Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’m cranky this morning. To me, sleep is probably the most crucial tool in my self-care toolbox. When I have a terrible night’s sleep, I’m just the worst example of my most awful, terrible, dark-sided self. Last night I got creative with dinner and I mixed some ground turkey with tabouli, which I have to say was delicious (and my family agreed). I decided to be generous by sharing some of it with the dogs, by mixing it up in their food. Big mistake. Colossal error in judgment, on my part. Josie, our collie, has a sensitive stomach and my husband and I paid the heavy price for my short-sighted stupidity, last night. Josie woke us up about every two hours to go out. (at least she saved us a mess in the house. She’s tidy like that.) It was like having a newborn again. I read that earlier this year, a 57-year-old woman, in the United States, gave birth naturally to a baby boy. All I can say is, “God bless her.”
Before I started writing today, I decided to check out Holiday Mathis’ horoscope column to see if she thought that there was any hope of me, salvaging the rest of my day. Holiday Mathis often writes in wise riddles. This was my horoscope for today:
“The special fondness between you and your people gets the spotlight as you laugh and share stories, many retold for the 100th time. This is how a legacy gets cemented.” (I’m a Sag, by the way.)
Now, I am not sure how good I will be at telling any stories today, without a level of snark and irritability, stemming from my exhaustion, but we do have our weekly Family Facetime call tonight. And I have noticed that I repeat a lot of the same old stories that I have told at least 100 times, on these family calls, and also to hundreds of other different people. When I was a kid and my elders did that repeating of the same old stories, I always figured that it was a form of aging and memory loss, but now I am wise. As I am telling one of my fond stories, I am fully aware that I have told the same story 543 times previously. As I am telling the same old story, there’s a voice in my head saying, “Oh, come on! Lady! You’ve told this story again and again and again. Look at their eyes glazing over. Stop betraying your age, you old fool!” But I can’t help myself. As an elder who commands some respect, I have my captive audience.
I think that maybe I didn’t repeat my stories so much when I was younger because I didn’t have as many stories. Or I was taking it for granted that I still had a whole lifetime to make stories. Or maybe I didn’t have the wisdom to glean anything from my stories to make them worth sharing. Or perhaps when I was younger, I was more self-conscious, and thus more afraid of being called “boring.” I honestly don’t know. All that I do know, is that as I age, I repeat a lot of my same old stories and it’s not a memory thing. I am fully aware that I do it.
I do like Holiday’s positive spin on it, though. My husband and I have been watching the Vikings series on TV. The Vikings did not have a written language. Their history is all based on legend and lore. Many times during the show, we witness Viking mothers telling stories of their rich history and ancestors to their children before they fall asleep. In the words of Holiday, “This is how legacy gets cemented.”
Most of the stories that I tell again and again, have a degree of fondness and intimacy and hope and humor interlaced in them. Many times I am repeating these stories to the very people whom I made the stories with. Maybe this is a way to try to capture and to keep the wonderful feelings that the experience brought about for all of us. Maybe repeating stories is about holding on to the very essence of all of the players involved. So that when these loved ones are no longer physically with us, we have captured the very spirit that will make them more real to those people who will never meet them physically, but will learn about their heritage, through legacy and lore. People and experiences that are important to us, we want to keep. We want to cement these people and experiences into posterity. Our stories are our lives. Our stories are our way to remain alive forever. Our stories are just a way of transferring the energy of the love and the life that exists in our hearts, on to those who go after us for generations to come, in this adventure that we call Life.
