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Strange Dreams, Weird Morning

August 5, 2019 //
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I slept decently well, and more or less through the night. My coffee is delicious, mild, and the mug comfortingly warm in my hands. I make a point to let go of a small, fairly petty, moment of resentment that attempts to develop; I changed the grinder settings for the coffee grinder at my partner’s suggestion, and my coffee this morning is better. I wasn’t resenting his suggestion, only the lack of understanding that I hadn’t set the grinder as it was with any deliberate intention; it had gotten jostled, and since then I haven’t gotten the settings quite as I like them. I’m pleased with the current settings. The resentment is irrelevant, and lingers only because there was no moment of explicit understanding to satisfy them, when I spoke up. It’s silly to hold on to that, and not at all helpful. 🙂

It was a good weekend. Short. Well, the same length as usual, but feels short. It was a weekend well-spent. I got good rest. I enjoyed a couple great trail walks. I enjoyed the company of my Traveling Partner. It was pleasant.

I woke in a weird place. Maybe it was my dreams? I just feel vaguely… out of step, or as if there is “something going on” that I’m not actually noticing. I know from experience that it doesn’t do to invest time and emotion into such things; they are often illusions, and where they are not wholly imagined, they will be revealed or sort themselves out, in due time. So… I let that go too.

I think about the honeysuckle blooming along the trail I walked this weekend; it reminded me of childhood and “back home”.

I take a breath, exhale slowly, relax, and sip my coffee. I repeat this a handful of times, until I find myself feeling strangely silly; the inclusion of the coffee makes me giggle, although, for me, it is quite common on a Monday morning. The weather report forecasts a very hot day. I’m grateful for air conditioning – although, and this is true, I’m also grateful for blue skies, and sunny days. 😀 Gratitude to spare.

The vague unsettled feeling I woke with begins to dissipate.

It’s another work week, and already time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, Summer, The Art of Being

Your Results May Vary

August 4, 2019 //
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“Success” is a funny thing; it is defined quite differently from individual to individual, from task to task, from moment to moment, and exists on a slippery gradient that shifts just when it seems to be “obvious”. When we chase it ferociously, it’s often not our effort that determines our outcome, it’s more about our focus… or our willingness to learn, to grow, and to begin again. There is, unquestionably, effort involved, and that varies, too… with preparedness, with good fortune, with circumstance, with how much help we are likely to receive, with how relatively difficult our own notion of success actually is (for us, individually). It’s weird to me when I see people pin all their hopes and sense of self on a single idea of success. Personally, I like my success to stay fairly manageable, and not keep me up at night. So… small stuff generally. 🙂 It adds up.

A flower seen along yesterday’s walk.

Why am I on about this, on an easy Sunday morning? Simple; I walked 3 miles yesterday, hitting a tiny milestone, a modest goal, and finding a small bit of success on my fitness journey. It’s such a small thing. All the driving last year, and the lack of trail miles that resulted from the lost leisure time spent on the road, resulted in starting this year struggling to make 2 continuous walking miles with any ease. I like ease. I embrace ease. I strive for ease. Which means… I need more time walking. My scale agrees. lol I’ve been at it this year, a bit at a time. I’ve been slowly and steadily losing the weight I’d accumulated (in part due to diet, and definitely due to not walking – see the pattern?). I had been approaching things rather unproductively, for some time, pushing too hard and struggling across my imagined finish line, and ending up so exhausted (or injured) that I’d need days and days (weeks) of much lower intensity work to recover… and… um… walking is pretty low intensity as it is. lol I changed my approach; it helps to study and learn, and reinforce practices that have proven to work.

I’ve put in some study time. Consulted a dietitian. Gotten more serious (again) and more focused (again), and returned to seeking and accepting – and celebrating – smaller successes. They do add up. Yesterday’s three miles will join the three miles I’ll walk later today, and next week getting an easy two miles in over my lunch break won’t break a sweat. It bodes well for my camping trip, and how much fun that will be, hiking out in the trees, with so much more ease. 😀

I’ve got my favorite site reserved. 🙂

When my practice fails me (because I am allowing myself the choice to fail myself), I begin again. Knowing what matters most to me, myself, helps with that; practicing things that have no value, no positive outcome, or which contribute nothing positive to my life can be added to that long list of things to let go. Recognizing successes is dependent on understanding success… my idea of success is pretty definitive if I’m hoping to recognize my successes. It took me awhile to get here. It’s easy to let an externally imposed notion of success drive our choices and our behavior… education, marriage, offspring, career, address, social status, wealth… none of that is specifically, explicitly, characteristic of “success”. Seriously. You get to choose for yourself what your success looks like. Is an unwed PhD-holding carpenter living in a small town successful, or not successful? Hard to say, isn’t it, unless you know what they want from their life. Is an accountant of limited means, living luxuriously, resources stretched to the breaking point, losing sleep to panic attacks, while impressing colleagues and neighbors, a “success”? Well… “At what, exactly?”, would be my question. (I tend to think not, but again; I would need to understand their idea of success to have any reasonable thoughts on that.)

So…yeah. My idea of success really only applies to me. I’m more successful, professionally, than I ever imagined I would be; it wasn’t what I was focused on in life, generally. I’m more emotionally well, and enjoying better mental health than I have at any previous point in my life – that feels incredibly successful, to me. I worked to get here, and it’s been a slow, often quite difficult journey. Worth it. Am I wealthy? Nope. I don’t expect I ever will be. I’m content with knowing the bills are paid, and that “getting ahead” is within reach. It’s enough. I’ve already wasted too many years on someone else’s idea of success (a parent, a partner, a teacher, an employer… lots of folks out there ready to suggest that we are not successful because we have not yet achieved something significant to them). What gets me out of bed with a smile every day may not be the thing that satisfies you. Do you. Definitely a better choice, day to day. 🙂

Still… I do put time and thought and effort into being a better me today than I was yesterday. Every day. There is no “finish line”. No completed product. No final goal. No level of mastery such that I can’t continue to make that single, purposeful effort to be my best self, as I understand the woman I most want to be, here, now. There’s always another mile I could walk. Sometimes I’ll falter. Sometimes I’ll fail. That’s okay too; I can begin again.

I smile into my fairly dreadful cup of coffee and consider my morning walk. It’s early, and not yet hot. The trail I intend to walk is level, and paved, and not likely to be crowded at this time of morning. I’m eager to get started, but also aware that I didn’t think to grab socks when I slipped out of the bedroom with the rest of my clothes; going back in risks disturbing my sleeping partner. I really don’t like messing with people’s sleep; a byproduct of my own sleep difficulties coloring my thinking about sleep, generally, and my tendency toward (perhaps excessive) consideration. I catch myself mindlessly scratching at a mosquito bite from yesterday’s walk, stop myself, and add “bug wipes” to my camping list, still smiling. The moment also serves as a useful reminder that I would do well to walk in my hiking boots today (not wear sandals) – if only because mosquito bites on feet just suck so much. lol

I think over my approach to getting socks without waking my partner, smiling, and grateful for the lovely start to the day. So far? Very successful. 😀

 

 

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, solo hiking, Summer, The Art of Being

Hot Coffee, Cold Toes

December 2, 2018 //
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Weird night. I woke repeatedly to answer a question someone asked me – in my dreams. Different dreams. Different questions? No idea, I was confounded each time my attempt to answer (out loud) woke me, because I could not actually recall the question I had tried to answer. My sleep cycled through this strange sequence some 5 times, to my puzzlement when I finally woke, to enjoy the day ahead. No nightmares, although my urgent desire to answer this single question was really frustrating to wake from feeling so incredibly unsatisfied.

I make my coffee. Answer a couple messages. Still feeling sort of weirdly out of step with the day, the time, my experience, I rather randomly (it felt) threw open the patio door and took my coffee with me to my meditation cushion, and restarted my day. Bare feet extending over the door sill, sipping my coffee, feeling the hints of mist-not-quite-rain tickling my skin and dampening the edges of my pajama pants, I sat a while, smiling to myself, enjoying the chill of the autumn morning with the warmth of the house at my back. One of the squirrels began to approach, but realizing the peanuts were really quite near me, without any door between us, he retreated to the deck rail to flip his tail at me rather aggressively, and chitter his annoyance in whatever passes for language among squirrels. I presume it must be a similar experience as arriving to a breakfast destination only to realize there’s a wait. lol Not meaning to be a buzz kill, I move back a bit and close the patio door, so my squirrel neighbor can enjoy breakfast in comfort.

A rainy day, a squirrel.

I sit quietly a while longer, thinking about spring camping. (You may recall, I’ve said I’m “a planner” by tendency? It’s a true thing; I’m planning my spring camping weekends as “now” as I can; it’s less than 6 months away! I frankly feel a bit rushed. LOL) This past year, my camping plans were almost entirely derailed by the regular weekend trips down to see my Traveling Partner; gas money, and time, that in other years would have been camping trips, and the usual recovery weekends between such things were spent recovering from commuting back and forth to be in my lovers arms for just a day or a few hours. My nail-biting as I review maps and details is less about nights out in forests, and more about days out on trails; I need the exercise, and trail hiking is my favorite way to get it.

Ultimately, we each choose our own path…

I figure, maybe if I put more planning under my hopes and dreams for 2019, I can enjoy more of all the things. 🙂 Other things sort of got in the way this year. Break ups, moves, career changes, lifestyle changes, resource changes, business organization changes… all these sorts of things are incredibly disruptive for people, when they come up. For us (together), we handled at least one of each of those in 2018. It was an expensive, and emotionally taxing, year. In some ways inconvenient, unpleasant, and painful. Disappointing. Hard. In other ways, though, it has been a healing journey, a bit of progress, finding some better ways, forging stronger healthier connections as we end relationships and associations that were toxic or overly costly in human or social currency (or, yeah, financially). We’ve all had our own hard mile to walk this year. You, too? Probably, right? 🙂 We’re all in this together, so it’s a fairly safe assumption we’ve each had our challenges.

The year is quickly winding down. There will be no elaborate “punch line” or “finish” to the end of 2018, I suspect, just a fatigued sigh and a moment of relief that it is over, that love wins, that I made it through from one crazy blow out rager of a New Year’s party at one end, to… what? What will New Year’s Eve be this year? Will I be home alone quietly, spending the holiday as is generally my practice, in meditation, contemplation of the year past, and the year ahead? Will I find myself surrounded by friends (or strangers) at some massively loud banger this year, celebrating full on with a crowd of other people, also celebrating, and all the over-stimulation that provides? Fuck – I’m still blown away by the house party I attended last New Year’s. It was… intense. lol The delicious illusion of inclusion and hopefulness that night really set the tone for what it seemed the year would become… of course, it didn’t. Because that’s how illusions work; all show, no substance. The hopes we fostered that night became the disappointments in the year ahead, but of course, we did not see or acknowledge that, then. lol Why would we? It was as if casting a spell, shared by all of us, over all of us, hoping for something much better than we’d previously had. Or… maybe it was just a party? 😉

Mt McLoughlin, Oregon

This year I expect to be a tad more studious about my New Year, whatever I do with it. It’s always a great time to begin again. 🙂 We can’t really know where our journey leads, but we’ve still got to make the journey. Sometimes what looks like a destination, turns out to be nothing more than scenery along the way. It doesn’t change the worthiness of the journey itself, to discover that our path leads past something beautiful in the distance, rather than directly to it; what we see from our own limited perspective in one singular moment may not be as real (or attainable, or desirable, or as near at hand) as we’d like to make it. 🙂 There are so many more options on life’s menu than we can see from the perspective of one moment.

The map is not the world. The fantasy is not the reality.

I look over maps of trails and camps nearer to where my Traveling Partner currently resides… there are some choice locations that are wilderness, in spite of their nearness. There are choices that are very near, indeed, and so manicured, maintained, and resourced, they would be more glamping than camping. Some cool opportunities to be “near enough” that he could pop over to my campsite, or I could pop over for a few hours of partying and music, and we could still generally be doing our own thing… this is a solution that appeals to me greatly. 😀

I sip my coffee and daydream, as the gray sky shifts in tone and hue from “why are you even up already?” to “why are you still lounging around in jammies?”. Looks like it is time for another coffee…

 

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, forgiveness, Free Will, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5

This Head Cold, That Car

August 12, 2018 //
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I was too sick most of yesterday to maintain any excitement about the car in my driveway. Actually, when I first woke up during day light hours and noticed it there from my vantage point at the kitchen sink, I initially wondered who was here, before realizing my error and remembering the car. lol

There was a point, during the later portion of something I am inclined to call “mid-morning” (although for me it is actually, most days, well into the day because I am such an early riser), when I did feel well enough and restlessly housebound enough to want very much to go… to the store? Somewhere. I wanted to go somewhere. To feel forward momentum. To be out of the house for a few minutes. To have a purpose and direction that had to do with any else than blowing my nose again, or making yet another cup of tea, or broth. So… to the store?

I made a short list. Put clothes on. Got into the car and then I got honest with myself. I was restless, ill, and bored, and I just wanted to drive the car. lol I didn’t need anything at the store. Certainly, I didn’t need to spend the money. I pulled out of the driveway with care, and pointed the car in the direction of rural roads. I drove around, through forests and meadows and farmland, contentedly counting on GPS to get me home once I’d satisfied my desire to drive the car and be out of the house a bit. I didn’t bother with the pretext of going to the store. About an hour into that, my sinuses started itching again, my nose started running, and I started really feeling ill again. I eyed the small pack of Kleenex in the console, half gone already. Time to head home. I got home grinning from ear to ear, feeling content, and also feeling tired, ill, and ready to go back to bed.

A point in time between day and night.

I pretty much slept the rest of the day and night, waking now and then only long enough to have some soup, or tea, or re-up on symptom relieving over-the-counter nostrums and use the bathroom. So it went for the rest of the day, all of the night, and until some short time before full daylight this morning. Aside from some volunteer time on Friday, and buying the car, this entire weekend has been blown by being sick. I am, on the other hand, also exceedingly well-rested. lol

I’m sipping my coffee this morning, still feeling a bit fussy, head still pretty stuffy, but pleased that it hasn’t seemed to move into my chest (yet), which is a good thing. My coffee tastes delicious. It’s iced and also seems very refreshing. This seems, to me, to be a clear sign of recovery. I enjoy the moment, and the flavor, and also notice the colossal pile of used tissues, on the floor next to my desk, where I’ve either missed the waste basket or more likely, from the shape of the pile, and its vastness, I simple filled the basket and continued tossing tissue that direction. lol I am mildly embarrassed at the awareness that there are likely piles just like this one next to every over-filled waste basket in each room I’ve occupied this weekend, that the ennui of illness caused me to overlook and ignore. Maybe I have it in me today to tidy up a bit? (I think I might; and clearly I am well enough to notice the untidiness at this point!)

I begin to form a plan, an approach, something gently constructive to do with what is left of the weekend. I remind myself I am still sick, and won’t finish a long list – so I make a short one. The things that will bug me most to come home to, tomorrow: do the dishes, take out the trash, water the garden… I think about adding more, and decide to just stop there. Do those three things, gently. If I’ve got more in me after that, well, it’ll be obvious enough what else needs to be done. 🙂 No need to force myself through a busy day needlessly, it’s still the weekend.

I finish my coffee. Roll out my yoga mat. I begin again.

 

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Summer, The Art of Being

Slowing Down to Live

October 16, 2017 //
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Yesterday was lovely. I had a decently long list of things I had determined “needed” to get done, and after a leisurely coffee in the morning, some time lingering on the deck in the morning chill, and gently catching up on world events, I got off my ass to work the list.

I gave up after about 2 decently productive hours. The crisp sparkling autumn sunshine kept catching my attention and tempting me into the outdoors, and I quickly “re-evaluated my life” on a small scale and decided to go hiking instead of doing housework. 😀 Yep. That’s a thing I sometimes do.

I’m glad I did. The two hours I spent walking in the sunshine felt amazing, and I guess I really needed that time, out there in the trees. The local trail I chose is nearby, rather steep, and “doesn’t really go anywhere” in the sense that one must either commit to a very long hike, or do one of several out-and-back hikes possible on a combination of shorter trails. I hear it is a popular area to hike. I had the trails to myself on a beautiful mild autumn day.

Well, I had the trail to myself, except for these guys, and lizards, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons… I was never alone.

It was quite a lovely hike. I returned home feeling properly recharged and refreshed, and although it had not been my intention, quickly worked off a few more items from my list of things to do.

The busy week ahead may blow me off course in a number of ways, and I contemplate how to best take care of myself this week, as I sip my coffee. In anticipation of my sleep routine being thrown off by my odd work hours ahead (long late shift Monday, very early shift Tuesday, concert night out Thursday…) my brain “helped me out” by getting an early start on that, and I slept like crap last night, waking often, rather pointlessly, and struggling to return to sleep. Anticipatory sleep disturbances are entirely annoying. I’m still smiling. I still feel pretty good. I sip my coffee and put my attention on those positive details; they have more value for building implicit memory that will tend most to support good emotional wellness. It’s a practical thing. It requires practice. 🙂

Figuring out how best to maximize my opportunities to spend time with my Traveling Partner is high on my list of things to do to take care of me. I’m excited that he’ll be in town. Our planning includes a visit to my new residence, and perhaps even an overnight visit, or at least something more than a few minutes to walk through the place. I include in my planning – and in my daydreaming – regular reminders that “things don’t always turn out as planned”; my Traveling Partner lives his life with “spontaneity settings” turned all the way up. lol The way I see it, I may not do any writing tomorrow, and may not write on Friday, depending on time, timing, and how many spoons I really have left.  Busy weeks are hard sometimes. Fuck I am eager to see my Traveling Partner, though, and the fact that this is a busy week for other reasons, while inconvenient, isn’t going to prevent me doing it. 😀

Okay. I’ve got plans. I’ve got a flexible mindset. I’ve got verbs. I’ve made choices. I’m ready for the week… The journey is the destination.

I’m walking my own path. I am my own cartographer.

I’m ready to begin again. 🙂

 

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Sleepless Nights, The Art of Being, The Big 5
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