Moderation

Health is such an odd mixture of things.

It helps to eat the right food and exercise.  Cutting as much salt as possible out of my diet is obviously a good thing for me.  Unfortunately for me, just about everything is bad for some measurable part of me!  Carbs are bad for my glucose levels, fats for my cholesterol, and beef, pork, broccoli for my uric acid levels!  Even artificial sweeteners and fizzy drinks are bad for me!

Mostly, though, I have a feeling I just need to lose weight and I am managing that little by little.  My blood pressure has dropped over twenty points and is normal now.

Except when I go home.  Home is where family and friends live and that seems to set off all the alarms in my body!  My blood pressure soars the day before and continues high for two days after I return here.  Evidently I don’t deal with some kinds of stress very well at all.  Of course most of those are not my usual stressful situations.  They are unique, so I guess it could be worse.

It looks like I am going to have to learn to live on a moderately portioned rather bland diet and while that is not exciting; the alternative is much less appealing.

Not worrying

I was running behind my brother when I was about twelve years old and wearing thongs on my feet.  Suddenly there was a searing pain and I looked down to see my big toenail hanging from the side.  It had been kicked off!

The horror of that hit me like a ton of bricks.  I grabbed my toe and hopped screaming into the house where my mother tried to sit me down in a chair so she could look at it.  I refused to let go.  “It’s going to hurt.  It’s going to hurt!”  I kept hanging on to that toe and repeating those words again and again.

“Does it hurt now?”  My mother asked and I was astounded to realize that for some strange reason, it did not.  It did hurt a little when she bandaged it up, but by that time I was all cried out.

Since then I have tried not to get too upset over things before they happen, because….well, because they might not be half as bad as I anticipate!

Still, it is almost impossible to totally ignore the fear that precedes the unknown.  When whatever I am worrying about is over, no matter what the outcome, I feel much better.  And when it turns out to be nothing to worry about, I am almost elated!

And then I am tired.  Worn out by all that non-worrying I tried not to do ahead of time.

Out of the depths

 I hate it when people point to someone and say, “See?  If she did it, anyone can!”

That is so blatantly false!  There is always the over achiever, the child who makes it despite incredible odds.  And there are probably a million other children who cannot possibly make it under those same odds.

Most of us, if we are honest, would not be where we are today without the help of some good and wise people who loved us enough to lay down the law, or throw bread crumbs in front of us.  Depending on who we are, we need encouragement and good advice.

Expecting our children to do more than we are capable of is wishful thinking.  Child rearing is work!  And if we aren’t prepared to do that work, we shouldn’t have children. 

The children might make it without conscientious and nurturing guardians.  They might find other people who love someone else’s child enough to do the work and have the time and money and energy that is necessary.  But it is a gamble.

We wouldn’t gamble a child’s life by tossing it in the sea and waiting to see if it can swim, or if it will drown.  Expecting some teacher, or local hero, or underpaid babysitter to save my child is a gamble.  Children deserve so much more than that.

There are children left behind before they ever leave the womb.  Their mothers drink or smoke, their fathers use drugs.  After birth they are ignored or drugged or sat in front of a television to keep them out of the way.  Once in school no one helps them with homework or takes an interest in developing their other talents.  The occasional one will make it big and society will point and say, “See?  If he did it, anyone can!”

Not all parents are equal, but almost all parents are capable of learning to nurture their own young.  It begins when the parent is born.  Children learn what they live and while some may not, it will go a long way towards improving the lives of countless others.  Most of us try to improve upon what we already know and that means each generation of children has the possibility of a better life without having to be the one in a million super hero.

Let’s be realistic. 

Milestones

Funerals are complicated affairs.  I often say wedding when I mean funeral and funeral when I mean wedding.  Somehow, in my mind, the two are almost interchangeable and have been for as long as I can remember.  They are the only two occasions in my family where EVERYONE shows up, dressed to the nines and there is a huge feast afterwards.  Both involve a long procession of cars and a ceremony up in front that involves one or two people.  It is understandable that a child might confuse the two, but part of my mind has never totally separated them and I am way past childhood.

My father refused to allow songs with words at my mother’s funeral and I understood that.  Having his grief wrenched from him in public would have offended his English sense of propriety.  In his honor, we did the same at his funeral and yet, I ask myself what the music is for?

Today I believe music is part of honoring the dead person’s personality.  Yesterday's funeral music was country western.  A couple years ago it was the Beatles at another friend’s funeral.  At my father’s, my son and friend played Amazing Grace on guitar and flute.  The memory of that moment wrings tears from me and I think that is what the music is really for: a way to tap into our innermost place and set some of the grief free.

Setting ourselves free, we also set our beloved’s soul free.

Obviously for me that takes a while and so each funeral I attend is, in a way, the same one, over and over and over again.  Until finally that soul has settled into a heaven I can accept and believe and deal with even in my most innermost thoughts.

Mile markers

It is crazy the things I think about when life is stressful.

Last night I was remembering the first purse I ever had.  A navy blue and dark red plastic shoulder bag with the white head of a Scottish terrier protruding from the front.  I was three years old and I took it with me to see my first movie, Pinocchio, with my Daddy.

Later I had a green leather purse with white leather shirring on the front and a shiny brass clasp from Germany.  My Daddy brought it back to me and I filled it with my very own ballpoint pen and a handkerchief I cross stitched when I was six.

Easter of my tenth year my mother bought me a patent leather purse that was shaped like a tiny flat hatbox. And every year when school started in high school I was allowed to buy a new purse the way kids today buy backpacks.

What does this all mean?  Only that I realize that these little things have somehow become the mile markers of my childhood.

Amazing

Oh the places I find things!  Some of the best have been in the most unlikely spots I could ever imagine.  And some of the even better ones found me.

The only thing I am really sure of anymore is that almost anything is possible.  Not everything, although I won’t swear to that, but it does seem that the more open I am to possibilities, the more they appear at my door.

One morning I wake up and there is Amazing!  Wagging its tail and asking to be let in.  What happens next depends.  I can slam the door safely shut, or go out in the yard and play.

Playing ball is a great way to analyze a situation.  Attitude, balance, character, emerge quickly and pretty much without artifice when I’m just playing.  At the end of the day I have been in the sun and the shade, out in traffic and stuck in the mud.

By the time dinnertime rolls around there is plenty of food for thought.

Reality

“Tis easy enough to be pleasant, when life flows by like a song…”  That was a line from a poem my mother had on her kitchen wall by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.   It comes to mind right now.

Up until today my biggest concern was what I was eating and how much I was walking.  Tomorrow that changes.  Tomorrow I have a full day with a tour in the morning and appointments in the afternoon.  I will not have the luxury of eating when I want, or possibly what I want.

It doesn’t get better as the week progresses.  I will be busy Friday and on the road early Saturday to help out a friend.  Add concerns about family and life becomes a bit more real.

I have to say it scares me a little.  It has taken me a long time to get to this place.  I really want to stay here.  Of course I know people who do more every day so I know it is possible.  The question is only, is it possible for me?

Yes!  Yes it is.  I am going to be very positive about this.  (And maybe pleasant too!)

Twelve days down and counting...

The best way to get something done is to focus on it.

Focus too much on it and it becomes an obsession!  So where’s that happy medium everyone talks about!

The less I like doing something, the more time I need to spend making sure I don’t “not do” it.  Otherwise I have a tendency to just put unpleasant things out of my mind and go merrily along.

I have spent the last twelve days not overeating!  That should be simple.  I just go about my life and when dinnertime rolls around, I eat what’s on the menu and move on.  But, as anyone who has ever dieted knows, it doesn’t work that way.  I tried not calling it a diet, but let’s face it folks, this is NOT my normal eating plan!  It may be a healthy diet, or a diet I will need to maintain for the rest of my life, but it is not normal – yet.

I tally up those meager little calories ten times a day.  I weigh myself every morning.  I know, I know, they say not to do that, but if I don’t, I don’t stay focused.  I dread the evening walk, but I’ve been able to keep doing it. 

The only hope I have is that pretty soon this lifestyle will become a routine.  Most routines that I have acquired in the past required at least three weeks of repetition.  Nine more days and counting…

Less is more

I can’t tell you how many people are constantly looking for the right miracle diet to improve their health.  Or how many doctors continually run tests to prove that their patients need to change something.

I don’t see the point in either unless a person is ready to make a change.  In fact, it is my belief that it only adds stress to what is already a difficult situation.

Of course the doctor covers himself by running the tests.  He can point to them and say, “See I did all I could.”   But I don’t think the tests prove that at all.  They only prove he ran the tests.

I react to most things by eating and I eat many foods that are not particularly good for me, but when my doctor began running blood test after blood test and scheduling appointments every month or even more often, I quickly put on another twenty pounds!  I don’t think I am the exception.

We finally discussed this and lengthened the time between visits to six weeks.  Amazingly, my blood pressure dropped, my weight is slowly dropping and I’ll bet my other readings are improved when I go back next time.  For me stress was as much an issue as the measurable issues my doctor was concerned about.

Not everyone is the same, but I believe that really sitting down and discussing what is going on in a patient’s life might be just as useful as a year’s worth of tests and office visits when you get down to the nitty-gritty.

Earthlings

I have always loved Aboriginal paintings.  I never knew why, but as I lay trying to go to sleep last night a thought occurred to me.

Maybe what I like about them is that they express the world the way I see it.  Not with lizards and kangaroos and crocodiles and certainly not with snakes!  I am thinking of the style of painting.

I believe we are all made of the same basic things and these things move between us and through us and around us, in various ways.  It’s the old in the beginning there was the earth thing.  Everything else sprang out of that.

The building blocks are on the floor and however they come together the smallest ones always have moving parts.  I really am you at the most fundamental level.

It seems to me that the Aborigines have captured that with their dots and short flowing lines.  I can almost see the earth shimmering through them.  And just because my world has grown so far away from these basic tenets doesn’t mean the reality of it has changed.

The bottom line is we are people of the earth, from the earth.  We are earthlings!

Reality

The ability of the human mind to make a case for things both ways makes hindsight particularly unreliable.

I hear people tell me what and why they did things that I know are not true.  I was there!  The worst part of this is that if they do it, I probably do too.

What difference does it make?

It eases the repercussions of past actions, but it can also be used to justify future ones.  When that happens, it is destructive.

Persistence and hard work are the way to succeed, but they only succeed at doing what they point to.  If I want to go from here to there and a huge cliff is in my path, no matter how many times I walk off the edge of that cliff, I will fall.  I need to find a different way to negotiate that impasse.

Change is hard and changing behaviors that feel good and seem right even when they don’t work makes it even harder.

You really can’t fool mother nature.

Once upon a time

Today is almost over and I realized I have never written a thought.  There is a very good reason for this.

My yesterday did not end until five o'clock this morning, which barely left time for today to begin, but begin it did!

I was awakened like Snow White by a little prince who filled my world with sunshine when he smiled and then I had to feast and do a little cleaning since it is Saturday and suddenly it was four o'clock!

Once upon a time only comes like that....once upon a time.  It would be a shame to waste it.

“The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work.  Hard work is the price we must pay for success.  I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.” 

 Vince Lombardi – Football Coach, Green Bay Packers

A friend sent this quote today and it rings true for me. 

When I want something badly enough I can make it happen.  It may require a bit of creative thinking, or an incredible amount of work, or even a fair amount of pain, but most things are not impossible.

Persistence is part of the recipe.   How many times have I quit just before I might have succeeded?  I really have to want some things – a lot.  I wanted to quit smoking.  It took over ten years for me to find a way that made it work, but I finally did it!

And I have to be realistic.  I wanted children and after years of thinking that was impossible I became a foster parent and then an adoptive parent.  I had children!  Just not the way I had expected. 

I wanted to be loved and understood for exactly who I was.  It took a lifetime, but it happened.

The price of success for me has often been years of trying and failing and then discovering that success isn’t always exactly the way I pictured it, but it is still just as sweet. 

Failure usually means I didn't want it badly enough.

Something changed

Bearnard arrived at my house in a box.  He was a stuffed teddy bear.  A very beautiful, very cuddly, very fuzzy bear with a big nose and two penetrating little eyes.

In the beginning he simply sat on my bed looking cute.  Then one night I had the urge to give him a book to read and I think that was when it all began.  Perhaps it was the book, an out of print copy of James Agee’s The Morning Watch, that caused him to change.  I kept watching him sitting there with it and realized a little voice in my head was telling me he much preferred Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

He looked so cute that I took his picture before changing the books, so perhaps it was the camera.  I’ve heard there is magic behind the lens of a camera.  Whatever it was, I began noticing that Bearnard is more than a big nosed stuffed bear.  He is a very nosy bear!

He gets into everything so I have to keep a close eye on him.  That means he often goes with me to one of my volunteer jobs, or to visit friends and I have gotten into the habit of taking his picture during those little visits.  After a while I realized that I had so many of those pictures it seemed I ought to do something with them, so I began sending them to my grandchildren, one at a time with a little story about what was going on. 

Bearnard gets into everything!  Nothing is safe from his big furry nose.

I used to have a dog, Chauncey, but he really didn’t do well in the apartment so he lives with my sister and her dog. I used to talk to Chauncey and sleep with him and ask his opinion about things.  He was a very small dog and I used to worry about rolling over on him at night.  Often I had the uneasy feeling that he needed more attention than I was giving him. 

Lately I have noticed that Bearnard has slipped quietly and easily into his place!  I sleep with him in the big bed in my apartment just like I did Chauncey.  I talk to him and ask his opinion about things and even get that uneasy feeling that he needs more attention than he’s getting.  I don’t, however, ever worry about rolling over on him! 

Bearnard seemed to be just a stuffed bear when he first came here, but not anymore.  Maybe it was the book, or the camera, or maybe it was because he was a Christmas bear and Christmas is full of magic; but whatever caused it…something changed!

Bearnard is no longer my stuffed bear.  He is my pet bear!

Alone

Alone in my apartment on the one day a year dedicated solely to lovers is not the tragedy I might have thought it was in my youth.  Like all words, “lovers” has so many levels.  Spanning everything from the surface to the deepest most innermost part of being.

The seed was planted when I was born and imprinted on my parents.  Love was needy and intense and extraordinarily self centered. 

Growing outwards, love reached for those who were enough like me to give me those things I wanted and needed the most.  It was a mutual giving in order to receive.

As a parent, love exploded into giving!  Love like this is as close to god-like as a human being ever comes.

As my children grew and my world expanded, the knowledge of that love began to creep out and fill in all the nooks and crannies around me.  Until now I find myself a lover…connected so ineffably that I am never alone.

Out of the light

“And in one moment all my past acts become irrevocable.”  This is a line from a poem by Carol L. Goor. 

These are powerful words. 

They hold within them all the dreams and wants, the regrets and desires that are no longer possible.  “Irrevocable” think about that.  One moment that changes everything forever more.

What would I change if I could go back?  I think I know and yet I really can never know for sure.  Dwelling on the past can be like running on a hamster wheel without getting my heartbeat up; just a useless circle of regrets that do no good at all.

Instead I envision myself becoming the best that I can be now.  There is comfort in that…and light too.

Ounce by ounce

I grew up thinking that socializing was eating.  Daddy came home for lunch and we all gathered around the dining room table to eat cheese sandwiches, vegetable soup and talk.  The same thing happened at dinner with a more elegant setting.

In between my mother was busy cleaning and washing and ironing for a large family that grew up before the days of permanent press and disposable dust mops.  If she took a break, it was to have coffee with our neighbor, Aunt Jo, on the patio next door.

Breaks meant eating.  Trips to Champagne on weekends to have my brother’s casts changed meant donuts and chocolate milk in the car to pass the time.  Holidays were celebrated mostly by feasting and not the scurry to buy things that today has brought along.

And while I am not particularly in favor of the current need to celebrate all of life with retail consumerism, I am learning that it doesn’t have to be accompanied by food all the time either.

Not an easy lesson for someone who is used to picking up something to eat in the car, and while watching television and even reading a book, but the good life is killing me, ounce by ounce and something’s gotta change.

A sqaure peg in a round world

I have a tendency to think my way is the best.  I suppose that is human nature and a good thing for the most part.  After all, why would I do something if I didn’t think it was the best way?

Of course I do do things that are not the best all the time.  I eat the wrong foods and too much of them.  I don’t exercise enough.  I have a tendency to stay up too late and then I get up later in the morning.  But it is the eight hours of sleep that matter in my opinion.  When they happen shouldn’t really make a difference.

I also tend to be better in the short haul.  I am meticulous, almost a perfectionist about some things, for a while.  Then my attention wanders, my interest lags, and I tire of it.  .

People need continuity, but I also need change.  My sister is good for the long haul.  She’s raising my dog and still a nurse after over forty years.  We need people like her, but I can’t be that.  Everything about me comes in short bursts of energy.  It always has, even my sport of choice, tennis. 

Teaching preschool meant organizing my day into twenty-minute segments.  Perfect for me.  Paying bills comes once a month for a short period of time.  Writing this thot once a day takes around 30-60 minutes.  Housework is dragged out over the course of a week.  Laundry was such a chore I wanted to move rather than spend all that time in a Laundromat.  Now I rush in, wash my clothes and take them home to dry.  Yes, I’d rather hang things around my room than stay there and watch that dryer spin. 

I like to lose myself in the passion of something and then move on to another passion.  Sometimes I wish I was different, but I think I am finally coming to terms with me.  I used to pretend I wasn’t this way, but I still really was.  Now that I am “retired” I seem to be able to give myself permission to like me the way I am.

The world needs all kinds of people, even me.

Stay out of the shadows

I really didn’t know my paternal grandmother.  She moved away before I was seven years old and I only saw her once after that.  Even when she lived two blocks away I seldom saw her, and only ate dinner at her house twice that I remember, once by myself. 

Yet I think I am more like her than anyone else I know in our family.  I remember the beautiful handmade dolls she made for each of us.  Intricately detailed clown dolls for my brothers and a Chinese doll for me, complete with black silk embroidered clothes.  The story is that when my parents went up to the family vacation house one year there was a closet full of matching dresses waiting for my sister and I.  Each one carefully embroidered and smocked.

I discovered that she took my father and his sister to museums and places like Turkey Run, Indiana to explore and hike, all things I did with my children, but that my mother did not do with us.  I’ve also heard that this grandmother loved to play Bridge and read.  I remember some of the books she sent me, Puss In Boots and Paddle To The Sea, both before I was five.  In those rare times we were together she told me about the Anasazi and the Hopi and I’m pretty sure that sparked my interest in the history and folklore of both.

As I look back on my life I realize this woman had an incredible influence on my life for no more than I was allowed to be with her, but that a lot of our similarities must be genetic. 

Like her I love to create things and read and explore.  Like her I wandered off across the country after a long marriage and divorce.  But I think I have found a peacefulness and satisfaction in my life at the end that she never found.

I wonder what it would have been like to spend more time with this person who seems to have had more in common with me than any other woman I’ve ever known, but perhaps we spent just the right amount of time together; just enough for her to light the fires that lay latent in me and not enough for me to become her shadow.

Common Sense

Doctors are not gods.  They do not deserve blind faith.  Any intelligent person knows that there are extremes to everything and those extremes serve most of us poorly.

Gone are the days of the country doctor who comes to the house and leaves with a chicken, or a basket of eggs.  Today’s doctors are in league with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the hardships of maintaining their own homes, cars, kid’s schooling, their own schooling, and clubs. Most of them are out there to make money, among other things.

Get past all of that and there is still youth and idealism to deal with.   I have years of dealing with my own body.  The idea of turning it over to someone else, no questions asked, is beyond comprehension.

The advantages of a clinic are the differing opinions of the doctors there.  If anything validates my concerns this does.  There are very few real Dr. Gregory Houses.  Doctors are people like all the rest of us.  They are trained to make decisions, by looking at the symptoms and then they issue diagnoses accordingly, but there is no guarantee he is right.  If he is wrong?  Well, he tries again.

I, on the other hand, have to live with the unnecessary surgery, wrong diet, and side effects of medicines, which can actually be terminal.  It happens even with the best doctors.  I KNOW people who have been more messed up by their doctors than by nature.

Ask questions!  Listen to the answers.  Then evaluate those answers!

This is your life!

Doctors are not gods.  They do not deserve blind faith.  Any intelligent person knows that there are extremes to everything and those extremes serve most of us poorly.

Gone are the days of the country doctor who comes to the house and leaves with a chicken, or a basket of eggs.  Today’s doctors are in league with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the hardships of maintaining their own homes, cars, kid’s schooling, their own schooling, and clubs.  They are out there to make money.

Get past all of that and there is still youth and idealism to deal with.   I have years of dealing with my own body.  The idea of turning it over to someone else, no questions asked, is beyond comprehension.

The advantages of a clinic are the differing opinions of the doctors there.  If anything validates my concerns this does.  There are very few real Dr. Gregory Houses.  Doctors are people like all the rest of us.  They are trained to make decisions, by looking at the symptoms and then they issue diagnoses accordingly, but there is no guarantee he is right.  If he is wrong?  Well, he tries again.

I, on the other hand, have to live with the unnecessary surgery, wrong diet, and side effects of medicines, which can actually be terminal.  It happens even with the best doctors.  I KNOW people who have been more messed up by their doctors than by nature.

Ask questions!  Listen to the answers.  Then evaluate those answers!

This is your life!

 

The bestest

It is so tempting to look for the good stories elsewhere. 

I think the ghost stories and the folk tales all come from another place, another time, another person, when all around me the tales weave themselves alive.

The heroes and the villains walk among us everyday and the music that accompanies them is as great as any John Williams theme if only I stop to hear it.  I just don’t hear the synthesized version, the one played by French horns and violins.  The one whose melody carries the reality is the one Williams heard in his head before it was transferred to those earthly instruments.

I listen for the inspiration.  I look for the reality.  I reach out and gather it up in arms that want to fling it back like flowers from a bouquet…and sometimes I can and sometimes I cannot.

The truest tales come when we work together.  I start a sentence.  You finish it.  You start one and I finish it.  We both are listening and watching and reaching out with every fiber of our being and only then do we find the whole story.

When that happens it becomes a reality and everyone sees and hears and feels what we do.

Love One Another

Love one another.  I’m willing to bet everyone knows where those words come from and even if you don’t most people claim they care deeply about their fellow human beings.  What bothers me is that the people who most fervently subscribe to those three words are often the very ones who have a personal addendum that I don’t remember seeing beside the original.

I don’t believe it said love one another unless – and here the list is very eclectic and long depending on the personal agenda of the one making it.

I am always shocked by the people who are intelligent and educated and yet still find a way to justify the way they think when it involves anyone not subscribing to their own narrow perspectives.

The world is not black and white.  There are a zillion shades of gray and you don’t have to be a Vulcan to see that even do no harm is not as clear as it seems.  But I can absolutely tell you that killing someone, or torturing them for good is an oxymoron.  And I can also tell you that there are a lot of ways to kill people besides outright pointing a weapon at them and using it.

Passive aggressive murder is as old as time and it is still being used as the sanctioned way of disposing of anyone who gets in the way, or is different. 

People have the right to live and love with dignity, to control their own bodies, receive necessary medical care, an education, and access to jobs they are truly qualified for.   I don’t think it is possible to love one another if you don’t believe that. 

Everybody's gotta breathe

As a child I dreamed of the day when I could do what I wanted.

But life has a way of evening things out.

One thing becomes abundant and others become more complicated.

I like the idea that I, like fine wine, only become better with age, but the bottling of this grace isn’t a heavy glass bottle topped with a cork.  It is a flesh and bone body that sometimes seems distressingly fragile and ungraceful.

It doesn’t seem fair that I now have the time and the freedom and even perhaps enough money, but my casing is dulling the exaltation.

Still, it is what it is.  I have choices.  I may not like them, but what’s new about that?  The secret always seems to boil down to the same thing no matter what the situation is– and that is to live in the moment. 

Like any other time in my life, in this moment I am okay.  Breathing in I relax.  Breathing out I smile.  Thich Nhat Hahn came up with that and it has served me well over the years.

It doesn’t replace planning, or frugality, or common sense, but it goes a long way towards keeping the little men in the white coats away.

A little bit goes a long way

It is so much easier to give advice than take it...yet it isn’t.  Not really. 

I feel a terrible responsibility when I give out advice.  It is one thing to do something myself and risk whatever might go wrong.  Then I am the only the one to blame or at risk.  When I offer the same advice to someone else it is a whole different story.

I always err on the side of caution, but there are so many unknowns! 

Nature has a way of taking care of some people and not others.  I’ve known people who were fat alcoholics eating barbecued food and smoking every day who lived to be very old.  I’ve known others who appeared to be in excellent health and dropped dead during their daily jog at a relatively young age.

I don’t know what the defining differences are.  Doctors don’t know either.  They make guesses and these are good ones:  Smoking is probably the number one worst thing you can do to your body over all.  After that I think it might be stress and from then on it is anybody’s guess.  Probably because each one of us is different.

Doing my best not to give bad advice is about the best advice I have.  Often that means not saying all those things I am thinking.   

And that is hard!

 

A new generation

I went to college at the very end of the sixties.  We thought we could change the world.  “Make love, not war.”  Today most of us have become mainstream citizens.  We gave up the headbands, bare feet, and idealistic rebellion of youth for regular jobs and the very life styles we were so against back then.

Or did we?  We are not our parent’s generation.  We may look like it when we walk down the street, or drive out of our garages, but there are differences.  We made mistakes.  We failed at achieving many of the things and over did others, but that is always going to be part of change and big changes come slowly.

Ultimately we did achieve a few things that I am proud of.   We stood behind Bobby Kennedy and brought civil rights into reality.  We gave both men and women the option of working outside their home, or staying in it. 

We turned from idealistic protests to petition signing, hard working adults, some of whom have given their lives and many who gave up the quality of their lives to make a difference. 

So today, when I find myself totally disillusioned with the politics of the day and the blatant pandering of government to big business I remind myself that there is a new generation out there, joining all those who went before, and many of them are just as determined as we were to change things.  And they will, but change comes slowly.

It is a better world, but it will be even better if we all keep nibbling away at the complacency and ignorance and greed that seems to be a natural part of the human race.

Amazement

I learned many things in elementary school, but the biggest one was how to get my mother to do my homework.  Manipulating a woman, who saw grades as the proof that she was doing all the right things and her children were bright and successful, was easy.  Even for a six year old!

Of course neither one of us was aware that this was what was happening, but it still set the course for the rest of my life.  I was a bright child.  I quickly learned that most adults can do elementary school work better than elementary school children.   Unfortunately, it also undermined my belief in my own ability.

Eventually I reached the point where my mother was no longer capable of doing my work.  Unfortunately I was not really prepared to do it either so there were some real rocky years ahead for me.  I learned from all of this and I think I did much better with my own children.

I am, just now, really working WITH someone for the very first time!  In the past, the closest I could usually come was a division of labor.  You do this.  I’ll do that.  And if we are lucky it will come together in the end.  When my three-year-old students did this, I said they were working side by side.  It is the very first stage of playing together.

Watching different perspectives come together, weaving themselves in and out of each other, creating a finished product that is not simply two parts pasted together, has been a revelation for me!  I am amazed at how uniquely beautiful such a project can be.

Soul mates or just good friends

Everyone seems to be looking for their soul mate, but not everyone is looking for the same kind. 

My soul mate would probably have that proverbial half of my faults and twice my virtues. Not that I would notice mind you.  I’d think we were a perfect match!

If I ever found someone exactly like me I probably wouldn’t be all that attracted to them.  There are parts of me I am not particularly fond of.

In fact, there is much to be said for a certain amount of delusion in life.  I’m doing the best I can and if I had to look at what some people thought of that I might be so depressed I’d give up on what I have!

So…rather than my soul mate, I think I’m just looking for someone who kind of likes me the way I am and is willing to give me the room to improve as I can.

My friend

“I get by with a little help from my friends.”

“That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.”

We haven’t really come so far from the bards of old.  We still remember things best in  song and rhyme and we still revere the songwriters.

And we’re still singing about the same things, so those must be the important ones, right?

Life is about putting one foot in front of another.  Some of us seem to do it better than others.  Some of us make it look effortless and some of us make it look so hard, it’s amazing we even try.

What seems to make it possible, or at least bearable, are the other people.  It doesn’t matter if we are Siamese twins, or disembodied voices, when we are here for each other in the ways that count life is better.

“How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.”