admin, Author at Adulting: Second- Half

Meaningful Habits

This morning I got to thinking about rituals, routines and habits.

This is some information I found from the internet:

The difference between a routine and a ritual is not necessarily the action, but the attitude behind the action. To many, a routine is getting up every morning, eating breakfast, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, getting dressed, and going to work. … However, rituals are viewed as more meaningful practices.

A habit is an action we do often in a regular and repeated way. Routine is a regular way of doing things in a particular order. The main difference between habit and routine is that habit is a recurrent with little or no conscious thought whereas routine require a high degree of intention and effort.

I’m still a little confused. I guess it is just a matter of degrees. I got to thinking about all of this because my husband is on a business trip. Because of this, our morning routines/rituals and our evening routines/rituals are shook up a little bit.

Our typical morning “routine” consists of my husband going to the gym freakishly early. (He can have that part of the routine all to himself.) When he arrives home from the gym, I saunter out to the kitchen, where our two youngest children are eating breakfast, gathering their stuff to head to school and either stressing about upcoming tests or joking about upcoming events, depending on the schedule. I take out and feed our dogs and when I come back inside my husband has poured my coffee into one of our many mugs. I like to think that he chooses “the mug of the day” deliberately and carefully as all of our mugs have some meaning to us. We have collected them from vacations, our college, our children’s college, and sometimes just from quirky impulsive shopping days. I recently purchased a mug that says, “T.J. Maxx is my spirit animal” on one of those more impulsive shopping excursions.

After kissing the kids and sending them on their way, we saunter back to our bedroom, where I read The Daily Skimm, some headline stories and our horoscopes to my husband while he gets ready for work. After he leaves, I head out to my desk to start writing my blog.

I suppose that is just our morning “routine”, but considering how much I miss it when he is gone, I see it more as our morning “ritual.” I have my own “rituals” when he is out of town, too. Last night, we had Chick-Fil-A for dinner. This meal is almost a given when my husband is out of town. My kids put in their orders without even asking me “What’s for dinner?” I also just reserved on Redbox a strange, indie documentary film for me to watch tonight. I’m greatly looking forward to it and I am sure that my husband is relieved to not have to watch it with me. We watch more traditional films when we are together, so I save my more “out of the box” film choices for when he is traveling.

Every year and every season our routines change a little bit. I guess when what we do during a new routine becomes habitual, it becomes more meaningful to us. When our habits and routines become more meaningful we see them more as “ritual”, almost becoming sacred to us. I imagine if we really examined our everyday routines, our holiday traditions, our vacation and trip plans, etc. we would see just how much habit/routine/ritual plays into the big picture. We usually don’t notice this, until a change-up occurs or when something unusual disrupts the flow, but it is really true that we are creatures of habit. I think that the examining of our habits/routines/rituals is a smart thing to do, though. Perhaps some things are just habits and perhaps they aren’t particularly meaningful or helpful or even healthy for us anymore. Maybe little tweaks here and there to our every day practices could start a ripple effect, allowing even more creativity and excitement and anticipation to enter into our every day lives. And at the very least, by examining the actions that have become like rituals to us, we can be thankful for all of the real meaning and comfort that we do have in our daily lives without even realizing it.

What Do You Say?

We have a phrase in our family that we have said for over a decade. Whenever one of us talks about fun upcoming plans, or an interesting day, in our perkiest sing-songiest voices, with our heads rocking back and forth we say, “That’s cool! That’s fun!”

That much-used family phrase came about from an encounter on a school bus that my middle two sons had with a cute little girl who asked them if they were twins and they said, “No, we’re just brothers.”

“That’s cool! That’s fun!” she replied as she hung over the top of her seat on the bus trying to make new friends for the school year. That was the first reported story of that particular school year and that particular phrase has “stuck” in our family for all of these years. I imagine most families and people have borrowed phrases that become part of their history, their vernacular, their being.

My friend would always say, “Dammit, Jim,” in her best “Dr. McCoy from Star Trek” voice whenever something annoying would happen. Although I have never been a Star Trek fan, I decided to mimic it until I owned it because it helped me to keep my potty mouth at a respectable level. Recently my daughter, who has probably never seen Star Trek, asked me about this quirky habit of mine and she said, “Who’s Jim?”

“No worries!” is another one I copied. Some kindly man said that to me probably two decades ago and it made me feel so good, I decided it had to be part of my vocabulary to pass along. My husband likes to quote from movies. He has held on to Billy Bob Thorton’s, “Some folks call it a slingblade . . . ” for a long, long time only because I think he likes to do that deep guttural “Mmmmm-hmmmm” at the end of the quote.

I could go on and on and I’m sure everyone else can do the same with their family’s phraseology. It’s the things like these that make a person or a family, so uniquely them; a part of them that makes them so divinely special and different from the crowd. It’s the little things, like shared phrases and nicknames that make us feel connected to our loved ones.

When my eldest son first headed to college, my daughter and I couldn’t stop crying. In a misguided emotional moment, I told her that we should think of all of the things that annoy us about him so that we wouldn’t feel so bad and miss him so much. That was a fail. It just made us sob harder, because when you focus on all of the attributes of a person, you are understanding every little detail of what makes that person so alive to you and you are realizing how well you know and love that person.

At this middle age stage of our lives, it is almost certain that we have all gone through the very painful experience of losing people whom we love. It is in those dark moments of loss, that in wanting to save a clear memory of that person, that we think of all of the little details, quirks and nuances that made that particular loved one who they were to us and who they were to the world. It’s rarely the big things that serve as a reminder of the essence of a person or a family or a group of friends, but a mixture of all of the special little moments, looks, laughs, habits, scents, ways of moving, ways of speaking, inside jokes and understandings, etc. that bring a smile of recognition and joy to our hearts.

What are some phrases that are part of you? Where did they come from? What’s the story behind them? These are just some of the ways “you are being you” in the world and someone or many someones, are noticing that and treasuring that about you.

No Ostrich Pucky

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a story of mine that was kind of crazy but true, concerning my little white chinchilla. I called it “no horse pucky.” (I think “horse pucky” is a hilarious word so I wanted to use it.) Today I have another “no horse pucky” story. It didn’t happen to me. It happened to my friend, but she is a reliable source. Anyway, you can’t make this pucky up.

So years ago we lived in a neighborhood that was close by to a ranch that was filled with all sorts of exotic animals. This ranch had giraffes and zebras and even a hippo. The ranch ran a hayride through the middle of their land and as you were sitting on the back of this trailer being pulled by a pick-up truck, many of the animals would come up to the people on the hayride looking to be fed. This ranch was a fun attraction and our kids would have school field trips there fairly often. My friend was chaperoning one of those field trips and she was wearing antique Cartier earrings gifted to her by her grandmother. Now you may be asking yourself, why was my friend wearing Cartier earrings on a hayride? Well, she’s British. They’re very proper. Have you ever seen the royals look anything but fabulous??

Anyway, my friend was on the hayride and the truck stopped and the animals came charging up to the ride, looking to be fed. There was one ostrich on the ranch and the ostrich was particularly friendly. My friend was excited to see the ostrich and to be able to look up close at its lovely, long eyelashes. As she was lovingly gazing at the enormous bird, it must of caught a glint of something shiny on my friends ear, and that glisten must of looked delicious to the ostrich. Out of nowhere, the ostrich plucked an antique Cartier earring off of my friend’s ear and ate it.

My friend was devastated. These were antique Cartier earrings inherited from her grandmother! So, she implored the owners of the ranch to help her. They understood her plight. The lucky thing is that there was only one ostrich on the ranch. So one of the ranch workers kept a dutiful eye on the ostrich for several days. Sure enough, after a few days, the Cartier earring reappeared in the ostrich’s pucky and was reunited with my friend who has the earrings to this day. True story. Feel free to giggle and pass it on.

Character Marks

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.” – Will Rogers

This summer we took some wonderful hiking trips and on one of them I ended up with my legs covered in a rash from poison oak. That’s okay. I would do it all over again. But I do have some nasty pink scars left on my legs that I scratched so much that I think I invited some varicose veins to the surface to join the fun. Sometimes I just “own” the scars, sometimes I cover them up with concealer and sometimes I look up telephone numbers of doctors who inject veins to make them go away.

I think I’m at the stage where I’m on the fence of aging gracefully versus fighting the fight to keep a youthful appearance. When I was in my late thirties, I found a cool magazine clipping and I hung it on my mirror. It had a picture of a beautiful woman with a few lines on her face. It said something to the effect that “Beauty is accumulative and all of these lines are just character marks from the story of your life.” That sounded so right . . . . when I was in my thirties.

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I love that quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous commencement speech. It makes me feel winsome and hopeful at the same time. When I’m 75, I guess I’ll look back at pictures taken of me now and wish that I looked like what I look like right now.

In today’s world of giant, overwhelming beauty stores like Ulta and Sephora, of every procedure available to turn you into whatever boob size/nose size/butt size/movie star you want, of impossibly attractive 80-year-old actresses like Jane Fonda, and households of Kardashian sisters becoming multi-millionaires primarily due to the hustling of their collective beauty, it’s hard to decide what your own limits are to “preserve and protect” versus letting it all go and just being free.

I guess it really does come down to doing what you want, what you value and what makes you feel good with the realization that you can’t stop others from doing what they feel the need to do and be. Do you want to be that perfectly preserved, valuable, beautiful, ageless Barbie doll in the box or the much lived, loved, tattered and torn, worn for the wear, kindly and comely Velveteen rabbit? Probably most of us will end up being something in-between and that is okay. We have to forgive the flawless Barbies and the sanctimonious rabbits, though. They have the right to their decisions and we have the right to ours. Perhaps if we feel love and compassion for all of us as we work through this aging process together, those feelings will glow through and as a whole we will see beauty like we have never seen and it will be timeless.

This is Friday

In honor of all of my awesome James Madison University Alpha Sigma Alpha sisters (shout out) who have been so supportive of my published essay in The Fine Line magazine, I have written down this little “ode to Friday” with you in mind:

We love you Friday, oh yes we do!

We love you Friday, this much is true.

When you’re not with us, we’re blue.

Oh, Friday, we love you!!!

New readers, on Fridays I keep it superficial. That’s just how I roll into the weekend. I list three products/services/ideas that I really like and that have kept me hummin’ over the years. I would be thrilled to see more recommendations in my Comments section from my readers. Hint. Hint. We could turn this into to something really useful and fun if everyone shared the love!! Please feel free to check out previous Fridays for earlier recommendations. So far, I’m not rescinding any of them. No recalls.

Here we go:

Graptopetalum Pentandrum Superbum Flat Succulent – So I was trying to find the nickname of this beautiful plant on the internet and all that I could find is that it is in the subspecies “Superbum.” Enough said. I love all succulents but this one is queen of them all. I discovered this gorgeous, drape-y, purple, impossible to kill succulent at a garage sale. It is in that moment that I fell in love hard with succulent plants. I have created probably 18 pots (I’m not a minimalist) of this succulent from the one little plant that I fell in love with at a garage sale. I even offered to pay full price for it. The neatest thing about the “drape-y grape-y” (my nickname for it) is that water beads up on it, so it looks like it is adorned in diamonds after it rains. If you haven’t fallen on to the succulent bandwagon yet, this is the plant you want to start with and then don’t blame me for the obsession that happens next.

Sky Map app – My middle son “blinded me with science” with this awesome recommendation. This app for your phone will tell you the name of every twinkly dot you see in the sky. All you have to do is hold the phone up to the sky and you will know where Mars, Venus, the constellations and even the moon (being silly) is in accordance to where you are standing and looking up at the sky. All you have to do is shake your phone to calibrate it. Seriously. I love this app! It even works through your car windshield, although that is not how I would recommend using it for safety reasons. Trust me on this.

Paul Mitchell Tea Tree Special Shampoo – Anything with tea tree oil is invigorating. In my twenties, I discovered tea tree shampoo when I found my head tingling in a great way after a shampoo from an “ahead of its time” beauty salon. We used tea tree shampoo for a few years after that and then unfortunately, I got distracted by something on sale probably and forgot about it. My boys were little guys at the time that we used it and they loved the zingy feel of it on their heads so much that it was a great bribe to get them into a bath tub. I am so happy to have rediscovered this! Honestly, sometimes I rub down my limbs with it because the sensation is so exhilarating! It’s like cleaning your hair and your body with a York Peppermint Patty. Seriously.

Okay, I cannot wait to see the Comments today!! I’ll end with the Friday quote of the week:

“Music always sounds better on Friday.” – Lou Brutus

Have a great weekend! I appreciate you reading my blog! Big love and thanks!!

Insert Hand Over Mouth

“Before you say it, Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?” – Bernard Meltzer

I used to espouse the above quotation to my children so much that my youngest son took it and ran with it. He said it so much and so loudly in school, that his second grade teacher made a giant poster board of those three questions and credited it to my son. For the record, my son is not Bernard Meltzer.

In all fairness, this was more of a “do as I say, not as I do” teaching. It is something to strive for every day, but I admittedly fall short. I have a tendency to be blunt. I also have a tendency to blame my bluntness on the fact that I’m a Sagittarius. (As if a pseudoscience based on the alignment of planets excuses me for being an ass, but hell, taking accountability is a work in progress, too.)

We’ve all heard the saying that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason, but in a loud world filled with so much information, it sometimes feels like we need to shout to be heard. And quickly. The trick is to stop and to think and to ponder before shouting, I guess. There is a Latin saying that when translated goes something like this, “Truth speaks for itself, if we let it speak.”

I have learned from experts that there are 5 simple rules for good communication. The first rule is to be in a place of empathy and compassion. The second rule is to stay calm and try not to speak from an angry place. The third rule is to use “I” statements instead of “you” statements to avoid blaming and shaming. The 4th rule is to ask questions instead of lecturing. “How do you think this situation makes me feel?” is a good question to ask another person for getting them to see things from your perspective. And the 5th rule is to make an agreement about things going forward and to forgive the past. Of course, these rules work best if you are superhuman, or the emotionless Mr. Spock or the incredibly kind Dalai Lama, but nevertheless, they are something to strive for in our every day relationships.

There is a neat tee shirt company called Om + Ah London. One of their best selling tees says this: Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people. I imagine that being a thoughtful communicator would go a long way in achieving this goal. The quote is certainly a worthwhile goal to strive for and possibly might be worth putting on a giant poster board right beside my desk.

Dream Come True

Okay, time for a dramatic moment. I consider this a victory for all of us Second Halfers! I’m officially a published writer today. The wonderful digital magazine The Fine Line published one of my previous blogposts today. You can find the link here:

https://thefinelinemag.com/

This is big for me. It is a dream that I think I always had, to be a published writer, but I let it go latent. This moment is a huge reminder to myself to not listen to that ugly, negative, snarling, fearful voice in my head telling me that I’m not good enough, nobody cares about my ideas, and to just sit back and shut up and keep doing the dishes. We all have that ugly voice raging at us and we need to silence him or her. Now. When our “ugly voice” is silenced we can hear the still, quiet, calm, peaceful, knowing voice that is inside all of us. That is the voice which is beckoning us to share our true selves with the world. When we do that, we are helping creation become what it is truly meant to be. And that is a gift to ourselves and to the world.

“One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live – with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad – but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else’s.” – Michael Ignatieff

Second Halfers, our time has come. We are ripened, wisened and brave. We know who we are now and it is time that we love and accept who we are and share our total creation of ourselves, fully and honestly, with life. We have championed our families, our careers, our mentors and our mentees, but it’s time to realize that it is good and right to champion ourselves as well. I am so grateful to you all for your support and feedback on this blog. Thank you for inspiring me to open up some latent dreams, and rallying me along the way.

” . . .sometimes, the fiercest thing you can do is to be unapologetic about who you are and what you want.” – Anonymous

Short and Sweet

A while back, I wrote a blog about an article that I had read. The article claimed that studies had found that exhausted people are “socially repulsive.” Well, guys, I was at the Monday Night Football game with my family last night and so this morning, I am feeling rather “socially repulsive.” I don’t want to end up writing something regretful or incoherent, so I’ll just pass along this cool piece of advice. A man on Quora named Takudzwa Razemba said that this is the best advice that he had ever received from his grandfather:

“If you’re persistent, you’ll get it. If you’re consistent, you’ll keep it. And if you’re grateful, you’ll attract more of it.”

Have a great day! I’ll be back in better form tomorrow.

Just Say Thank You

Why is it so hard for us to accept compliments? My friends and I got into a discussion about this the other day. The topic came up because an electrician was at my home doing some work for us and he complimented a few things in our home. Every time that he paid me a compliment, I rolled my eyes, made up some stupid quip about the item that he was complimenting, or I laughed. Now, I know my etiquette. I know that the proper thing is to just say “thank you,” but I didn’t do that and I didn’t even realize that I didn’t do it until he would respond to me like this, “Oh, so you don’t really like it?” That response jolted me into some self-awareness of just how lousy I am at accepting compliments sometimes.

My friend said that when we don’t accept compliments we are actually insulting the person who paid the compliment. When we put down what someone else says is nice, we are dissing their tastes. We think that we are being kind or humble by not accepting compliments, but in reality we are rejecting their gift of kindness. Another knee-jerk response to a compliment is to compliment the other person back. But those “gotcha back” compliments seem kind of hollow, as a true compliment comes spontaneously from the heart, not as a “payback.”

Compliments are great. We should bask in them. Mark Twain said, “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” Robert Orben said, “A compliment is verbal sunshine.” Why not give the person who compliments a little “verbal sunshine” back with a big, bright smile and a, “Thank you. You just made my day!” What is a better way to make both of you feel good???

We are unfortunately quick to accept criticism. Even if we think we haven’t accepted the criticism, we ruminate on it all day long. We stew in anger at the audacity of whomever criticized us or we sulk in shame as if making one mistake dooms us to the depths of hell. If we are willing to put ourselves through all of that for criticism, constructive or not, why would we not allow ourselves to soak in the light of a kind compliment? I think the cartoon character Happy Bunny says it best:

“Please put all criticisms in the form of a compliment.”

It is Fall

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” – Albert Camus

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.” – John Donne

Today is the first full day of fall. I love this season. I know so many people who say that autumn is their favorite season. I live in Florida, but I grew up in Pennsylvania and I went to college in Virginia. Both of those states admittedly have much prettier fall leaves than what we get in Florida. Still, even Florida has its change of seasons. My house has a lake behind it and behind that is a nature preserve. In the fall, the light of the sun is finally able to poke through the preserve’s thick wall of trees and brush, hinting at the light that lives inside all of existence. The Japanese people call this beautiful sight of “sunshine filtering through leaves”, komorebi. I’m surprised that we English speakers don’t have just one word for that phenomenon because it is so lovely to behold.

“I love autumn, the season of the year that God seemed to have just put there for the beauty of it.” – Lee Maynard

When my son was on a travel soccer team trip a few years ago, we headed up north for a soccer tournament and one of the mothers, a native Floridian asked me timidly if I thought that it would be okay for her to bring back some colored leaves. I said, “Honey, they will give you as many Hefty bags as you want.” I remember the hours spent raking up the beautiful leaves in all of their splendor. I remember all of the different school assignments and crafts involving the lovely leaves. For some reason, those chores and assignments never seemed as agonizing as picking up fallen apples covered in bees in the summer or shoveling snow in the winter. There is just something so comforting in all things relating to fall. The gorgeous colored leaves, pumpkins, pumpkin spice, Halloween and Thanksgiving, swirling light winds, back to school, the start of football season, light sweaters and throws, etc. are all things of autumn and things that are almost universally appreciated.

“Autumn is the mellow season and what we lose in flowers, we more than gain in fruits.” – Samuel Butler

Second Halfers, we are autumn. We have gone through the spring of our childhoods and the summer of becoming an adult. We are in our full-color prime, bearing the fruits of who we really are and showing the world the beauty of the banquet of what we have to give. We are calmer than in our previous seasons. Our colors don’t necessarily burst, but our colors are vivid and show all that we have lived through and experienced, making our season’s colors the most beautiful of all – the colors that all of the world celebrates. How blessed we are to be in this lovely season of our lives!

“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature has been saving all year for the grand finale.” – Lauren Destefano