower, dress, make coffee – and I find myself continuing to be so easily distracted this morning.

Meditation is no less important to my all-day well-being on a morning like this than on any other; meditating on a morning like this is very difficult.

Frustrated with myself in a small way, I nonetheless indulge my restlessness with music videos, science videos, and digital communication. I am not helping matters in doing so, I’m just calling it out. I’m very human. (I suddenly imagine an AI blogger calling out her humanity regularly as a ‘proof’ and reminder, for very different reasons, and wonder if it is worth writing the short story? Another distraction. Nice one, Brain.)

The music has the power to get me moving, even early in the morning, and that’s got some good things going for it, without regard to its phenomenal power to distract me from just about everything else – motion means gradually easing the stiffness in my joints, and my pain will be considerably lessened, too. So… there’s that excellent rationalization for relaxing and enjoying the music. 🙂 It has become clear over time that I benefit from acknowledging the positive outcomes in my experience as specifically as I would ever bitch about the challenges; what I invest in becomes of greatest significance to me, what I savor becomes more powerful in my memory of life.

I listen to music awhile longer, sipping my coffee, thinking about love when I listen to love songs, thinking about life when I listen to songs about living the moment fully. I listen to songs about drama, and appreciate how little of it I really deal with these days. Another track manages to remind me that there is value in meditation, and that beginning my day with tested good practices is something I count on. A good reminder.

A good morning to begin again.

A good morning to begin again. Aren’t they all?

Today is a good day to practice good practices. It’s time to set this aside for meditation – as practices go, meditation has continued to do so much to build and maintain an emotional foundation of contentment, self-sufficiency, resilience, and calm. Choosing differently knowing the value seems unwise. Besides – I’ve finished my coffee. 🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, health, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Awakened by the Rain

December 23, 2015 //
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I woke to the sound of rain this morning. I also woke to the sound of rain a number of times during the night, briefly, returning to sleep quickly – since there is nothing about the sound of rain that is at all alarming for me. When I last woke, realizing the downpour might have consequences for driving later, my fretfulness about driving in torrential rain – which does cause me some anxiety – prevented me from returning to sleep.

It’s been a strange morning. I started the morning anticipating a fun morning fixing Barbie dolls with some neighborhood girls of Barbie doll age, while sipping tea with their mothers. It seems a very ordinary sort of thing to me, a remnant of a past I grew up with that no longer exists in many places – one in which neighbors know each other, talk in passing, and care. It fits in here in this little community; we help each other out now and then, talk to each other, share how things are going. (I am not the person I was at 25, or at 40 – I wonder sometimes if these simple moments of connection would have had the same value for me then?) It matters to me that Maribel and Anna, down a few doors, have colds today. It matters to their Mother that they not share them with me, or the other older ladies in the community. Simple consideration, simple courtesy, simply neighbors. These things don’t really have a season, you know? They can be done all year. It starts with being present, with being aware, with taking an interest – it starts with smiles and greetings. It doesn’t have to end at all.

The change in my plans slows my morning down quite a lot, and I take time on a variety of small tidying up sorts of chores to make my traveling partner’s time hanging out on Giftmas Eve and Giftmas Day more comfortable. People with allergies are often challenged by apartment conditions that don’t trouble most folks – like ancient abused carpet potentially releasing allergens into the air with every new footstep. Vacuuming, damp dusting, and taking care with details like little corners and covered surfaces. all matter greatly and improve an allergic loved one’s experience. Totally worth a bit of extra time and effort – anything that improves his comfort prolongs my own joy in sharing his company. 🙂 (Verbs again, and always – what we want routinely requires our action.)  This is also not some aggressive agitated drive to reach ‘perfection’ – the love is in the intent, the will, and the effort made. That my lover’s comfort matters to me such that I take action is the important piece of the puzzle. There’s no score or report card, or financial gain, or praise expected – or criticism; it’s not about removing all the allergens from the world, it’s about saying ‘I love you’.

Be love.

Be love.

Slowing the morning down offers more value than extra time to tidy up; I am less anxious about driving in the rain, later. Slowing things down is often a game-changer with my anxiety. A great many things that cause me anxiety are worsened if there is also a sense of immediacy or urgency also associated with them. Slowing things down reduces any sense of urgency by making whatever it is less imminent. There’s a missing step – and it’s an important one; I don’t use that additional time on growing and nurturing the feeling of anxiety. Once basic planning and healthy expectation-setting is managed, I simply move on to other things. “Simply” – it gets easier with practice, it’s not ‘effortless’, it’s just not complicated. 🙂

Today is a good day to practice good practices, and a good day to share them. Today is a good day to say good morning to a neighbor in passing, and to smile at strangers. Today is a good day to recognize how human we each are, each having our own experience, each on our own journey – still so very human that we easily overlook how similar our experiences may actually be…and if we don’t share, we won’t know. Today is a good day to step outside my comfort zone, and be a welcoming presence in my world. Today is a good day to be love. 🙂

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

This Particular Now

December 21, 2015 //
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It is a quiet morning. I slept in, and managed to do so in spite of a ringing phone next to my bed, left turned up from the night before. I woke minutes before my exhausted, distressed traveling partner arrived at my door. At this point there is little about my leisurely morning that differs from many other leisurely mornings; I have my coffee, and this safe and quiet place, and I am writing.

There are differences; each day, each moment, each experience differ subtly one from another, however similar in most regards. Today, some differences are small (I spent the morning writing notes on holiday cards, checking addresses, and getting them into the mail – as usual, at the last possible minute). Other differences are more significant; my traveling partner is sleeping in the other room, exhausted but feeling safe and able to sleep in this quiet space. I am ‘standing watch’, quietly writing and drinking my coffee. We care for each other in the face of any challenges the world throws our way, and today he earnestly needs to rest, to give in to sleep, until he wakes rested and able to reason clearly. My vigil affects the content of my thoughts and the emotional tone of the morning. I take time for me, too, ensuring I don’t inherit my partner’s stress (which could potentially render me less able to be rational and supportive). Quiet mornings are excellent for meditation. Meditation is excellent for maintaining perspective and balance in the face of stress.

Today balance is important, most particularly that balance between honest recognition of difficult circumstances in a relationship, and not over-stepping the boundaries as friend, lover, and partner by dictating decision-making in a ‘you need to…’ or ‘you have to…’ sort of way; there’s no win in doing so. The outcome of telling a loved one what he or she ‘must do’ about a problematic relationship is rarely anything other than later stress and agita over the outcome, whatever the decision-making may have been. So, I do my best to simply love my partner well, and listen deeply, and answer only the questions asked, and to do so honestly but without attempting to persuade or influence – to ‘be here’ for my partner, without making demands on his decision-making, whatever my own opinion may be. I sometimes feel as if I am holding a very detailed map… pointing at the map… and saying ‘you see where this is going?’, but it is truly not for me to make decisions about a relationship I am not part of, or to plan the route on a journey that is not mine.

I pause for a moment of compassion for the Other in the equation, feeling complicated emotions myself – a soup that includes concern, sadness, frustration, anger, and a very real helplessness. I have no power to improve things in any way, and no words to share that could change how many verbs are involved, how many choices are being made – or not made – or to ease the suffering, so much of which is self-inflicted. I take a few deep breaths, and think back on other years, other relationships, my own challenges, and as I exhale I let it all go. This one isn’t about me.

Storm-tossed, damaged, emotionally flooded - there is still a chance to begin again.

Storm-tossed, damaged, emotionally flooded – there is still a chance to begin again.

Today is a good day to practice those practices associated with listening deeply, with non-judgment, with acceptance and compassion. Today is a good day to practice those practices associated with not taking someone else’s experience personally; we are each having our own experience, truly. Today is a good day to avoid diving in to ‘fix’ something that isn’t mine, and that I haven’t been asked to fix. Today is good day to ‘be here’ for a friend, a lover, a partner – and to understand that sometimes just being here is enough.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Hormone Hell, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, Words

Begin Again

December 20, 2015 //
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It’s late. I made a choice to finish the evening gently, investing in small joys I associate with the holidays: the music, the twinkle lights, the scents, and the flavors. By choice, I finish the evening with a smile floating on the current that is the things that are going well, rather than becoming snagged, weighed-down, by something going less well. (It would be a rare thing in life for absolutely 100% of everything to be entirely ideal.) I’m comfortable with contentment, and I have enough for that. I take time for me, and treat myself gently, and well.

Glow

Relaxing in the glow, I begin again.

I meditate a while and set aside enough of my concern for my traveling partner to rest easily and trust his good decision-making. Losing sleep over the circumstances benefits no one. Feeling comforted from within and able to ‘be there’ if called upon, I chill awhile longer in the glow of the Giftmas tree, grateful to love and be loved, and grateful to have enough.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, Words

Who Wrote the Menu?

December 16, 2015 //
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I am sipping my coffee and thinking about sweaters. Well, actually, I am thinking about a particular sweater I like very much that just doesn’t go with the rest of what I am wearing at all, and immediately after finding myself wishfully thinking it would be nice to have this particular sweater in a number of other colors, I realized all I’d have to do to have that is learn to knit or crochet and get to work on it. That’s not my most likely choice in this instance, but it got me thinking about life’s vast menu of possible choices, and how little of that vast unlimited potential I actually consider day-to-day, myself.

When I dine out, I expect generally I will be choosing my meal from a menu – the restaurant prepares the menu, and it is the nature of menus to limit the choices presented. It is a system that works out pretty well. They tell me what they offer, and I choose from that list. If I don’t like the choices, I can go eat elsewhere and choose from their menu.

When I go grocery shopping, I may not have a menu, but I will nonetheless choose from the limited selection the grocery store offers me, and if I need or want things they do not supply, I can take my shopping elsewhere, and choose from the products offered by some other merchant.

When I attend classes, I choose from a list of available courses. It is clearly not a complete list of all possible knowledge I could choose to study.

Simple or fancy, the menu is a limited list.

Simple or fancy, the menu is a limited list.

Choices seem to generally work in the observed fashion; we are presented with some limited selection and we choose from that, or go elsewhere in search of something we want that is not offered there. I don’t often stop to think about the implied limiting factor: whatever is on the menu, or on the shop shelves, it is but a small sample of ‘all the possible foods’ or ‘all the things to buy’. Life is like that, too, only… I’m the person I generally find to be responsible for limiting my own choices; I am writing the menu, myself.

That sweater isn’t going to knit itself – and, by the way, I’m not likely to be the one knitting it either. I don’t know how to knit. I could choose to learn…if I chose to… Learning to knit doesn’t seem to appear on ‘my menu’ of things to do in life. I could make excuses about being thumb-fingered, or having tried before, or any number of lame reasons why I don’t choose to learn to knit, although I really love sweaters and could learn to make my own. On the other hand, when I first began playing around with watercolors on paper, painting wasn’t just ‘on my menu’ – it was akin to ‘the special of the day’ in that moment in my life; I chose it before I could consider choosing it, and it is a natural part of me. Who wrote the menu? This internal list of what my options are in life – where did it come from? Who maintains it? When I feel as though I ‘have no other choice’ that isn’t likely to be the literal truth of it – and even recognizing this is often not enough to immediately open my eyes to the impossibly unimaginably vast potential array of choices truly in front of me.

Be love.

Be love.

The year is ending, and it is a season of contemplation and of questions for me. Where now? This has been a remarkable year for change, for growth, for love to blossom as though new – and I have so many choices possible in the year to come…but…what are they? Am I open to all of them, and equipped to choose what will tend to support my needs most over time? Will I choose to be a better human being than I was yesterday? Have I limited my menu too much by rejecting very promising opportunities, projects, or adventures because I don’t see myself as that person – or because I think I ‘can’t’ or ‘shouldn’t’?

It’s funny – when I was a kid there was a lot of push to send the message to children that they could do or be ‘anything’ they might wish to do or be. It’s even sort of true. Then there was a swing in the other direction, to refrain from encouraging children in an unrealistic way, and more in favor of being ‘practical’ and ‘real’ with children about their potential and abilities and and to avoid ‘setting them up for failure’ with overly high expectations. That’s even sort of sensible. Both approaches touch on real things; it is rare that we really understand the vastness of our potential, and we are able to overcome so much to achieve what we desire! On the other hand – there are obstacles in life, verbs involved, and some things may not be so simply done. I hesitate to say ‘impossible’ about any particular human achievement, myself: moon landing, space shuttle, space station, solar power, tunnel bridges, The Beatles, eggs fertilized outside of wombs, women on the Supreme Court, the internet, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and all within my lifetime! How many of these things seemed impossible at some earlier point? So, when a little girl wants to be president – why not? On the other hand, it sure isn’t going to be easy to get there – and success won’t be a given.

Even Santa has a list...

Even Santa has a list…

I am sipping my coffee in the glow of holiday lights, and listening to the heater click and pop as it begins to take the morning chill off the room. I am wondering if I might like to learn to knit, although I had once attempted it without much success perhaps I have changed? I smile, and let other choices and options I might not generally consider drift past my awareness: encaustic? through-hiking? remote travel? exotic cuisine? a martial art? disc-golf? a musical instrument? another language? a silent retreat? a cruise? As I list options something strange happens just at the edge of my awareness and I pause to consider it; the longer I go on, the more similar to things I already do, or have done, or are very like my existing interests each thing becomes – I have to almost fight myself to allow experiences or events significantly outside my norm to reach my awareness and hold my attention for a moment. That’s something to consider further.

I choose even my perspective; I am my own cartographer on this journey.

I am able to choose even my perspective when I am aware that choice exists.

If I am writing the menu for myself, then even the choices regarding how I filter or limit my choices is mine to choose. What will I choose today? What will I choose tomorrow? What matters most – what I choose, or that I choose? Today is a good day to consider ‘all the options’ – and what that means, and how I am limiting myself in life by limiting my choices. Today is a good day to update the menu.

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Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, Words
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