I’m sipping my second coffee and smiling. It’s a lovely morning. I woke from a strange (and amusing) dream that had been influenced by recent videos my Traveling Partner and I had watched together. He made an appearance in my dream. We laughed together over coffee when I shared the details (and did a fairly good impression of my partner’s “exasperated-still-loving-you” tone). It was a wonderful start to the morning just to share conversation and coffee together. 🙂 Ordinary stuff – but so so sweet.
…Don’t forget to enjoy the small things; sometimes they matter most.
The morning is still dark. The weather is relatively mild (especially so for January, but, you know, the climate is changing). I look over my “to-do list” for tasks I may have been dodging – maybe get one or two of those done today? I smile softly to myself. Mornings like this make everything that follows feel easy.
I pause my writing to do a bit of travel research I’d promised to take care of for my partner.
I glance at the time as I hit send on the email… already time to begin again. 😀
Maybe skip this one today? This entire article is mostly me just beefing about shit that irritated my consciousness after reading through the business news this morning. Mostly irrelevant to the usual themes, and if that’s what you are seeking out, this may be a disappointment. I do get there eventually, but… tl;dr? Do your best today. Do better than that tomorrow.
Cities are not built by gold. They are built by labor, and by working hands.
I am sipping my coffee and reflecting on items in the business news this morning. Layoffs. A relatively tasteless (in context of layoffs) comment from a CEO that “ChatGPT is a free employee” that businesses need to learn how to use. Massive greed. Fraud. Companies paying for luxury entertainment at fancy conferences – while doing layoffs. Shareholders looking for another nickel. More frauds. Crypto scams. People being treated as machinery. Businesses looking for new ways to pay people less for more work. The media working hard to peddle controversy and keep my attention.
…I think we’re getting a lot of this quite wrong, somehow…
How do you define success? Take a while on that one, please. No rush. It’ll be important to you later on.
What about “greed”? How do you define greed? Do you apply the same definition to your own behavior and standards as you do to those around you?
What are your thoughts on how businesses treat employees? Is that a reflection of your own perspective as a working human being?
What do you think about pay equity? Should people doing the same job be making the same money? Do you think it matters where they live or what demographic they are part of? Why?
Perspective really matters on a lot of this. The perspective of someone in the position to be an oppressor is unlikely to be the same as the perspective of someone among the oppressed.
…The perspective of someone looking to cash in on simply having an opinion for sale is quite its own thing…
[I wrote some relatively radical pro-labor ranting, which I subsequently deleted. I’m not here for that. Not really. (I really should not read the news in the morning. Not even the business news.)]
This really isn’t even about that.
I’m thinking about how much I’ve personally grown over time. How my thinking has changed. The woman I am today, and how I seek to treat the people around me, is not the woman I was at 19. At 25. At 37. It’s been a hell of a journey of evolving thinking and changing values. (That’s a good thing.)
One of the things I’m finding … interesting… is that the woman I was at 19 would have been defined today as a “conservative” but made shit wages in a low-skilled job with far fewer protections as a worker than exist today – and often voted to prevent that from changing for the better! I work very differently now. Think differently. Vote differently. I’m definitely not “conservative”. I seek different outcomes – equitable, beneficial, positive outcomes that provide for the betterment of folks who need that support most (instead of for “the shareholders” or “the company” or people who are already affluent) I’d ideally like to get that result without destroying the one planet we have to live on right now.
Why would anyone want to get rich at the expense of the survival of the entire planet?
…Why we’re at it, why is “getting rich” such a common measure of success for so many people, at all? Seriously. Is counting money all that damned interesting once you have everything you need in life to thrive?
…Wouldn’t it be interesting if businesses took their measure of success not from their gross margin or profits, but from their contribution to society in the form of taxes paid and outcomes achieved?
Why aren’t we (as a global society) making sure that (all) people have the basics that they need in life to thrive? Globally we appear to have the resources to do it. Solving the “how” is what matters… so… why does so much of the discussion seem to be about whether we should?
My coffee has gone cold already and I haven’t even solved global poverty, the plight of the working class, or figured out the easiest way to communicate how problematic greed is. lol Oh, I wasn’t really trying to. I’m just trying to say “we could do better than we do right now” and that we could put some fucking attention on that… even if only over our morning coffee.
…Isn’t it important enough to talk about? Rhetorical question. Of course it is. It’s just necessary to also do more than talk.
I sip my coffee. It doesn’t much matter that it’s cold. I’m privileged to enjoy this cup of coffee. There may come a time in my own lifetime when coffee isn’t so widely available in such good quality. I make a point to appreciate it, in the early morning quiet.
My Traveling Partner finished building a new sit/stand desk for my office space at home. It’s the same space that is my art studio. I feel “wrapped in luxury and good fortune” to have an office at home – or a studio. It’s beautiful, and functional, and I feel loved. Amazing. Took a lot of work and time to get to this place. It required some lucky breaks. Some thought. Choices. It absolutely required a good partnership – one that supports my growth, and my fondest desires. I did not get “here” alone.
Alone? Alone I’ve only ever gotten… nowhere.
…My emotional wellness has been a similarly long-time, challenging journey – the success of which has been built on luck, effort, happenstance, choices, time, practice, failure, and a good partnership (or many). Just saying; we don’t get where we’re going alone, even though we’re walking our own hard mile.
…And we can almost always do just a bit better than we did… before we knew we could…
So.
It’s time to begin again. Do better though. Do better than yesterday. Every day.
So far…, so… I’m not perfect. Not even close. If “perfection” were the measure of human success, I would be an abject failure. Just saying, there’s something to appreciate that a. the bar is way lower than that and b. we even get to “set the bar” for most values of “success” in life ourselves and then also score the results. “It’s not that bad.” describes a lot of things. Pro-tip: there’s real value in pausing to reflect on how good it is and how bad it isn’t now and then. The results may surprise you.
“Good enough” has to be good enough, sometimes. 🙂
Are you wondering why I linked that track in paragraph 1? Here it is again with the lyrics. 😉
Last weekend I was ill. Like, dragging myself to the bathroom for multiple episodes of all manner of biological disaster through the night on Friday, and running a bit of a fever all day Saturday after my guts were utterly emptied from both ends. Yick. Horrible. My fever finally broke in the early evening on Saturday. Yesterday I was exhausted (in spite of drifting in and out of a restless sleep most of Saturday), and a bit faint and dizzy feeling. I managed to push a couple loads of laundry through the machines, and even put away most of that, but anything more was honestly beyond me. My Traveling Partner was super helpful and supportive and kind, and the only moment of discord between us was a bit of frustration with me over my relative incompetence in that state that made it super difficult to do the one “thinking task” (and it was a way easy ask) that he called upon me to do late in the afternoon. Thankfully, he saved me from possibly bricking an expensive laptop by being more aware than I was that I had “gone down the wrong path” on that task. My own frustration with the situation resulted comically in being mad enough to “storm off” to take a walk… which amounted to going to check the mail because I did not even have the strength to take a real walk of any distance. Hilarious. Had to come home and fucking behave myself and work on making things right with my partner like a grown-up.
Today feels like “just another work day”, but with a helping of “why did I think I would actually be fully up to this already?”. I didn’t sleep well, either. I had slept so much (I suspect) in the prior days (without drinking much coffee) that I ended up “over slept”, and since yesterday I did have coffee… I couldn’t sleep. Since I didn’t have quite half my usual amount of coffee, I also ended yesterday with a wicked headache (or was still sick…?), and the medication I took for that tends to result in not being able to sleep deeply. The result was a restless night. Funny… I’m okay though. There are things that matter more. Life? Love? Beauty? This quiet contented moment of reflection? The grocery list I don’t want to forget to shop for later. lol
I yawn and rub my eyes. I pause and write my Traveling Partner a love note. I fucking love that guy. I also appreciate him. I take a sip of coffee and a big drink of water and get ready to begin again.
It’s the 10th of January. Not fancy as days on a calendar go, nothing splendid like the first of a new year, still… a good a day as any to make a change for the better, isn’t it? There’s an entire day ahead, suitable for making changes. Pick something, do the thing, see the result, refine the practice, and repeat. Easy. 😉
I woke this morning from an interrupted night’s sleep. The artificial “sunrise” of my alarm seemed to come too soon, and too brightly (although I opened my eyes just as it came on, and it comes on quite dim, so… perception vs reality can be quite subjective). I had the sense that I’d been awake, or awakened, often during the night. I felt groggy as I rose, showered, and dressed. I made it out the door without waking my Traveling Partner, or so it seemed. I know he also had a restless night. He woke me twice to tell me he was sleeping poorly, and managed to keep me “on alert” (without intending to, I’m sure) by fussing and swearing in the other room because he was having a rough night. At some point he must have returned to bed, because that’s where he was when I woke, and seemed to be sound asleep. I found myself more pleased that he was sleeping than I had been annoyed to be awakened, myself, and grateful to get out the door quickly and quietly to head to the co-work space.
I love working from home. The practical reality of it is, though, that sometimes in the early morning hours when my partner would like to be sleeping it can be a poor fit. The local co-work space works as a pleasant compromise without the tedious, time-consuming, and risky commute into the city. That’d be a miserable way to spend 15 hours every week if I had to do it daily. I sip my coffee feeling fortunate to have so many options, and the freedom to choose from them. So, here I sit in an office, sipping coffee. I’d rather be home…but only if that reliably meant enjoying my morning over my coffee at home comfortably without stress or fussing over whatever, and dealing with stress because one or the other of us had a bad night. I like “easy”. Like… a lot.
I remove a couple paragraphs. I lost the thread of my thoughts. I sip my coffee thoughtfully.
Winter mornings are not well-suited to early morning camera walks. The sun rises so much later in the morning that it encroaches on the start of my typical work day. Instead of waking to the earliest hint of daybreak sometime around 04:30 or 05:00, I wake to my artificial sunrise well before dawn. With this in mind I’m thinking about making my everyday practice to head directly to the co-work space every morning that I don’t go into the city (not just Tuesdays and Thursdays), and just let that be what it is until the dawn comes earlier, allowing me to grab my camera and hit the trails around and about first thing, before work. Once the sun is rising around 06:30 or earlier once again, I can go back to my happy practice of hitting the trail first thing with my camera, then returning home to get my work day started there after I know my partner is awake. This works really well most of the year.
I reflect on how nice it is that we support each other with such care, generally. Seems nice. Oh, we do struggle and fuss at each other over some fairly petty bullshit. We’ve got communication challenges because cPTSD is messy and my TBI is… challenging. We’re human. I get irked with him. He gets irked with me. That’s just real. Frustration and bullshit and baggage are parts of the human experience. We’re pretty fucking human. Sometimes it is easier to love each other from a bit of a distance. LOL
This morning I miss him. I reflect more on what works than on what doesn’t. I’m grateful for the love we share. Could I do better? Yes. Could he? Yes. Do we both need more practice? Yup. I smile thinking of him fondly without overlooking the practical realities of loving him. Love doesn’t need me to tell myself pretty lies or to whitewash my lived experience. Love is no happily ever after fairytale. It’s also not a tragedy. Love is love. Part of living life. It’s complicated and messy and sometimes needs more from me than I feel I have to give. My results vary.
Weird day. I woke up feeling rested and merry. Seemed like a good start to the day, and mostly I suppose the day has been fine. Okay, not fantastic, but I’ve no expectation that each day will be 100% pure awesome from the moment I wake, until the moment I later close my eyes to sleep. My results – and my experiences – vary. My Traveling Partner woke from a restless unrestful night of sleep and made it clear he was not enjoying the morning. I did what I could to be chill and supportive. My efforts were not immediately (or reliably) successful, so I got my shit together, grabbed my list of errands, and headed out before I’d even taken more than a sip of my coffee. Seemed the like sort of morning to enjoy my own company for awhile, and let him have time to wake up and get sorted out.
I’m in a massive amount of pain this morning, and although it has done nothing to dull my good mood, I’m having to manage it. It’s there in the background and amounts to a bit of a distraction, and a thing that slows me down (without stopping me). I’ve taken the medication I can, and I’ve stayed on top of all the other self-care details pretty well, too. I still hurt. It is what it is. I don’t expect this to change; it comes and goes (in severity) with the weather, and with stress. I can’t do much about the weather, but I sure can do things to manage my stress. So, I do those things. lol
Today has been mostly about staying ahead of my pain, staying out of my partner’s way, and getting a few things done. Laundry, some kitchen re-organization (seems a good day to tidy up cabinets and cupboards and toss out stale spices), and the sort of routine housekeeping I commonly do on a quiet Sunday. My partner is mostly out in his shop, making things. I smile when I think about it.
“Easy” isn’t always about “perfect” – sometimes it’s just about not making shit harder than it has to be, and not taking the things that go wrong personally. I mean, seriously? How often are they ever “personal”?? Circumstances are just circumstances. Moods come and go like weather. I can’t “fix” someone else, or live their experience, but I can sure avoid making it all about me. I can sure focus on self-care, and kindness, and just doing my best to treat everyone around me well. If I’ve legitimately done my best, that’s pretty much what I’ve got to offer, right? 🙂
Evening Light 