Feel Good Friday

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My grandfather loved to garden and he had a gorgeous bleeding heart plant that I can still picture to this day. Isn’t it wonderful when certain things in nature remind you of people and places and things that you have loved along the way? New readers, Fridays are devoted to the “outside pleasures” in life. Welcome to Favorite Things Friday!!! On Fridays, I typically list three favorite anythings that have added joy to my life and I strongly encourage you to add your favorites to the Comments section. You can never have too many favorites. Please see previous Friday posts for more and more favorites. Here are today’s favorites of mine:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/health/orlando-hospital-coronavirus-patient-housekeeper-wellness/index.html

The link above takes you to a feel-good story in the news. (Those are hard to find these days, aren’t they?) The news story talks about how a cleaning person at the hospital helped save a COVID patient’s life, by talking to him daily and by giving him hope and inspiration by talking to him about their families and about their shared faith in God. This man was so ill that a priest had even delivered his last rites. Miracles are all around us, and this story is a good reminder of that fact and also about the power and beauty of human connection.

Trip Splitter App – My friend just mentioned this awesome app yesterday. This is an app that makes it simple and organized, for people to enter their individual expenses, when on a group vacation. It then makes it easy to divvy up “who owes who what”, at the end. (Does this wording remind you of anything? Who’s on first? That’s what I said. Who? Who.) I love simple and useful apps that make life just a little bit easier. This app sounds worth its memory space on your phone, for sure.

Finally, my favorite word for the day is a Korean word. The word is “son-mat” and it “describes the specific, irreplaceable flavor of someone else’s cooking.” (NY Times) My husband’s colleague, who lives in New York, only recently got his first take-out pizza since before the coronavirus crisis began. He told my husband that the pizza was the best pizza that he had ever tasted. Ever. “Son-mat” is a word that should exist in every language, in my opinion. There is something very special about something cooked by someone else. We all bring our own uniqueness and love, to even foods as simple as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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Just U and I

There’s been quite a bit of talk about contact tracing and how important it will be, to keep the tide of new coronaviruses cases low, particularly now that we are reopening our states, at a rapid pace. Johns Hopkins is offering a free on-line course teaching people the skills needed to be a contact tracer and the link for that course can be found right here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing?edocomorp=covid-19-contact-tracing

I read that many states will be hiring thousands of contact tracers and therefore, many people are taking the course. Even people not particularly interested in actually becoming contact tracers are taking the course in order to learn how the contact tracing will work and how it will help slow down coronavirus infections in our communities. The course takes about 5-6 hours to complete.

Contact tracing uses a variety of people skills and sleuthing abilities to get in contact with as many people as an infected person may have passed the virus to, in order to convince these people who were possibly infected with the coronavirus, to get tested and to also, self-quarantine. Apparently the job takes a fair amount of people skills to wade through a sick person’s mistrust and fear and need for privacy, in order to be able to help the person currently infected, and all of those others who might have come in contact with the infected person. Since a lot of the work is done by telephone, and many people typically don’t answer unsolicited phone calls, the work can be very frustrating. Still, if you are a people person, and inclined to do sometimes tedious detective work, it would probably be quite fulfilling to do a job that quite literally, helps to save lives.

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Paved Paradise

Beautiful Flowers - Picture of Rotary Botanical Gardens ...

We have a little narrow flower bed in our back yard that is sort of a hodge podge of plants that didn’t do well in the front of our house, or in other more notable flower beds and planters around our house. We plant these failing, limp little greenies in this back bed, by a small lake, in hopes that they get revived. We got the idea from our local Home Depot store. They have a flower bed in an otherwise hot and cracked and ugly parking lot, that is filled with plants that didn’t sell. And honestly, both of these flower beds are among the prettiest groupings of plants and flowers that I have ever seen, other than in fanciful, public, well-tended botanical gardens. The flowers in our back bed and in the Home Depot leftovers bed, thrive and bloom and burst with all different colors and shapes and sizes. They aren’t particularly planned out arrangements, but the mixture of all of them, reaching to the sky and showing off their blooms and green finery, is stunning. The plants scream “I’m Happy!” Invariably, the plants and flowers which we put into our back bed, thrive better than any other plants that we care for, inside and outside of our home.

It struck me the other day, that through this whole coronavirus situation, a lot of us have been thrown to “the back beds” of our lives. But the interesting thing is, I would be willing to bet that we all have gotten a few “happy surprises” and insights about ourselves and our lives. We might find that there are some aspects of being in the back bed that have really helped us to truly thrive, maybe even in some ways, better than ever. In my own family, my husband has worked from our home, instead of an outside office, for the first time in his thirty years of working on his career. And he likes it. My mentees have mentioned that online learning works better for them and they feel like they are learning more, without distractions. Friends and family have all noted that the less rushed pace and the no longer filled up calendar pages, have really helped with catching up on much needed rest and contemplation. We all seem to hope to keep more open space in our lives, even after this virus situation corrects itself. I have found myself rediscovering some very comforting corners of my own house, with pretty views that I never took the time to notice before. My husband and I are in the beginning stages of contemplation of what and where our empty nest should look like, once our daughter goes to college in a couple of years, and this virus situation has really helped narrow the field. Despite sometimes being intrigued to try city living (we’ve always been suburbanites), we realized, through this situation, that it is an abundance of nature which really soothes our souls. A big city is no longer a draw for us, in retirement. In fact, we’ve even been tossing around the idea of a more rural way of life.

Most of the plants which we attempt to heal and to revive, in our back flower bed, come back with a flourish. Sometimes we do end up re-planting the renewed bloomers back in other parts of our yard, but many of the once withering plants, end up staying in place, in the back bed by the lake where they were restored. They stay where they were healed. They bloom where they are planted. And their beautiful rejuvenation is a glorious sight to behold!

How To Let Go

Friends of mine were recently sharing together on a text chat that this whole coronavirus situation has helped the aging process, happening in us middle-aged women, to move along quite exponentially. Talk about adding insult to injury! I feel like I am taking the Advanced Placement Menopause course, as we mostly shelter in place. I don’t know if this “uber warp speed aging” is actually happening, or I was just too busy to notice before. Plus, regular salon visits, pedicures, and spa days, went a long way in keeping the whole aging process at bay, or at least a little more hidden from view. Truly, though, if we are honest with ourselves, stress wreaks havoc on our physical bodies. And I think that we can all agree that our stress levels are climbing right along, in tandem, with the coronavirus case growth charts.

I’ve been reading some materials lately about how to best deal with our stress and emotions, through all of this. We women, have a tendency to not only feel, intuit and take on our own stresses, but we often open our own tender hearts to feel, intuit, and take on the stresses of our families, our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, our pets, our community workers . . . . you know the drill. We women especially, often get overloaded with emotion and often, we don’t even realize it, until our unprocessed feelings show up in our bodies, in the form of ailments, injuries, exhaustion, exponential aging, etc. So what’s the best way to deal with this swirling cauldron of all of these intense feelings??? The answer is to feel them. As a wise person once said to me, “Don’t fix your feelings. Feel them.”

There’s a method to allowing yourself to feel your feelings, without getting overwhelmed. Worrying about getting overwhelmed with emotion, is why so many of us avoid the healthy experience of just feeling our feelings. We are afraid of losing control, but the irony of it is, when we don’t allow ourselves to feel our own very natural feelings, we have lost control. What we resist, persists. The feelings and emotions that have not been allowed to be accepted, to be felt, and then finally to be released, remain in our physical bodies and our mental states, and they come out in different ways, such as an over-reaction to a slight, or migraine headaches or a shutdown mental state where we get so numb that we can’t even feel all of the good feelings, which are also a very important part of our daily existence.

Many of us middle-aged women have had, at least, one or two experiences with yoga and/or meditation. The idea behind these lovely practices, is to calm your system down to the point where you are very much in, the actual present moment. You are very in-tuned to yourself right in that very present, now moment. In these slow, deliberate states of being, you are able to notice things about yourself. You notice your own thoughts, and you notice all different sensations in your body. This process allows you to see, that in actuality, the most peaceful, centered part of yourself, is the wise presence inside of yourself, that is able to notice your thoughts (without judging your thoughts, or at the very least, your wise presence just also notices your judgment thoughts). Many spiritual people believe that this very peaceful, centered, Awareness part of you, which just lovingly notices and experiences your thoughts and your sensations in every moment, is the real You – your spirit, your God within. The idea of Oneness comes about, when it dawns on you, that every living thing has this very same loving, peaceful, Awareness within, and all of the rest of it – the body, the ego mind with its judgments and preferences, the individual external experiences, are all really just fluff. The rest of it (the fluff), is really just tools and vehicles that give us the ability for the real part of us (spirit) to have this Life experience. In that sense, God is the Ocean and we are the waves. Everyone carries the Universe inside of themselves.

So with that in mind, just like we notice our thoughts, or notice pain in our body, we can also just notice our emotions. Feelings are natural. There is nothing wrong with having thoughts and feelings, even the ones that we label as “bad.” We will only ever be held accountable for how we act on our thoughts and feelings. Feelings and thoughts are nothing more than energy that is part of the natural process of life. Every human has all sorts of thoughts and feelings going on, all day long, every day.

Interestingly, we humans typically do three things with our emotions. We either suppress/repress them, in other words, trying to deny that we have them, because we have judged these feelings as negative, and we want to disassociate ourselves from the “badness” of them, or we try to escape from our feelings, often with addictions like working, TV, alcohol, drugs, eating, etc. or finally, we express our feelings by venting, over-rumination, over-analyzing or dumping them on to someone else. In none of these cases, do we just let the quiet, peaceful Awareness part of us to just relax into the experience of just feeling our feelings. If we can sit with our emotion, we can just notice it. What thoughts are flaring up with this emotion that we are feeling? What body sensations are happening to us as we “feel our feels”? Remember, what we resist, persists. But if we sit with our emotion, realizing that a particular emotion will be like a wave that comes in, crests, and then flows out, it becomes, really no big deal. And a felt feeling doesn’t leave residual “stuff”, for our bodies and hearts to have to carry with it, like a big heavy load of baggage. The feeling is felt, and then, the feeling is let go.

Now realize, because many of us middle-agers have spent a lot of our lives, stuffing our feelings, avoiding our feelings, denying our feelings, judging our feelings, analyzing our feelings, intellectualizing our feelings, projecting our feelings – basically doing everything but actually FEELING our feelings, there is a pretty big reservoir of unfelt/unaccepted/unprocessed emotion in many of us, that we carry around with us, all day, day in and day out. I have heard the stored unprocessed feelings, to be likened to a giant Olympic-sized swimming pool, or to a huge pile of coal. So, in particular circumstances, say for example, unprocessed anger about a very unfair job situation that happened ten years ago, part of that reservoir, that giant pool of stored emotion, will often spill out in say, an over-reaction to someone cutting you off in traffic. In that case, when that anger flairs up, you give the other driver the finger and you stew in over-sized annoyance or you carry a grudge all day about that driver and you let that incidence color your entire day. But if you are being aware of your thoughts and feelings on a regular basis, you probably start realizing that your over-reaction to being cut off is probably more about a lot of unprocessed anger, in you, about a lot of other stuff. In this example, you are just expressing your emotion, but you aren’t really allowing yourself to just feel the anger, to accept the emotion without resistance and judgment, and most importantly, by not feeling and accepting the anger within you, you can’t get to the point of being able to then, let the anger go. Instead, you have just added more drops of water to the Olympic-sized pool of stored anger energy, that you haul around with you every day. You cannot let go of a feeling until you actually have allowed yourself to feel the energy of the emotion, without judgment, without analyzing it, and without guilt. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the natural feeling, that unprocessed feeling becomes another pitcher full of water or another lump of coal, in the already heavy load of cargo that we’ve been carrying around with us our whole lives.

Now keep in mind, even the most enlightened among us, probably still have some stored-up, unfelt emotion about past events in our lives. Working through the feelings, and being able to feel pools of emotions, whether they be kiddie pools or water parks or piles of feelings, whether they be ant hills or mountains, takes time and it takes energy. Often, there is a guilt or shame feeling, about having our other feelings that must be felt and experienced and accepted and let go, prior to being able to feel the original feelings of say, anger or jealousy or resentment or pride.

I bring all of this feeling work stuff up, because I am trying to avoid adding to my own pools and adding to own my piles of unprocessed feelings, with this very scary, fear laden situation that we have going on in the world, with this awful virus. I have been trying to do this process of just letting myself feel my feelings, whenever they come up to my conscious, so that I am able to accept them and then, I am able to let my feelings go. This process helps me to come to the end of a day, with a relatively even-keeled sense of peace and it has helped navigate me, to areas where I really need to focus on cleaning up some pretty big piles of unfelt/unreleased emotion, when I am ready to do that process. Give the “feel your feelings” process a try. Start with little feels, like annoyances with people standing too close to you in the grocery store, or disappointment about a cancelled event. Feel the annoyance, feel the disappointment. Notice, with detachment, the thoughts and the body sensations that arrive with the feelings of annoyance and disappointment, and then notice, surprisingly, how quickly the emotion goes back out from the shore of your presence, back out into the big arms of the ocean of peace. Let go and let God, “they” say. What could be better?

The Masked Man

Image via screengrab

I don’t enjoy wearing the masks. They are uncomfortable, hot and they make me feel unfriendly. My son who lives in New Jersey, said that he saw a woman in the grocery store wearing a mask with slits cut out under her nose and her mouth. It kind of defeats the purpose, right? Still, I empathized with her. Once again, I’m in total awe of all of our essential workers, who wear the masks hours and hours, on end. The following post went viral in my local Nextdoor neighborhood social media. The person who posted it, said that she did not write it, nor did she know who to attribute it to, but I’m glad that she posted it anyway. It hits home.

“I wear a mask in public, NOT for me, but for YOU. I want you to know that I am educated enough to know that I could be asymptomatic and still give you the virus. No, I don’t “live in fear” of the virus, I just want to be a part of the solution, not the problem. I don’t feel like the “government is controlling me,” I feel like I’m being a contributing adult to society, and I want to teach others the same. The world doesn’t revolve around me. It’s not all about me and my comfort. If we all could live with other people’s consideration in mind, this whole world would be a much better place. Wearing a mask doesn’t make me weak, scared, stupid or even “controlled,” it makes me considerate. When you think about how you look, or how uncomfortable it is or what others think of you, just imagine someone close to you, a father, a mother, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle choking on a ventilator. Then ask yourself if you could have worn a mask to prevent their suffering would you have?”

I love the idea of being “considerate”. I love the idea of being “part of the solution.” We are like one worldwide team trying to conquer this horrible virus. It’s good to be reminded that we are all on the same team.

Are You Certain?

27 Best Uncertainty quotes images | Quotes, Me quotes ...

Our state of Florida is starting to open up a tad, and we are getting back to my least favorite part of parenting. We are putting limits on things, that other parents are okay with, and our kids are frustrated. We get to be “the bad guys” once again. We’ve agreed to have weekly family meetings to discuss what our current house stance is on summer jobs, outside interactions, masks, beach trips, shopping trips, restaurants, etc. It would help me more, if I felt more concretely solid about what is the right thing to do, too. We have been very fortunate to not know anyone personally who has been infected with the coronavirus. Our zip code has less than five cases of it. Like all places in the world, there are a fair amount of restless people here, wanting things to get back to “normal.” I don’t like the idea of living in fear, but I must balance that with being responsible to myself, to my family, and to my community. With the onslaught of so much information, it’s hard to know what and who to believe. There still seems to be a lot of mystery surrounding this virus. How are you all coping with this uncertainty? Feeling uncertain is admittedly my least favorite state of being. I trudge strongly forward when I feel resolute. Uncertainty kind of paralyzes me. I’m going to try to take this perspective seen below, on uncertainty. It screams “hopeful.”

Margaret Drabble - When nothing is sure, everything is possible ...

The Healing

“Nobody tells you this but sometimes the healing hurts more than the wound.” – Think Smarter, Twitter

Think Smarter nailed it once again. I remember when I gave birth to my first child. He was nine pounds, which a baby that size was much less common, over twenty years ago. Of course, going into labor and giving birth to my son was quite painful, but no one prepared me for the fact that I would feel like I had been hit by a Mack truck, for a good long while afterwards. Pushing my robust baby out of me, ended up spraining my tail bone and I had to sit on a rubber doughnut for weeks. Of course, my son is worth it. I’m not complaining. He is one of the greatest joys and loves of my life. Still, when I saw the quote mentioned above, this is one of the many instances, in my life, that came to my mind, to validate it. Before my first son was born, I read a million books on childbirth, listened to a litany of frightening childbirth stories, (which any woman who has ever given birth to a baby herself, and notices a young, pregnant woman, feels a compulsion to share every gory detail), and of course, I took the requisite neighborhood Lamaze classes. Everyone focused on giving birth to the baby. All of the advice was geared towards the birth episode, which typically lasts less than one day. Not once, not ever, did I feel warned about how physically terrible I would feel after the birth, and I didn’t even have a cesarean delivery.

We’ve been wounded here with the coronavirus, folks, in a big way. The initial gash of realizing that people were dying at an alarming rate from a disease for which we have no cure for, nor protection from, and then having to quarantine for weeks on end, and all of this happening, in a time span that felt nothing short of sudden, was shocking, alarming and intense, to say the least. The initial wound of realization was overwhelming and numbing. The initial injury hit us like a sledgehammer. It still seems utterly surreal. Still, we are going to heal from this coronavirus situation. We know this. We have already started to slowly open things up, to air the wound out, and we are trying to scab over this horrible situation, a little bit, in any way that we can. We have the smartest people in the world, working 24/7 to find solutions to cure the coronavirus and all of the damaging side effects and complications, that has come with it. We are all in a state of mourning for our losses, with some of us having paid the worst price of all, but still, we shall heal. It’s just that the healing is not going to be quick and easy and painless. No real healing ever is, from any kind of major trauma. The healing from any wound or trauma, is often the hardest part.

Today, I read on the internet, a quote that said, “Enjoy the space between where you are and where you are going.” Life is mostly made of those in-between spaces. And I don’t think that we were meant to waste the in-between spaces, by wishing them away. The vast amount of healing and growth and life, happens in those in-between spaces. We just don’t notice what happens in the in-between spaces, as much, because they are not nearly as jarring and life-stopping, as the unforeseen traumas and dramas, that stop us in our tracks. The in-between spaces are lulling and less interesting than the joyous, raucous conclusions and celebrations. But what do we celebrate on graduations? We celebrate the hard work of years and years of wisdom gathering and knowledge building and a child evolving into an adult. We celebrate the in-between space, starting with the first day of kindergarten, to the last day of high school, for a senior. There’s a lot of life that happened in that in-between space. And also, a lot of experience and growth that occurred in that span of many, many years, in-between. Every birthday is really a celebration of the in-between space between birthdays. Birthdays celebrate the life that happened in the in-between space, in the time period of one year. The in-between spaces are so very important. We need to be patient and grateful for the spaces. Right now we are in an in-between space that started with a horrible virus infiltrating the world and it will end with a calming, healing conclusion. We know this. Right now our job is to live as healthfully and peacefully and patiently as we can, in this in-between space. Little do we realize, that we are currently growing, exponentially, as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations, as the world, so that when we finally get to the healing conclusion, we will have globally transformed into a wiser, stronger, more compassionate, more clear version of what we were before. That’s what healing does. Healing is not easy. But a true healing, while inevitably leaving a scar, brings about such an authentic transformation in us, that sometimes we find ourselves perhaps even a tad grateful for the initial, sharp, deep pain, that brought us around to the in-between space, which helped us to heal into our most whole, our most authentic, our most enlightened versions of ourselves .

The Fish Bowl

I’ve been trying to decide what I miss more. Do I miss not being able to do specific things or is it more that I miss the feeling of freedom to do whatever I feel like doing? Out of my immediate family, I honestly think that my daily life has changed the least. In my family, it is more like everyone has become an integral part of my daily life and routine, that’s all. It is like I am living in a fish bowl that now has a heck of a lot more fish swimming around in it, than usual.

Welcome to the Fish Bowl Enter with Caution | Make a Meme

That’s all I have for a Monday. Mondays are tough in a normal world. In quarantine world, they are extra sluggish. See you tomorrow. Stay well.

Soul Sunday

“I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift – a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.” – Max Ehrmann

So yesterday I was going through some old books of mine and I found a lovely poem by the heralded author and poet, Max Ehrmann. This is an old poem. Ehrmann wrote it in 1927 and its worldwide popularity started around the 1950s, years after Ehrmann’s death. The poem is called Desiderata which is Latin for “things that are yearned for.” As my regular readers know, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Typically, I write a poem, or I find a poem by someone else that I want to share. I ask that you share your poetry in the Comments section. This is not a critique session. This is a safe outpouring of our feelings in the form of words. Please share. Your poems are precious gifts to yourself and to us. Today, my offering is just to share Desiderata by Max Ehrmann because the poem holds particular poignancy in times like these, especially.

Desiderata | Desiderata poem, Desiderata, Words

You’re in a Time-Out

Yesterday was a turning point day for me, I think, in this whole quarantine situation. I finally got to a point of surrender. Early into this dire coronavirus situation, a friend sent a funny text of a meme that suggested that perhaps God had put us all in a time-out. Now I believe in an all-loving God. I don’t think God is out to punish us. I think that God just lets us have free will and often allows the consequences of our free will to happen, but at the same time God promises to be with us and to comfort us and to help us, every step of the way. If we allow God to do it.

So yesterday, I got to thinking back, to when my children were little and I doled out time-outs. Time-outs really weren’t meant for punishment. Time-outs were meant to stop the frenetic behavior, the tantrum, the out of control conduct, right in its tracks, so that my child had a chance to calm down, to not escalate the situation, and to bring himself or herself back into balance. When I put one of my children into a time-out, there were all sorts of first reactions. They would cry and scream and rail against it. I remember one time, my eldest son and I both pushed against either side of his bedroom door, for what felt like an eternity. An angry, curly-headed, three-year-old ginger little boy is a lot stronger than you would guess. And so is a frazzled, at-her-limit, young mother. After the denial and anger about the time-out, my child would then start bargaining with me, promising to change their behavior, if I just let time-out be over, RIGHT NOW. This begging and bargaining was usually still loud, and angry and full of cries and self-pity. There was nothing “even keel” about it. After the bargaining and arguing for the time-out to be over, a reticence would set in. The child would sulk and pout, with a teary, “Why me?” expression on his or her face, as they sat in a corner of their dismay. And then when the cry shivers finally slowed down and stopped, my child would come around to a calmer, more peaceful emotional place and would even start amusing himself or herself in their little corner of the world, knowing that the time-out would soon be over and they could then head back out to play.

When you really consider it, a “time-out” really looks like a mini grief cycle. Yesterday, I think I finally came to the “acceptance” stage of the coronavirus and all of the consequences the coronavirus has brought to our global society. Acceptance is not the same as approval. Acceptance is the surrendering to “what is.” Yesterday, I donned my gloves and my mask and shopped in my grocery store, and I accepted the many empty shelves that have never been that empty before, in my lifetime. I didn’t hold my breath as I moved around the store, feeling the anxiety creeping up quickly, tightening my neck and my shoulders, as I shopped. I actually felt more peaceful at the grocery store yesterday, than I have since this whole thing began. Yesterday, I rode my bike all around my neighborhood. I don’t ride my cute, old, beach cruiser style bike very often, but every time that I do ride it, I ask myself why I don’t do it more often. Riding it around, at an easy-going, non-purposeful pace, is so enjoyable. Yesterday, I held my typically not-very emotional daughter, as she cried and cried about missing her friends, missing her tennis season, missing her old way of life. I didn’t try to find a way to make it better. I couldn’t. I knew that she needed this release, so I just held her and I let her know that it was okay to cry. I accepted her pain and loss. I surrendered to the idea that as her mom, I can’t fix it all, but I can hold her and I can love her and I can let her know that I understand. Nothing changed in our circumstances yesterday. We are still in quarantine. There is no vaccine for the coronavirus yet. There are so many “unknowns” still swirling around this very precarious situation, but yesterday, I didn’t cry and scream about it. I didn’t pretend that it wasn’t happening and that life was “normal.” I didn’t try to find a loophole to bargain my way out of the situation, and I didn’t lay in bed all day. Yesterday, I shopped with a mask on, biked around a particularly quiet neighborhood and I held my daughter as she cried. I accepted the situation and I felt more at peace than I have felt since this all began. I suppose “time-outs”, much like the cycle of grief, have a good purpose. They are not punishment. Time-outs are a chance to get back to a healthy center and to really reflect on what is most important to you, when all of the emotional charge has dissipated. Surrender and acceptance . . . . much like “plop” and “fizz”, what a relief it is. Surrender, accept and feel the relief.