The last 75 years

 

I was born just before the beginning of the 1950s and it has been an amazing journey.

I saw the transition from telephone operators to Iphones.

I remember getting our first television.

I remember Sputnik and the first man on the moon.

I came of age when birth control made children a choice.

I saw women able to have their own bank account and credit cards.

I watched the glass ceiling become thinner and thinner.

I saw a man try to become dictator of the United States of America.

I've seen Illinois Governors go to prison.

And maybe I will see a former US President go there too!

Mating call

 

Our little neighborhood is gradually transitioning from middle aged and older people to young adults.

I can hear it in the too loud laughter responding to the even louder bravado inciting it. The sophisticated set is comfortable in their skin. They make enough money to have the things they want and now they want the lifestyle to go with it.

It is the mating call of the up and coming.

There is a naivety about it that is both charming and annoying.

They honestly believe that this behavior will attract the people they want and admire, little knowing how it will turn on them in the future.

The giggle that stirred a heart annoys the hell out of the businessman who is starting to feel trapped by his situation. And the bravado of a so-called strong personality wears thin when the bill mongers are beating at the door.

This is a stage most of us go through. Some at 14. Some at 28 and some at 40. Unfortunately the end result is seldom any different.

It is play acting with a fury where we try to emulate the people we see on the big screen, who are in fact, play acting.

It pays off for one of them.

Tycoon hoarders

 

In the beginning humans were focused on simple survival. Shelter, food, safety, those were the guiding lights for our earliest ancestors.

Having enough slowly evolved into having more.

And more and more and more!

Hoarding money, or land, or power is not considered the flaw that other forms of hoarding are.

For some reason we think these high profile hoarders are special and a few are. A few use their stash to better mankind. Others just use it for hedonistic experiences for themselves and those closest to them.

The ability to collect things does not make you wise or kind and yet in those famous words from Fiddler On the Roof, if you're rich they think you really know.

We need to start asking ourselves what these people know. Do they really know how to take care of people, or a country? Are they truly qualified to guide us into better lives?

Maybe it is time to step away from judging people by what they have and look at the way they live.

It isn't as easy, but it might be a big step forward.

Sea to shining sea

 

I was looking at photos today and I realized if my extended family all lived together in a village we could be pretty self sufficient.

We have security people, nurses of all sorts, gardeners, teachers, mechanics, computer people, attorneys, carpenters, artists, musicians, engineers, electricians, brick layers and professors, just about everybody I can think of that we might need.

However we are stretched coast to coast, sea to shining sea, north, south, east and west across this continent.

We keep in touch through phone calls, texts, sporadic visits and the occasional card, which is at least better than in covered wagon days when good bye might mean forever.

We are a truly continental family.

The secret

 

Does everyone have one?

A secret so special and so dear that it belongs solely to them?

Something that can sustain them forever.

If they choose to let it?

The lesson and the journey

  

We are all born into this world crying and screaming and probably wishing we were back safely inside the warm nurturing bodies of our mothers.

Time passes and we are taught that we need to find our places, our vocations, our raison d'etre, but one reoccurring experience in my life makes me wonder if that is truly the point of being.

Of course I do not remember being born, or letting go of my mother, but I do remember moving away from my first friends, July and Paul, close to my fifth birthday.  We moved in with my grandmother while my dad was in Germany with his father for six weeks and I missed my daddy, even though he called me from that strange place far across a lake I couldn't walk around.

Throughout the rest of my childhood and teen years I would leave schools, neighborhoods and friends behind, always missing them, but adjusting, because I always had our family.

When I was married I left my entire family to move across the country with my husband who was in the army. Years later both my mother and father would precede me in death. Letting go of them was hard.

We had three children who grew up and moved away from home and once more I missed them dearly. Then my husband wanted a divorce and I left him.

Since then I have had many friends and lived in several places, eventually leaving them all to move on. Soon I will leave this place too. I've been here seven years, one of the longest times I've ever lived in one place at one time, but I've lived in this town since 1971 with the exception of a few years here and there. That's over fifty years in one place!

I am having interesting dreams as I prepare for this move. I feel it may be my last, but more importantly I am realizing that maybe what I am supposed to learn about life is letting go. Letting go of everything that is not essential is a journey much more complicated than giving up possessions. 

And yet it will free me up to be like the light and the wind where I will experience everything in a brand new way.

The best

 

My granddaughter graduated from college this weekend and I could not be prouder.

Anytime someone manages to get their degree it displays their willingness to work hard and persevere, but my granddaughter did this against incredible odds.

Here is a child who bought her prom dresses at second hand stores and altered them into beautiful. A girl who started working the minute she was old enough without ever letting her grades slip. A person who persevered in a home that did not value education all that much.

She made sure both she and her sister had all the ordinary milestones so many children take for granted. She is that exception to the rule, the one who made it beyond all odds.

And she managed to do it with style!

Once touring Europe with her friend who was going to school in Ireland, Moving far from home and setting up her own household. Supporting herself from the day she graduated from high school while working on this degree and now holding down a wonderful job that makes a difference in this world.

A human being just can't do any better than she does.

Mind tricks

In our family we are in the middle of a big move, a divorce, a college graduation, renovating a house, and planning a wedding.

Not one person is uninvolved.

And yet a good part of all of these things is waiting and waiting is hard.

Sometimes waiting involves preparing for an event, but everything happens in its own time.

The unknowns involved with waiting can be some of the most stressful moments around.

When action is delayed the mind plays and replays all the possibilities and some of them are not good. 

Of course that is like worrying, or really it is just another form of worrying and as I've said before, worrying is just another way of tricking your mind into believing you are actually doing something. When you are not.

The real trick is probably finding a way of not worrying or stressing out over the uncontrollable.

Bringing up baby

 

My daughter is the perfect example of a slow person.

She had a very traumatic childhood before she came to live with us, so her first four years, the years when your brain learns how to learn, were pretty much lost. Years of tutors, summer school, and everyone in the family working with her got her through school.

Now she is just like everyone else and better than many people.

She holds down a full time job, has a lovely home, goes on fantastic vacations and is getting married next summer. 

She has never stopped learning.

Prodigies are people whose brains learn faster than most of us do, in ways we don't completely understand yet, but if they are not brought up correctly they might lack social skills, or other skills the rest of us take for granted.

Most truly happy, successful people grow up learning how to navigate the world. Without that it doesn't matter how good looking you are, or even how talented, because if you can't get along on your own and with the people around you, life is hard. Money can only buy so many things for so long. After that people catch on and you become an outcast.

Drama eaters

 

It is not possible to live a life of peace and joy when someone is constantly focusing on the hopeless, the ugly, and the lost causes?

Drama mongers feast on bad news. They always have some tidbit to share that makes people feel bad, or tries to extract pity from them.

People like this are downers.

It does not matter how many ways anyone comes up with to solve their problems, they find a way to focus on them.

They always find a way back to what makes them unhappy and miserable. It is their goal in life to be pitiful and sad and needy.

They do not want a solution.

What would they do for excitement if no one was there to send them to the hospital, or threaten them, or give them a reason to share their story over and over and over to everyone around them?

These are sad people who grew up mistaking pity for love, so they never find true love and peace. They simply find people who feed their neediness and those people stay as long as they can bear it before they leave too.

If you find yourself telling the same sad story, year after year to person after person, maybe you should step back, ask yourself why and go to counseling.

Nine months

 

When I worked with a Jungian psychologist doing dream work, one of the things we often discussed was how dreams often represent new opportunities as births of things that began nine months ago.

Nine months ago I started a new job. It was a last ditch frantic effort to make my life work financially after losing all of my IRA to a scammer. It was also the moment when I began to be able to look at it more as a scam and less as a broken heart, because my heart was broken.

I put everything into the new job. I had the highest hopes and I loved what I was doing.

Fate was not on my side, though. I caught everything the children brought to school and was seriously ill beginning around Thanksgiving. By Christmas Eve I had Co-vid and that was the beginning of the end.

I may never recover my health completely. I have been left constantly achy and always worn out, no matter how much rest or sleep I get. And on top of all that I have gained a lot of weight which is hard on my body too.

Losing weight is never easy, but when I can only be up and about for 10-20 minutes at a time before I have to rest, it is really difficult, but fate is also kind. I discovered a subsidized building for seniors that is quite nice and it looks like I will eventually be able to live there.

Now if I can just hang in there until that happens all should be well. In fact, I hope that over time it will be more than well.

What we want

 

People are most comfortable with what they know.

Even if what they know is not good, or is painful. There is comfort in knowing what to expect.

A child grows up believing it is loved, so whatever happened to them is the love they seek for the rest of their life.

As adults move forward they learn to look for truth or comfort and if there must be a choice, many people seek comfort over the truth. 

They tell themselves the stories they want to hear; the ones they want to believe. And even if those stores prove false again and again, there are people who continue to believe in them. These are not simple optimists. They are simply simple and everyone around them pays the price.

The truth is worth reaching for even when it is not comfortable, because without truth there is likely to be no progress. No improvement. 

And what covers up truth eventually becomes a moldy, smelly, rotten comforter.

Waiting game

 

The hardest game of all is the waiting game.

There are an infinite number of ways to move the pieces, but in the end they are still in a state of stasis.

The strategy is complicated.

It must include future possibilities as well as present constraints.

The moves are also dependent upon the moves of the other players.

This is a game of strategy and tact enforcing almost all the life skills one has learned.

Control

 

I have a huge network of people willing to help me and I'm still struggling.

I realize that ninety percent of my problem is in my head. I'm worried about having a place to live where I feel safe and comfortable. I'm concerned about the timing of the transition and the cost of the move. The cost of the move weighs heavily on me.

And yet, people have given me money and made offers of help that seem to cover all these things.

So, I wonder, why am I so worried?

I suspect it is because so much of this is beyond my control and my faith in other people has generally been fragile. They make promises, but they aren't capable of really keeping them. I can't fault them for being who they are, but that still doesn't give me peace of mind.

I am pretty much packed and today I'm taking the first carload down to store at my nephew's. I don't want to be that person who waits until everyone is there to start getting ready and my experience in the past is that most people have a different sense of timing than I do. If gas was free I would take several more carloads down so all that is left is the big furniture. 

I'm taking a deep breath and simply trying to stay calm.

Stress

There is a lot of stress in my life right now and there has been for many months.

I would like to think good people never bring stress upon themselves, but that would not be true.

Most stress is directly related to something we do, or do not do. Sometimes it is both.

Raise a child to believe she is above the rules, does not have to abide by any laws, or be a productive contributor to both her family and her community and you are creating a problem. Both for the child and you, and the world.

Fall so irrevocably in love that you ignore all faults in a beloved and all warning signs from both the world and those who love you, and you are waiting for a broken heart.

Trust in people you do not know to be implicitly trustworthy and you put your entire life at risk.

Some of life's greatest stressors have to do with people we love and how both we and they respond to the stimuli in this world.

But all is not lost. 

Everyone can begin again if they really want to. They just have to be willing to make the necessary changes. If they don't, the consequences can be brutal. A mind constantly under stress deteriorates and so does a heart.

Family

 

Growing up I did not know the difference between family related by blood and those who married them. In our family there was no difference. I think that is an older way of looking at life. A marriage once meant a new son or daughter to be loved and lived with just as one born to you.

My mother-in-law treated me as the daughter she always wanted. We had a great relationship, but my husband often told me she was not my mother. She was only his. 

Later in my life there was another man and he too was very clear about the people in his family. They were HIS mother, HIS daughter, HIS son, HIS grandchildren. I was allowed to care for them, even love them, but I could never be part of them. They were a group unto themselves.

This is a very short sighted way of looking at things. 

I have two adopted children that are every bit as dear to me and a part of my family as the child born to me.

My brother-in-law did not include these children in their family tree! 

Draconian beliefs don't serve anyone well. They go back to the idea that some people are blue bloods, purebreds, born to be better than others.

Erecting invisible barriers only serves to divide people and a people divided do not ever thrive as well as those united. Everyone loses something in these situations and often it is much more than they realize.

Families of the heart are much stronger.

Swimming upstream

 

I was born there, nearly 75 years ago, but I did not grow up there. My family moved back my senior year in high school and I couldn't wait to escape to college the next year.

That was the first of my conscious efforts to leave this place of my birth.

I loved coming back to visit my grandmother, but this is a sleepy little town. One of the summer attractions was sitting on the bleachers watching people swim at the public pool. During the school year the high school gym had a gallery above it so people could come and watch basketball games, graduations, and dances. People watching was the main attraction.

Years later I moved back two years after my divorce thinking I wanted to be around family, but families grow in different ways and I had nothing in common with mine anymore.

Now I am going back again. This time like the salmon swimming upstream for the last time; I really don't have a choice.

Except that my circumstances are different now. I am no longer looking for new adventures. Hope has pretty much left the room. Now I am looking for a peaceful way to end my life with dignity. Perhaps this new approach will yield some surprises. Maybe I have been selling this place short.

I am willing to try harder this time, to be thankful I can visit my parents in the cemetery, walk around the courthouse square for exercise, possibly meet some new people, or find a new passion.

So, maybe there is hope after all. It's just hiding behind a lot of old detritus.