It is the “pack it up and head on home” day of vacation. These types of days are always reflection and digestion days, for me. It is the time to really think about what I have experienced and how that experience has affected me. Have I changed in any way because of my experience? Did I learn anything new? How did this experience impact the relationship I have with my family members? Will anything that I have experienced impact or change my daily life at home? How did this experience influence how I view Life?
This trip is no longer the eagerly anticipated adventure in the future, but is now part of our family’s memory scrapbook. It is no longer a question of what awaits us, but now a story of what happened, in an adventurous week, in the life of our family. That story will be kept alive by shared memories, laughs, and some pictures to prove that it is part of our shared experiences. Yet, we all will digest it, in our own personal way, born out of our own perspectives and feelings and preferences. In that sense, the story of this year’s epic family vacation, will be the same story, yet a collection of individual stories, all at the same time. But, isn’t that true of all stories? Isn’t that true of Life?
Happy Friday, readers and friends!!! Happy Friday all!!! Honestly, this particular Friday is the first Friday, in a LONG while, that I wish it weren’t Friday. This Friday marks the almost end of a wonderful, memorable family vacation. It marks the end of something that we all have been looking forward to and anticipating for a long, long time. As my family grows up and out, I realize that each of these vacations are even more precious than ever, as our six schedules are becoming more and more complex to allow these long, interrupted periods of time with each other, to even be a possibility. Since I am experiencing my ultimate favorite thing – uninterrupted adventures with my family, I am going to stop posting and start adventuring and I won’t be listing my three favorite things. Please don’t let that stop you from sharing some favorites in my comments section and new readers, please check out previous Friday postings where I usually list three favorite products, tips, websites, songs, etc. that have wowed my world.
Happy Friday Friends!! Enjoy your day and have a wonderful weekend!!!
I bought this sign in an adorable little antique/curio shop yesterday. I’ll probably put it right above my desk. At the same shop, I also bought handmade earrings that I liked so well, I went to the etsy shop and bought a necklace made by the same local artist. The artist emailed me and we had a really fun exchange. In Florida, we call shopping the local little shops and farm markets, shopping Flocal. It is my favorite kind of shopping.
We are doing a lot of outdoorsy stuff this week, together as a family. It’s a good way to be together and yet be on our own, all at the same time. My second son asked us why people are in such awe of nature. We all had different answers. I said that nothing man has made can compare to the beauty and magnificence of nature. My eldest son disagreed. (He has always loved cities. On his fifth birthday, I had his birthday cake designed to be a tall building.) My son said that we are animals, too. So when we were all oohing and awing over a beaver dam, that is why we also marvel over the Hoover dam. I thought that it was a good point he made.
My husband said that we are in awe of untouched, wild nature because it is not something most of us see and experience in our every day lives. We all wondered if the park rangers are still in awe of the natural wonders they experience as part of their daily lives, work and experience. I hope so. I hope that the park rangers can view their work environment every day, the same way the rest of us are taking it in – with wonder, with amazement, with the breath-taking awe of an ecology living in synchronicity and teeming with a mass diversity of beautiful versions of Life.
“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. ” – Eleonora Duse
Last night I watched my four kids laughing, and joking, and teasing and talking and even squabbling a little bit, and I felt my heart soaked in gratefulness, awe and love for these most precious people, whom I have been privileged to raise. When they were little, I must have taken it for granted that they would always be this little band of four – the oldest, curly-headed ginger leading the pack, not far behind him, his brother, the adventurer and the instigator, followed by the youngest blue-eyed boy, (yet the biggest pup of the litter) and finally, keeping up and keeping them all in line, their brave and beautiful little sister. And then the growing up and the “growing beyond” happened, and it happened so fast.
Last night I got a glimpse. I got a glimpse of the roots that they all share which keep my children’s feet firmly planted on the Earth, even as their individual blossoms are spreading far and away. Those roots are strong. They have a base of roots entwined with a shared history, camaraderie, memories, and shared DNA. They all have had the shared experience of my husband and I, forging our perspectives and hopes and ideas, of what lives lived well, look like, and they will be able to nourish their own perspectives, hopes and ideas from the nutrients they share, from down deep under the surface of our family soil.
This was posted on Twitter’s Think Smarter a few days ago. This is so true, it’s scary. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to shrink up and hide in a little hole. I get the irony. I write a public blog every day where I spill my guts, yet I abhor the idea of being cyber-ly followed and tracked.
Privacy is such an independent, personal concept. When we were little, my cousin made up a song that we used to tease her about, yet I can still sing it. “PRIIIIIIVACY! If you want some . . . . close the door!! PRIIIIIVACY!”
I am perfectly comfortable with being very open about my feelings and perceptions on a public format, but I like my day-to-day happenings to be mostly private, and my own. I think most people are probably the opposite of that. Yet, there are the people who are willing to “let it all hang out”, like reality TV stars and the Kardasians. On the other hand, you have the entirely mysterious people who seem to leave no public footprint at all.
No matter what our privacy preferences are, one thing can be sure, if we have a cell phone, or a computer, or we spend any time in public places, someone/something is seeing us, recording us, tracking our preferences and keeping the data. It’s funny that I am comfortable with the idea of God and the angels doing this. Yet artificial intelligence makes me shiver in fear and disgust sometimes.
Confession: I’m a big cry baby when I am angry. I probably cry more when I am angry than when I am sad. It drives me crazy. It drives other people crazy. I think other people think that it is a manipulative thing on my part. Unfortunately, I’m not a good actress. I wish that I could automatically turn on the waterworks, when they could come in handy. There are times when I think to myself, “This IS the appropriate time to cry,” and yet, I can’t get any kind of tears to flow, to save me.
I don’t like to see myself as a weak person. I’m 48 years old and the mother of four almost grown children. I’ve taken my share of licks in life. I don’t get angry easily or often, but when I do, I admit that it isn’t pretty. I am a fire sign. My temper has been described as “fiery” by more than a dozen people in my life, throughout the years. Perhaps I need to cry the tears, in order to quell the fire.
I took an informal survey with some friends about the tendency to cry when you are angry. Luckily (I guess), I am not alone in this trait. Of course, I was only surveying women. An article in Psychology Today has this to say:
“It’s become increasingly common for therapists to note that underlying your anger are feelings of hurt. In fact the more pronounced your anger, the greater the hurt it conceals. So if the phrase “angry tears” sounds oxymoronic to you, that’s because it is: It’s profoundly descriptive of human experience yet, on the face of it, certainly sounds illogical. Still, it’s likely that at some point in your life you, too, have felt this deeply mixed emotion.”
Medical News Today offers these tips to control crying:
Tips for controlling crying
1. Walk away
2. Use words
3. Have props and use distractions
Having something to scribble on, a stress ball, or something to look at visually may be of use when heading into a situation that could trigger crying.
4. Think about something positive or funny instead
5. Concentrate on breathing
6. Blink and move the eyes
7. Relaxing facial muscles
8. Get rid of that throat lump
(Emotional crying also affects the nervous system. One way it reacts is by opening up the muscle at the back of the throat (called the glottis). This feels as though a lump is forming in the throat. Sipping water, swallowing, and yawning can help make the lump go away.)
9. Do some exercise
If all else fails, one article suggested that people should admit and address it up front that they are currently feeling angry, and when they feel angry, tears often come. It is not a trait they can control or like, but it shows the level of passion, hurt and anger they are feeling about the particular circumstance. In that sense, you can take control back in a situation, where you are feeling a little out of control.
I guess like all things, a level of acceptance probably would help the situation of me crying when I am an angry. What you resist, persists. If I own it, to myself and to others, and treat it as just my personal response to deeply felt emotion, it becomes less of a big deal. Maybe it will become even less of an occurrence, with that level of acceptance. I don’t know. Let’s test it. In the words of Clint Eastwood, “Go Ahead, Make My Day.” (but wear a raincoat, just in case.)
The other day, I had the pleasure of having “the cable guy” at my house for the span of the entire day. We decided to finally switch cable companies, overcoming a long span of inertia, by the fact that we were being gouged by our previous TV/internet provider for years. But when our cable bill started competing with our grocery budget, when it started coming in right under the mortgage payment, I could no longer sit idly by, letting our money fly out of the window, at high internet speeds.
Frankly, I look at TV/internet providers, the same way that I view politicians: just a big pot of mess and evil, to greater and lesser degrees. So when the new provider told me that “the cable guy” would be at my house for an hour to an hour and a half, tops, I already blocked off the whole morning, on my calendar. Ever the optimist, I didn’t plan on blocking off my entire day to allowing a small, angry, sweaty man race all over my house and attic, swearing under his breath, digging up my yard, only to hand me the channel changer to one of my TVs, to have us both realize, that we could no longer turn the TV off. So the break that I was getting in a cheaper cable bill, would now be made up in our electricity bill.
During the new cable set-up day, I texted friends complaints throughout the day. We came up with a brilliant plan to light a fire under future cable guys’ butts. We decided that whenever you are having cable/internet/phone service (or any of the like) set up, you should invite over your most annoying, know-it-all, relative or neighbor. We all know the guy (sorry, but it IS usually a guy) who I’m talking about. He’s the guy who knows more about, and how to do everybody’s jobs, than they do. He is the guy standing behind “the cable guy” holding a coffee cup, filled with high octane coffee, barking out tips and suggestions and platitudes on how to get the job done right. My friends and I figured that would at least shave off a few hours from the job, as long as things didn’t escalate to murder, hence involving police and ambulance workers.
Reality is though, I won’t be having a cable guy out to our house any time soon. I will complain to friends and neighbors about outages and prices and the ridiculousness of having 879 TV channels, of which, only about three of those channels interest me. Then, decades down the road, I will finally get fed up with, “Sorry, but you just don’t qualify for any of our fantastic discounts as this point in time.” (once they get you hooked in with inertia and fear of a day spent with an angry “cable guy”, discounts no longer apply – ever.) I will call a new provider. They will tell me the change will take only a few minutes (this is decades down the road, remember). At this juncture, I will invite “that guy” over to make sure that “the cable guy” stays in his allotted time frame, for rigging and wiring my media to the price gouging setting. I have a plan in place.
Before I left for my getaway, I was having trouble sleeping at night. This is not because I am worried about anything or because I am in any pain. It all had to do with a horrible, loud, annoying noise that kept me tossing and turning and seriously thinking about purchasing ear plugs or a white noise machine or a straight jacket. This loud noise wasn’t anything man made. It was coming from a creature of Mother Nature.
Our backyard butts up to a small lake and behind the lake is a relatively untouched nature preserve. Normally I love living like Snow White. The diverse nature we observe here is truly stunning and fascinating. We get rafters of turkeys (that is the correct term for a group of turkeys, btw) walking through our backyard all of the time. We get all sorts of birds – herons, eagles, hawks, ducks and woodpeckers. We see deer, rabbits, armadillos, possums, raccoons and alligators, on a frequent basis. Normally, these lovely critters act just as fun eye candy and we have a mutual respect for our respective places as creatures on this beautiful Earth. We all keep a healthy distance from each other and we live in happy symbiosis.
Mating season can get quite loud here, though. I thought mating season would be over by now, but for a few days before I left on my getaway, there was a very insistent, loud, demanding, horny as hell creature who just wouldn’t shut up. Whoever, whatever it was, sounded like he was right outside of our bedroom window. My frustrated, exhausted husband got up once, in the middle of the night, looking to see if it were squirrels or alligators or a new species of bird whose call we hadn’t heard before, sitting right outside of our window, insistently calling out for a mate. I got up to help him, but we just couldn’t find the sneaky source. We rustled in the bushes, our fears of finding something dangerous, with sharp, gnash-y teeth, being abated by our desperate need for sleep. We turned on all of our spotlights, so bright, you would have thought we were a prison, looking desperately for a fugitive prisoner. The noisemaker continued through all of this fuss, mocking us, as he carried on with his insistent screeches and howls.
I had forgotten about this annoyance when I was on my trip. I kept remarking about how well I had slept on my trip, attributing it to the mattress pads or the hotel pillows, not realizing that it was really the serene silence that I had been missing, that was helping me get such sound sleep. As I eagerly turned in last night, excited to be in my own surroundings, in my own familiar bed, as I shut my eyes, ready for sweet, dreamy slumber, my noisy, aggravating nemesis starting his siren song AGAIN. UGH! I had completely forgotten about this pest, on my sweet escape. Last night I got spotty sleep at best.
This morning, as I was grumpily making up our bed, the noise started up again. This was unusual. It had been mostly a night thing . . . a nightmare, for sure. Once again, it sounded like it was coming from our window sliders. In desperation, I got my phone’s flashlight and I looked all over the window, trying to follow the sound. I finally found my nemesis. He wasn’t large. He wasn’t scary. He wasn’t feathered and he didn’t have sharp teeth. He was actually kind of cute and innocent. He reminded me of Kermit . . . Kermit the frog. I set him free. I set us both free, I hope. Tonight will tell if he decides to come back. . . . I guess it isn’t easy being green.
This is travel day, friends. So I am going to call it a “light write” day, so that I don’t miss my flight. I feel very lulled, refreshed, revitalized, yet relaxed. I like how I feel right now. I like my energy. I hope that I can carry my good vibe into my home life and keep it there for a while. If I like me and how I feel right now, I suppose that my family and friends will appreciate a more chill me, as well. I am filled with peace and gratitude.
Whatever you wanna be, just, at the end of the day, if you’re being a good person, which is not hard to be, and you’re putting positive energy into the world, and you’re appreciative and loving to the people around you that care about you and everybody in general, then it’ll work out. Gnash
