Fortune for the day: “Work is love made visible.” – Kahlil Gibran
The TV show, 60 Minutes was particularly good this past Sunday, I thought. The entire show was made out of segments about nature and animals. I lapped it up. (So did our Labrador retriever, Ralphie, as he kept looking behind the TV for the pack of wolves showing on the segment about the Yellowstone National Park wolves) My favorite segment featured Joel Sartore, a photographer for National Geographic who has made it his life’s mission to make a pictorial ark, much like the biblical, Noah’s ark. He spends at least half of each year, going around to zoos and conservancies photographing every species that they have in captivity. Sartore only uses black or white backgrounds and he focuses on the animals’ eyes, so that we can fully empathize with their emotions and their inner beings. During the 60 Minutes segment, one animal which he photographed was the last frog of its kind. Once that particular frog passes, there will be no more of that species, ever again to be found on Earth. Currently, there are 9,844 pictures of species in Joe Sartore’s Photo Ark. He says that it will take him about 25 years to document every species currently in human care. Peruse the miracle of it all, in awe and amazement, at his beautiful website:
Fortune for the day – Eternity is a dimension of the here and now. – Joseph Campbell
“The Cotton Bowl” by Hank Willis Thomas
My husband pointed out this artwork to me, recently featured in the Wall Street Journal. Hank Willis Thomas is a Brooklyn based artist, who has a big exhibition of his artworks, going on right now in Portland, Oregon. My husband said to me, “This picture reminds me of how you always say that our American football games and boxing matches, always remind you of the ancient gladiators, with all of the privileged onlookers, safely cheering in the stands. The gladiators get a sense of omnipotent glory, yet their bodies are being beaten to death, all for the entertainment of the fans.”
He is right. This picture depicts what I have been trying to convey. It is true that a picture paints a thousand words. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching a good football game, like many people. My husband played football through college. Two of my sons played Pop Warner football. All of my sons have attended a university with a glorious football tradition. Football is a huge part of the American culture. Yet it is brutal, and for many who play it, it seems to be their only ticket out of lives ridden in crime and in poverty, for themselves and for their families. However, the consequences of playing football, to the bodies of the players, is undeniably real and tragic. In 2017, neurosurgeons studied 111 deceased NFL players’ brains, with 110 of them showed the signs of CTE.
CTE is described this way on Wikipedia:
“Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries. Symptoms may include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking. Symptoms typically do not begin until years after the injuries. CTE often gets worse over time and can result in dementia.”
My family is a sporty family. Every one of my four children played(s) at least one sport throughout their childhoods into high school. There are so many positive aspects for a child that comes from playing a sport. My children have learned how to take good care of their bodies with exercise and good nutrition, they have learned how to manage their time by having to balance homework and practices, they have gotten a hands-on perspective of teamwork, and they have experienced the humility of bench time. Still, as the aspects of technology and nutrition and medicine have grown substantially in the fields of health and sports, our bodies are almost taking on the strength of machines – machines that can be lethal to ourselves and to each other. The following is from a blog from a local medical clinic’s website:
“Sports Injuries Are Becoming More Common Among Our Youth
Over 30 million children and teenagers participate in organized sports in the United States. Although a number of precautions are typically taken to keep athletes safe during these activities, a worrying trend is emerging as sports injuries become increasingly common among children and teens. Statistics show that around 3.5 million children below the age of 14 are hurt annually while playing sports. This number accounts for 40% of all sports-related injuries, regardless of age group. Meanwhile, similar studies reveal that over two million injuries, 500,000 doctor visits, and 30,000 hospitalizations affect American high school students each year.”
The injuries are not just coming in from the traditionally “rough sports.” This same article also states that since the year 2000, “the number of serious shoulder and elbow injuries among young baseball and softball players has increased fivefold.”
My middle son broke his shin playing competitive soccer in high school. His friend, on the same team, had to have two surgeries to correct a serious dislocation in his arm, that occurred during a game. I could rattle off a list of high school athletes (all contemporaries of my kids) who have had to have surgeries, due to playing a high school sport. I imagine that you could make a similar list, too. Yet, at the same time, I can’t think of one person, who I knew in high school, who had to have a sports-related surgery. My high school was a large, competitive high school in the Pittsburgh area – an area that worships its football culture.
I think that in a lot of ways, the sports industry has become big business, playing off of parents’ egos. I am not going to pretend that I was ever immune from this phenomenon. But here are the facts:
“Overall a little over 7% of high school athletes (about 1 in 14) went on to play a varsity sport in college and less than 2% of high school athletes (1 in 54) went on to play at NCAA Division I schools. The largest percentage of both male and female college athletes competed at NCAA Division III schools.” (NCAA org)
and this:
“Fewer than 2 percent of NCAA student–athletes go on to be professional athletes.” (NCAA org)
Of course, I am looking at all of this retrospectively, with a little bit of chagrin. My daughter still plays high school tennis and she loves it. My husband and I love to watch her play, but we mostly want the sport to be a stress release for her. We do not want it to become a major cause of pressure and stress for her, either mentally or physically.
I am very curious as to what the history books are going to have to say about our day and age. Will our sports look brutal and barbaric? Will ego-based competition always just be a part of being a human, or will we evolve into something more unified? How will we evolve? Will our evolution be for the better or for the worse, and who can really judge what is better, until retrospection becomes a factor? I find all of this very interesting and mind-boggling, but this is one thing that I do know: I so very much appreciate artists like Hank Willis Thomas, who can put all of this confusing discourse, swirling all around in my brain, into one gorgeous piece of artwork that simply and beautifully, says it all.
Fortune for the day – “When anger spreads through the breast, guard thytongue from barking loudly.” – Sapho
Anger does start in the chest, doesn’t it? And it has a burning feel to it, that does spread like fire and even sometimes like an inferno. What are you feeling right now? What does that feeling feel like, in each part of your body? Notice it. Stay with it. Describe it. Feel it. Let it go.
New friends, Sundays are our Poetry Workshop days. I share a poem and I feel a longing to have more of my readers share their poems in the Comments section. (Longing is a hollow feeling deep in my core, I’ve noticed) Anyway, it’s safe here. Even if you don’t feel like sharing, write a poem just for yourself today. You’ll find it freeing. You’ll be able to express more than you ever could with regular prose. I promise. Here’s my poem for today:
Fortune for the day – “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”- Albert Einstein
The time has come for another “No Horse Pucky” story. I haven’t recounted one of these types of stories, on the blog, in a long, long time. This story is from long ago. I wasn’t even married when it happened. I was engaged to be married, though.
It all happened in an ugly, green minivan. That particular minivan ruined minivans for me, for the rest of my life, despite a minivan’s convenient nature, which would have come in quite in handy, for a mother of a large brood like mine. You see, I was 23 years old and the ugly minivan, was an all expense paid company car. I had inherited the minivan from the previous textbook sales representative, a middle-aged family man, whose position I had taken over, after he left to go to a different company. I had sold my Barbie car (as my Dad liked to call it), a bright red, zippy Miata convertible, and I was now sporting around town in an unsightly, lumbering hunter green minivan. Blech!
Anyway, one evening on the commute home, being stuck at a long traffic light, I got distracted. I got distracted by my new, shiny, lovely engagement ring. I am, admittedly, a highly distractible driver. (My sister once said that I drive like it is an afterthought to everything else that I am doing.) I decided to take my engagement ring off, to admire it from all different angles, while waiting at the stoplight. While I was gazing adoringly at my new bauble, the light changed, and the rightfully irritated driver behind me, blew his horn loudly and long-ly. It startled me and I jumped, which made my engagement ring fall out of my hands, slide down the steering wheel column, down into a crack where the steering wheel connects into the dashboard.
At the next traffic light, I decided to use a pen to try to pry the crack open a little bit, so that I could slide my ring back up into my hands, to put it back onto its rightful finger. I pried the crack open so wide that the force of gravity swiftly swooped in, to teach me a lesson and the ring fell down into the crack, now disappearing from my sight. I started panicking, imagining that perhaps the ring had fallen out on to the road, as if the minivan was a bottomless car, the type driven by Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble. (the van was pretty bad but not THAT bad) In my hysterical state, I cut off three lanes of traffic to take a sharp right turn into the nearest service station that happened to be right there, like a lighthouse, a great beacon of hope, in the desert of my despair.
“Help me! Help me, please. My engagement ring fell behind my steering column!” I shouted out to the man in the back corner of the garage. The man, covered in grease, eyed me up and down, suspiciously and motioned for me to pull the minivan into a stall of his garage. He dismissed my silly fears of the ring falling onto the highway and told me to go calm myself down, in his small, dumpy waiting room.
About a half hour later, the man sauntered into the waiting room, holding my engagement ring. He informed me that he had to remove the steering wheel, to retrieve my poor ring, which had been like a small, innocent, pretty animal, waiting patiently, yet desperately, at the bottom of a dark, smelly well.
“Ma’am”, he addressed me with a stern scowl on his grease-marked face. “Let this be a lesson to you. This is why we DON’T take these things off.”
Fortune of the day – “In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped.” – Lao Tzu
In case you are wondering how to say Lao Tzu, it sounds sort of like this, “Lout Za”. I always forget and I have to look it up all of the time. One of my absolute favorite features of the internet is the pronunciation videos.
Happy Friday, my dear friends! Happy Favorite Things Friday! New readers, Fridays are simple and on the surface. On Fridays, I list three favorites of mine and I encourage you to do the same in the Comments section. One can never have enough favorites. Please also check out previous Friday listings for more favorites that I have shared in the past. I’m sticking with my favorites!
Today’s favorites:
Viridian Bay – If you like interesting, eye candy objects in your garden, you will love this website. They have so many cool garden accent pieces, like statues, and wind chimes and lanterns. I think that their prices are pretty reasonable, too. Even if you are “just window shopping” the internet, Viridian Bay is a really nice, relaxing website to peruse.
Quaker Instant Grits – I love grits! One of my favorite dishes is shrimp and grits. (I also love Quaker instant oats.) I don’t think that the rest of my family are as nearly into grits, as I am. That’s why these individual packets are so great. I can get my grit fix and give the rest of the fam, the usual rice and/or potatoes. The jalapeno flavor absolutely pops! Get yourself a box, if you are hankering some southern comfort food, in an instant.
Naturium Multi-Peptide Eye Cream – I read an article recently that stated a good eye cream must have peptides, in order to help soften the wrinkles and to tighten the crepey skin that comes with aging eyes. I purchased this cream on Amazon. It is reasonably priced and while I am not seeing miracles, I do like how it makes my skin feel. Until I find something better, this has become my daily go-to under eye cream.
Friday: Well, hello! I’m right here for you. Right here. Right now. We are going to really enjoy the day together. We’re going to laugh, we’re going to have fun and we are not going to take anything too seriously. Let me wrap you into my big, warm, comfortable arms and you just sit back and enjoy the ride!
Fortune for the Day – “What’s old collapses, times change, and new life blossoms in the ruins.” – Johann Von Schiller
The bucket story from yesterday’s blog post, seemed to resonate, so I will add one more thought that really stuck with me from Dr. Christian Conte’s book about anger management. He states that as people, we are more likely to judge ourselves on our intentions and yet, we are more inclined to judge others, by their actions. So, this implies that people are judging us on our actions, because they really aren’t privy to our intentions and they may make incorrect assumptions. Just having this knowledge about how we judge ourselves and others, makes me want to maybe give others a little more of the benefit of the doubt, but to also hold myself a little more accountable for my own actions. Along these lines, I recently copied down this quote into one of my “Things to Ponder and Write About/Inspirations” notebooks. I think that the quote is from Think Smarter on Twitter, but I am honestly not certain:
“Any time you worry that someone is going to judge you, that is really you judging yourself.”
Hmmmmm. Judgment is an uncomfortable subject, so let’s bring this back to intentions. Last year I read that it is more useful to rephrase “New Year’s Resolutions”, to “New Year’s Intentions”. “Intentions” has a more positive, hopeful ring to it, than the demanding, demeaning, judg-y, foreboding tone of the word, “Resolution.” If you are having trouble coming up with New Year’s Intentions, these questions that I cut out of an article from the last issue of Spirituality & Health magazine, I thought were interesting, positive and absolutely thought-provoking:
Fortune for the day – “All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.” – Dame Julien of Norwich
Recently I flipped through an interesting book by Dr. Christian Conte. Dr. Conte is a renowned anger management specialist who specializes with working with some of the most violent criminals in our country. He tells a lot of parables in his writing. I like that because they are simple and easy to remember. He tells one story of a teacher, who told her students that she was going to give each of them an empty bucket. She asked her students what they would fill their buckets with. They all shouted out things like food or money or even, (and probably most likely), their cell phones. The students asked the teacher what the right answer was to her question and she replied that there was no right answer. She replied that she had no judgment about what they put into their buckets. She just asked them only to agree with this statement, “Whatever you, in fact, put into your bucket, will be in your bucket. Your bucket will be filled with everything that you put into it. Agree?” The students all agreed with a “duh!” sarcastic expression on their faces. The teacher then said to her students, “Your mind is just like your bucket. Whatever you fill it with, that is what is in your mind. Choose carefully what you fill your minds with.”
Fortune for the day –“From their errors and mistakes, the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.” – Plutarch
My husband and I sometimes act like cranky old fogies when it comes to today’s new inventions. We have often giggled about our friends and relations, who have cameras all over their homes, as if they live in the White House, or Fort Knox, or an American embassy in the Middle East, or something. (Our course we have two large, annoying dogs who would lick any unlucky, unwise intruder, to death, in a matter of minutes, so we are safe. Ha!) Perhaps I may be guilty of naivete or even more so, of the old adage, “What I don’t know, can’t hurt me,” as I insert my head into the warm Florida sand. So imagine my surprise, when I got a little choked up at a Ring TV commercial being played during last night’s championship football game. Ring sells doorbell cameras and video cams, among other security products. Typically, I get annoyed at companies whose profits come from playing off of people’s biggest fears, but I got a new perspective about Ring last night with this spot:
Essentially, Ring showed real footage of people being caught being kind. Ring showed a series of real people doing what most of us people try to be – good neighbors. It warms my heart to watch it (again and again) and usually, I can’t stand commercials. I would typically scoff at buying a Ring doorbell, but this ad honestly made me reconsider my position. Now that is what I call good marketing. As stated at the end of the advertisement, “Thank you, my brother. I appreciate you.”
“Thank you, my brother. I appreciate you.” Let’s practice saying that a little more in 2020. I imagine that would go a long ways in changing the world into a better place, if everyone made that a new year’s resolution/intention. And that resolution is easier to keep, and feels a hell of a lot better than starving ourselves, on celery quinoa diets, to try to lose a few pounds.
And readers, “Thank you, my brothers and sisters. I appreciate you.” (from the depths of my sincerest heart)
Today’s Fortune: “The soul is here for its own joy.” – Rumi
Today is Monday and I slept horribly last night, for reasons unknown to me. Just as I am all over the map in my actions, flitting from one half-finished chore to another, so goes my thoughts. Therefore this is going to be a “random thoughts, all over the map” day here, at Adulting – Second Half. Here is what is conjuring up in my wild and crazy, and very sleepy mind right now:
First Thought – If I am going to continue to be archaic and insist on using my Barnes and Noble hardback, paper desk diary, as my daily calendar, I must improve my handwriting. My handwriting has become barely legible. Further, I must stop writing “in code.” The reality is, I forget the code that I created almost immediately after I write the crazy, unidentifiable words/symbols/wtf? on my calendar, and I spend hours in puzzlement and bewilderment and anxiety, trying to understand what I am supposed to be doing. I then become my own version of Angela Lansbury, trying to decipher my own sloppily written, and not-so-very clever abbreviations, for the things that I must do in life, in a timely fashion. I must fix this problem. Stat.
Second Thought – I saw this quote on twitter made by a young woman who appears to be in her twenties: “Third wave feminism in not about empowering women, it’s about hating men, yelling in the streets, and on demand abortions. Traditional feminism is empowering. Third wave feminism is embarrassing.” Someone commented on her tweet with this comment: “Third wave feminism hurts women more than men. Men are afraid work with women now, afraid to be in the office with them, afraid to date them. Any man with a career he has worked hard for would be NUTS not to be terrified.”
I have walked this balance beam for a while now, raising both young men and a young woman, in this current divisive climate. I understand that sometimes it is necessary for the pendulum to swing far out in one direction, in order for healthy change to actually happen, but I do hope that it comes back to center soon. I think, as women, when we project anger and hatred and disappointment that we have about some “bad” men, on to every man who we meet and know, we are being completely unfair. Do we do that to other women in our lives, making every woman who we meet, feel bad about being a woman?? If a man is instantly disliked just for being a man, what makes us, as women, so likable and agreeable, to him? If a man’s experience is that every woman who he knows, are man-haters, one can see how he would start to deeply distrust women. Thus, he will project his learned hatred of women on to every woman who he knows. And thus, the cycle of inequality, mistrust and divide continues. I think that it is our responsibility as mothers, grandmothers, aunts, etc. to be strong, wise, healthy examples to both young men and to young women, and to raise up strong, confident, kind, capable, loving, self-respecting adults, who can discern for themselves who is toxic (no matter what that person’s sex may be), and to be brave enough and healthy enough to create strong values and boundaries, to protect and honor their own true selves. When they feel solid in self-love, they will share that healthy love and respect with the other men and other women in their lives, who deserve it.
Third Thought – My husband and my eldest son are currently reading the book called Empire of the Summer Moon, at the same time, so that they can discuss it when they are finished. The book is primarily about the history of the Comanche Native American tribe. Now the book sounds a bit too brutal for me to stick my nose into, but it did remind me of this scene from one of my favorite movies of all time. If you have never seen the movie, Hell or Highwater, put it on your watch list. The character development is excellent. It is one of those movies that you think about long, long after you have watched it. Here’s the scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V-5p3fM90s
Now, I must get back to more half-baked projects and to deciphering what I am really supposed to be doing today, that is, when I can figure out what the chicken scratch on my calendar really says. Have a great week, friends!
Fortune for the day: “What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be.” – William Blake
Let’s get to the poetry workshop part of the day! Here’s mine, please put your stream of thoughts, in poetic form, in the Comments section. Thank you, Carla, for joining in last Sunday. I deeply wish that our poetry forum would get more poetic in 2020, so that we have many interesting, thought provoking poems to read and to interpret and to feel and to connect with, on our Soul Sundays, that we share here at Adulting-Second Half. This is firmly a no-judgment zone. I have veto power and I will not allow any hate on my blog forum. Poetry comes from love, from vulnerability, from the deepest understanding of life that sometimes cannot be put into ordinary prose. Poetry does NOT come from fear and hate. Again, here’s my poem for the day:
The Mind
The most outrageous adventures
Most often take place in the far corners of our own mind.
It is fascinating that a place of comfort and reprieve
Can also be a berth of agonizing hell,
In the flip of a switch of an ordinary, random thought.
If a thought is allowed to continue and to grow and to repeat itself,
It becomes a prison cell, a sorceror holding a hypnotist’s ball and chain,
Creating a trance and a falsehood of reality, that overtakes the soul.
If we can stand back with bemusement and detachment,
The mind is often nothing more than a scatterbrained child,
Changing continually, with the winds of whimsy.
Just for fun, it likes to see how far reaching its thoughts can take us,
evoking deep, primitive emotions that stir wild energy,
intense energy, flowing throughout and reaching every cell
of sometimes the entire physical body.
The one thing that the mind doesn’t ever care to be . . . .
