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Favorite Things Friday

➕➕Miriam➕➕ on Instagram: “Endlich Wochenende... #schöneswochenende #freitag #friday #cozy” | Its friday quotes, Weekend quotes, Happy friday quotes

Many times my friends and family who read my blog, tell me that they really like my “Friday Favorites” posts the best. This tells me that people like to stay on the light side of things. It is fun to be in the frivolity of life. Life can be just too damn serious, at times. I like the light side, too. It’s just that lately, I have been in a simplify mode. I haven’t been wrapped up in my usual, lustful consumerism. The older I get, the more I know myself, thus, my favorites stay pretty steady. I know what fits, what tastes good, who my favorite singers and authors are, and I stick with them. It’s hard to find new favorites all of the time. So on that note, I am going to write about an article I read this morning that mentions our collective, favorite, “un-cancellable” celebrities. These are celebrities that have very few, if any, detractors. These celebrities are considered to be greatly loved by the masses. These celebrities are among our favorites of all celebrities. Here are some of the celebrities on the list:

Betty White, Dolly Parton, Mister Rogers, Julie Andrews, Alex Trebek, Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves, LeVar Burton, Jim Henson, Jack Black, Dev Patel, Chadwick Boseman, Hugh Jackman

I look at this list of celebrities, and I think to myself, “It’s true, I’ve never met any of these people, but I do feel a fondness for all of them.” I have never heard anything hateful about any of them. And I ask myself, “Why are these particular people so well-liked?” Universally, on this list, I see people who appear (or who appeared to be, when they were alive) to be kind, true to themselves, in love with what they do in life, generous, full of purpose, self-deprecating, warm, gracious and grateful.

Considering some of the celebrities who are our collective favorites in life, I imagine we could all add a few more to the list, with smiles and appreciation. Sometimes the noisier, more outrageous, opinionated, brash, attention hound, “trainwrecked” celebrities get more of our attention, but our true favorites in life are not the people whom we “love to hate”, but more so, the people who personify love. They unassumingly love their lives, love their crafts, and they are grateful to have the support of the Universe to carry out their purposes. There is a wholesome goodness about these people that seems to emanate from their true cores – well beyond their images. What makes anyone or anything “a favorite”? Who are your favorite people and why? Remember that the traits that you really like about other people, are traits that you secretly like about yourself, too. A favorite person, place, or thing, is something that makes us feel deeply good, in the truest, non-fleeting sense of the word. A favorite anything, is consistently good, and true, and authentically and unapologetically himself, herself or itself. We love our favorites because they vividly bring out our favorite parts and attributes and inclinations, of our very own selves.

Favorite People, Favorite Places, Favorite Memories of the past... | Picture Quotes

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

Unbreakable

Yesterday, I received the terrible news that my cousin’s wife died. They have two very young daughters. Honestly, friends, I am a little overloaded with the feeling of sadness these days. It’s getting to me, and “glum” is so not my “go-to” state in life. I think most people would describe me as cheerful, upbeat and optimistic. I would describe myself that way. I still am cheerful, upbeat and optimistic. It’s just that lately, I feel like I am clinging to these states of being with white knuckles and angry, indignant frustration, added to the mix of my stubborn peace and happiness.

In all truthfulness, my life is mostly amazing. But I have also gone through my fair load of sh*t in life, just like everyone else. I could list some of my worst experiences and you would say to me, “Yikes. That’s really, really crumby.” But on a much bigger list, I could list all of my life’s blessings and miracles and wonderful experiences and you would say, “Wow, you are so damn lucky!” I suspect most human lives would fall along these lines. In most of our lives, the good still outweighs the bad.

My college friends recently bought me a beautiful pendant. It is a Celtic knot and it holds the word “UNBREAKABLE”. It means a lot to me, that my friends see my strength, and know that I will survive whatever life has in store for me. And I will thrive through the thrilling times, too. I wish that I didn’t have to focus so much on my steely, “unbreakable” side these days, but this part of me is what is forcibly carrying me to the softer, kinder times, surely to be close around the bend. Sometimes being strong and unbreakable, means remaining cheerful, upbeat and optimistic, no matter what!

Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable | Mood quotes, Love quotes, Words quotes

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

Epilepsy Awareness Month

Credit: Epilepsy Foundation

My regular readers know that our youngest son suffers from a seizure disorder called epilepsy. I won’t be writing much today, because we are headed to yet another appointment with his neurologist, where my son will be getting yet another EEG test (his third EEG in just the last two months). This experience is the hardest situation that our son (and our family) has to live with, and to manage day in and day out, with the knowledge and empathy for the many other people and families, who also have to live with, and manage this devastating disorder. Here are some truths about epilepsy taken from the Epilepsy Foundation’s website:

1 in 10 people will have a seizure and 1 in 26 will develop epilepsy during their lifetime. We need more people to learn seizure first aid to help save a life.

There are 470,000 children in the U.S. living with epilepsy. Kids can change the world by educating those around them.

Epilepsy receives 10 times less funding than other brain disorders. We need to raise funds for care, advocacy, research and education.

This is a link to an excellent resource to best understand how to help a person who is having a seizure:

https://www.epilepsy.com/living-epilepsy/seizure-first-aid-and-safety

The Epilepsy Foundation and CURE Epilepsy are two outstanding organizations working to find cures, and treatments, and funding research, so that people who have epilepsy, have a better chance at living normal, healthy lives. Please consider giving to these organizations when you are making your charity choices. Also please peruse their websites to learn more about, and to understand what people who live with epilepsy go through, while dealing with this deeply frustrating, and debilitating, and sometimes even deadly disorder. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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

Small Stuff

When I let someone in traffic and they don’t wave, I picture myself using their guest soaps. – @a_simpl_man (Twitter)

This morning, this tweet literally made me laugh out loud, in recognition of myself – in more ways than one. I always find myself getting into a little tiz when someone doesn’t acknowledge my various small acts of kindness and consideration. But then I start admonishing myself that “I should do good, just for the sake of doing good, not for the appreciation and the pat on the back.” And then I spend more time thinking about how I really spend way too much thinking about situations like these, anyway. “For goodness sake, just let the guy come on to the road, and move on. Life is too short to waste time on overthinking about teeny perceived slights, by strangers. Grow up already!” Sometimes I honestly even waste my time spending it on the question, “Did the person I let on to the road, actually wave a thank you to me, and I somehow missed it because we were at a bad angle to each other?” Seriously. I can be that neurotic.

On the other hand, when someone lets me into traffic, I become almost frantic about making sure that they see my “wave of thankfulness.” I want to make sure that they see my gratefulness, so I become this crazy caricature of myself, waving like a maniacal buffoon. Sometimes I even stick my hands outside the window or through the sunroof, to make sure that the driver sees my symbol of gratitude and acknowledgement that I see them as one of the kind and thoughtful and patient people, that in my mind, makes this world a better place. Then, I imagine that the driver who lets me into traffic is thinking, “Calm down lady. It’s not like I bought you a new car. Take a chill pill.” And then once again, I get mad at myself for spending way too much time overthinking inconsequential happenings in my daily life, such as these.

This tweet also gave me a giggle about guest soaps. I grew up with guest soaps in every single bathroom of our house. And we knew NEVER to use those guest soaps, nor the fancy towels arranged pertly, by the ornate soaps. That would have been a deathwish. Those guest soaps sat there in their designated dishes, until they were infused with dust, stuck to the dish like they were super-glued onto the dish, and their once vibrant colors, faded to dingy dullness. These guest soap molds would start coming undone by time and by air, to the point that a soap which was once an intricate, detailed, lovely, expensive mermaid, was now nothing more than an oddly shaped lump that would more easily pass for maybe a hint of a manatee (and soon, even that became a stretch of the imagination).

I personally have Christmas guest soaps that I have owned for more than two decades. I put these soaps out in our powder room, every single year in an intricate Spode Christmas china soap dish. These soaps are clear glycerin with words like “Joy” and “Merry” infused inside of them. Last year I noticed that the clear glycerin has turned more into a muddled, dirty, grayish brown. These guest soaps have become so unsavory, that of course, now, no one would ever even dream of actually using the soaps, for sanitary purposes. (what an oxymoron) Still, I’m attached to these gaudy Christmas guest soaps. I contemplated it, but I just couldn’t throw them away last year. I will unpack the guest soaps again this year, and I will put them in the Spode dish, and all will feel right in my world this holiday season.

The other odd thing about fancy guest soaps is that they almost look edible, like fancy chocolates. When I was a kid, these soaps were scarily tempting to put into my mouth, to try and eat them. (It’s kind of like when you were a kid and no one could convince you that the Hershey cocoa powder would not, at all, taste like delicious hot cocoa packets. I think I had to learn that lesson more than once as a kid. I was a slower learner, in these ways of life.)

So, I just realized that I have spent about 40 more minutes of my life contemplating minutiae. And that’s okay. Just like waving or not waving to polite strangers, or using guest soaps or not using guest soaps, does not totally matter in the bigger scheme of things, it sometimes feels good to spend some time on “the small stuff.” Still, at the same time, it’s good to remember Richard Carlson’s famous, important, poignant line, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff.”

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

Monday-Funday

Credit: Rex Masters, Twitter

We didn’t get many trick-or-treaters last night. My husband read that only 16% of parents planned to take their kids out trick-or-treating this year, as compared to 12% last year. COVID does not want us to have any fun. At least the percentages are going up, slowly but surely.

Have a great week, friends!!! Happy November!!!

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

Soul Sunday

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

Maybe I should call it Ghoul Sunday since it is Halloween?! Happy Halloween! Despite having only bought my Halloween candy this week, and despite the fact that my family insisted that I way “overbought” for our typical number of trick-or-treaters, guess who has to go out today, and buy more candy?!? I’m not complaining.

My regular readers know that Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. I was tempted to share a link to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, but that’s just too cliché, even for me. I actually found a poem this week that I really like. It speaks to the ruts which we get into, and the process that we take to get out of our dead ends in life, whether they be bad habits, or relationship issues, or just anything in our lives that we wish to change for the better. So today’s poem on the blog is not written by me. Still I’ll probably doodle a poem for myself, sometime today. I suggest that you do the same for yourself. Poems are an interesting way to converse with your deepest self. Here’s today’s poem (and have a fun Halloween!!):

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters - Portia Nelson | Sobriety quotes, Wise mind, Autobiography

Scarface

If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.
— Thich Nhat Hanh

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
— Leo Tolstoy

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
— Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst

All therapy is grief work. – Edith Eger, famous therapist who survived the Nazi Camps

About five years ago, I went to a therapist, as I was working through some “stuff” that was happening in my life, and I was wanting some professional insight on how I could better deal with my “stuff”. Living with the fears and the uncertainties that come from my son’s epilepsy, was a major part of that “stuff.” Despite completely believing in the value of therapy, and despite knowing that it is the strongest people in the world who admit that they have problems, and seek to change for the better, I still felt vulnerable and embarrassed about being in therapy. I take pride in “keeping it all together.” I consider myself to be a pretty responsible person. I became extremely concerned about what my therapist was writing in “my chart.” So, one day, I point-blank asked him (with some admitted trepidation), “So what’s my diagnosis? What are you writing down there?”

“It’s simple,” he said, “You are grieving.”

Grieving is hard. And it’s not just about losing the ones we love. It’s about coming to terms with how truly vulnerable we are in life and what little control we really have in what happens around us. We grieve different stages in our lives being over with. We grieve lost opportunities and relationships that end. We grieve about mistakes which we have made. Grief is exhausting and overwhelming at times, but if we don’t let ourselves do it, we shut off the valve to all feelings and sensations and emotions. A lot of people who end up shutting off that valve to the normal cycles of feelings and emotions, end up with terrible personality disorders and debilitating addictions, which ironically, ends up making relationships, and even life itself, even harder to navigate and to experience. We have the ability to cycle through, and to experience our feelings, even our grief feelings. Our minds, and our bodies, and our souls were designed to experience the awe of all of it. We must trust this fact, in order to experience the true fullness of our lives.

This same therapist gave me a visual for grief that I have always found to be the most helpful information that he ever gave to me. I believe that I have written about this on the blog before, but this visual analogy is good enough to be worth repeating. It truly helps:

When we first experience a trauma, our wound is deep, and bloody, and so painful that it’s scary, and often overwhelming in its ugly searingness. Anything that even comes close to touching that wound, puts us in scorching pain. We are fearful and sensitive to anything that might so much as graze our vulnerable wound. Eventually, though, that wound starts to scab over. It becomes a little less sensitive to the touch. It doesn’t need as much hyper-vigilant protection. But of course, as life goes on, something happens related to our initial trauma, and that scab gets ripped right back off, and the healing process has to begin all over again. This can happen many times. But finally, after enough time and patience and growth and love and self-care, the wound becomes a scar. The scar never goes away, but it is not nearly as painful to the touch, as it was, when it was a fresh wound, or a even when it was a scab. The scar serves as a reminder of the pains which we have survived. The scar serves as a reminder of just how strong we truly are, and the truth about just how much we really feel and love and give, to the one and only life which we have been gifted to experience. In that sense, scars honestly can be the most beautiful parts of us. Scars remind us of just how much we have lived, and how much we have loved.

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

Friday Love

Love Friday Pictures, Photos, and Images for Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter

Good morning! Today is my favorite day of the week, not just because it is Friday, but because it is also our 27th wedding anniversary. I share a passionate, loyal, understanding, caring, dedicated love with my husband, the love of my life. I am incredibly grateful for the love and the life which we share. We have gone through many ups and downs, and all arounds, in our shared life experiences, but through it all, we have always been, and we will always be each other’s yin and yang. We fit together really well. I love you forever, J. Happy Anniversary!

Typically on Fridays, I list three favorite things or songs or websites or books, etc. and I strongly encourage you to list your favorites in my Comments section. Please check out previous Friday listings for more favorites. (some “favorites” might be good Christmas gift ideas). That being said, during these last two months, our youngest son’s epilepsy has been kicking our butts. (Don’t worry, we’re still in the fighting ring. We’re just a little beat up and bloodied right now. We will prevail!) So, today, I’m quite literally “listless.” That being said, one of my dearest friends, texted this excellent, life-saving tip to our friend group this week and I wanted to make sure that you, my beloved readers, have it, for your safety file. Here is my favorite tip of the week:

Have a wonderful and fun and thrilling (and safe) Halloween weekend, friends! Thank you for being here for me and having my back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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

Not ok

I’m sorry, readers, but my son’s epileptic seizures keep on happening, despite the fact that he is now taking five different anti-seizure medications at once. I have no words today. My family and I are worn thin right now. I lose a piece of myself every time that I witness my son lose a piece of himself. Epilepsy sucks. So, I’m just gonna sit here and be a little blue. Thank you for coming by, and sitting with me a little bit.

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

In My Hole

When I’m feeling particularly lowly, I dig a big old deep introverted rabbit hole and I go down to the bottom of it and I hang out there. It makes me feel safe. Luckily, I like my own company – even the frowny version. Mercifully, the people whom I love the most, get that about me. They don’t force me to crawl back up, before it’s time. Occasionally, I hear some shouts from the top of my rabbit hole, and a long rope, with a bucket attached to it, is lowered down, and the people who love me most attach little notes and texts, telling me that I can stay down here, as long as I need to, but in the meantime, here are some cards and gifts and reminders that when I decide to crawl back up towards the light of the sunshine, there will be people waiting for me, who care about me, up at the top. If that’s not hope and love, I don’t know what is. Thank you. I love you. I’m just recharging down here. It’s all going to be okay. I’ll be back up soon!

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