Today is a day spent mostly doing chores again and getting ready for the holidays. I also started a Coursera class on research for essay writing. I’m hoping to mail the rest of my packages and get some groceries. I also have another shot in my low back.
I’m finding I feel stronger and more hopeful than I ever have. Much of it is due to choosing to believe I can control my thoughts and my life. The other piece is honestly looking at the good in my life with eyes open and letting the envy of a different life fall away.
In short, I feel the agency to have perspective about the negatives and focus on the positives. I haven’t felt like this for a long time.
I’ve heavily focused on what has been wrong. It’s been hard when my brain was awash in cortisol. My whole body really, was in a fight/flight stance for years/decades. That definitely led me to believe it was no longer a short-term situation but something habitual that wasn’t getting any better.
I remember clearly the time I sat up on the roof of our old building and wrote in a small journal that I must be cursed. I had come to realize that something was seriously wrong w/ both of us. We were not moving ahead and kept creating situations that brought dangerous and unhealthy people into our lives. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I finally saw that we weren’t having the same experiences other people were having when they talked about life’s stresses, etc. Ours felt exponentially harder and stranger, more intense, more scary, more potentially damaging.
We are both coming out of that place. I can look at our new office space as a real step forward. It’s a real thing, a positive change. We are no longer in a rundown building. We are no longer needing to scrape by. I can look at all that still needs to get done at the office to make it really shine, or I can marvel that John and I together created a company that has a Main St. HQ with almost twenty employees. We own a company with revenues of almost $2 million. We could sell it tomorrow for probably double that or more. That’s our hard work.
We almost separated over the stress, but we didn’t. We aren’t.
I can keep focusing on what has happened and how hard it’s been or keep looking ahead at how things have improved and the neat things to come. It’s up to me.
The prayer I say many mornings has this phrasing:
I will kindle my fire this morning
In presence of the holy angels of heaven,
In presence of Ariel of the loveliest form,
In presence of Uriel of the myriad charms,
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
Without fear, without terror
of any one under the sun,
But the Holy Son of God to shield me.
I would also add that I am shielding myself by choosing this life. I want to be wide awake, and I don’t want to always be looking at someone’s else’s life. I love interacting with people and learning from them. But that’s communal, shared life that breeds that cross pollination of wisdom. Envy is different, and I’ve been guilty of that.
*****
One thing I observed when I was visiting my friend in California. She’s very organized, very smart, very into food and natural healing. She lights little fires each morning in her kitchen with sage and palo santo. In another culture, she might be thought of as a little witchy.
She has all of her vitamins and many of her oils, etc. in a nice basket under her kitchen island. She pulls it out for different things and shoves it back.
I came back from the trip inspired to do the same. I have always disliked our vitamins and pills being in the same cupboard as glasses but didn’t know what else to do with them.
I spent last Sunday reorganizing the kitchen, getting rid of quite a bit, and moving all of that down into a large drawer next to the dishwasher. It feels much more appropriate and accessible. It’s easy to see everything that’s in there. It feels less central as well to the kitchen. It’s easier to throw something into a drawer that try and reach into a higher cupboard to see everything.
I remember well my Dad wandering from his bedroom to the bathroom and making many, many stops at the hall cupboard for medicine. Sometimes I’d open it and look at what he was taking. There was a lot in there.
It was a security for him and at times, medicine has been a security for me.
It feels good to be getting our medicine into a drawer and to be making food the central part of our health and healing. I admire my friend and how she’s learned so much and tried so many things. She really has crafted a healthy life in an somewhat unhealthy culture. She’s inspired me to keep moving toward healthy eating. I have other friends who inspire me to be outside and to exercise more. Others help me with my mental and spiritual life.
It all comes together and integrates, for health or unwellness. Your body keeps the score.
*****
As we get closer to Christmas, I’ve thought a lot about gift giving and buying. I wish I hadn’t created such a monster of the gifts. It’s what I grew up with and something I’m good at. It just takes a lot of time, and is such a focus now, we don’t do anything else.
I wish a long time ago we’d have changed to doing something different in the morning, like going on a walk or maybe taking blankets to a shelter. We’d have a nice breakfast and a few gifts, but not the volume we have now.
Last year I definitely toned it down, but it seems hard to really do fully.
I keep seeing ads for things that are just the very best version of something, like a perfect shower cap or the perfect socks. It seems that’s what a lot of our culture has become, finding the perfect something or other, not just getting it in it’s most basic form.
I’m negative on this, but I guess the fact that the second cause of death in 18-34 year olds in my country is suicide makes me constantly wonder what is happening to society where we have so much stuff and it’s not meeting anyone’s needs. You have to question it all, the entire machine, to craft a life different than what you are nudged toward.
The Blue Zones information and research talks about how healthiest people live in communities where they are nudged toward healthy living in food, movement and social aspects. Our culture nudges us toward isolation, shopping and unhealthy eating. So I’m constantly fighting that and trying to find ways to do something different.
*****
I got several shots this afternoon in my back of a sugar solution, ozone and some kind of numbing substance. It’s a form of ProLo therapy that osteopaths use to help with healing and damage in the faschia and nerves. I think he is really onto something. I’ve had this pain in my back for years literally and it also radiates out to my left hip. It’s kept me from being aggressive in any way athletically. I’ve assumed it was related to sitting strange for twenty years due to pelvic pain.
So I’m tired tonight and also have the rectal pain a bit again. On we go. At least I’m not depressed.
My attitude toward Jay is changing dramatically. I saw a quote today that said to avoid the index-finger position as it wants to blame people. I’ve done too much of that. I’m glad i’m ending those days.
I also read something recently that talked about focusing on your partner’s positive qualities. If you focus on the negative, that tends to get magnified and it’s like nothing good is happening. I have really, really done that alot. I’m focusing now more on the good that’s happening and it’s making a big difference. I feel a spark for him that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s incredible.
*****
I’m really exhausted by the gift-giving at the holidays. I feel this pressure to have gifts under the tree. I don’t know what to buy Scott and I’m tired of giving gifts. I’d love to do stockings and then maybe one under the tree or something. We’ll see. I’d like to just do a check and a few gifts, the stockings. I’d like to do something nice for an organization as well. We’ve never embraced that much.
We’ll see. I am part of the problem as I said earlier. I need to change and create new traditions that are less around opening gifts.
I just read some notes from last summer up at the cabin, and I’m sad at some of what I believed and how I acted. I have had a lot to change. I was in the habit of blaming, and there was a lot of pain that had lasted a long time. I’m glad I’m seeing that things are different, that I’m looking ahead and seeing the changes, seeing forgiveness and change myself.
I’m also aggressively getting through the piles everywhere, the projects that have kept me blocked from creating. I’m digging through it all, all over the house, paring down. It feels good and it is in fact liberating. It is affecting my ability to be creative. I’m excited.