The days have been sort of tumbling by in a blur. Some days I am so thoroughly exhausted by day’s end, I fall into bed feeling spent, and sleep overtakes me quickly. Other days, I make it to the end with enough left in the tank to prepare a pleasant meal, and even to enjoy it, and clean up afterwards. Regardless, and seemingly without any direct connection to my relative state of fatigue, I’m looking back on this blur of days and nights. The feeling of constantly scrambling to gain traction on a slick floor, or of treading water in the dark, describes it best, I guess.
I sigh to myself as I walk this trail in the darkness. Walking in the dark isn’t my preference, but it’s the time I have for it. Not walking isn’t an acceptable option (for me, in my opinion). There’s a metaphor in that, or perhaps a lesson.
I get to my halfway point before daybreak. No surprise there; I got an early start. My left hip aches, and it feels like arthritis pain. I frown to myself. I guess it could be worse. I distract myself , to avoid dwelling on pain. It isn’t helpful (at all) to let my pain occupy my mental space for long. Giving it that much attention tends to make it feel worse. I breathe, exhale, and relax, and redirect my attention to the strangely pink night sky. The clouds are illuminated by the community below, in the distance… but why pink? I think about it pointlessly awhile longer. A snapshot taken with my cellphone does not capture what my eyes think they see. There’s probably something worth reflecting upon in that experience, too.
…The pain I’m in persists in distracting me. I persist in letting that go…
I can’t make myself look at the news today. It’s not worth the stress to be informed about the latest new way our government has found to cause needless suffering, or to find out how else government insiders and Trump cronies are picking our pockets to fill their own bank accounts. I don’t need to be told that another billionaire grifter or criminal has been pardoned; this is the era we are living in. It’s pretty fucking horrible. Reading more details about the same old shit doesn’t make it easier to accept – and not reading about it doesn’t stop the terrible degradation of our democracy, as it spirals into authoritarianism. If you have the means, it’s probably a good time to get out, and go somewhere safer.
I sigh again, and realize I was holding my breath – or at least not breathing. I sit for a few minutes, just breathing, and focused on my breath. It is too easy to let shit get to me, to let the stress and anxiety seep into my consciousness and wreck my mood. I inhale the mild autumn air, filling my lungs with it. I exhale, and let the stress leave my body along with my breath. No, it’s not “easy”, but it is a practice that can be practiced, and with practice it becomes easier over time. After some while, it becomes really effective. (Think in terms of months and years of practice, though, not minutes.)
I meditate, watching the treeline for the first hint of daybreak. I breathe, exhale, and relax, holding myself in this present moment. At least for now, there’s just this timeless moment of presence. I’m okay with that, it’s a pleasant moment, and for now I feel easy, and my heart is light.
Over the past 12 years of this blog, I’ve come so very far! I’m grateful. I’m not certain I could have endured the world as it is, where I was with myself, then. I was thoroughly mired in chaos and damage, and there was a long journey ahead of me before that would change in a notable way. I took it in steps, though, and I just kept at it, practicing practices, and walking my own path. I’ve learned some things along the way, about life, about love, and about finding meaning and a life worth living. It has been very much worth it.
So, no doom scrolling this morning, no news feed, just a woman, a trail, and a moment of pleasant solitude before dawn on an autumn Friday morning. Later, there is work to do, and there are errands to run. I’ll do my best with all of that, and that will have to be enough. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the moment I’m in. Later, I’ll begin again.
I’m grateful for this pleasant moment, here, now… It’s enough.
There are numbers, and the calculations of getting on in life, everywhere. We apply our personal decision-making calculus all day long. Merge before or after that car in the adjacent lane? Buy boneless skinless chicken breasts, or cheaper chicken thighs? Have a sweet treat while also trying to limit sugar consumption? Vacuum today or on the weekend? Commute to a more distant co-work space or work from the local library – or at home? Maybe you don’t think of these as any sort of “math problem”, but aren’t they?
I’m standing at the door outside the “more distant co-work space”, waiting for the next member to arrive. I am locked out. The door code was reset, and because my membership tier changed with my change in employer, I would have had to have been added manually, which I was told Monday was done – or being done, or going to be done. It hasn’t been done. 😆 This throws off the timing of my day, considerably, although there is no expectation by my boss that I’d be in so early. It’s lovely quiet time that I find very productive. I miscalculated.
There is more commonplace math in my day, today, too. It is payday. Time to update the budget and see to the bills and expenses. I can honestly say math is not my favorite endeavor, but it is also true that it has “paid my way”, job after job, decision after decision, payday after payday. Fighting it is fairly stupid and I wish I had been willing to embrace it more studiously, sooner.
… There is no chair or convenient place to sit while I wait. My feet are already beginning to ache standing here. The hallway by the door is sheltered from weather, and I’m appreciative of that fact, but it is also too warm in here. I sigh quietly and pace back and forth while I write. I try to stifle my impatience, the only cost to me is a bit of discomfort, and a few lost minutes… Minutes feel so precious, though. I remind myself gently not to get hung up on time and timing. Not for this, for sure.
The calculus of a locked door plus a ticking clock.
… What I wouldn’t give for a fucking chair right now… We are often willing to pay a price to avoid inconvenience. 😂
Amusingly, it is easier to work as I stand here, than not to. I only lose the minutes I give up willingly, in that sense. It less convenient, surely, and slower, but most of my work tools are browser or app based, and I have them available on my “phone” (I rarely use this device for phone calls at all, but it’s handy to have a tiny computer in my pocket everywhere I go).
I chuckle to myself as I calculate the relative value of giving up, coming back at 09:00, and grabbing a seat at the cafe on the other side of the parking lot in the meantime… faster WiFi than here in this hallway, and I’d be off my feet… but I dislike having to waste time setting up my workstation more than once…
I sigh. I sip my coffee. I breathe, exhale, and relax… it’s as good a spot as any to meditate. I get as comfortable as I can on the floor, and begin again.
I am waiting for the sun, at a local trailhead. I’m not in any hurry, and it is a calm, quiet morning. The forecast says maybe it’ll rain, later. For now, I amuse myself wondering if that’s lightning I just saw. What I definitely saw was a brief very bright diffuse flash of light somewhere beyond the clouds obscuring the predawn sky, and then, later, another. I didn’t hear thunder, so I guess that if it was lightning (what else would it be?) it must be quite far away.
In the darkness, before dawn, it’s easy to wonder.
Another work day. Nothing much to say about that.
My tinnitus is crazy loud in my ears. My spine is a column of pure pain; I tell myself it’s “only” arthritis. It’s an unhelpful bit of exaggeration, but I count on it to persuade me that the pain can safely be ignored. I take my morning medications, which include prescription pain relief. It helps some, but only serves to “take the edge off”. It’s been a long time since it was any more effective than that.
I sigh to myself and grab my cane. I’ve got enough daylight now to walk this trail safely. I get started…
… I walk, lost in my own thoughts, and find that I’ve gone down and around and back to my starting point, already. It’s still early, barely daybreak. I decide to walk the loop again (it’s only about a mile and a half)…
I stop at a favorite resting point, when I reach it. My mind wants to dart ahead, to focus on work, but it is not yet time for that, and I pull myself back to this moment, here. The sky is gray, and cloudy, with the look of a sky that might rain, maybe. The air smells of rain, too. Another flash of distant lightning, another hint at rain.
Weather…or not.
The hills far to the west are hazy, looking more like a watercolor impression of hills on the horizon, and a bit unreal. This moment even feels a little unreal. Too quiet. Too still. The darkness of the trees between me and the river beyond seem vaguely spooky, although they have no secrets. It’s just a row of trees along the river bank. I walk here often.
I watch the sky continue to lighten, as daybreak becomes dawn, and an unseen sun rises somewhere beyond the clouds. The sky shifts from night black, to the deep blue of dawn, to the gray and cloudy sky I see now, and hints of pale blue behind the clouds peeking through where the clouds shred slowly as they move… north? North. I breathe, exhale, and relax. Somewhere nearby, the noise of a trash truck interrupts the stillness.
I sigh to myself as I get to my feet to finish my walk and head to work. Whether or not it actually rains, there’s still weather of some sort. Whether or not my path takes me where I expect to go, it still leads me somewhere. Having the experience is what matters most – the being and doing are the point. The journey is the destination. Isn’t that enough? I think about that as I stretch. The clock is ticking, and it’s time to begin.
New job, first day, and all of that went well yesterday. My headache was a 12 on a 1 – 10 scale as I headed home, and I did my best not to allow it to vex me. I was grateful it was a Tuesday – by longstanding practice, it is the Anxious Adventurer’s night to cook, which means less work (for me) and tasty tacos (generally).
… Turned out to be less than ideally easy to get to that moment…
My brain was exhausted when I got home, and the headache was kicking my ass. A shower might help, I’d thought, but no, it didn’t. I took additional pain medication and settled into a darkened room to meditate and hopefully ease my pain and maybe recover some cognitive energy to get through the evening on…
My Traveling Partner alerted me that he was facing unexpected difficulties and excessive time required in a project to do with server maintenance on our home network. My many many (hundreds of) gigabytes of images were…so many. Too many. Backups of copies of duplicates of old drive contents and folders of images I didn’t want to lose were carefully saved – and in several cases nested within each other, multiple times by several names – a byproduct of every tense OS upgrade, or computer replacement over time (for decades), and worse still, it was also all partially backed up as zip files from my old Google Photos app or on a cloud storage platform. Fuuuuuuuck. So many copies…of copies.
…Can I please do something with that fucking mess?!...
Yeah. I was annoyed and aggravated and frustrated to tears by the impatience and irritation in the otherwise entirely reasonable request. I’d even been working on it, piecemeal, much of the past year on and off, whenever I had a spare minute, was also thinking about it, and happened to be on my computer… But I hadn’t finished the important part (deleting the old copies) – I was pretty spectacularly busy with working for a living, caregiving an injured partner, running errands and keeping up the housework, and trying to stave off exhaustion as much as I could while managing chronic pain.
In an instant I felt unappreciated and disrespected – and invisible. I cried the entire time I pushed myself through the steps of reviewing each folder, feeling angry and unsupported. I wept frustrated tears while I deleted folder after folder, fingers crossed that I would not delete the sole copy of some image that has lasting value for me. I managed to finish the work needed in about an hour of mostly focused time, distracted only by my own tears and my Traveling Partner’s continued pings, messaging me continuing to explain why finishing this project matters to him in this moment and more generally, and checking on my progress. Unhelpful for me in the moment (trying to focus and work with a headache), but I recognized his desire to feel heard, and to reconnect and resolve painful emotions. I did my best.
… G’damn that fucking headache though, and not one fucking word of sympathy or care from anyone, which caused hurt feelings that lingered for a while in the background. I was silently mired in a very “fuck all of you” sort of place for a little while before I was able to let it go. Humans being human. I’m fairly certain everyone in the house was doing their best, but…as is often the case, it didn’t feel “good enough”. Our results vary, and as human primates we can expect a certain amount of bullshit and drama to be part of the experience. I chose to let small shit stay small and move on from it without doing anything more to address the circumstances directly.
A new day, a new chance to begin again.
Funny thing, this morning none of that mess is important or relevant at all. My tinnitus is loud in my ears, but my headache is an inconsequential 2 on a 1 – 10 scale. My Traveling Partner was awake when I left the house and seemed to be fairly merry as he kissed me goodbye for the day. It was a pleasant parting and I’m eager to return home at the end of the work day without resentment or ire. Resilience for the win. I’ve worked years to get to this place. I’m grateful that a momentary upset no longer sends me spiraling into chaos, futility, and despair that lingers for days or weeks.
I walked the local trail with my thoughts, enjoying the dawn. It’s a new day. It even feels good to have finished a project that had been stalled (and was seriously taking too long). I breathe, exhale, and relax. I can feel the reduction in the chaos in my life, having cleaned up my files. Funny how that works (for me). I’m grateful to my Traveling Partner for taking such skillful care of our network, and for making it clear that my failure to complete a project I’d started more than a year ago was holding up progress. I’m grateful that his own resilience allows him to bounce back from a tense or angry moment, too. I’m grateful that I never fear violence as a potential byproduct of his anger – he’s not that person.
I watch the sunrise contentedly from my halfway point. It’s a new day, a new moment. I’m okay for most values of okay, and there is no anger in my heart. It’s a fresh start – and time to begin again.
How long can you sit on hold before you feel angry? Once that point comes, when the person on the other end finally gets to your conversation, how do you feel? How do you behave? What is that experience like for you? Okay… and what is that experience like for them?
…It is a Wednesday afternoon, and a busy work day. I’m on hold as I write this…
…I’m scheduling – or trying to – an important appointment for my Traveling Partner. I’ve been on hold for awhile now (22+ minutes), following our initial exploration of available dates/times. When the Scheduler returns to the call, she’s identified an available care provider in a good timeslot, on a day we can make work. I’m grateful. Is it aggravating to wait on hold for 23 minutes to complete this task? I guess, sure, (especially considering the dreadful hold music). On the other hand, not being a dick about it and just doing the needful in a pleasant (and accepting) way resulted in a better outcome – the appointment is made, and it fits in with other scheduled plans, and isn’t at some ridiculously inconvenient time, and the person on the phone was happily willing to help me (likely in part because I wasn’t penalizing that person for the circumstances). That’s as nearly ideal as scheduling an appointment can get, is it not? Why bother being angry over it? The time it took? The fact that it was necessary at all? That seems both ridiculous and petty. (Things take the time they take.)
…Patience is sometimes easier said than done, I know…
So many healthcare providers are trying to meet too much need with too few resources. Raising patient costs doesn’t close the gap created by too few doctors, nurses, technicians, specialists, or administrative and domestic staff needed to meet the need for care in a community. Anywhere. Lashing out at someone whose job is to be helpful is not the shortest path to the desired outcome, for sure. So, I generally try to do better than that when I have to be on the phone with someone (in spite of my dislike of being on the phone, generally).
…Or in slow checkout lines…
…Or queued for some event…
…Or trying to find parking in a busy area…
…Or when I’m frustrated by something but having to also deal with another human being about something else altogether unrelated…
…Or when I’m feeling anxious and other unrelated shit seems to be going wrong “for no reason”…
I guess I’m saying that when we make room to feel our feelings, then also make a committed (mindful)(self-aware)(disciplined) effort to also behave in accordance with our understanding of our “best self”, and treat others with kindness and patience, and take steps to manage the potential volatility of our emotional experience of the moment, everything that flows from that skillfully managed moment turns out better than it would have if we’d lashed out angrily, gone to pieces, or punished the people around us for the experience we are having. Long sentence, but it is what I was hoping to communicate as a single idea. It takes practice. I know my own results vary – so I am assuming yours likely will as well. Still, we do become what we practice.
…When I practice patience, I become more patient, in a broader variety of interactions…
I took those notes while I waited on hold. I made the appointment, and moved on with my day with very little aggravation. Turned out to be a pleasant afternoon. I woke up this morning, a little early, head kind of stuffy, but generally merry and feeling okay. It’s a new day. A new opportunity to practice the practices that create a good life and healthy interactions with the people in my life. A new cup of coffee.
Ah, but how to “practice” such things could be a question, eh? I’ve got good and bad news – and it’s the same news – the “how to” is “easy”, inasmuch as it is not complicated, but it is also quite “hard”, because there is a measure of trial and error, repetition, studious self-reflection, and failures that precede new attempts, involved in practicing such things. The tl;dr is that I’ve simply got to do the thing I wish to practice in the fashion I’d like to see myself handle such things – and if I fall short, I’ve got to recognize that, acknowledge it, accept it (and any consequences), understand that failure, and keep working on it – through all the unsuccessful well-meaning attempts, and the likely lack of consistant positive reinforcement from others (because, of course, they are having their own experience). Doing better than my current best is reliably always a “work in progress”, and it’s a process of incremental change over time, which can be somewhat unsatisfying. If you change what you practice though, change itself is inevitable.
We have so many opportunities to do better. We also have a bunch of opportunities to do worse – to escalate interactions that start going wrong, to inflame emotions beyond what is appropriate, to create conflict where none existed, to hurt each other when we could be lifting each other up. We have choices. Making an effort to choose wisely in each interaction, each day, is itself a choice. What are you really going for? Where does your path lead? How do you want to be remembered?
Sometimes it’s hard to wait in line (or, to wait at all) – but the payoff is the thing we’re waiting for, the wait time itself is largely irrelevant. Sometimes it’s hard to be patient in the face of silly questions or constant interruptions when we’re trying to get something done – but the quality of those interactions are often far more important in our lives that the thing we’re focused on doing. Sometimes it’s hard to listen considerately while someone is talking – even though we asked the question being answered, and wanted the information. These are all moments that could use our best self (and more practice). I sip my coffee and think about the many times I’ve made shit so much worse than it had to be. Being entirely human, I’m likely to do that again in the future at some point – but that isn’t going to stop me from doing my best each day to be the best version of the woman in the mirror I can imagine, with what I know now. I’ll simply keep practicing. We become what we practice.
Stick with the basics – it’s a great place to start.
Make it as difficult as you want, I guess. Complicate things as much as you think you must. Telling yourself it “wasn’t your fault” or that you “couldn’t help it” when things go awry doesn’t change the fact that you had (and made) choices. I personally think it is generally a poor choice to willfully make shit worse than it has to be. It’s worthwhile to practice doing better than that. I think back to the abrupt and very final end of my second long-term relationship (and one that felt, at that time, truly committed and “forever”) – it was over circumstances that spiraled around “making things worse”, until the last thread of my affection was stretched to a breaking point, and suddenly snapped. In mere hours I went from needing to “take a minute” to calm myself, to wanting to have “a couple days alone” to think things over, to “we’re done, I’m out of here”. It probably didn’t have to go like that, but it definitely did – and it was a choice. I sit reflecting on that for some minutes, and comparing that to the way my Traveling Partner and I typically work things out together (it’s very different, and I am grateful for the effort we both put into talking and listening).
“Emotion and Reason” 18″ x 24″ acrylic w/ceramic and glow details, 2012
Choosing not to make things worse is both a choice and also a practice (if you make it one). I look out into the cloudy sky and think about emotional storms, and emotional choices, and how significant emotion is in this human experience. We are creatures of both emotion and reason, and we tend to lead with emotion, and respond to emotion before reason ever joins the conversation. That’s not a character flaw, it’s what we are. Our emotional intelligence is probably pretty critical to our success (and survival), overall (depending on how you define success, sure; my definition includes a reliable feeling of well-being and contentment).
…When I practice calm, I become a calmer person across a broader variety of experiences…
Developing one’s emotional intelligence is not as easy as saying it is an important detail. I get it. We don’t typically include such things in K-12 education (when it is most needed) in a structured informative way. Few of us grow up in families with even one emotionally intelligent adult in the household, based on my limited experience and casual observation. We don’t put much time (and probably no funding) into developing tools that can be shared with people who are seeking to do this work themselves. Like a lot of things, it’s complicated by various hidden agendas and resource limitations. When I began down this path, myself, the help I needed was sometimes not easy to find. I was fortunate to find a good therapist whose expertise was a good fit for my needs (and fortunate to be able to afford it at the time I needed it most). My reading list has some items specific to emotional intelligence (although we don’t all learn through reading). It is unfortunate that some of the best work on the topic is sometimes a bit of a slog to get through, requiring what feels like “real work”. (If I were pressed to make specific recommendations, I’d probably point to Buddha’s Brain, and Emotional Intimacy for the studious, and The Four Agreements for those looking for a quick introduction with illuminating allegories.)
…You’ll have to walk your own path, and do your own work, this is not a negotiable detail…
It’s a journey with a lot of stairs to climb…
I sit with my coffee and my thoughts awhile longer. How did I even get to this place, this morning? Oh, right, reflecting on the importance of being patient (and pleasant) while on hold trying to make an appointment for my beloved. I chuckle to myself, aware how valuable those skills are in so many day-to-day interactions. My results vary. I keep practicing. I glance at the time – it’s already time to begin again.
Evening Light 