I realize that now, at this stage of my life, I really don't have my whole life ahead of me. It's actually more behind me than ahead.
For some reason, which I won't get into, I've had this strange sort of heaviness. It's not bad, but it's not the most pleasant thing one could experience. But it feels very real and solid.
This feeling that I'm feeling led me to question why I'm feeling this way. What I came up with is the realization that there were dreams that I never did fulfill, desires I had that were left somewhere down the road for someone else to pick up and carry on with.
Life didn't turn out the way that I had planned. Not a good or bad thing, it just is.
Life is like that ya know...things don't always turn out the way we want them to or the way we originally thought they should have turned out. In a previous blog I wrote about the fact that us being in control is really an illusion. You know, are we in a dream or is the dream dreaming us sort of thing.
For the most part, this is the happiest time of my life. But just lately I've been in this introspective type of mood.
(lyrics by dave matthews...broken things)
Sometimes the road is crystalAnd sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mindTell me what it is that you're missingAnd I will see what I can findYou want to be so sure ofEvery step you take butYou can't always know what's comingYou can't always trust the twist of fate Well oh my loveMy heart is set on youSet on youOh my loveMy heart is set on youSet on you The stars shine down from the blackAnd we're picking through this broken glassWell how could we know that our lives would be soFull of beautifully broken things War is the most vulgar madnessAnd winters can be so cruelYou can't always change the way things are like thatCan't change the way I think of you butWell oh my love my heart is set on you. DAVE MATTHEWS BAND - BROKEN THINGS LYRICS
It's late on a Thursday night and I need to be up no later than 6 a.m. tomorrow...Usually I write these blogs on a weekend...but hey..it's one of those moments when the mood strikes. And you know what they say? Strike when the iron is hot. (Whatever that means...but I get the gist of it.)
My daughter wanted me to babysit her kids, my grandkids tonight. I moved here for that, so I had to say yes. She promised it wouldn't be but an hour. And she was right. But she called from the store on her way home from her class (She's a trainer at a great gym) and asked if there was anything she could get me. I told her 80 calorie greek yogurt and she said she was also getting a bottle of red because she had this horrible pain in her neck from maybe sleeping on it the wrong way. After a deep muscle massage, it still didn't feel much better. Red is a great relaxer.
She came home and poured us both a small glass as the kids bombarded her with, "I'm hungry", "Can I have some ......"etc etc When they were finally settled in front of the tv watching a movie, we had our quality time together. I can't tell you how much it means to me to just sit and hear her talk. I love it that she opens up to me and yes, I'm her mother, but also, I'm a mother/friend. She accepts me for who I am and ditto..I accept her who she is.
Do I think of the first time I saw her with her tiny little body all wrapped in a blanket with her rose bud mouth and her black eyes staring into mine from her aquarium like bed? Yes, sometimes. But tonight I saw a woman focused on a career of helping people live healthy, active lives, a very supportive wife,and a mother bear of three who so wants to raise her kids to know the love of God. Not easy tasks, none of them!!
I'm old, I know it sounds very self absorbent, but it's true. I see what passing the torch truly means now. This age is odd, and I now understand my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. Maybe that's why I dream of them so often. I believe they see me. The bible talks about "the great cloud of witnesses" and I believe it's them, cheering us on..saying we did it..so can you. Because sometimes...well..you know..sometimes it just ain't easy.
But I'm blessed, fortunate, whatever word you want to use for those two..that I am. Yet I do wish I were God. Yep, I admit it. I wish I were God and I wish I could make everyone have happy endings..especially my kids and my grandkids etcc. But I also have the faith to know that the real God is much kinder, much more loving and way more wise than I am, and that he has my most loved family in the palm of his hand.
I love you Shauna, more than my heart can sometimes bear.
I'm on a mission...a mission I started years ago to wash my own brain of things that don't serve me or anyone else. Trying to get the negative thoughts out of my mind is sort of like cutting cancer out of one's body. In my opinion, negative thoughts are like emotional cancer.
I'm not sure where they start, but I can only speak for myself. I know that when I watch things on tv that are sad, contentious or hateful, it disturbs me. It starts very tiny and half the time I don't even realize it's there until it snowballs. I begin waking up with a sort of cloud over my being.
So, on facebook I decided that anything, anything at all, that causes a sort of sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, will be hidden. Clicking that one little button is such a fantastic choice. It's like ...Pooof....gone. Seen no more!
Facebook is an interesting medium.
When I first joined, I was used to myspace where I could be somewhat anonymous. I probably was still in the myspace frame of mind, but I sort of put it all out there; bore my soul to the artificial world of pseudo relationships. Just like everyone else, I connected with new friends and reconnected with old ones. It was sort of like Junior High all over again..The more friends I had, the more popular I felt.
That is until, I started getting friend requests from people I barely knew. However, it was the old friends that I valued. I couldn't wait to reconnect and reconnect I did. I have to say, when I did, I had no idea how far apart our lives had taken some of us.
With me, what you see is what you get. For the most part anyway. So it isn't a secret that I have changed. My beliefs have progressed and my philosophy has grown to adulthood. Basically, I try my best to move towards love in my thoughts, actions and words. But I started slipping in this fraudulent world of the internet. Especially around the time of the elections. The hateful things I would read, inevitably I was sucked in and at times, turned in to a closed minded hater. I tried not to; God knows I tried.
I said all that to say this: I had to make some difficult decisions. And no, I'm not being dramatic, these 'friendships' went way back. But I had to delete them for my own sanity.
I'm sure they are probably happy I'm the one that did the deleting...It's hard to...well...to break up. I feel much lighter though.
I still love a a few of them very much, and others, I must say, I never really was that fond of them anyway. Sort of good riddance.
So, my intentions are to, yes, move towards love. That starts by thinking good thoughts as much as I possibly can.
So, here's to the weekend and here's to happy thoughts....xoxox
So, I have been thinking about control for a long time now. It's an odd word that, to me, denotes power. Don't you think of power when you hear the word control? Especially in a free, western country where we have the right to do so many things that other countries wouldn't, couldn't even think of. I mean we are a wealthy country to be sure! I know there are exceptions, so I'll talk about my background, which is very middle class. I was born into a middle class home, had middle class friends, went to middle class schools, live in middle class neighborhoods and have a middle class job. Is it clear that I'm going to keep this about the middle class? Good.
From the time most of us were born, we become absorbed in the search for security. We begin our journey out of our dark, warm, comfy home inside our mother's uterus, through no choice of our own, and we are forced through this ridiculously small passageway, squeezing, pushing, and being pushed, as our bodies slide against the walls of our exit path.
We feel something on our heads pulling now, instead of a push, and then suddenly, BAM....!!! Our whole being feels like something drastically horrible is about to happen. Fear grips our soul as the blinding light mercilessly pierces through our tiny eyelids, and suddenly that wonderful warmth that we were so completely wrapped in is gone...dissipated...vanished...and all we feel is something quite the opposite... vulnerable, unguarded, unprotected, naked, and well...COLD. That's it ...it's just cold!
Our arms are flailing, our heads feel shaky and heavy, and bothersome, and of course, our little legs and feet are flailing as well.
Suddenly we are very aware of this thing we later learn is our body. It feels so heavy and cumbersome. We can't really process what is happening, and we can't verbalize it either, but we feel like we are going to spiral endlessly through some sort of strange, scary universe into a frigid state of consciousness that exposes us to our worst fear; falling. And all we can do, for the first time ever, is open our tiny little lips, fill our virgin lungs with oxygen, take a deep inhale and force all of the emotions, feelings, fears, into one monumental scream.
What do we want? Why?
The people on the outside of our warm, consolatory environment that we called home for about nine months, know what we want. They know because we are then taken, by some kind soul, and are wiped off so that the once warm aqueous liquid which surrounded our form, now doesn't cause us to freeze to death. That kind soul also knows that we sense all of our limbs might fly right off of our being because they are no longer bound and held snugly by the walls of our mothers body. So what do these kind creatures, these angels of mercy do? Thank God! They wrap us up tightly with some sort of material that warms us, and hopefully keeps our limbs in tact. The material feels nothing like
that beautiful, silky feeling the liquid inside our mother's belly gave us, but still, things begin to calm down a bit.
And thus begins our search for the security we lost the day we took our first anguished mouthful of air. That sense of well being is now a thing of the past, but oh, we remember it, as we will remember it all our lives, but we won't realize we remember. And we want it back, and we will always want it back. What a traumatic experience birth is!. Dave Matthews is right, whether we are middle class, upper class, poverty stricken; whether we are powerful in body mind and spirit or totally helpless, we all come weeping out of someones vagina.
There you have it; the quest for security, for homeostasis. So, what do we middle class-ers do? Well, we save money, lots of money if we listen to our elders who are much wiser than us. We save for college, we save for homes, cars, children, furniture, and of course, insurance. We will even pay people to tell us what the best thing is to do with our money so that we won't be left in the proverbial "dark". We want security, order and most of all, even above monetary things, we want to KNOW what's going to happen. A little. We want to know where we will live, what school we will go to, what job we will have and we want to know where our next meal is coming from.
We also want the security of the love we felt before we were able to even process the words or feelings related to love. We look for it everywhere. On the internet, in churches, bars, grocery stores, and the list goes on. Once we find it, we want to keep it and never lose it. So we plan. We make promises (a lot of which we can't keep) and we tell ourselves that because we are adults, we can deal with the desires that came with us the day we were squeezed and pushed into this imperfect world.
But then something happens out of our control.
A death. A tragedy. A betrayal. A disappointment. If we are honest and don't use things like God, drugs, people, ideas, food, alcohol, religion, and a plethora of so many things, to help us feel "safe", or keep us from fully feeling that horrible pain that perhaps we felt in a different time and a different place (Why does this feel so familiar? we innocently ask ourselves, but deep down we know!)
If we are truly honest, we realize we have no control. We realize that it can all be gone in a blink of an eye, in a puff of smoke.
Sometimes when I think that life is orderly, controlled and has this sort of solid continuity to it, I think of the people in the World Trade Center after the explosion when they were trying to get out of the chaos of a crumbling, burning building. They couldn't even tell which way they were going. Some even thought they were going down stairs when then were actually going up. In a matter of moments an orderly, regular day became another world, a strange conglomerate reality that put them in a moment and than another and another. But they were moments. And then they were over, and nothing was ever the same for anyone after that.
I think what I'm trying to say is that yes, there are moments when we feel the warmth of security and love. And yes, there are times when our plans work out so wonderfully well and all seems right with the world. But I think, for me anyway, I must remember that I have very little control of matters. Perhaps I have control now of my body; that's why I work out, that's why I watch what I eat. That's why I take my blood pressure medication. But at sixty one, I realize that, perchance, someday, I may not have that sort of control over my own form, my own body. Yes, it's a little disconcerting.
My journey has not been yours, and of course, yours has not been mine. But one thing we do have in common is that we really aren't in control. The answer for my dilemma is my faith in my God, and my faith in myself; knowing I am created in the image of this powerful God I have chosen to believe.. Choosing to believe in someone or something bigger than me is something I have control over. Choosing to believe that someone or something is loving; as a matter of fact is love itself, is something I have control over. In my very darkest hour, my God hung on to ME, I did not necessarily hang onto him. (I chose to use him simply because I believe Jesus is God and Jesus is a man.)
My lesson in this lack of control thing? Well, hey, there are many lessons I've learned. But the most important lesson is to just let go of control.
To know that I have very little control. To know that when I'm scared, it's okay, that when I doubt so much, that too is okay. Because of this lesson, I have learned that I can choose to love others, even if they are a pain in the ass.
I have also learned to appreciate who I am and who I have always been.
Another huge lesson that I have learned is to live in the moment. To look around me and actually see, as if for the first time, a beautiful world. To actually see love in everything. And these are my choices, the ones I actually do have control over.
