Month: April 2025

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ Yesterday I stumbled across this appetizer serving plate in a store that unfortunately had a small chip in it (as in a crack or break, not a Doritos nacho chip), and they didn’t have any other of these plates for me to buy. It said “Dipshit” and I thought that was totally hilarious. Looking for a similar plate online, I found all sorts of profane and hilarious plates and so I had my own private comedy hour (although I did text some pictures of the plates to friends, to laugh along with me. Laughter is best when it is multiplied.) The one that seemed to get the most laughs from all of us, was this one:

To be funny, humor always has to have a hint of truth in it. Sadly, many of us talk to ourselves this way, even when we are giving ourselves a “pep talk.” For example, the next time that you feel irritated with your mood, and you angrily scream at yourself “Could you just stay in the moment, and be peaceful for once???”, etc. remember this plate, and laugh. Laugh at yourself. Put your inner bitch to the side, and be kind. Be kind to yourself.

+ Our Boykin spaniel, Trip, is kind of a jerk. He’s our jerk and we adore our jerk, but he’s a jerk. Trip is bossy, boisterous, wary of anyone who isn’t family, attention-seeking, snappy, hyper, and overall, mostly obnoxious. His looks are adorable (he’s been compared to Bob Marley if Bob Marley were a dog), and Trip’s fur is luxuriously soft and he is the most affectionate dog whom I have ever lived with in my life (and I have lived with many a dog over the years). Still, overall, Trip is kind of a jerk. And we have mostly accepted this about him, since he is five years old and nothing about his mannerisms have changed all that much. So my husband and I were walking the jerk and the other sweet one (the beautiful, calm, elegant collie) last night, and we passed a man walking his dog, whom we have passed many times on the road, typically just greeting each other with waves and nods, but that’s about it. Yesterday night, the man stopped, just as Trip was pulling my husband in zealous zigzags, just as he does very night, except to occasionally enthusiastically kick up dirt and rocks with his back legs, just for the helluva it – a fun shower for us all. Sigh. The man yelled over to us, “I have to tell you guys that seeing your dog every night makes me so happy. It lifts my spirit. He’s like a happy, busy little kid. You guys are so lucky. He is so full of life. He makes me happy and filled with energy just watching him. Your dog is something special.”

Honestly, that might be the first genuine, amazing compliment that Trip has ever gotten from anyone outside of our family. We are used to the backhanded compliments about him, “Well, at least he looks cute . . . .” Trip didn’t understand the compliment. Nor would he care. Trip was busy putting his nose into a tortoise cave at this point. But I relished the compliment. I relished it because it was a reminder to look for the good in everything. It was a reminder that we all have different tastes in things, people, places, ideas, dogs . . . .and that’s what makes the world go around. It’s what makes the world interesting. The kind compliment was a reminder that a curse can also be a blessing, and that it is best to try to seek out and to focus on the blessing part, whenever we can. It was also a reminder to be like Trip. Trip doesn’t listen to the boos or the cheers (one of the greatest basketball players of all times, Bill Russell was booed almost nightly by racist crowds. His daughter asked him if he heard the boos and he told her this: “I don’t hear the boos because I don’t hear the cheers.” Bill Russell was confident and comfortable in his own skin, He focused on what he did best, and what he loved, and he cancelled out the outside noise. Bill Russell didn’t need cheers to validate himself, and so the boos didn’t phase him.)

+ Here is a poignant quote from the classic 1970s book, How to Be Your Own Best Friend: ” . . . you have to make a very basic decision: do you want to lift yourself up or put yourself down? Are you for yourself or are you against yourself? This may seem like a strange question, but many people are literally their own worst enemy. If you decide to help yourself, you can choose to do the things that make you feel good about yourself instead of the things that make you feel terrible. Why should you do what gives you pain when it is just as easy to give yourself joy?” (To drive the point home, see exhibit one above, “plate.” To further drive the point home, see exhibit two above, “perspective.”)

“Don’t use errors as an excuse to beat yourself up. Use them as an opportunity to lift yourself up.” – Alan Cohen

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

A Must Addition

I know that these reflections of Pope Francis are circulating widely on social media, but I have always looked at my blog as a thought museum. These beautiful reflections are A MUST for the archives here at Adulting – Second Half:

“The walls of hospitals have heard more honest prayers than churches…
They have witnessed far more sincere kisses than those in airports…
It is in hospitals that you see a homophobe being saved by a gay doctor.
A privileged doctor saving the life of a beggar…
In intensive care, you see a Jew taking care of a racist…
A police officer and a prisoner in the same room receiving the same care…
A wealthy patient waiting for a liver transplant, ready to receive the organ from a poor donor…

It is in these moments, when the hospital touches the wounds of people, that different worlds intersect according to a divine design. And in this communion of destinies, we realize that alone, we are nothing.

The absolute truth of people, most of the time, only reveals itself in moments of pain or in the real threat of an irreversible loss.

A hospital is a place where human beings remove their masks and show themselves as they truly are, in their purest essence.

This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people.
Do not criticize your body too much.
Do not complain excessively.
Do not lose sleep over bills.
Make sure to hug your loved ones.
Do not worry too much about keeping the house spotless.
Material goods must be earned by each person—do not dedicate yourself to accumulating an inheritance…

You are waiting for too much: Christmas, Friday, next year, when you have money, when love arrives, when everything is perfect…

Listen, perfection does not exist.
A human being cannot attain it because we are simply not made to be fulfilled here.
Here, we are given an opportunity to learn.

So, make the most of this trial of life—and do it now.

Respect yourself, respect others. Walk your own path, and let go of the path others have chosen for you.
Respect: do not comment, do not judge, do not interfere.

Love more, forgive more, embrace more, live more intensely!
And leave the rest in the hands of the Creator.”
—Pope Francis 🙏

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

I Am

I was going to wait until tomorrow to write this post. For years, when I blogged daily, I devoted Sundays on the blog, entirely to poetry, so that seemed like the apropos day to write about this gem which I have to tell you about. Yet, I’m too excited to wait until tomorrow. Yesterday, I devoured an entire book of poetry. And I’m not a huge poetry fan. The book which I read, is called I Am Maria by Maria Shriver. To be clear, I am not a big Kennedy family follower/fan. I have never read any of the other many books that Maria Shriver has written, but I can honestly say that I Am Maria is one of the best books that I have read in a long, long while. Every woman whom I know and I love, came to mind as I read Maria’s many, various poems. I believe that most women could relate to at least 20 percent of the book and most women would relate to a whole lot more of it. If you are a woman, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a lover, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a God seeker, you will deeply relate to these honest, raw, vulnerable, authentic poems. It will inspire to open yourself up to your own inner poet. Do yourself a favor, and gift yourself this book. From one of Maria Shriver’s poems:

“I know I have the soul of a seeker.

The heart of a warrior.

The mind of a thinker.

The drive of a visionary.

And the spirit of a wild horse.”

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Towards Alignment

” . . .stop sugarcoating our patterns and start lovingly confronting them – especially ones we’ve been romanticizing as coping mechanisms. What are you chasing out of comfort rather than alignment?” – Dosse’ – Via Trenou (Refinery 29)

When a ship gets completely off course in one direction or another, it is human nature for the hypercritical captain to charge out, screaming at the crew, bringing them to their knees, for the loss of direction. And it’s also human nature for the crew to get really defensive with the hypercritical voice of the captain. After all, there are a lot of reasons for getting off course, and a lot of them are not in anyone’s control. Unforeseen storms and squalls appear out of nowhere, and have to be dealt with before being able to navigate back to the journey towards the destiny.

So, it’s also human nature, when it finally becomes obvious to us, as individuals, that we have gotten a little or sometimes even “way off course” in our own lives, in one way or another, whether it be with our health, or our relationships, or in our careers, or our finances etc., or even a combination of areas, to have the captain of our own ships (our high strung demanding inner critic) start barking at us. “How could you let this happen? What is wrong with you? Look at this mess! You’ll never get to where you want to go!”

And then, appropriate to our human nature, our defensive inner crew of voices starts justifying our problems. We had unforeseen storms in our lives, pop up. Of course we gained weight, or lost money, or had a heart attack, or didn’t have time to nurture our relationships. We had fires on the deck to put out. These storms were scary. We needed coping mechanisms to deal with it. We were treading water. We are only human, after all.

And this is where our ships tend to get stuck in the water, circling in the same exact spot, over and over, where the inner critic captain is taking us down to dust at the bottom of the boot, and the defensive crew is justifying what had to be done to cope with life on the unpredictable waves of the sea.

Now, the challenge becomes to skillfully change captains. If we pick a healthy, compassionate leader who understands that life on the high seas can be difficult and unpredictable and we kick our irate Captain Nightmare Inner Critic to the curb, we can focus on getting back on course. No one has to be defensive and explanatory. We got to this point of the journey for many reasons, but the main thing is, we need to get back on track. It’s a waste of time to go back and forth berating ourselves, and then defending ourselves for things that have happened in the past. This keeps us stuck, right where we are, in a situation that we want to, or we need to change in our lives, in order to go in the direction of our dreams. We need a captain who steers us back to the journey towards our true north, with no more wasting time, lamenting on the hows and the whys of what got us off-course (other than to learn from our wrong turns, and mark them on the map, so we don’t repeat them).

Are you in alignment with where you want to go in your life? Or are you staying stuck in delusion, or in the unhealthy pattern of berating and defending yourself? Even if you start moving again, and you end up being a little off course, if you are a good steward to yourself, you will make course corrections as you move along, and eventually, you will get to exactly where you want to be.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

What Color Tonight?

Every year since I started the blog (even for the many years in which I blogged daily), I have taken Easter weekend off from writing. I’ve always considered Easter weekend to be my truest yearly reset button. It makes more sense for the renewal of life to start again, at this spring time of the year. Everything is new and starting fresh and revitalized and hopeful and full of expectation and aspiration. Everything is teeming with life. Springtime is the innocent infancy of another year in our lives.

Our area in the world is known for its beautiful sunsets. Last night, my husband and I, and our dogs, walked down to a local park to watch the sunset. There were more clouds than usual obscuring the sun, but the light rays still shone their ever long bands, into a bluish, yellowish haze. Sometimes the sunset is bright orange and red. Other times it is determinedly yellow until its last final seconds. A woman was watching the sunset with us, and she said that she had to buy more space on her phone, because she has taken so many pictures of the sunsets, on practically a daily basis.

“It’s different every night, isn’t it?” I said to her.

“Yes, and it’s always beautiful.” We both said practically in unison.

This is the case for everything which we do on a regular basis, isn’t it? We think of our everyday experiences and our daily habits as “the usual” or even mundane. We often think of our daily duties, and our traditions and our holidays and our other cyclical, annual experiences as “the same ol’, same old”. And sometimes we sigh with feigned boredom about this fact, but sometimes we also hang on desperately to “the same”, mostly out of fear and a desire to control everything to keep it the same, for reasons of nostalgia and comfort and security. But nothing really ever remains exactly the same. Even us. Especially us. And so, if we are honest and open and big-hearted and compassionate with ourselves, we notice that the “it” of our every single days, is always a little bit different, and yet, it’s always beautiful, in its own singular way.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Jetlag

I have experienced jetlag in the past, but never has it hit me so hard as it has this week, coming home from Japan. My husband is experiencing the same phenomenon. I spent most of the day Friday, thinking it was Saturday. We both wake up like clockwork around 2 a.m. every night, and we can’t fall back to sleep until 5 a.m. or so. Yesterday when we fell back to sleep, we slept to after 11 a.m. Today I forced the both of us to get up and out of bed at 8:30 a.m., and despite two cups of coffee, I am still in a zoned-out fog.

We experienced the same jetlag when we arrived in Japan, but the excitement and the adrenaline of seeing and experiencing new things kicked in, and waking up early had the added benefit of being the first ones in-line for breakfast. And after walking 22,000 steps a day, sleep was easier to come by (and to stay with) each night.

It doesn’t help that we both caught colds towards the end of our trip (packed cities of people and tourists made this almost inevitable). Colds are the perfect ingredient for making you feel out-of-sorts, cranky and sleepy. I haven’t felt this desirous to just be “back to normal” in a long, long time.

I always say that one of my favorite parts of travel is the appreciation that it gives to you for your own home, and for your own everyday life. I am also feeling an appreciation for my everyday lifestyle/sleep cycle, and I am panging for it to return.

“And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.” – D.H. Lawrence

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Konnichiwa

I haven’t written a blog post in a minute, because I have been on a trip to Japan with my husband. It was my first visit to Japan and I loved every minute of it. I wanted to see something unique and more exotic than I have ever seen before, and Japan did not disappoint. Today, we were trying to get over our jet lag (there is a 13 hour time difference – so instead of Monday night, we actually watched the March Madness basketball final, in Japan, on Tuesday morning in a coffee shop and then, at the last few minutes, we went outside, only because loud and excitable is highly frowned upon in public places in Japan. After that, when we traveled back to the United States, we landed at home earlier than we had left Japan – experiencing true time travel!) Here are some of my “takes” from my trip:

+ I’ve never been around a culture more respectful of others than I have, when I was in Japan. We visited Tokyo and other majorly populated cities, and I can count on one hand the number of times in which I heard any “honking”. We were told that people in Japan only honk to help others in a dire situation. No one ever honks out of anger or frustration. This was so utterly refreshing (and peaceful). People treated everyone with kindness and dignity and lots of bows (as in nodding your head). One young man made a point of stopping to ask my husband and I if we needed help (we were trying to find a good restaurant in Osaka and we sat on a street corner, probably looking quite dazed and confused). This young man, donning a suit and tie, was just getting out of the train close to 7 pm (the Japanese work late hours) and yet, he (with the excuse that he was practicing his English) made a point of walking my husband and I, to a restaurant that he insisted that we would like, because he had taken his parents there (I guess he figured that we were around the age of his parents, sigh) and they had liked it. (It was a great restaurant!)

+ I’ve never visited a cleaner place than Japan. And ironically, they have very few public garbage cans anywhere in Japan. You are expected to take your garbage home (or to your hotel) with you and then dispose of it there. And this rule was fully respected. The taxis, trains, subways, and streets were honestly, practically spotless (which just added to the ambience of peace and quiet which was felt everywhere).

+ My husband insists that the highlight of the trip to Japan were the toilets. All of the toilet seats in Japan (even in public spots) are heated, have fancy bidet options, and offer soothing nature sounds to cover other sounds (ahem). It honestly has been sort of hard to come back to clammy, cold, plain ol’ boring, no frills toilet seats.

+ We decided (after some imbibing of sake) to enjoy the public baths from natural springs coming from the mountains. The public baths are segregated by sex in Japan, and thank goodness, because you are required to experience the baths entirely in the nude (unless you have tattoos – if you have tattoos, they have stickers to cover them up) I was admittedly nervous and apprehensive before the experience, but once settling into the baths, it turned out to be a beautiful, accepting, lovely experience. There were women of all ages there, from the elderly all the way down to a little girl. I honestly found the Japanese bath experience to be a beautiful celebration of womanhood and femininity in all forms. I truly felt connected to my inner goddess. As I eased into the hot, bubbling waters, I melted into self-acceptance and into love for myself and for others. It was an experience that I will never forget, and I was grateful that I mustered up the courage to do it.

+ The food is amazing in Japan. Especially surprising to me, was just how good the coffee (I thought that the Japanese would just be about tea, but their coffee was so good, I would put it up there with Italian coffee) and bread were, but also, one time we had a gourmet meal of shrimp heads, cherry blossoms, eel, sea urchin, and octopus, and that meal was as totally delectable and delicious as the Japanese coffee and bread. The sushi in Japan is enormous and incredibly fresh. (I will never eat grocery store sushi again.) The Japanese have an unbelievable dedication and attention to detail that I have honestly never seen replicated anywhere else.

+ Everything is adorable in Japan. Everything. The food, the people, their voices, their clothes, their dogs etc. etc. Even things that are meant to be scary, are cute and funny. We were on a hike and the Japanese bear warning signs looked like something closer to beware of Yogi Bear or the Care Bears. I almost hoped that we would run into one (and I thought that if we did run into a Japanese bear, it just might be pink with a heart on its tummy). I bought so much “cute” stuff in Japan that we bought another suitcase, and of course, the Japanese storekeepers carefully wrapped and adorned each little item. We haven’t opened the sweet, carefully wrapped little packages yet, but it is going to be like Christmas when we do – a complete celebration of darling delights!

+ Speaking of adorable, in one restaurant we met a charming, older couple who turned out to be relatively famous in Japan. The husband was a renowned Japanese photographer and the wife (cute as a button) turned out to be the first Japanese Playboy Bunny ever. (She is now 75). They were both so welcoming, kind, cute and funny and I couldn’t help but feel that it was kind of ironic that the wife always covered her mouth when she giggled. (I guess that she felt it was more important to be humble and modest by covering her mouth, than by covering any of her other parts. I just don’t know. Regardless, she was a living doll.)

+ We were lucky enough to visit Japan during their cherry blossom season which only lasts one week, out of any year, at the height of its season. The cherry blossoms were beautiful and the wind made it look like it was snowing. Apparently, the Japanese government planted thousands of cherry blossom trees to give hope to their people after WWII, and it was entirely apparent just how much the Japanese revere these trees, and rightfully so. The cherry blossoms are breathtakingly beautiful, and maybe moreso, due to their fleeting beauty.

+ I don’t think I have ever experienced a culture that so perfectly blends its reverence for tradition, with its desire for expansion and technology than I have in Japan. It is so utterly fashionable to be able to appreciate the “old with the new” and to be able to blend it all together in a way that works, so interestingly and seamlessly. I have never witnessed this better done, than in Japan. I guess that I would call it “Ultra-modern vintage” or maybe just simply “perfection.”

+ But a word about “perfection” – we were reminded at a temple, that Asian cultures typically are sure to purposely add at least one “mistake” to their art, or to their rugs, or to their food, or to any of their creations, as a reminder that we can always do better. If we say that something is “perfect”, than there is only one way to go from there, and that is downhill, and this is not good. It is always best to leave at least a little room for “the best that is yet to come.”

+ When touring one of many intriguing temples (there are thousands of these Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Japan. When in Europe, you tour old churches, and in the far East, you tour ancient temples and shrines. Which to me, is just a humbling reminder that there are many, many intriguing, gorgeous paths to God.), we met a young, newly married couple from Oregon who were farmers. On their off-season, they travel the world and they often “wing it.” When I expressed my amazement and awe with this “wing it” approach to global travel, the young woman said to me, “Well, in worst case scenarios, you can always rely on the “mothers.” No matter where you are in the world, the mothers are everywhere and they want to help you.” And at that moment, I swelled with pride. It made me feel marvelously happy to be part of the sacred tribe of international “mothers” – the safety net for us all.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.