Happiness

 

It seems every person has that one something that keeps them going. Then they have the thing that makes them feel put upon enough to feel useful.

My sister likes to buy things. Other than that she like to push things, a mower, a vacuum, a rag for getting rid of spots.

My sister-in-law likes to collect things and cook. Her penance is dusting all those things she collects.

My brother likes to garden and ride his stand alone bike.. He does anything else his wife doesn't want to do.

One of my friends likes to travel to meet friends. He walks his dog several times a day.

Another writes homilies that he shares with the world. He cooks because he likes to eat.

I like to paint pictures. I also like to write. I enjoy reading. None of these things are suffering in any way, but the closest I come to a need for suffering is keeping my apartment and clothing moderately clean.

People no longer have to toil from morn til night just to live and yet we still need that carrot that gets us out of our chair and doing something. Our puritan heritage in this country tells us we must also suffer some if we want to be considered good people.

We are moving closer and closer to a sane world where suffering is not our reason for being. It doesn't make us lazy. It makes us happier and there is nothing wrong with that.

Here, there, and gone!

 

It is given so many names.

Some people call it an attachment disorder.

Others call it being footloose.

I've heard it described as the wanderlust.

And sometimes it is just seen as restless, but whatever it is, it is me.

I'm not quite sure why, but I suspect I was raised to be it, by whatever name you give it.

As children we only know what we live and I lived with my mother, father and siblings. We had extended family of course, but the core was simple and solid.

My first friends outside this unit appeared when I was almost five years old. Julie and Paul, I still remember their names. They lived across the street and sometime we were allowed to cross that street and play together. They were called friends and I took them for granted like I did my family.

Then we moved and I never saw them again. I didn't make new friends until after we moved again to Springfield and I started kindergarten. Billy Pearson and Shawn Patrick were near me alphabetically and they became my new friends. Strangely enough one or the other appeared, or reappeared for the next twenty years, including first dates and coming out parties. I even ran into Bill on Facebook and discovered he told his children about me when they went home to Springfield, which was many many years behind us.

In the middle of sixth grade we moved again. Just across town, but I lost contact with all my elementary school friends, including Kathy Thomas my best friend. We didn't have a way to travel back and forth across town back then, but I made a new friend. Sandy Kirkpatrick a red headed girl who liked to roller skate and was a patrol girl like me. One day in seventh grade the bus was too full to let me on and Sandy's dad drove me all the way out to my junior high. Sandy and I usually walked home together in the afternoon.

Of course right after seventh grade we moved again. This time to a small town called Chatham where my dad taught school. I went to eight grade at a school out in the middle of the country and made one friend there. I can't remember her name now, but she was a new girl like me, We ate lunch together and played on the old playground equipment after lunch.

Halfway through that school year we moved back to our old house in Springfield where I went to six years of elementary school. I just assumed I would pick up with my old friends, but it didn't really happen. Life is awkward when you are 13. By then I had long stopped missing old friends when we moved. I just knew they were out of my life and accepted it. I did reconnect with Kathy and we remained friends through our junior year in high school when I moved again.

This time to a town where my mother was born and raised. To her it was going home and I had aunts, uncles, great aunts and a grandma there. I had cousins too. They were almost like my siblings. We were close, but I didn't really make any super close girl friends here. I did date some boys who were in band with me and I went to Homecoming and Prom, but it was a strange experience. I felt like I was going through the motions and doing what I was supposed to be doing in a book or something. I didn't really feel like I was a part of it in any deep emotional way.

I had a very difficult time when my mother died, but other than that I just sort of know I will have to let go of anyone and everyone I like or love. 

I am divorced and my children are scattered all over the country in Washington, Arizona, and North Carolina. I expected that. They were brought up in a town where most children went somewhere else after they were out of school. I am very close to all of them.

Most of the other people in my life are like faces in a long parade that just keeps getting farther and farther away. I remember them fondly, but feel no real emotional attachment to most of them. I knew from the start that our relationship was what it was and that one day it would change and we would drift apart. Unlike my siblings who live here I don't really have any local friends. I do have lots of acquaintances and people I can talk to when we run into each other. 

It's not exactly out of sight out of mind, but it is very similar. I am unlikely to move from this apartment because it is so nice and so affordable, but I haven't met anyone yet that I want a deeper relationship with. It seems my life revolves around whoever is here and now and a few people who are so close they are really my family of the heart and as close or closer than my siblings.

Curiosity

 

I walked into my second story living room this morning and there, right in the middle of my screen was a huge locust.

It was just sitting there. Not moving. Not even one leg flittering around and it carried me away.

Whatever could have brought it to such a place and caused it to stay so long without moving?

It's a great veiw, but that creature's eyes were not seeing what I see with my two eyes. First of all it has five eyes and none of them are quite like mine.

Then I began to wonder other more interesting things. Like why my window and not the others on the front of our building. Then, maybe God is not the all omnipotent father figure the men who wrote the Bible believed. Perhaps God is a variant on a three year old loose in the universe!

This morning it was playing with bugs and decided to put one on my window to see what both it and I would do.

It blew gently to see if it moved. It focused the sun on it to warm it up and then, swoosh, it flew away.

Distracted, it moved on to play with the other stuff in the sandbox, using its creativity to sort the molecules into multi-verses. 

A cosmic child unfettered by the restraints of mortal children.

Walk!

 

It seems as if I have spent my entire adult life worrying about eating too much.

Back in my twenties Twiggy was the one we all wanted to emulate and I managed it between 102 and 115 pounds for years. That's not a lot since I am nearly five foot seven.

Later after my pregnancy I hit 140 and thought I was immensely obese, which my husband concurred with.

And after years of crazy yo yo dieting, often losing as much as 90 pounds and gaining it all back I found myself as a type two diabetic with stage four kidney disease.

A1C is the blood sugar standard I use to see how I'm doing and at first I thought 150 was obscenely high, but then last year I started hitting 189, which is truly high

Recovering from my stint going back to work and catching COVID then moving down here left me chair bound for over a year. I am just starting to recover.

One of the most amazing things I am discovering is that walking for fifteen minutes after every meal drastically reduces my blood sugar! Now this sounds simple, but doing that is incredibly difficult for me. My feet, my hips, my breath and sometimes even my heart hurt even though I am barely ambling a long.

But the results are so amazing I keep on struggling to do it. Last night I gorged on an entire pizza. Yes, I am still an out of control eater, but my blood sugar this morning was 120 and I am keeping the weight below two hundred. Not amazing, but in the right direction.

Take two

 

I was at a potluck a few days ago and the main course was fried chicken.

I wondered how that worked out for a large group. Think about forty people.

I personally prefer the breast. I like white meat with a minimum of fiddling with bones.

I couldn't hear if there were any specific instructions for how much chicken each person could choose. There may not have been any, but everyone in front of me seemed to be taking two pieces. 

I took one chicken breast, pleased that I got my favorite piece and a little surprised.

Then I looked up and saw the woman who took the largest breast she could find and dug through the rest of the chicken before taking another huge breast. She was not a large woman, nor was she someone who looked malnourished.

I thought maybe she was short on money for the rest of the month and needed to save this for another meal. Or perhaps she was very hungry and would actually eat all that chicken in one sitting, but neither of these felt right.

She looked like the kind of woman who lacked either a conscience, or social grace. She was lean and muscular with a short gray haircut and no nonsense clothing. Not tailored, or sophisticated, simply down to business, a woman who was used to getting her way.

She was a woman I would not want to cross and I wondered what made me have all these thoughts of her. It had to say something about me.

Did I secretly want to take an extra portion of the best chicken? Was I envious of her almost arrogant strength? Did I somehow feel so threatened by her I needed to denigrate her actions?

I honestly don't think so. 

I think she was just a greedy, thoughtless person, possibly a narcissist, who took advantage of anything put in front of her.

Now that's a lot of thoughts about a woman I barely know.

Being noticed

 

Being noticed has both good and bad connotations.

It raises a million questions about why.

Am I unique, a puzzle, an anomaly?

What drew me to their attention?

What is it about me that is worthy, or cringe worthy, of being noticed?

And why did they look away the moment I noticed!

What's the point

 

Everyone has their own idea of what life should be. It's that infamous word, should.

People write volumes about what things should be. Usually to validate their own lives. To an athlete it is winning. To a minister it is saving souls. To a doctor saving lives. To many people it is making money.

I suppose we think we are unique among the creations on this earth. Most things in nature live to grow, reproduce and die. They come. They are. They transition back into the earth. Humans seem to feel we must be more and better than.

Better than what and how is the question. Other manifestations in nature help each other or facilitate other things, but they generally don't go overboard doing it. It seems to be a natural give and take.

Many people seem to need to over do things that have no real point in making their quality of life better. If they simply enjoy it then that is the point. But I see them doing it to impress each other and that is pretty fruitless in the long scheme of things. Impressing others lasts relatively short times. In the long run most people will not even recall it down the road.

I see people who go back to working their old jobs in their seventies because they want to buy things. Buying seems to become their main joy and focus. Most of these things are to impress those around them with their taste, or affluence, or whatever, but it doesn't seem to make them content. It simply drives them to overdo in other areas of their lives. If one flower is pretty, wouldn't a hundred be prettier? If one can of bug spray works, wouldn't two be better? 

It's the old give a mouse a cookie thing. If you give a senior a house, she's going to want flowers for the yard and the flowers will need a hose to water them and then the grass will grow and she will need a lawn mower to cut the grass and that lawn mower will need batteries to run and that means she will have less time to do other things, so the hose never makes it out of the car, so she needs buckets of water for the flowers and that means she needs to buy a bucket. (true story.)

Maybe we should focus more on what makes us content and stop looking for more extravagant reasons to be.

Bad news

 

Bad news swoops in like bats over a full moon.

It might not mean anything, but the implication is there.

Darkness blotting out the light.

I struggle to live in this moment, a moment when all is well.

The theory is good. I can't be anywhere else.

And yet a part of me wants to dwell in those dark spots up ahead.

What ifs that may amount to nothing,

But could be the pivotal point of everything.

At least everything I know now.