I had a relaxing day hanging out on the dog beach with my husband and the pups, yesterday. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ralphie, our Labrador swallowed too much salt water from his enthusiastic “merman” routine in the water, and ended up with the squirts. Josie, our collie, decided that it was hot enough to risk drowning, so she even did a little swimming, in order to cool off, before retreating back to the shore. A young couple decided that their enormous Doberman with the spiked choke collar was well-trained enough to be off-lead, so the said dog decided to “mingle” with every other dog within eyesight, despite his owner’s desperate calls and whistles. Like I said, nothing unusual happened. Here is a sampling of good quotes I found in my readings, and decorative sign sightings this week:
“The mind only has questions. The heart only has answers.” – Cal Garrison
“Your vibe attracts your tribe.”
“If love is anything, it is everything.” – Christopher Poindexter
“Please don’t disturb my peace if you are at war with yourself.” – Think Smarter
“If it doesn’t open, it’s not your door.”
“I stopped having $5 reactions to nickel worthy provocations.”
Yesterday I was grumble-y. So much so, in fact, that in the middle of my ranting, raving, complaining, pissing in the wind, my daughter interrupted my sad soliloquy, with, “Mom, embrace the suck.”
I started laughing. It’s so funny when your kids throw your own words back to you. If you remember a few Favorite Things Friday, back, “Embrace the Suck” was one of my new favorite philosophies, courtesy of The Navy Seals. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
Today I am not grumble-y. I am happy, and joyful. It is a beautiful summer morning. It is Friday. Life is good. Even when you embrace the suck, it is still good!
New readers, on Fridays, I list favorites. It can be favorite websites, plants, books, clothes, miracle creams, etc. I encourage you all to add to the list. Please see previous Fridays for more favorites. It’s okay to enjoy the material side of life. We are meant to experience life fully, and tactically. That is why we have bodies and senses. There are so many delights in life to sample. It’s like a delicious buffet, a blooming bouquet, and an amazing, never-ending amusement park for us to explore, all at once.
Today’s favorites are my favorite inspirational, spiritual songs. These songs are my jam when I want to connect with our Creator in a fun, musical way. There are a lot of them, so I couldn’t narrow them down to three. But these are my very top favorites that never fail to uplift me and to remind me that we are LOVED and we are gloriously interconnected. Here goes, in no particular order:
New World Son’s “Sweet Holy Spirit”
The Beatle’s “Let It Be”
Toby Mac’s “Get Back Up”
Nicole C. Mullen “Everyday People”
Salvador’s “Heaven”
The Black Eyed Peas and Justin Timberlake’s “Where is the Love?”
Wade Imre Morrissette’s “Om Narayana”
Jeremy Camp’s “Here I am to Worship”
Aaron Shust’s “My Savior My God”
Audio Adrenaline’s “Big House”
David Newman’s “Love, Peace Chant”
Scott Underwood’s “Take My Life”
Brandon Heath’s “Give Me Your Eyes”
The Guru Singh Experience “Ong So Hung”
Now go sing your song and have a fabulous, miraculous, awe-inspiring weekend!!!
I think that soon designers are going to come up with lines of fancy bullet proof vests. I think they may even become a staple in people’s closets. My friend said that bullet proof book bags are already available for kids. Sad. Very sad.
I read an article today that said that those of us born in the 1970s and older are the last generations to remember what life was like without the internet. We are called “digital immigrants” or “innocents.” The article’s main premise is that we are the last humans to realize how good it is to have “digital detoxes” in order to just sit with our inner worlds and our imaginations. The author reminded us that the internet, itself, was invented due to someone’s imagination.
My friend’s elderly dog passed yesterday. She has had a tumultuous decade, raising two teenage boys primarily on her own, after a nasty divorce. The last year or so, she has really gotten her groove back and is on an even keel upward. I think that our pets sense when it is okay to pass on. They understand when we have our strength back. They know so much more than we give them credit for, sometimes. A lot of the times.
I started taking Burdock root a few months ago, as part of my daily supplement regiment. I forgot why I started taking it. I looked it up on the internet. It is great for joints. I realized that my joints have not been so stiff lately. I think it must work.
I like this tweet from u.fo:
may the next few months of 2019 be filled with pleasant plot twists, spontaneous fun, and good vibes.
My friend sent a beautiful parable about the strength of women, to our group chat just now. It is an interesting kind of strength that we women have, because often our softness and nurturing hearts, belie our cores of steel, and our hard fast loyalty to our faith and to the mission of our lives.
I think I lost my sanity temporarily on a hike this summer. In a fit of really ugly crying, uncontrollable shaking, and a surge of angry energy that I didn’t know could be held in my body, I tried to explain to my family, the strength that it takes to love a family so much. You love them so much that all you want for each and every one of them, is to experience every amazing adventure and delight that life has to offer, and yet try to balance that, with trying to keep them safe, and whole and innocent and wondrous. I have always told my four children that they are my heart, walking around on eight legs.
My second son is my daredevil child. He’s the one that started my temporary crack-up this summer, when he decided to jump over a waterfall, despite the many warning signs, posted right by the shore. This son has broken more bones than any of my other children, and he is the only child to have been pulled over for speeding in his car. He is the one that was always creating crazy skateboard ramps, or icy sledding moguls, or crashing his bike, even with warnings that he was headed for disaster. My second son has been skydiving and has traveled far distances without us, with a cocky air, that tries to portray that adventures are nothing more to him, than breathing. He’s also the one who always forgets to call, to let us know that he is safe. My second son is brilliant young man with a heart of gold, who dreams of becoming a doctor. He is headed to South America next week to be part of a medical mission. And I am extremely proud, vicariously excited, hesitantly supportive, and absolutely terrified, all at the same time.
I think that is the amazing, balanced strength of a woman. We have arms that hold those who we love so tight and so close, so that they can’t help but know that they are constantly surrounded by warmth and safety and love. Yet we also use those same arms to gently push those same objects of our love, towards their lives’ adventures, with confident, reassuring pats on the back, that all is going to be wondrous and whole. I think that it is amazingly strong to be able to hold and to let go, all at the same time.
I’ve mentioned in one of my Favorite Things Friday posts, the journal that I write in every single day. It is a published journal called Buildingthe Best You by Caroline Harper and each book contains two years of daily journals. I like it because the area to write in is so small, you can’t even write in full sentences. Basically, every day you answer the same six questions and the next year is right beside the previous year on the same page, so you can do a quick comparison of your answers. It takes all of three minutes to fill out, every night. Every three months or so, there are longer questions with more space to fill, but overall, it is very simple and quick to fill the journal out and at the very least, you have a quick recap of what you have been doing with your time and life. And by comparing the years, you can decide if you have made any progress in your life skills, or if you are at a standstill or even regressing. It’s a great tool.
I just finished filling out my third journal book at the end of July. So, I have consistently kept a journal for six years. This beats my past record of six consistent days of keeping a journal, by quite a lot. My past record was made when I was in the third grade and My Diary (literally) had a fancy little lock on it. I imagine that I stopped writing the journal when I lost the key to the lock.
When I realized a few years ago that I was actually committed to keeping a journal, I purchased a bunch of copies of Building the BestYou, as they were on clearance at Barnes and Noble. When I went into my cabinet the other day, to start a new journal – my fourth one, I did a quick inventory of how many journals I had left. I figured I had enough journals to get me well into my sixties. But then I started getting nervous. The superstitious part of me started kicking in, in an intense way. My breath was quickening, and my heart was beating harder . . . . I knew what I had to do. I went to Amazon and I ordered two more books. I effectively added four more years to my life. Keeping a journal is powerful stuff.
Above are pictures of charts that I took from an interesting book that I read over the weekend. The book is called The Happiness Curve WhyLife Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch. The author is an award winning journalist, who set out to do some research as to explain what used to be known as the “midlife crisis”, which the author himself prefers to call a “slump.” The book sets out to show the interesting fact that in a time period in life where people have achieved a fair level of success in everything that they had set out to do: their careers, their families and relationships, hobbies, etc., many of us midlifers seem to feel a confusing, unexplained level of dissatisfaction. As shown in the above charts, our life satisfaction ratings are at the lowest that they will ever be, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a real reason for it. As the author writes “I’m dissatisfied with my life right now because. . . .(yet) there is nothing after the because.” The author starts the book offering these heartening statements:
“First, midlife slump (not “crisis”!) is completely normal and natural. Like . . . adolescence, it is a healthy if sometimes painful transition, and it serves a purpose by equipping you for a new stage of life. You may feel dissatisfied, but you don’t need to feel too worried about feeling dissatisfied.
Second, the post-midlife upturn is no mere transient change in mood: it is a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who weare. It often brings unexpected contentment that extends into old age and, yes, even into frailty and illness.
Third, by extending our life spans, modern medicine and public health have already added more than a decade to the upturn. . . . . Some sociologists call this new stage of life encore adulthood. Whatever you call it, it is a gift the likes of which mankind has never known before.”
What I liked best about the book was the positive reassurance. The book reassures us that it is normal and natural to feel that way that we do (science shows that even primates go through a midlife slump), during such a huge transitional time period in our lives. Just like we give a little more understanding to our teenagers, knowing they are going through a lot of big changes all at once, we have to offer that same kind of leeway and comfort to ourselves. While the book showed all of the research proving that this time period is an emotionally fraught period, it also showed the research that proves that this tough phase passes into something that is reportedly to be, many people’s most satisfying life periods ever. While we are in the trough, the author recommends that we normalize our feelings by opening up to spouses and partners and friends, who are likely feeling the same malaise, to interrupt our internal critics and stop with comparisons, to take care of our physical bodies with good nutrition, exercise and rest, to practice staying in the present moment, and to step (do NOT emotionally leap) into changes that you are wanting to make. He says in order to avoid impulsive moves that you might regret, you should make lateral moves in an incremental, constructive and logical manner. However, the author says that “the most important wisdom of all” is to wait and to sit in the knowing that it gets better. He says this:
“In the Voyage of Life, you are a plaything of forces larger than yourself, borne upon a stream you cannot control. So relinquish control. Trust the river. Trust time.”
The author speaks of walking with a fellow writer, a man whose life and work he had always admired. He was shocked when his friend admitted that he, himself, had experienced a midlife crisis/slump. His friend had this to say:
“Midlife crisis begins sometime in your forties, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about ten years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually this is pretty good.”
The author ends the book on this hopeful note:
“If I had to explain the upside of the U in just three words, the words I would use are these: Gratitude comes easier. That is the hidden gift of the happiness curve.
I recently heard a man say that he lives for his vacations. I thought to myself, “That is scary and sad.” First of all, most Americans only get, on average, 2-3 weeks of vacation per year. So that is a lot of pressure and expectation resting on less than one twelfth of your entire year. What if your vacation ends up not being everything you built it up to be in your mind? What if you get sick? What if the venue looks a lot better in pictures than it really does in person? And even if your vacation does end up being a fabulous time, why would the rest of your life (the overwhelming majority of it) be a drab and dreary purgatory, until your vacation time is called?
I started to think that it would be a worthy goal to try to make every day feel like it has a little bit of vacation in it. Now, I recognize that this is easier to accomplish on weekends or other days that are off from work, so I figured yesterday, a Saturday, would be a good day to give it a good college try. I talked my husband (the teenagers at home had their own ideas of what a vacation day looks like, and that idea didn’t include hanging around all day, with mom and dad) into going to a neighboring town and hitting a small museum, a quaint art gallery and lush botanical garden – all three places that have been on my bucket list for quite some time. They were all three inexpensive, yet interesting venues that you didn’t need to invest hours and hours, at each one. The mix of all three made for a circus of the mind. It was like going to different tents for entirely different experiences and expeditions, and all three were easily explored in a short distance of a few walk-able miles, and the venues were explored and devoured in a time span no longer than four hours. We also managed to fit in a delicious meal at an authentic German cafe and had fun conversations with other diners, which ended with the whole cafe singing “Happy Birthday” to Kathy, a sweet elderly woman who was on her way to a baseball game, but she first sat and relished in our off-key, but full of heart and noisy song. My husband and I topped all of this off by splitting a homemade ice cream sandwich, which was made of delicious, creamy homemade ice cream sandwiched in between an award-worthy brownie and a cookie, pressed (yes, and the ice cream stayed cold, don’t ask me how) and then sprinkled with Butterfingers. While, we devoured our treat, we happily watched a little girl and her mother dance in the bubbles that were streaming playfully from a bubble machine that the ice cream parlor’s owners had installed outside of the store. The little girl wore a shirt that said this:
“Everybody Laughs in the Same Language”
When we got home, our kids were at home and still up, so we all cuddled on the couch and watched a movie together. Yesterday was easily a vacation-worthy, memory-filled experience. Now, I realize not every day is going to have the free hours for ambling, and not every day is going to be crisis free. Honestly, right now it feels good to envision the rest of my day, today, as a day at home, resting and getting organized for the week. Still, I refuse to live a life that is only zestfully experienced, two or three weeks out of a year. Yesterday, reminded me that with a little bit of effort, imagination and a “go with the flow” adventurous spirit, and without the tethers of grand expectations, even an ordinary day can feel like a vacation.
I had my annual physical yesterday and my doctor has a wipe board in her waiting room. One of her staff wrote this quote on the board in fancy letters:
“Be Patient with yourself. Nothing in nature blooms all year.”
I thought that was such a nice reminder. We are such tough task masters on ourselves. Also, sometimes I think that the qualities about ourselves that we take for granted, other people marvel about. I know that I am so impressed with people who really think ahead and seem to be so prepared for anything, like good scouts. Another quality that I just marvel at, is people who can pack up a suitcase or trunk of a car, so it fits about eight times the amount of stuff you think should be able to fit in there. I love people who put you at ease right away and make you feel like you have known them since you were born. The point that I’m trying to make is that we all have some really special traits, beyond our obvious talents that we use to define ourselves, such as art or music or sewing or number crunching. Just because it seems easy and innate to us, doesn’t make it any less special. Our gifts are the gifts that we share with the world, that in turn, makes the whole world move in symbiosis.
So please today, know that you are special, needed, and gifted, even when you are not in full bloom.
Hi readers! Happy Friday!!! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! New readers, on Fridays we discuss STUFF – the material parts of life that make living grand. On Friday, I mention three of my favorite things, songs, websites, books, etc. etc. and I ask you to add some of your favorite STUFF in the Comments section. Please check out previous Friday posts (there are a lot of them by now), for more favorites.
I grew up in Pennsylvania. In the summertime, in Pennsylvania, people have flowers galore. It is truly lovely. I spent my thirties in North Carolina. Carolinians enjoy beautiful flowers in the summer time, too, but due to the heat they don’t plant quite as many of them, as the northerners do, in my experience. When I lived in NC, I fell in love with the Crepe Myrtle bushes/trees. Carolinians plant those beauties everywhere! Then in my forties, we moved to Florida. I was shocked to see that people didn’t plant a whole lot of the traditional flowers that I was used to seeing. You see, Florida is just too damn hot in the summer and delicate flowers like impatiens, just wither and fry down to nothing, unless they are connected to a drip, containing gallons of water. And even then, there are no guarantees. However, tropical flowers bask and thrive in the Florida sun and grow at exponential rates, so much so, that soon a machete becomes a much needed gardener’s tool.
Above are pictures of three of my favorite Florida Loving Plants. Here is why:
Bromelaid – I bought one small bromelaid with its gorgeous pink flower, a few years back, to support breast cancer awareness. Well, now we own about 18 of these beauties from that one small plant. These plants put rabbits to shame in the field of reproduction. Their flower is so dramatic, and bursts with color and energy and it blooms for a long time. I love, love, love this plant!!
Musical Note Clerodendrum – This plant is fabulous. It’s blooms are white puffs that look just like musical notes. It constantly blooms as if it is constantly singing. Ours really took off when we planted it in a flower bed, by the small lake that we have out back. It looks delicate, but it can’t help but thrive and bloom and burst with its song, in our tropical environment.
Chenille Plant (red-hot cattail) – I have this plant in a jardiniere (remember that word from last week, friends??) by my front door. It just grows and flows like a little waterfall full of pink, fuzzy caterpillars. It does just fine in hot Florida, although it does require a fair amount of watering. (I sometimes pour a little ice in it, and it seems to appreciate the effort while it withstands the sunshine)
Enjoy your weekend, friends! As always, thank you so much for your support and validation!
