Awakening

I think it is possible that I am going through another metamorphosis and I don't know where I will end up.

Like a teenager doing summer jobs I am learning what I do not want to do with the rest of my life. It's what I really love that hangs in the balance now.

I have no real ties to any one area.

It all boils down to how brave I will be.

In the dark

I have been having the same dream in different forms for three nights now. I find myself abandoned with my youngest son (Who is a baby in the first dream and a man in the other two) and I am exhausted. I try to find a place to sleep, but there is no place to rest. We are in different places in each dream and always think of possibilities that don't work out in the end.

They are long frustrating exhausting dreams that end when I wake up even tireder than when I went to bed.

Tonight I don't even want to go to bed anymore. In fact, all day I found nothing of interest in my world except a postcard from Bestest. I just walked forty minutes in the dark. It was the second best thing I did today.

I'm not sure what is going on. Possibly I just spent too much time with other people during the past few weeks and forgot how to entertain myself? Maybe it is because I changed the decor in my apartment. Maybe things will be better because I can open the windows tonight and sleep in real air for a change.

I am reading a heavy, although not depressing book and I have watched some heavy movies, so tonight I watched an Italian comedy and I'm looking for something else to read.

Still, I am not looking forward to laying down in the dark.

Be an educated voter

An intelligent person can find information to support anything they want to. It may or may not be true, but they can also find information to convince themselves it is right.

Let us not sell out our country, our people, our children and grandchildren by trying to find reasons to support hate and divisive-ness.

Take a history class, find out what our forefathers really thought from people who know, not from politicians twisting things for their cause.  Learn from our constitution, including the amendments. Remember what is on the Statue of Liberty.

Disillusioned

I walked thirty five minutes tonight. It is the first time in ten days.

Up till then I had been walking 40 to 100 minutes a day since January.

I hoped this would lead to a healthier life.

I have seen no evidence of this, so when the heat is obnoxious and my body betrays me in significant ways, it is hard to stay excited about walking.

My blood pressure has not dropped. My weight has gone up. My body is doing strange and scary things. It feels unfair.

Then I think, nature is not fair. It just is.

Late freezes kill lovely flowering trees. Horrible storms wreak havoc that causes death and destruction across the world. Human beings destroy beautiful things every day. Bigger animals kill smaller ones.

That is life.

About the best I can do is just go forth and live, the best I can.

I want to tell the story

Times were hard. There were no jobs. People living in great mansions found themselves closing off all but a few rooms and trying to subsist there when their grandparents had had chauffeurs and maids and vaults filled with jewels. Now it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread.

And then a savior came. A man who promised to restore the good life, to make things better. He spoke to the frightened and frustrated hearts of the wealthy and once wealthy. He spoke to those who were afraid and hungry. He spoke to the angry and he gave them a solution.

He gave them a scapegoat. He united them in hatred.

 I was born in November of 1949, the second world war was still vivid in the memories of the people around me. I had nightmares of running through brick tunnels trying to escape the Nazis at a very young age. The people who ran our local grocery store, The Grunewalds, were survivors. My fifth grade teacher painted vivid pictures of how inconsequential Jewish children were during that war. My music teacher described how her students ran, dodging the buzz bombs, not knowing where they would land as houses exploded around them and later how they wore Mickey Mouse gas masks when they were put on trains and sent from London into the country where people prayed they would be safer. I met one of Mengele's twins after she spoke to a group one night.

Tonight I am remembering all the dismembered hopes and dreams and people who were the casualties of that time.

Precarious place

I watch parts of the Democratic Convention and for the first time in quite a while I feel proud of our country.

It is easy to forget how many good people still live in this country, how many people really want the best for others, how much goodwill honestly exists in our country. I see faces of all colors, all ethnic groups, and know that there are people there who embody the belief that all people are created equal and all people have the right to worship the way they want, love the people they love and live without fear of being cast aside simply for who they are.

A few people stand out for me. Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey and Michele Obama, our first lady.  I think we will continue to hear about these two, and maybe others.

For a few moments I am less afraid that our country might end up on the hands of a man who acts before he thinks. Less afraid that the hand who can push the button for the annihilation of the world because someone hurt his feelings will be put in a position to do that. Less afraid that social security will be taken away from the people who worked their whole lives to put the money in it. Less afraid that my grandchildren and their children will not have the right to vote or make decisions about their own health. And so much more.

 Hillary Clinton is not perfect, but who is?

At this moment in history she is hands down the best person running for President of the United States of America and our only hope that our country will not be put in the hands of a self-centered narcissist who mocks people with disabilities and women and prisoners of war and people whose parents were born in another country and so many other un-American things. Here is a man whose only real claim to his popularity is his ability to unite frightened, frustrated people with hate. Hate, the lowest and easiest common denominator that has been used by dictators throughout history. It is a vote for a man whose behavior would never be tolerated on any school playground in the country.

We are in the process of electing the person who will either protect the values this country was founded on, or selling out to the people who have the money to buy it. They are not afraid to buy into Trump because they believe they have enough money to buy their way out of any problems he creates for them.

Be informed. Do not rely on any one source for your information and especially not organizations that are known for being slanted, good or bad. Now is not the time for intelligent people to follow anyone blindly.

The future of our children is in a precarious place. What kind of country will they grow up in?

Goals

What if you woke up tomorrow and discovered that everything you based your life on was false?

You say that could never happen?

Measuring anything is always subjective. It's like that old question. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  To some people the answer is practice, practice, practice. To others it might be get on a plane, fly to . . .  And to still others it might be, why would I want to go to Carnegie hall?

Life goals in our society seem to depend on having things others can't reach, or achieve, or have.

What if our goals were something else? What if being happy didn't depend on one upman-ship? What if it were possible to be happy without comparing ourselves to others? Or what if being happy meant peace and enough of whatever we needed instead of whatever we could grab the most of?
 
It  seems to me that the biggest obstacle between me and true joy is often myself.

I am more connected to the rest of creation than I want to believe, so when I step on others I am injuring myself in ways I don't even understand.
 
Defining success in terms of peace and kindness, compassion and love, is harder than finding the lowest common denominator with competitions for power and place.

Ignorance is no sin, but in the long run it's no great advantage either.

Pleasing to death

The kindest and best thing you can do for those you love is be true to yourself.

That doesn't mean doing what you think you are supposed to do, or what others think you are supposed to do.

It means looking deep into your heart and finding out who you really are -- the real you before all the sposed tos began molding you into something else.

The romantic ideas learned from fairy tales and movies are there to create drama and drama is not the same thing as the right thing. You'll notice that all that drama in the stories and films causes lots of problems -- it will do the same thing for you.

Being pitiful is not the same thing as being lovable. The most attractive people are those who are self reliant and capable.

It is not necessary to be mean to be true to yourself and if someone really loves you they will not turn away from you forever because you are who you are. But . . . and this is a big one . . . you can drive people away by trying to do things just to please them. In the end the truth will come out and often in unpleasant emotional outbursts that drive a wedge between you and whoever you were bending over backwards to please.

Rather than running around trying to buy someone's love, or pleasing them to death, show them, by being an example, how to be a healthy, independent, useful human being. That might be the most loving and greatest thing you have to give.

Bittersweet

Tonight I am homesick for my children: For summers long ago when we went to the library and the pool and to play miniature golf . . .  For the times I kissed tiny feet and made smurf houses on the kitchen table out of pop bottles . . . For those summer nights when we sat on the porch swing and read books just before bed.

I miss going to baseball and soccer games and watching them walk down the driveway to go catch the bus on school mornings.

I miss making three little matching outfits every summer and polishing three pairs of little shoes every night.

I never wanted them to grow up and yet I did, because it was the right thing to do.

I don't miss the arguments with their father. Looking back I wish I could have done that differently. I am sorry they grew up amid so much upheaval. That was never the way I planned it. Never the way I wanted it.

But it happened that way and now I can only be sorry about that part -- I wish I had done something differently there.

I miss them.

The stuff in between

In the midst of lots of drama life always goes on.

Each of us knows our own mortality, our own life, our own important milestones, but to the universe we are just one more life form among millions of others. We come. We go. We do things in between and that is the important part for most of us.

That stuff in between.

For me that has been particularly important lately.

I drove down to my brother's and the first thing I did was get my car stuck in his yard. I went to visit, not kill him and yet, here he was trying to push me out of the hole I was stuck in. Luckily a nice man drove by, got down on the rain soaked road and hooked a rope to my back axle and pulled me out! The rest of the day was much less strenuous.  I had brought a picnic and my brother drove the car, and five hours later we were back home. A lot of good stuff happened that day.

Tonight I went to the last municipal band concert along with the usual crowd. Like all other nights there were lots of people sitting in lawn chairs listening to some gifted musicians volunteering to perform all sorts of music. Unlike all other nights, tonight was as still as a vacuum and as humid as a Florida swamp in the middle of August.

The musicians played as sweat ran down their glasses, swatting bugs that crawled down their collars and up their legs. The rare breeze that did blow through the park knocked the piccolo's music over towards the end of his rousing solo, but he continued gamely on and either knew the rest by heart, or we knew so little we didn't notice if he simply improvised. A lot of good stuff happened this night.

These are the sort of things that differentiate me from you and all the other living things in our universe and while they may sometimes seem calamitous, in the grand scheme of things they are what make us each unique and right now I can appreciate this.

It's sweet.

Responsibility

The most difficult thing to remember can be that most things aren't personal.

As much as I might like to believe that the universe revolves around me -- it doesn't.

I am important -- to me, to those who love me, and to the many people who may benefit from something I do, or don't do, that I may not even know about.

But beyond that, those little annoyances that occur at work, or on the road, or in the park, or just in my own house really have very little to do with me.

That being said, how I react to these things can make a huge difference in my life, or the lives of others.

It may not seem fair, or even be fair, but responsibility goes way beyond necessity.

Shrinking life

Life is filled with habits that need to be broken in order to keep living in the light.

What worked beautifully in one part of my life becomes obsolete or less important as time goes on. That goes for both the good things and the problems. I don't need the same things today I needed ten years ago. Life is shrinking and I need to be choosier about what I focus on.

Of course there are constants, but even those can be altered. There is more than one way to meet a need. I need to be creative.

One valuable coping mechanism I have is to focus on the real elephant in the room. The biggest thing here. 

Trying to enliven the conversation with how bad things are is a young person's habit. By my age I know that lots of bad things happen, but they are only part of moment to moment living. If I am honest with myself: in the grand scheme of most days there are more good things going on than bad if I allow myself to notice them.

 I'm working on that. Noticing the good things and keeping the rest in its proper place. That's a harder habit to change than you might think. I need to be relentless.