The art of living

 

People seem to approach life in two basic ways.

The first is trying to adapt and find solutions for their problems.

The second is complaining about their problems and finding excuses for why nothing works.

There really are unsolvable problems, but most things can be dealt with if a person is willing to adapt, experiment, and think! 

Believe it or not, thinking is a miracle worker!

Open the mind. 

Break down the problem into parts.

Deal with each part in a plain old common sense way.

And voila! It's amazing how much less confusing and difficult life can be.

Happiness is

 

Our society seems to always be in search of happiness outside itself. Of course happiness is actually an extreme. Contentment would be a better goal, but whatever they are seeking it seems most people expect it to come from somewhere that is not them.

The world is willing to jump on that! Doctors prescribe anti depressants, psychologists offer all sorts of services, the entertainment industry thrives on it. 

Theme parks like Disney, Harry Potter, Six Flags, all rely on people needing the odd or exotic experience to feel happy, gleeful, joyous! 

Television has whole networks dedicated to romance and uplifting faith movies. Magazines and books and podcasts tell us how other people supposedly find real joy and love and happiness!

There are people who shop continuously, always hoping to be able to buy something that makes them happy. They even try to buy happiness for their children and family and friends, thinking that the newest fad will give them fifteen minutes of joy. 

And there is the kicker.

Fifteen minutes of anything except life can be bought for some price almost anywhere. Death cannot be cheated. Eventually everyone dies, but in between being born and dying you can find tiny increments of happiness outside of yourself, all around you, if you have enough money, and that is what you are seeking.

But long term happiness, contentment, the kind that gives us good dreams and makes sitting with ourselves feel really good only comes from within.

That is hard to give anyone else, maybe impossible, but we can demonstrate it to people around us if they are interested. Unfortunately in today's world that is uninteresting and too slow for many people. They want what they want and they want it now!

Young children are perfectly happy as long as they are healthy and cared for and fed. They don't need fancy toys. Everything is a toy to them even their own bodies. They don't need peer playmates until they are around three. They find themselves infinitely intrigued by the world around them. Then the people and things around them teach them this isn't enough and suddenly they have NEEDS and they are BORED and it gets worse from there.

There is nothing wrong with wanting or even needing things outside of us to spice up our life, but the problem comes when these things become necessary for what we believe is happiness. It is possible to have problems, big problems, in life and still be content within yourself.

It's worth spending some time with your self, getting to know the real you, discovering your hidden talents and what makes you special, because no one else can really do that and that is where the mother lode is.

The road from independence

 

People who pretend to be nicer and sweeter and more caring than they act terrify me.

They are untrustworthy.

They are manipulators.

They are parasites in a world where most people seek to be independent and it backfires on them in the end.

Eventually they forget they are pretending. 

Then they forget how to learn new things. 

And finally they forget how they did the old things.

They become raging maniacs when someone calls them out for lying.

This is the road to dementia.

incentives

 

I think it's kind of sad that most incentives in this world seem to be monetary.

Big pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to produce drugs if they can't make a lot of money from them.

I wonder how important those drugs would seem to them if their children needed them to live, or to have better quality lives?

Doing good things just because they improve our world is still rare enough that it makes headline news when wealthy people use their wealth for someone other than themselves. It's not like these people are making great sacrifices, but they are doing good things. I appreciate this. There should be more of it.

I know many people who are middle class or lower in income who make real sacrifices in order to make the world a better place, but we seldom hear about any of them.

Here's to the people whose love of humanity is their only real incentive.

Illusions

 

I know someone who is always trying to make a point by telling me of another person who had the exact same experience as she did. (Like sitting on her toilet and finding it to be very close to the ground.} I don't disagree with her. I never have disagreed about the height of her toilet, but for some reason it is important to her that I understand she and this other person agree upon this very important thing.

Needing people to agree with us comes from an innocent part of our lives where grown-ups were more likely to let us have or do something if they agreed with us.

As adults it should be very clear that someone agreeing with you may be satisfying, but it hardly proves anything. A lot of people agreed that the current president was the one to vote for and most of us know this was not true. 

Now majority rules. That I agree with, but whether that majority is right or not is always a matter up for discussion (or maybe not in our country anymore.}

Mob action , lynch mobs, mobsters, are all examples of people banding together for all the wrong reasons, even if they happen to agree with each other.

A thousand people may sit on your toilet and proclaim it to be very close to the ground, but what does that mean? Are you going to get a new toilet? Are you going to modify your present toilet? Are you asking me what I think you should do?

I think you should just get over it. Adjust and plan for how far down you are going to have to sit.. 

Why do we focus on being like other people as if it proves we are right? It only proves someone else sees things the same way and maybe there is some comfort in that.

But it is an illusory comfort at best.

Blessings

 

Blessings don't have to be religious at all.

Some blessings are simply the reflections of good that is so often missing in this world.

Our world has become a corporate structure. Every business, including churches, medicine and schools are now built around rules.

Rules, while being quite important  for order, often become excuses for not going the extra mile.

Today, in a huge medical complex, with a doctor who drove to our town for his weekly visit, a nurse went above and beyond all expectations and beyond the rules.

I walked the equivalent of a city block just to get in the building. Then I walked another block just to get up the elevators and to the office desk. And even after all that, on a severely injured foot, I had to walk down two very long corridors to the examination room.

I could have asked for a wheelchair when I entered the building, but I was too proud.

By the time I was done with my appointment the prospect of making my way all the way back to my car loomed as an insurmountable trek. I asked the nurse if he could just get me a wheelchair as far as the front door of the building and he happily agreed.

Imagine my surprise when we passed the front door and he pushed me all the way out to my car in the far parking lot! 

His only request?

Don't tell anyone. 

So I'm only telling you because you have no way of identifying him, a true angel without wings or halo, doing the work of good people.

The horror within

 

It's not politically correct to call someone crazy, but sometimes other words elude me.

Imagine spending your life with someone who was always held up to be everything you are not (and everything your family thinks is important.)

People are created by the molds that form them, which is why there are so many family rituals, traditions, and preferences. We want to be liked and being like someone makes us more likable to them. 

My mother used to get so mad she would throw glasses or even whole chairs. It did not seem unnatural to me and neither did her habit of slapping me so hard across the face that my nose went numb. Her criticism of me was subtle, always supposedly for my own good, but she considered everything about me awkward, clumsy and not pretty.

I knew I did not want to be like her and yet some of her habits carried over until I was nearly middle aged. Not the slapping in the face habit, but the taking it out on material things habit. Little by little I worked through all that. Still, I had a maternal aunt who was a bit dotty too. She use to send my dad bottles of clear water that supposedly contained mites from her head.  They weren't there, but she shaved her head to get rid of them and once set her whole apartment on fire. 

It comes from both sides of the family, this craziness, and I worried it might get me. Instead it got the perfect member of our family. The petite, pretty, social-lite who tried to be as low class as she could manage all her life. She taught herself to use bad grammar, walk pigeon-toed, dated men who were truly losers and put all her focus on a pretty daughter who is now considered bi-polar. 

This person will bend over backwards, lie, make up things, or do whatever it takes to please people and most people think she is a sweet little woman who is just a bit dotty. That's the scary part. 

I've always been leery of her passive aggressiveness. It can be incredibly cruel and sly, but after seeing her explode into a bellowing, screaming, foul mouthed monster who could not be reasoned with or stopped for over twenty minutes I saw what lay beneath. It's just possible her daughter is the result of living with this woman.

She scares me. It's like living in a horror movie. I know that monster that lurks within, but no one else will ever believe me unless they see it too and she has a lot of practice hiding behind the kind old lady facade.

Seething smiles

I come from a family of passive aggressive women who consider it only polite to make people miserable with smiles that chill your blood.

We were taught to be people pleasers at all costs and to believe that all mis-truths are only little white lies told with the best of intentions.

The havoc this has wreaked on our lives, not to mention all those other lives we touched is unbelievable. It is, perhaps, the most evil way of communicating that is possible.

It provokes the kind of seething anger that causes heart attacks, destroying marriages, friendships, and relationships of all sorts, because eventually there will be a mind blowing volley of truth that erupts from lips stretched too tight for too long.

It is not rational.

Or healthy.

Or really even normal.

It is something I have spent years disposing of, but it lingers in the fringes of the older generation reminding me how cruel it is.

Something bigger than me

 

This world I live in is extraordinary. The beauty of the sky, the mystery of the waters, the almost overwhelming majesty of its mountains surprise me all the time.

I have been around for over three quarters of a century, not even a blink in the annals of time, but long enough as a human being to realize our human lives are short and as I contemplate what may lie beyond so many things come up.

I know there is something bigger than me. I do not know what that is.

But I can't believe that it would care if someone re-posted a Facebook meme in order to let a baby live one more minute, or that performing all the rituals different religions have come up with trying to control it, or impress it, make one whit of difference. To it.

I do believe those things make a difference to the people doing them. It gives them hope. It makes them feel like they have some control. It can become a way to tap into the body's ability to heal itself.

I don't know where I'll go after I leave this world. I'm hoping it will be peaceful. I suspect I will simply become part of the glory of nature, which is no small thing. To be one with the sun, to float on the wind, to splash along the shore is a kind of congruent belonging most of us long for in this life.

We will belong because we simply are.

Night frights

 

I'm back to the same old things. Some people react. Some people respond and the difference is enormous.

I don't know if it is from watching too much television, or something else, but there are people who seem to believe that everything is a reason for drama.

The truth is most of life is fairly straight forward and simple. Not every sound is a reason to panic and not every person who acts weird is dangerous.

Things may seem more frightening at night, but really, for most of us, we can turn the light on and it is no more dangerous, or different that is was during the day.

When I hear a strange sound in the middle of the night, I listen carefully trying to decide what it is. Then I try to rule out what it isn't. After that I consider my location. I am on the second floor of a large brick building without fire escapes and ways for people to climb up the walls in any reasonable way. I have a heavy door on my apartment with a dead bolt lock on it. in an inside hall. I live in a small town with the police less than ten minutes away, if that. The odds that someone or something is going to choose me, or my apartment over the other 147 apartments here are slim even if that person existed.

Last week I heard very strange sounds coming in my open window. I listened intently for a while trying to identify them and finally got out my iphone and recorded them. The next morning I sent the recording to people I thought might help me figure out what it was.  My brother wrote right back, "It's a gray tree frog."

Now I wouldn't want to hold a gray tree frog and I am not wild about their middle of the night mating calls, but they do not terrify me. The sound is obviously some kind of animal and not a big one either. 

I generally choose to respond to things I don't understand in a methodical, thoughtful way and not react in a panic just because I am not familiar with it and so far this has not ever let me down. I'm still alive and well. I have all my fingers and toes. No one has assaulted me out of the night sky on wings of fire, or anything else.

The room

They filed in. Slowly. Solemnly. Into a room deep under the house.

It was not a dark room. There was a glass block window high up on the back wall and a large rectangular shape in the middle of the floor.

Circling the rectangle, no one said a word, but slowly the solid shape began to blur and then move. It almost bubbled. Almost, but not quite. 

One at a time each person lifted their two hands and allowed little crystal looking shards of light to flutter down into the rectangle.

It was a slow and careful process, done completely in silence.

The viscous liquid in the rectangle began swirling and the light shards twinkled in its depth, but still no one uttered a word. 

Then there was a whooshing and from nowhere something swooped through the liquid, stirring it, never rising above the rectangle until out of the depths they came.

The very people who had been standing around the edge now rose from the goo below and only one of them spoke. "I am the lord and master."

Then they all turned and walked single file out the door and back up into the house. Most of them thinking how fortunate the Lord and master was because he would lead them all. He would make sure they were safe and they would wait on him hand and foot, but these thoughts disintegrated seconds after stepping foot out of the room. They were, each of them, a particular person in the household with a particular job, or use and it was not who they had been before they walked into the room.

Time passed and the ritual was repeated. 

They walked into the room, surrounded the rectangle and dropped their light crystals in silence, The power swooped through the liquid, but this time it resurrected one of them and for a moment he felt the envy of the others as he became the Lord and master.

This time was different. He knew what was happening. He had done it before and he wasn't honored to be the Lord and master. He only felt the weight of it. He tried to tell the others, but seconds after they left the room they were once more transformed into different family members, different people, all with a task or use to fulfill and they had no memory of the room at all.

Why are we here

 

Who really knows why anything is here? 

Some how this planet took a bunch of raw materials and life forms began to emerge. The most adaptable ones tended to last longer than the others, so that was encouraged naturally.

Eventually everything became what we know today and the only thing I can think of is that we are here because we are survivors.

Born into the world helpless, we are incredibly malleable creatures. Our senses are hungry. We want to touch, taste, feel, hear, see, and absorb as much as we can in those first years. Those are the glory years when learning for the sake of learning is as natural as breathing.

Our bodies are designed to be that way. All of its parts need to be used and if we stop using any part it begins to recede, to dry up, to falter and because we are whole beings this affects every aspect of who we are.

Learning is the fountain of youth.

Curiosity didn't kill the cat, it gave it nine lives!

The end of learning signals that the end of life is approaching. Our brain not only reads and remembers and processes ideas. It also runs our hearts and lungs and coordinates our muscles. We are whole beings. In the wild, animals who stop learning die sooner rather than later.

Human beings can sustain life for each other, but the quality is not the same as it is if we are independent learning organisms gobbling up ideas and experiences on our own.

Keep that mind active! Do something challenging as often as you possibly can. Push yourself to understand new ideas and new ways. Feed command central and the whole business of living is richer.

Today

 

This morning I heard the clock chiming on the square.

Beautiful, clear tones that have rung out the hour for longer than I can remember.

This is the part of Taylorville I love.

Not the gossiping, back biting, sordid sharing over backyard fences. Not the cheap shopping in stores that constantly change around the square. Not the made up country vibes the people like to pretend are our heritage.

But the actual heritage. 

A prairie town that sent soldiers to the civil war. A town that survived the depression because starving grocers extended credit to hungry families. A town surrounded by farms that grew corn and hogs and turned marshland in fields.

A place where education is important and each generation sees fewer drop outs. A place whose local newspaper transitioned to online, but still goes on. A cemetery full of history and a library that has outgrown the old Carnegie Library of my mother's childhood.

I remember waking up hearing the clock chiming the hour at my beginning and now, as I approach my ending, it still goes on.

These are the memorable parts of small town living.

What I did

 

After being told that all I did with my life was sponge off my husband's money I began thinking. I have actually done many things with my life, but some of the things stand out more than others.

I have been an ardent tennis player, a Bridge player in three leagues, couples, twin city nu-comers, and even Duplicate. I have been part of a gourmet cooking club, a foster parent, and an employee at a major insurance company.

I was a corporate wife with all the tasks the go along with that.

Once we had children my main focus was on giving each one of my children the support, encouragement, and opportunities to do the things that they showed promise in, the things they loved, the things that would help them become happy, successful adults. 

Our family participated in community theater, each one of us doing their own part. Mine was getting us all to the nightly rehearsals and sewing costumes ranging from tutus to the Von Trapp children's play clothes in Sound of Music.

Each of my children learned to play the piano and each one had the opportunity to play at least one other musical instrument.

I taught preschool classes at Sunday school and made sure all my children had a knowledge of religion to base their future decisions on. 

Then when my youngest started kindergarten I began working at a preschool. While doing that I also volunteered as a room mother and at our local elementary school in the library, our junior high in the nurse's office, and the high school as a mentor who helped students with disabilities take tests.

I was a cub scout leader who later made the neckerchiefs for my son's Boy Scout troop when they went too summer camp. I helped my daughter go out selling Girl Scout cookies.

I taught my children how to drive. I encouraged them to write and read and two of them became Young Authors. I was there for all their music recitals, band concerts, piano contests, soccer games and wrestling matches. I gave them the opportunity to do gymnastics and dance. 

I did everything in my power to give them a childhood that was loving, fun, and left them wanting to go out and explore the world and all their possibilities.

Now they all live in far off states doing the things they dreamed of doing as children. They are successful, happy adults who have, or are, raising children of their own, giving them the experiences they had and more.

And that is some of what I did with my life. 

Of course I also read, painted, wrote, played the piano and flute, pumped gas, and plucked the roses, but those are other stories.