Tag: middle age

Beasties

“The truth is simple. If it were complicated everyone would understand it.” – Unknown

I don’t need to form an opinion nor explanation about the above quote. It’s simple. Anything I would write, would complicate it.

This next quote was told to me years ago by a friend, who said that her grandmother would say it all of the time. I didn’t quite understand it, and I needed her to explain it to me:

“Snow does not fall to kill the world, but that every beasty shows its tracks.”

She said that it means that a lot of times what we think are “bad things” happening, happen only to suss the bad players out. So in that sense, “the bad things” are actually “good things”, or at the very least “good things” usually always come out of the “bad things.” And it is always wise to remember, when the “beasties” show us their tracks, this reminds us that the beasties are all around, and we should not follow them to our own detriment.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2769. What childlike characteristics do you still retain?

Empathy Machines

Before I get to what I really want to write about today, this:

“Reading is an empathy-generating machine.” – Dr. Vivek Murthy

Isn’t this the truth? When we are having conversations, we are typically taking turns waiting to talk. Our conversations have a tendency to veer off-topic. But when you are reading, it’s just you and the words which you are reading. And written words tend to be more soulful, more thought-out, more vulnerable, more honest than everyday conversations. Reading really helps you to understand how someone else feels about their experiences. Empathy is being able to answer the question: “How do you think this makes me feel?” for someone else, other than yourself. Reading gives you time to absorb and to understand the words, and to make conclusions about the words, without getting defensive or argumentive or confused. I absolutely love to read and empathy is a wonderful by-product of reading.

And also before I get to what I really want to write about today, this:

Credit: @woofknight, X

“Oh to have impacted someone so much that they find bits of your soul and hold the memory of you in things and places when you’re not around.” Isn’t this a beautiful part of the human experience? Isn’t it wonderful to have people (and pets) in your life who come to mind often, even when they are not around. And isn’t it also great to be the person who someone is reminded of, when they see or experience certain things? These are the types of aspects of living life, that my soul crushes on, hard.

Okay, finally to what I planned to write about today:

Yesterday, our youngest son called me around 11 am. And my heart fell to the floor. I knew that my son was at work, my kids rarely call me (texting is king), and also, he has epilepsy. Thankfully my son was fine, but he was letting me know that he had just gotten an emailed letter stating that his longtime neurologist/epitologist’s practice was no longer taking my son’s health insurance.

This was the final push, which we have long-known was coming, to force us to go about finding my son a new practioner. His neurologist is getting close to retirement age, he practices in a town three hours from where our son lives, and he is technically a Pediatric Neurologist. Our son turns 24 at the end of the year.

Already I have a lump in my throat, writing this. Our son was 14 when he was diagnosed with epilepsy. He started with the small seizures called “absence seizures” or “petit mal” seizures which had probably been going on longer than we think. I often thought that my son was ignoring me or distracted with daydreaming, which I know is not out of the realm of things that teenage boys do. (he has two older brothers) However, the summer that he was diagnosed with epilepsy, our daughter and I picked him up from a summer camp (where he had gotten very little sleep) and my son’s disjointed, disorganized, “filled with stalls and stares and pauses” stories about the camp made it clear that something just wasn’t right. Later that night, I found some videos of children having absence seizures on “YouTube” and my stomach filled with dread. I took our son to our beloved pediatrician the next day only to have him confirm my fears, and to quickly recommend one of the best pediatric neurologists in town.

It took a long while to see Dr. W. He had quite the waiting list of people from in town, and from out town, who wanted to consult with him. We went to see his younger associate first, and while this young man was fresh out of medical school, and was eager and obviously brilliant, he spoke entirely too fast, and too matter-of-factly, to parents who were quickly coming to terms that life as we had all known it, had come to an end, and a big change was in store for our family. We decided to wait for an appointment with the heralded Dr. W, to see what he had to say about our son’s condition.

I quickly understood why Dr. W was so popular with his patients (and all of the medical staff). He was kind, down-to-Earth, patient to answer all of the questions and challenges that I was peppering him with, and he took a genuine interest in our son, outside of his epilepsy. It turns out that Dr. W had grown up in a farm town, and he took an interest in studying neurology because he had an uncle with epilepsy who chose never to get it treated. (This uncle would often ride around on large tractors, to the dismay of his family.)

Over the years, we have had many ups and downs with our son’s epilepsy. Epilepsy is tricky because it is treated with heavy-duty brain medication, with heavy-duty side effects, and these medications work differently, with each individual and they can stop working as one’s body changes. There is not a “one medication fits all” situation with epilepsy. There are always more questions than answers with any condition involving the brain. Currently, what is thankfully keeping ours son’s seizures at bay, are three different medications, taken two times a day. Some people with epilepsy can never keep their seizures at bay. We are lucky. This I know. I have never been more grateful for anything else in my life. It took us a long time, and a lot of scary moments with our son having many major seizures, to finally get to this combination that currently works for him. And all of the while, Dr W. did everything in his power to support us, but more importantly, to support our son, as we went through this long process of finding meds with the least side effects, that still stopped the seizures. Dr. W cared for our son throughout high school, throughout college, and throughout starting his sales career in his young adulthood. Dr. W has been a constant in our son’s sometimes otherwise unpredictable experiences.

My son was an easy patient. His mother was not. I was a totally desperate, semi-hysterical, pain-in-the-ass, many, many times. (I’m pretty sure that my son and Dr. W probably have some private jokes about his neurotic mother who thinks she knows everything due to her intimate relationship with Dr. Google, and do you know what? I effing love Dr. W for this fact. Dr. W always made our son feel nothing less than a totally normal, awesome guy with an unfortunate affliction which we were going to find a way to control. Usually Dr. W spent the appointments more focused on these sincere questions: “What did our son think about that game last night? Whose our son dating now? How’s school going? Who can I reach out to at the DMV, to let them know that it is now safe for you to drive?”)

When you are going through something tough in life, you are never alone. God sends angels. They are usually in human form. Dr. W will always be one of these “angels on Earth” for me, and for my family. Always. He took “bedside manner” to a down home, yet ethereal form.

So yesterday, with my voice cracking, I told my son that he should reach out to Dr. W for a recommendation of whom he should go to now, for treatment of his epilepsy. The time that we long knew was coming, has now come. Thank you Dr. W, for everything. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of the deepest wells of my heart. I am a grateful witness and recipient, to you living a well-purposed life.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

938. What is the most beautiful city in the world?

Cycles

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Lin

When you have spent a good portion of your life striving to get ahead, raising a family, doing your best in the societal constructs of our times, and you come to a point of culmination – family grown, savings in the bank, learning from your past achievements and your failures, you give yourself a little timeout time to just breathe, and to bask, and to celebrate, and to reflect. And then . . . . the fear of growing stale and bored starts building up in you, and so you start to explore new things for new times. And these new things feel exciting and scary and uncomfortable and necessary if you want to continue to grow. My husband and I are starting baby steps into some new things, for this new phase of our shared lives.

Recently, my husband and I talked to each other about an older couple who lives across the street from us. Our neighbors are kind, and predictable and reliable. They are a comfort to watch them in their completely regular everyday routines. They are like a wonderful, well worn pair of your favorite slippers. But this couple is older than us – much older. We aren’t ready for “settled in our ways” yet. And so we have started considering new ideas and new interests and this is kind of unsettling. We are brushing the dust off of some of “our old ways”, and we are getting brave to explore parts of ourselves which we may have yet to discover. We are stirring things up to get “unsettled in our ways.”

If I have seemed distant and distracted on the blog lately, it’s because I am. I am propping up my courage to actively explore what I want in the next five years, and beyond. I am trying to get really real and authentic with myself, about what is working, about what isn’t working, and about what needs to change, and about what needs to be brought in, and about what needs to be let go, now that I am at the early stages of a brand new era of my life. I am starting to execute ideas that have been building in my mind, and this is exhilarating and intimidating all at once. I haven’t felt those kinds of feelings, this deeply, for a while, since I was finishing up my last stage of the first half of my adulthood. I understand that these are just the cycles of life, which keep on cycling us forward into our futures. And like all of the beginnings of my past life cycles, I am full of hopefulness and trepidation in equal measures. But the energetic momentum keeps me moving forward into new adventures. I honestly can’t wait to see what is up ahead and around the bend.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1690. Who makes you laugh without even trying?

Monday – Funday

Almost 20 years ago, living in an entirely different state, living in an entirely different house, we purchased a really swanky, top-of-the-line (for the time) TV and sound system. And up until yesterday, we still watched that big, old TV mostly because my husband and I are equally as stubborn, and we are both ones to hold on to our “big purchase” items like cars and furniture and electronics and favorite shoes, until they are almost not useable, not just out of thrift and/or laziness, but more so out of deep attachment and sentimentality. Our middle son is staying with us this month and being a tech-y kind of guy, he has always been the ringleader of his siblings, leading all of them to tease us about our ridiculously out-of-date TV with pixels that you still can see with the naked eye. Imagine!

So when agreeing to come shop with us at Costco over the weekend, our son finally got us over our hump. We broke down and we bought a brand new, up-to-date, way skinnier, no pixels on the screen TV (with all those other tech-y features that our son insisted that we just MUST have). And I think that the new TV is so big and bright, it hurts my eyes. But it is beautiful, and it is a great upgrade, and our son was a wonderful help, getting it all set up for us. Most importantly, I think that we’ll enjoy watching the new TV, very much, for the next 20 years.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

691. What is the last picture taken on your phone’s camera?

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. Jane Hirshfield, a famous poet, says this is why we should write poetry: “One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn’t know was in you, or in the world. Other forms of writing—scientific papers, political analysis, most journalism—attempt to capture and comprehend something known. Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.” Below is my poem for the day. Write a poem today. I dare you.

“grief crests equally in times of joy and in times of difficulty . . . “ – Chelsea Bieker

Stirrings

Sometimes the ingredients get tossed about

When you had no desire to cook them in your mind

You are left to deal with the churning mess

Of things you thought you had left behind.

I cooked this already. I stewed in it. The meal is done.

Not really, though. It was only half-baked, silly.

In some ways, this recipe has only just begun. . . .

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

400. What’s your favorite accent?

Normalize

“Normalize seeing your intuition as divine protection, mismatched vibrations as divine separation, rejection as divine redirection, sudden inner knowing as divine intervention, and walking on eggshells as a divine sign to walk away. Always trust in the perfection of divine timing.” – Inner Practitioner, X

Our middle son is in our home city this month, working out of a local hospital, as he finishes up medical school. We decided on going out to brunch this morning, after his dad was done biking, our son was done washing his car and I was done writing. So, they must be hungry men. I’m the one holding the show up. I hope that you are having a great weekend friends. See you tomorrow!

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

25. Who are your favorite writers?

Facefit Friday

Hi Friends!!! Happy Friday!!! Happy Best Day of the Week! On Fridays, I keep my thoughts on the surface. On Fridays, I focus on stuff that I like. Fridays on the blog are called “Favorite Things Friday.” Recently I read an article that stated, as you age, you are either more prone to wrinkling or to sagging. Now, I have both issues, but I believe that I am more prone to sagging, particularly in my jowls area. I am loathe to try something potentially expensive, dangerous or disfiguring, at this point in the aging game, but I did spring for a $20 Jaw Exerciser by Facefit on Amazon. Keep your expectations in check. This is not a substitution for a facelift, but I do believe I have noticed a subtle, but positive difference and it is easy to do the exercises when I am doing things at my computer, such as writing this blog. I also try to smile more frequently in my older years. Smiling is the cheapest, most effective facelift around!

Smile! It’s Friday! Enjoy your weekend! See you tomorrow!!

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

419. Do you tend to “live” in the past, present or future?

Thoughts for Thursday

+ From 2009-2018, the United States had 288 school shootings. Mexico, the next country in line for most school shootings during that time period, had 8. (CNN) Since Columbine, the United States has had 416 school shootings (Washington Post). Let me state the obvious: currently, whatever we are, or we aren’t doing, to address this problem IS NOT WORKING. What are our priorities?

+ Speaking about priorities, I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the podcaster (Jessica Lanyadoo) made an interesting analogy. She said that our ideals are the starry skies, but our values are the street lamps that light the way. Our ideals are the utopian vision of the world we would like to see. We don’t have enough power or control to turn the whole world into our ideal utopia, but we can change the light bulbs on “our street lamps.” We can make sure that we are spending our time and our energy on what we most value. When we do this, we have created a lighted path that leads the way to making footprints towards the starry skies of our ideal world.

+ There is common terminology used to describe penises: “showers or growers.” (I’ll let you google that for the more detailed explanation.) Recently, though, I heard the terminology used to describe people. “Showers” (not like rain “shower”, more like going to a broadway “show”) are the people who razzle and dazzle you from the get go. They are entrancing, charming, interesting people whom you almost instantly like, and whom you feel attracted to from the start. On the other hand, the “growers” are people who “grow on you.” The “growers” are people whom you aren’t sure how you feel about them, but if you give them a few more chances to get to know them, you start to discover their wonderful intrinsic qualities. They are like mystery packages that when you start unpacking them, they reveal really nice surprises. Showers put it all out there instantly. Showers are flowers in full bloom. Growers are flower buds. We need both kinds of people in our lives. However, in my personal experience, it’s often the “growers” who have turned out to be the steadiest, most impactful relationships in my life. Showers sometimes have the tendency to burn out fast. Showers sometimes turn out to be fake flowers.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2020. Do you like photography or videography better?

Here She Comes

I’m sorry for the delayed post. It’s been a morning of distractions which is not ideal for a distractible person, such as myself. I’ve shared the following excerpt on the blog before, a poem most often attributed to Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, but it is too poignant not to share again. I first read it when a friend sent it to me in a sympathy card after the loss of my beloved grandmother. I usually send it on in almost every sympathy card that I ever send because it has always brought me such comfort. Our son’s girlfriend just lost her beloved grandmother and so once again, I texted her this passage today:

“I am standing upon that foreshore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” “Gone where?” “Gone from my sight, that’s all.” She is just as large in mast and spar and hull as ever she was when she left my side; just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of her destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at that moment when someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout “Here she comes!” And that is dying.”

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

512. Have you ever carried a torch for someone?

Herd Animal

“Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they escape them, worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.” – Seneca (one of the more well-known Stoics)

It’s so true, isn’t it? Have you ever watched a special on wild animals, such as caribou or gazelles? You see the cute little horned/hoofed animals, hanging out with their herd, peacefully eating some greens or drinking some water out of a lake or a stream, and then the camera zooms in on some big cat, like a lion, in prowling mode, watching intently, just waiting to strike and suss out the weak animals of the herd, like babies, or the old or infirm members of the group. And then you feel that distress and panic, filling your chest cavity, as you notice that a few members of the herd, have stopped what they are doing, and they are flicking their ears, looking and listening intently, and then suddenly and almost instantly, they bolt, the entire herd starts galloping . . . . . the terrifying chase is on, and the herd is going at a frantic pace, their galloping hooves pounding the earth with an intensity of nails being hammered deeply into the ground. And even though you know that big cats have to eat, too, you feel so stressed, and also hopeful that the herd will escape harm. Either way (depending on the wild animal special you happen to be watching at the time – I’ve seen it go both ways), the chase usually does end rather quickly, either with the predator giving up, or with the predator achieving its one and only kill, out of the hundreds that it could have gotten from the big, full, hefty herd. Wild animal specials are probably the only truly realistic “reality TV.”

Still, it never fails, once the imminent danger ends, the herd quickly goes back to chomping grass and drinking water. They seem absolutely nonplussed about the trauma they just encountered, nor worried about the next trauma that is guaranteed to happen down the line. The herd of hooved animals trust their instincts to help them in dangerous moments, and while they remain vigilant, they also remain calm.

We, too, are animals. We often put too much emphasis on our thoughts and minds, and not enough emphasis on honing our instincts. Interestingly, it’s our thoughts and minds that can become our worst predatory enemies, because they keep us hostage and hyper-vigilant. They keep us in “danger mode” all of the time. This makes us exhausted and feeling spent, and then not always clued into what is “real and actual danger” and what is not.

Don’t be your own predatory Big Cat. Be a gazelle. Be a giraffe. Know that your fine-tuned instincts/intuition will kick in when real danger presents itself. Learn to trust that inner knowing, more than you trust those thoughts that keep you prisoner in either a regretful past, or a fearsome future. Chew greens. Drink water. Be peace.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

123. Would you rather own a private jet or a luxury yacht?