April 2019 - Adulting: Second- Half

Book Binge

I’ve been on a book binge. There are worse things to binge on, right? I love to read. To me, reading is one of the greatest pleasures in life. Two books that I recommend are My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.

I finished My Lovely Wife in a day. It is a horribly dark, scary thriller about a suburban couple who become serial killers together. I’ve been frustrated with how long our renovations are taking, so I thought that reading this book was a healthy way to vent my dark side. The book is not particularly gory or gruesome, but it is chilling and I have been jumpy ever since reading it. I like to tell myself that I read My Lovely Wife to see what a successful first novel looks like, but the truth is, I found the premise of the book, kind of intriguing and interesting and I like books with twists and turns. It’s a page turner, for sure, and it is likely to end up as a movie, starring Jessica Chastain.

I’m halfway through Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Lori Gottlieb is a Stanford educated therapist who writes a weekly advice column for The Atlantic. She turned into a therapist later in life, as she also attended medical school and worked as a producer for TV shows like “Friends” and “ER”. Lori explains all of this in her book in such a candid, honest, funny way that I stayed up late to keep reading it last night and now, this morning, I am cranky as hell. But as soon as I finish this post, I am going to get back to reading the book. It’s really good. The book is the true story of a “therapist going to a therapist” after a bad break-up and the insights from both sides are hilarious, helpful, insightful and a truly honest look at what it means to be human, and sometimes flawed, in our thinking and our perspectives.

Please share in the comments section your book recommendations. When I’m on a book binge, I just want to keep on going. I want to eat the whole box of doughnuts and/or the entire cake, you know what I mean?

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee

You Matter

I love people who return their carts to the return station.

I love people who are kind and interested, no matter what or who the subject matter is, at hand.

I love people who still write thank you notes.

I love people who laugh at everyone’s jokes and make them feel special and at ease.

I love people who are honest about who they are and do not perform metamorphosis, depending on their company.

I love people with sparkle in their eyes.

I love people who believe that almost everyone has good intentions.

I love people whose whole body smiles, when they do.

I love people who get excited about their passions.

I love people who remember little, seemingly inconsequential things that are meaningful to other people.

I love people who love nature and animals.

I love people who are comfortable in their own skin.

I love curious people.

I love people who can laugh at themselves.

I love people who you can rely on.

What’s on your list of favorite traits in people? I imagine you fit into my list, so thank you for being you. You brighten my life! You brighten other people’s lives! People notice. They really do. You matter.

That’s Weird

So, I am not sure what to write about this morning. I slept in. I feel kind of foggy. Nothing is striking me. So, I decided to google quotes for inspiration. My first search was “prettiest quotes”. This gave me a monitor full of quotes about beauty like the one oft repeated by Aubrey Hepburn, “Happy girls are the prettiest.”

That wasn’t really what I was going for, so I looked up “loveliest quotes.” This search filled my monitor with syrupy, sickeningly sweet romantic quotes to read to you lover, at bedtime. I won’t even repeat any of them here.

So, I finally searched up “most meaningful quotes”. For some reason, today all of these quotes just got on my nerves, but I kept looking. Then this one showed up (on the most meaningful quote search . . . seriously). This is one I had to share:

I’m not really angry today, but this struck me as hilarious. I find it even more funny because it showed up on a page full of wisdom from Aristotle, Confucius, Anne Frank, Einstein and Maya Angelou. I never knew how wise the minions were until I saw the company that they keep.

I get that this blog post has a Seinfeld-like quality to it – a ramble about nothing. But that is what makes Sundays so great, you can ramble on, or not. You can do meaningful things, or not. If there was ever a day to just be in the moment and to savor being alive, it is on Sundays. Savor your Sunday. I’ll be back tomorrow.

The Disrupted Nest

Once upon a time there was this little bird who loved her nest. She loved being in her nest with her mate and her hatchlings. Of course, her hatchlings quickly grew to be big birds themselves and they started leaving the nest more and more. One hatchling grew up to be his own bird and left the nest and created his own nest, in a tree, far away, of his own liking. The bird family still flew to see each other, though. They were chatty birds, who liked each other’s company.

This story isn’t about hatchlings leaving the nest, though. This is about the time when the little bird’s nest was completely disrupted and the poor little bird thought that she would go cuckoo or even batty. Though a bit flighty, this little bird wasn’t a natural cuckoo, and bats, obviously, are a whole different species, but this little bird found that she was really starting to empathize with cuckoos and those beings sometimes described as batsh*t-crazy. You see, the disruption in her nest felt like it would never end and it was turning her into a whole different animal as much as she tried to stay pleasant and chirpy.

It all started when the little bird and her mate for life, decided that their nest was in serious need of some new straw. They found some birds who were particularly good at nest renovation and they agreed to give lots and lots (and lots) of seed to these birds, in exchange for some fresh straw. When it was time to take out the old straw and bring in the new straw, the expert new straw birds arrived and hung out with the little bird all day long, every day, for months and months. The poor little bird tried to stay positive and she could see that the new straw would soon look very nice, when she looked past all of the old straw, and dust feathers lying all around the nest. She tried not to pluck out the feathers in her chest, in distress, but she found it hard to resist sometimes. She tended to get a little “pecky” with her mate and nestlings who still lived in the nest with her, when they came home to the nest in the evenings.

This little bird was an old bird who had been around the flock for a while. She had even been through previous nest renovations in earlier times in her little birdy life. She knew that the process of the rebuilding of a nest would be annoying and disruptive. The little bird knew some calming yoga poses like standing on one leg that helped her get into balance. (a lot of birds stand on one leg). Still sometimes she felt pushed to the edge of her nest . . . and her sanity.

This story doesn’t have any ending yet, but the nest is progressing a lot and I suspect there is going to be a happy, calming ending for the little bird and her mate. I suspect that they are really going to appreciate the changes and updates to their nest, to the point that they will soon forget about all of the upheaval and disruption that this renovation has caused. And I suspect a few years down the road (maybe give it a decade), they will have conveniently forgotten how stressful it was to have their nest torn apart and displaced (they have little tiny bird brains that aren’t known for good memories – see elephants, for good memorization skills). Then, the little birds again, will get a wild hair (or a wild feather, in their case) and decide to yet again, exchange piles and piles of seed for an updated nest. That’s just how birds work.

Stop Stressin’

“It doesn’t need to be a great day, as long as it is Friday.” – upJourney

Happy Friday, readers and friends!! Here at Adulting Second Half, Fridays remain fun and frivolous!! We don’t take anything seriously on Fridays. On most Fridays, I list three Favorites (whether they be things, books, music, etc.) and I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in the Comments section. Please check out previous Friday blogs for other excellent ideas to brighten up your living experience!

Here are this Friday’s Favorites:

Toffee-To-Go – I adore toffee. I love Heath bars. However, this Toffee-To-Go is the best toffee that I have ever eaten. It is the best combination of chocolate and nuts (which is the best combination in the world to begin with). It is totally impossible to not eat a small box of this mixed perfection in just one sitting. Go to their website now and order yourself a little box to be delivered to you or to your friends and associates, straight from Heaven.

Ballard Designs Clothes Drying Rack – A very wise, creative closet designer suggested that we add this dream contraption to our newly remodeled laundry room and I am so happy that she did! (shout out, Jo Anne) This drying rack hangs on the wall of your room and you pull the racks down from their magnetic closures, to dry your socks and intimates and whatever else you prefer not to put into your dryer. When you are finished, you just close the racks back up and they fold nicely back into the frame on the wall. Before this, we used to haphazardly dry our things on various pieces of furniture and unfortunately, some of the wooden furniture shows that we did that, with ugly water wear marks. (so sorry, my lovely, beloved rocking chair) This rack comes in all different sizes and is sturdy and attractive and yet, still extremely useful.

Madonna’s Medellin video – Love or or hate her, you have to hand it to her, Madonna remains transformational, relevant and interesting to this day. She came on to the scene when I was just 12 years old and now at age 48, I am encouraging you to check out her new video. The video is raunchy and racy and controversial (would we expect anything else from her?), but it’s fascinating to watch and I do really like the beat of the song. I watched a little bit of her MTV interview about the video and here are a few interesting tidbits that I took from it:

Madonna picked the directors for this video because she wanted it to look “painterly” (her words) and surreal. It does seem otherworldly.

Madonna currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. She moved there so that one of her sons, who wants to become a professional soccer player, can get his best training. In her words, Madame X (her new persona) is a “soccer mom” at heart.

Madonna believes that it is MUSIC that universally connects all people of the world. “We were connected before Instagram, people, seriously.” (her words)

Finally, Madonna told one of her fans that she wanted to get back to her naivety. Now, most people don’t look at Madonna and think, “naive and innocent.” She explained that what she meant is the naivety that she had when she just started out and didn’t care, at all, what people thought of her or of her work. Madonna explains that when she was young and starting out, she created herself and her craft, out of pure passion and inventiveness, without giving much credence to other people’s influence and criticisms.

I have never found Madonna to be a particularly warm, ingratiating person, but I really do respect her vision and her daring and her inspiration. She is encouragement for all of us Second Halfers to keep on creating, doing and exploring what makes us alive and “naive”, in the best sense of the word. And for that reason, I’m grateful for her influence.

The Negative Committee

The above is another great post on Twitter’s Think Smarter. Esther Hicks says to tell ourselves, “This unpleasant thought is unnecessary” any time a negative thought enters our minds. It scares me how much I have to use that mantra.

What if just for today we treated ourselves as kindly as we would treat a blameless child or an innocent animal or a service person doing a kindness for us? What if just for today we gazed at ourselves in the mirror as lovingly as we gaze at the people, the pets, the flowers or anything else that we love so much for the joy and happiness that these persons, animals and things bring to us? It’s our eyes that allow us to do the gazing. It’s our minds that process our senses and feelings about what we are gazing at and it is our hearts that fill with fullness and joy and wonder, when we are doing the gazing. Don’t our eyes, our minds, and our hearts deserve love and gratefulness for helping us process all of the marvels in our world? Shouldn’t we be careful what we feed into our eyes and our minds and our hearts? We have more control in this regard, than we think we do.

Image result for quotes on avoiding negativity — **Better yet, I think it might just be apropos to fire this committee and shut the door on them forever, dear readers!! Just for today, at least, cancel the meeting with the negative committee!!**

Balancing Act

I think that the internet was started by the little kids who ask, “Why?” all of the time. And not the little kids who asked, “Why?” just to be annoying, in order to get a rise out of the adults in their lives, or just to hear themselves chatter, but the kids who really wanted an answer. And good answers. I can’t be certain, but I think I was one of those “enquiring minds want to know” kids.

“What is vacation constipation?” and “What does dreaming about bald eagles mean?” are questions that I have already looked up this morning on the internet and I have looked up the answers, at more than one website.

“I don’t think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.” – Daniel Levitin

I read the above quote and I thought about it a bit. It is interesting to me that social movements often beget other social movements. We are having renovations done on our home, and inevitably the one project has now been the impetus for 3-4 more minor projects that all stemmed from the “open can of worms” of the first project. In the same way, the last line of the above quote about the information age suggests that information overload can lead to bad decisions. Hence, we have the “Being in the Now” movement, where meditation and self-awareness have become mainstream concepts. The trick is to balance the amount of information that we are assaulted with on a daily basis, with a healthy dose of relaxation and counting our breaths. . . . and not acting on everything we see and feel and hear and read, impulsively.

“Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilizations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it – to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

Take Notice

I live in a part of the country where a lot of people come to vacation. We get people from all over the United States, actually citizens from all over the world, visiting our neck of the woods. Currently, I am spending some time in one of the resort towns near to my home. There are advantages and disadvantages to living in an area like this.

I don’t love the crowds, nor the drivers who seem perpetually lost. I do appreciate the revenue and the jobs that are created for the people, like me, who live here. What I love the most, though, is the constant reminder of just how lucky I am to live in my lovely space on this Earth and that fact, is often reflected back to me, when I see the happy, excited faces of the people who have journeyed here, pointedly, to visit my home. Whenever, I stroll along one of our beach roads, I hear the happy chatter of love and excitement, no matter what language that chatter is being spoken in. I often see speechless wonder and awe reflected in lovely faces, young and old, particularly around sunset time. I experience renewal of my own wonder and awe and my own joy of being, when I take the time to see my living experience reflected back to me by a new, fresh outlook of a person’s eyes, who is visiting my town for the first time.

This isn’t an isolated experience for people who live in vacation land, though. I have visited lots of different towns, with many unique climates over the many decades of my life, and I have enjoyed every single experience. The novelty of a place different than my own experience is always so refreshing and revitalizing. When we go to somewhere new to us, it’s like we get to be babies again, looking at everything with a new found amazement, fascination, reverence . . . .

What is the best lesson about this experience, is that we can choose to live our own lives, in this frame of reference, every single day, if we just slow down and really experience how truly breathtaking it is to be alive. I hurriedly took my dogs out into our back yard the other day, thinking about my long to-do list in my head, and trying to get the dogs to rush to do their business quickly. Ralphie, our Labrador retriever, got stubborn and he refused to move. Luckily, I took that as a clue for me to slow down, too. I started noticing just how beautiful a small snippet of nature is and just how much life is teeming in just one little corner of a yard. The grass, the flowers, the wind, the insects, the birds, the rocks, the soil . . . . .

I think I am going to try to live my life like a newcomer more often. I’m so thankful for the perspective change, visitors to my town, give back to me. Life is such a blessing, if we pull out the lens and slow our strides and just take the time to take notice.

Refreshed and Renewed

I’m baaaack! This past weekend is the first weekend that I took off from writing my blog since I started writing it back in July 2018. It felt strange. I automatically sat down to my computer Saturday morning, but then laughed at myself and forced myself to get back up and to do something different. What I learned from this little experiment of mine, was priceless. I missed writing my blog. I missed my readers. A lot.

Sometimes, we fall into patterns and habits and schedules and we wonder how we even ended up in certain “ruts.” I think that I was afraid my writing had become rote to me and to you. But what I learned is, that this writing is necessary for me right now. It is a passion for me. It makes me feel more alive. It is not a habit, but now, almost a necessity for me. It has become part of my breath of life.

This past weekend was a little emotional for me, for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons, was that for the first time, I didn’t celebrate Easter with our six-person nucleus family. My eldest son lives in a different state now and luckily, he was able to spend the holiday with family members and even had other offers for celebrations, that he had to turn down. So he was fine and the rest of us were all together, so we were fine, but it was one of those acute moments of understanding how much our family life is changing and how much it will change, in the years to come.

Building up to Easter, is when my emotions were escalating. I bought so much candy for our kids’ Easter baskets, that the checker asked me if we were having a party. I had to put it on two credit cards. (okay, the credit card part isn’t true, but the first statement IS, pathetically, true) I was obviously in overcompensation mode. The funny thing is though, when Easter rolled around, I felt good. I felt calm. I felt peaceful. I felt hopeful. I felt the promise of the holiday.

Thank you for your understanding my need for a break. Thank you for still coming by to read past posts. (I see the stats.) I hope that whatever your traditions and beliefs are, that you were able to celebrate a beautiful spring weekend with people who you love. I hope that you feel refreshed and renewed. I do. And it feels good.

Seek and You Will Find

Happy Friday, dear readers! Happy Good Friday!! In honor of the holiest days of the year in the Christian faith, I am going to take some time off from writing this weekend to enjoy some more just “being” and reflecting. Thank you for your loyalty and understanding. I treasure you, my readers. Have a wonderful, hopeful, redeeming, restful Easter weekend! I shall be back on Monday with more musings! In the words of Jesus:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8 NIV