Author: MaggyMac

First published at 6 years old (The Daily Gleaner, Fredericton, NB, Canada). Have written something every single day of my life, if only a To-Do list. Bearing down on writing THAT book for me and myself alone. If it resonates, reaches, inspires, disgusts, bores, or otherwise affects external readers, I have achieved all I wished to achieve on this planet.

Slipsliding Away

I’m slipping. It’s interesting to observe that in myself.

I am devoid of ideas and inspiration. I am committed to this blog but feel I’ve somehow lost the plot. I want to write about my difficult past and tease out the lessons that might help someone moving forward. But my difficult past should light my way forward, no?

Well, that’s what I used to think. Turns out I am just a bumbling, struggling, flawed human being after all. My difficulties have not admitted me to any circle of esteemed healers and wise women. I am not a fraud exactly. I write my truth as I see and experience it. But I am not much of anything else these days either.

I remember back to my heyday in writing for a living. There was no room for slippage back then. Deadlines had to be met. Ministers needed to be briefed on the event you’d written a speech for them to deliver. Brochure copy had to make it to the printer when they said so – not when I felt like it.

For many years, this felt perfectly normal. Writing can become formulaic and predictable. I saw and produced so much of that writing when I was in academia and government. There really wasn’t much originality expected or required. What was required was a finessing of someone’s already established ideas (in academia) and parroting the ruling party’s policies (in government).

Stick to the expected script and not much could go wrong. Such is the skill and expectation put upon professionals. As long as words could be strung together in a type of flow with logical segues, there wasn’t too much more expected of a writer.

So I balked a bit when I read about an author who feared her award-winning novel would be the peak of her career. She spoke of being afraid to start a new project because it might not live up to the one that had brought her such accolades.

Apparently this more or less happened to Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird. Given the achievement of the novel when it was published in 1960, you could hardly blame her. She didn’t publish another novel until 2015. Turns out it was a forgotten novel by Lee and something of a prequel to Mockingbird.

All to say lately I’ve been struck by how much my head isn’t much into “healing” these days.

Instead, it is into plants and flowers and fruit trees and birds in the morning and flying overhead and gentle rainfall. And flower and seed catalogs. Now those catalogs are where a first-rate horticultural career could easily be founded.

Then it occurred to me – in that sardonic way when you hit your head and say “duh” – I am living life as a “healed” person and a “survivor.” There is no hubris in that.

Like my years of sobriety and my beautiful delicate marriage, I know how fragile and fleeting both good and bad can be in our lives. And I wonder why it seems at just that very moment when you have accepted and adapted to a raft of changes, you get more change.

I guess that is supposed to help us grow and “evolve” but it sounds like a pretty dirty trick to me. So don’t be surprised if my verbiage turns to the wonders that surround me these days.

For someone who spent most of her life running after happiness and safety and validation, it seems logical that when she gets it – knowing its’ fragility – you’d best hunker down to savor and enjoy it.

Maybe I am not slipping at all.

Maybe I am deliberately slowing down.

To smell the roses.

“Stopping to smell the roses is an act of appreciation and recognizing the source of the goodness in our lives.” Wikipedia

That checks out.

Home Safe Home

A common consequence of being raised in an abusive household is an adult survivor’s ambivalent feelings around the concept of ”home.” My feelings about “home” certainly were.

Maybe because of that background, I was determined to create one. I was as ill-prepared to do that as a chef who had never stepped foot in a food market, much less a kitchen. Home was foreign territory.

An abused child is powerless. The only option they have is to adapt and survive the environment they are in. When bad things happen or they see bad things happen, an abused child often believe it happened because they did something “wrong.” Children are notoriously egocentric..

I eventually came to distinguish feelings of “guilt” from feelings of “shame.” Guilt is feeling bad about a mistake you made. Shame comes from the feeling you are a mistake. Major difference.

I only know that I emerged into young adulthood with the twin challenges of navigating life having grown up without the basic blueprint everyone else seemed to have.

A label that sums up my childhood environment might be “bohemian intellectualism.” Or “intellectual bohemianism.” Basically an environment of free thinking adults without many rules and utterly inconsistent.

Which is pretty scary for children. If there is anyone on the planet who needs structure and boundaries, it is children. They need limits for many reasons. First, they cannot impose them on themselves. Their judgment isn’t all that. Children don’t always realize “when is enough.”

I have come to understand that setting boundaries and limits on children allows them to safely test the parameters of their lives. Life is overwhelming enough for adults to say nothing of small children. It is why parents try to protect children from life’s harsher realities before they are mature enough to handle them.

Trauma teachers frequently reference the resiliency and survival skills of abused children. All children are known to have some innate ability to “bounce back” from loss and disappointments. I believe I had that characteristic. But as a child, I remember wishing there was someone or something to guide and protect me. I concluded early that my parents weren’t capable of doing that.

Not for a lack of trying on my parents’ part, to be fair. Neither of them had healthy coping skills themselves and very poor judgment when it came to hiring babysitters and caregivers. My memories are mostly neutral or unhappy looking back on the dozen or so housekeepers we had come and go when we were children.

Caregivers infractions ranged from the benign irresponsibility of a babysitter having her boyfriend over while she cared for us. Greater violations came from imbuing trust in troubled adults to take care of vulnerable little girls. It seemed there were so many of these defectives who came into our life.

Home was never a place of safety for me. Those final few steps before arriving home from school often churned up a mixture of apprehension or anxiety. Maybe Mom was passed out on the couch, or in her bedroom. People might be sitting around drinking. Well before the sun went over the yardarm.

Those were just the daytime anxieties. On many nights, especially after guests’ drinking heavily, the anxiety got worse. One night I went into my bedroom and found a man I didn’t know passed out in my bed. I’m not all together sure where I slept that night. Maybe the couch in the basement rec room.

The work of keeping myself calm internally – both in my heart and in my mind – still requires effort. Like any “practice,” remaining calm and centered and focussed especially in the face of severe overwhelm and stress, takes commitment and repetition.

Life guided me to a healing path. I’ve figured out that the home and safety we crave is ultimately found within us. It took a long time to learn that. It is a process of building trust and belief – in the world around us and in ourselves. I don’t know which of those was harder for me to achieve.

When I compare how I am now to how I used to be, I drolly remind myself and those who witnessed me struggle, “I am much better now.”

It has taken a long time and much personal work to shake off that desperate and dogged insecurity. I have read that a loving and happy marriage can heal emotional wounds if the partners are truly there for one another.

I appreciate the safe harbor I’ve landed in. It might never have been. I look at this loving relationship with the same degree of wonder as I look back on what it took to me to survive.

Mine has not been a “normal” path. But I learned to keep myself safe and that I was worthy to have it. The evidence being that I am here now.

I can write down heartfelt words of gratitude for what is and, most especially, for what no longer is.

Perchance to Dream

It is rather brilliant how we keep the harsher realities of life at arm’s-length as we go about our day-to-day lives.

Death occurs around us all the time. It is happening somewhere right now to someone we don’t even remotely know and now never will. We rarely feel death’s bite until it is up close and personal. When someone in our family dies, or in our circle, however, the hole left in our own little world is palpable and vast.

Whether suddenly or after a long illness, the transition from interacting with a thinking, breathing individual to internalizing their utter absence is wrenching. It can stir up all manner of emotional reactions and invite you into a period of self-reflection. If you’re lucky.

Starting out in life, mostly we are lucky enough to ignore all of that. As young people struggling to find their feet and make their own lives, the primary focus in early adulthood is on building an education and career and home and family. Not for everybody, especially these days, but for many.

In his book, The Myth of Normal, author, physician and public speaker Gabor Mate challenges the collective concept of “normalcy.” He challenges our notions of what currently passes as “normal” in our physical and psychological lives in the Western world.

Instead, Mate says, our culture and the institutions it has created, are founded on very unhealthy and unstable ground. We have built most of our health and support systems focused on intervention and not on prevention.

In this sense, our society has built responses based largely on reactive and superficial markers. Doctors rarely have time to dig deep enough into a person’s history and social/emotional context to gather information about conditions that might underly and caused their illness.

Mate asserts that personal and cultural trauma contributes significantly to all health problems – both physical and psychological — and the physical and psychological cannot be fully separated from one another.

I could not agree more. It is life’s inequalities and access to opportunities that shape us. Also – as Mate explains – we are all defined for better or worse by the circumstances of our birth and the family we are born into. The continuum is widely divergent.

We paint over the divergence from our personal experience of “normalcy” with stories or rationalizations. Our co-created narrative attempts to explain away why our “normal” family is somehow legitimately different or unique or better than or less than others.

In our family, my mother dictated the value of accomplishment above almost everything. My father saw value in great wealth. While these were their espoused values, their reality was markedly different.

Ongoing struggles in both parents with addiction and self-esteem. Inter-personal violence. Destructive power struggles between my mother and father as they sought to prove superiority over the other.

So we had a house. And cars. And my parent’s had careers. And a marriage. And social standing. Until, one day, suddenly, they didn’t.

It is hard to grieve the death of a way of life. I look back now on how radically and permanently my life changed when my parents split up and we left the town I was born in. It would be rare for a child to make sense of what was happening to them in a traumatic environment at the moment. Children’s primary job is to survive and grow. Making sense of how they did that must come later.

I think of this when I reflect on the Ukraine or Gaza. The reality they are living through – the children in particular – will become their memory of ”normal” up the road. Yet we all seem to proceed with the expectation that to succeed in life, the survivors must simply put the past behind them, step up to do what must be done to make a life and integrate themselves as productive and “normal” citizens.

We do ourselves no favors by ignoring death’s reality and eventuality around us and for us. Traditional farmers seemed to have a better handle on this than city folk. The cycles of birth and death can be daily occurrences in lives lived close to the land.

Collectively, we are all “whistling past the graveyard.” So the trick is not necessarily to focus on death and its certainty while we are living our lives. But we shouldn’t discount it either.

Poet Mary Oliver dealt with an abusive childhood background by turning her focus to nature and exploring her own sense of wonder. It is available to all of us if we but look. We all need to figure out what Oliver famously asked of us: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

Answering that question for yourself and living it out is the rebuttal you will draw on when facing your own death. It will also allow you to create your own personal and unique sense of “normalcy,” and not one imposed on you by others.

It’s in you, believe me. All you have to do is find the courage and character to act on it. That is what I tell myself anyway and, for the most part, it is working.

Infinitely Meaningful

If we pursue a path of lifelong learning, the possibilities are infinite.

Too many people eventually arrive at a place in life where boredom and ennui settle in. Those people walk around with a general attitude of “been there, done that.” There is nowhere else they want to go – nothing else they want to do. What a pity.

We stop learning because we stop looking. We stop asking questions. We park our curiosity. We lose our innate sense of joy and wonder. That loss is both a choice and a process. To keep our curiosity and learning skills sharp, “use it or lose it” applies.

I have been thinking about this as I plan and plant a garden. Again. I once said that remarrying is an expression of hope over experience. I have similar feelings about gardens.

My gardening experiences are awash in a mantra of frustrations and disappointments. And, if I’m honest, learning. Much like life.

There is something about planting and growing things that repeatedly ropes me back in. At about the point I am ready to throw in the trowel forever, a redolent night-blooming jasmine grabs me by the nostrils and I’m off to the nearest nursery.

I have said that in the harsher learnings of life, I would much rather have read about them in a book. Nice thought but not how the game of life is played. Or gardening.

In recent days we have embarked on a petit patio planting project. A little lemon tree. A larger and leafier Hass avocado. A spindly bamboo that I bought just to see what it does. I hear they are super fast growers. I’m curious to see if that is true for my one tiny, little trooper. Out of an abundance of caution, I will hold off on ordering the koala bears for now.

With the careful placement of a smattering of new greenery, I feel a slight lift in my heart. Akin to falling in love. And like falling in love, I have no idea how it is going to turn out.

Gardeners must have great faith in a higher power. Call it Mother Nature or Gaia or a green thumb. I know that beyond my role as a caretaker, I don’t have much to do with the eventual success or demise of my planting. I will likely reap the rewards of this planting to the exact degree that I invest my love and care.

We’ve lost sight of the magic and wonder of plants because – like so many other practices – we have given over our management and control to others. We no longer grow our own food. We have placed our trust in others to do that for us. We have lost and gained in that process. We no longer know what harvesting and eating our own food “feels like.”

I have zero to little idea what I am doing. That’s kind of the fun in it. The sense of adventure and entering into the unknown. The challenges ahead and whether I will have the insight and fortitude to rise to meet them.

And yes, I am aware I am simply talking about plants. And that plants are everywhere. And that on a scale of one to ten, keeping plants alive is probably pretty low on the list of life priorities. Or is it?

I remember delightful lessons in Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, written 80 years ago in 1943. Saint-Exupery’s protagonist, the little prince learns that investing time and care and love in something makes that something important to us. As humans, we have an innate need for connection and the drive to make sense of our lives. The little prince finds a rose.And it becomes his whole world.

I know what will matter most to me at the end of my life will be those people and things that I choose and chose to love and how well I am/was able to do that. It is a deep and persistent longing and calling in all of us.

So here’s the question: what’s your rose?

“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…?

“They don’t find it,” I answered.

“And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…”

“Of course,” I answered.

And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2180358-le-petit-prince

This Couldn’t Hurt

I hope. I occasionally find laudable medical advice on the internet. I’m the first to admit they are not consistent and sometimes of varying quality.

But when any medical professional – ersatz or not – says we need to give up sugar, I pay attention.

I will one day write about my ongoing power struggle with sugar and how it came to that. But today – ersatz or not – I am posting this prescriptive list because it seems reasonable. Not gospel, not an alternative to regular medical attention and not guaranteed to cure cancer or even prevent it.

But it seems sensible enough to share. With that important disclaimer and proviso out of the way, read what this Dr. Gupta guy has to say about cleaning up our diet to clean up and preserve our health.

The logic is irrefutable, even if I follow some of these prescriptions haphazardly.

No one should die of cancer, says Dr. Gupta.

(1) The first step is to stop eating sugar. When there is no sugar in the body, cancer cells die naturally.

(2) The second step is drinking a glass of lemon juice mixed with a glass of hot water and after about 1 month the cancer cells shrink, drinking hot lemon juice can prevent cancer. Just don’t put any sugar in it. Hot lemonade is more beneficial than cold lemonade. A study from the University of Maryland found that natural medicines are 1,000 times better than chemicals.

(3) The third step to reduce the risk of cancer is by consuming 3 tablespoons of organic coconut oil in the morning and night.

You can use both treatments to prevent diabetes.

01. Yellow and purple potatoes prevent cancer.

02. Never eat more than 4 eggs a week.

03. Eating chicken’s back (thighs etc.) may cause stomach cancer.

04. Never eat fruit after a meal. We must eat fruit before we eat.

05. Do not drink tea during menstruation.

06. We should consume less soya milk.

07. Eat tomato on an empty stomach (hungry stomach).

08. Have a glass of water every morning before meals to prevent fatigue.

09. Never eat 3 hours before bedtime.

10. Avoiding water can lead to diabetes and high blood pressure. The main basis of nutrition should be high consumption of water.

11. Eat toast or oven baked toast.

12. Put the phone away at bedtime.

13. Drink 10 glasses of water a day to prevent bladder cancer.

14. Drink more water during the day until night

15. Drinking more than 2 cups of coffee a day can cause insomnia and stomach problems.

16. Need to burn less fat. Digestion lasts between 5-7 hours, which makes you feel more tired.

17. Eat less after 5:00 pm

18. Bananas, grapes, spinach, squash, peaches make you feel happier.

19. Sleeping less than 8 hours a day affects brain function. Half an hour afternoon break makes you look younger.

20. Boiled tomatoes have better healing properties than raw tomatoes.

21. Hot lemon juice destroys cancer cells. Warm lemon juice improves our quality of life and allows us to live longer.

Add 2-3 lemon slices to warm water to get our daily drink.

Lemon leaves a bitter smell in warm water, which is the best ingredient to kill cancer cells.

Cold lemon juice only has vitamin . It prevents hypertension.

Hot lemon juice prevents the development of cancerous tumors.

Clinical tests have shown that hot lemon juice works.

Treatment with this type of lemon not only eliminates evil cells, but does not affect healthy cells.

Citric acid and lemon, lemon juice, lower blood pressure and prevent deep vein thrombosis, reduces blood clots by regulating circulation.

No abject quackery here that I can identify. All of these suggestions are worth a shot to preserve our health. If we can but create and stick to the required discipline. An ongoing work in progress for me.

Thank You In Advance

What ever would the world do without war? How ever would it have evolved without brave men and women who donned uniforms and weapons when called upon and did their bit “for the side”?

The two latest world wars seemed to have a clear sense of purpose. In my Dad’s eyes, the goal of World War Two was simple: “Defeat Hitler.”

Our debt to veterans is honored on one day each year on this continent. Remembrance Day, it is called, in Canada. Veteran’s Day in the US. There may be similar occasions honoring the fallen in other countries but my research has not advanced that far.

Those who fought for our freedom paved the way for us to continue a way of life. That can be argued ad infinitum but is simply out of place on Remembrance Day on Saturday this year.

I was always struck by how deeply Remembrance Day services affected me. There is something profoundly moving and tender about watching declining old men and women rise shakily from their lawn chairs.

They gain their footing and toss off their lap quilts to salute their flag. Of course, we see broken old people and cannot see the strong, youthful soldiers they remember in their minds’ eye.

War is easy to forget and discount if you aren’t touched by it personally. For my parents, it was a huge and affecting chunk of their adulthood that solidified their pride in and allegiance to their country. It gave them a common purpose and a common cause.

Hitler made an easy, if evasive, target. He was so unarguably evil and psychotic. He surrounded himself with similarly sick souls who shared his inhumanity. Sadly, the harsh truth is that bullying and intimidation are effective short-term tools for pulling and keeping people in line. RIP six million Jews. Hitler’s brownshirts were merely thugs and criminals and they were good at it.

It baffles me how widespread and entrenched the banality of evil can be. Most local Germans living close to concentration camps refuted any knowledge of what had “really been going on”. Perhaps the worst is, had they known, what would or could they have done?

It was heartening in the wake of World War Two to see many international cooperation organizations emerge. Devoted to achieving and maintaining – if not global world peace exactly – then overarching institutions dedicated to wide scale cooperation and information sharing.

The United Nations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Food and Agriculture Organization. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The World Health Organization. The World Bank. And more than a dozen others.

Spotty and underwhelming as the overall record of United Nations organizations may be, it serves the world to have them in place. Yes, they are big, gangly organizations that don’t have a great track record at fulfilling their mandates or promises of defusing conflict or stopping wars. But I would argue, it is better we have them than not.

The world when the last World Wars took place is not remotely the same world as it is today. Young people today have little to no connection to the costs of war or what exactly the evil was that our ancestors fought.

It is good to have international organizations who ostensibly have an eye on the “big picture” as concerns the world. It is also good that our present military and government sets aside a day a year to thank our veterans.

It serves to remind us who were not there of what others lost and gained for our benefit. Their sacrifice was not only of time. Their youth, and youthful ideals, rarely came home from the front intact.

So I will plant myself somewhere quiet on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour. I will happily spend two minutes to remember those who went before to fight for our freedom and protect us from living in oppression.

I don’t mean to sound like Pollyanna. I don’t much like war either. And, of course, I wish there were better ways to resolve conflict. But November 11th isn’t really about any of that.

It is a collective expression of honor and respect for those gutsy men and women who joined up to join forces against evil when they were most needed. What they left behind is not perfect by a long shot. But they did accomplish this.

Theoretically, we can follow our own inner dictates to build the lives we want. Imperfect, I realize. But when we celebrate our collective victory over the failure of that twisted little Austrian, I know my thanks are abundant. Simply because we don’t have to live in a regime according to the dictates of him and his fellow henchmen.

For that reason alone, I happily say thank you day after day after day to my many ancestors who served, and I will say a special thank you, especially this coming Saturday.

RIP Dad RIP Scott RIP Monty RIP Joyce RIP Frank, et. al.

A Friend Indeed

Thank you, Gary Stairs.

“Piglet?” said Pooh.

“Yes?” said Piglet.

“I’m scared,” said Pooh.

For a moment, there was silence.

“Would you like to talk about it?” asked Piglet, when Pooh didn’t appear to be saying anything further.

“I’m just so scared,” blurted out Pooh.

“So anxious. Because I don’t feel like things are getting any better. If anything, I feel like they might be getting worse.

People are angry, because they’re so scared, and they’re turning on one another, and there seems to be no clear plan out of here, and I worry about my friends and the people I love, and I wish SO much that I could give them all a hug, and oh, Piglet! I am so scared, and I cannot tell you how much I wish it wasn’t so.”

Piglet was thoughtful, as he looked out at the blue of the skies, peeping between the branches of the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood, and listened to his friend.

“I’m here,” he said, simply. “I hear you, Pooh. And I’m here.”

For a moment, Pooh was perplexed.

“But… aren’t you going to tell me not to be so silly? That I should stop getting myself into a state and pull myself together? That it’s hard for everyone right now?”

“No,” said Piglet, quite decisively. “No, I am very much not going to do any of those things.”

“But – ” said Pooh.

“I can’t change the world right now,” continued Piglet. “And I am not going to patronise you with platitudes about how everything will be okay, because I don’t know that.

“What I can do, though, Pooh, is that I can make sure that you know that I am here. And that I will always be here, to listen; and to support you; and for you to know that you are heard.

“I can’t make those Anxious Feelings go away, not really.

“But I can promise you that, all the time I have breath left in my body…you won’t ever need to feel those Anxious Feelings alone.”

And it was a strange thing, because even as Piglet said that, Pooh could feel some of those Anxious Feelings start to loosen their grip on him and could feel one or two of them start to slither away into the forest, cowed by his friend, who sat there stolidly next to him.

Pooh thought he had never been more grateful to have Piglet in his life.

Oliviral.com

You Move Too Fast

In my oft-used marketing spiel to executives about building awareness campaigns, I often used the potter’s wheel analogy. Executives as a type are eager to demonstrate and push to get quick results. But quick doesn’t always translate to “best” or even to “better.”

Every bowl that is thrown starts with the proverbial pound of clay thrown onto the wheel. As the wheel begins to turn, the potter engages with the clay in a mutually creative endeavor. The wheel starts to spin, slowly at first, and the water is thrown on the clay. The potter gets into the slurry with his/her hands.

It is a common mistake for newbie potters to have difficulty controlling the shape and speed of the bowl or vessel they want to make. Therein lies the craft. The slow, steady coaching of that amorphous lump of clay into an object of beauty and utility is not easy. I learned that in a pottery class.

My New Brunswick potter friend, Tom Smith, who make beautiful raku mugs and sold them by the hundreds, chuckled when I told him that, and said: “We love pottery courses. It’s the quickest way people really find out how hard it is to do what we do.”

New potters let the clay get away from them. The clay can flop over precariously in one direction or another. Hold the clay too long or too firmly and the undisciplined form rushes upwards through your fingers. Speaking personally, flailing about with your hands and fingers trying to tame and pull the wayward clay back into submission is a fool’s errand.

The emerging product on the wheel looks more like an ostrich in need of a chiropractor than anything remotely resembling a serving dish. Once the clay has reached a certain height, there is little option but to scrap the whole project and start over from scratch.

The potter may have learned valuable lessons in this botched attempt. Still, it may have cost considerable time and effort. The corporate world doesn’t graciously allow, or forgive, much botching. Ergo my caution to eager executives to build a campaign slowly and methodically for the best outcome to their marketing/sales/communication plans.

It feels like we have lost our trust in process and investing the necessary time, often years, to perfect our craft. What used to be called apprenticeship seems to have gone extinct along with the late lamented dodo bird.

Writers bandy about a story about meeting a brain surgeon at a cocktail party who declares to the author: “After retirement, I am going to write a book.” To which the author replies: “Isn’t that funny? I was thinking that after I leave my writing career behind, I am going to take up brain surgery.”

Point made but likely lost on the surgeon who could likely never equate the intricacies of his craft with what writers do. Everyone can write, they reason. Which is true, I guess, if qualitatively variant. Writers are used to insensitivity about the actual skill and rigor required to practice their practice.

As Ringo Starr would put it: “You know it don’t come easy.”

Lately I have been having two key thoughts. Some empathy and concern about young people lulled into believing they are “ready for prime time” long before they know what “prime time” even is.

It used to take years to become an overnight success. Today any cute kid with a shtick can publish, perform and profit from an online presence. My question always is, “But for how long?” I wonder how long their audience will continue to be enthralled by make-up application videos once they have aged out into the real work world, had babies and are trying to snag a mortgage.

I am as guilty of techno-distraction as the next person. But I am trying to find a way out of that dependence. I want to revel in the joy that comes from sitting at a potter’s wheel for hours creating pot after pot with well-behaved lumps of clay. (Full confession, I don’t ever expect to get there. But I can dream, can’t I?)

I want to lose myself in amazing books that transport me. Almost anywhere. I’m selective, of course. I prefer to traipse through the mysteries of the heart, mind and soul. Some authors manage to take me on that journey. I often opt for trusted experts who have taught me more in a week with their book than I might otherwise have learned in years.

All to say, I feel an urge to slow down. Not as a surrender to the vagaries of age but to the value and quality of time. Satisfying as completing tasks may be, I don’t see countless hours knocking items off my to-do list as the memories I wish to savor on my deathbed.

I want to spend more time with family, friends and loved ones. I want to spend more time with myself. I want to spend more time in my garden. Yesterday, the HASS avocado tree we ordered arrived. I am beyond excited to see how it grows.

Note to self: Slow down long enough and frequently enough to make sure you can enjoy the process. Big work for a Type A personality like me, but necessary.

The Sounds of Silence

I have nothing to say. That interests me. Words are important currency in our society. People often seem to value them above a lot of other elements. Snakeoil salesmen have historically used them to good effect.

When thoughts and words aren’t forthcoming, it feels odd to me. We need words to offer and feel validation. We use them to connect to and shape our environment.

Words are important for plotting a path in life. Words underpin the narrative upon which we build our beliefs and develop our goals. Without words, we cannot articulate our dreams nor map a way to actualize them.

What is it about having nothing to say that intrigues me? In part, words have been my survival tool. I have relied on my ability to write or talk my way either out of or into any situation I believed I wanted to be part of.

I cannot say words were equally effective in improving my judgment, however. Some of those situations I got into I very quickly I wanted to get out of. There is a lot of wisdom in the caution “be careful what you wish for.”

We don’t much value nothing these days. It doesn’t sell well or for much money. And yet, there is so much available for us to learn and feel in nothingness and silence.

Most people fear emptiness. Recall in your own life uncomfortable silences that may have made certain interactions difficult and awkward. Recall the allure of frantic celebrations or parties we attended when thinking or speaking might have been impossible. The din of people trying to talk over loud music drowns out any intimacy there could be.

I once attended a 10 day silent meditation retreat in a beautiful country setting based on the ancient Vipassana tradition. Vipassana is a meditation discipline wherein we train our minds to “see things as they really are.” My interpretation of Vipassana is that by letting the mental clutter in our minds settle, we can clearly see ourselves and others.

Here is what the worldwide Vipassana website tells us about the practice:

There are three steps to the training. The first step is, for the period of the course, to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual activity, speaking falsely, and intoxicants. This serves to calm the mind, which otherwise would be too agitated to perform the task of self-observation.

The next step is to develop some mastery over the mind by learning to fix one’s attention on the natural reality of the ever changing flow of breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils.

By the fourth day the mind is calmer and more focused, better able to undertake the practice of Vipassana itself: observing sensations throughout the body, understanding their nature, and developing equanimity by learning not to react to them.

Finally, on the last full day participants learn the meditation of loving kindness or goodwill towards all, in which the purity developed during the course is shared with all beings.

https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/about/vipassana

The experience of a silent retreat is purifying. And calming. But many don’t make it through the ten days. Days Three and Four are well known as “bolt” days. These are the days when people are most likely to leave. For some people, being alone with their thoughts in complete isolation is too difficult and too frightening.

I believe you have to be ready before you undergo a ten day course of complete silence and disconnection from the outside world (no cellphones, journals or even books are allowed). Participants are free to go as they wish. They are also free to come back if/when they feel ready.

Finding a time and place to experience complete silence and disconnection is no mean feat. Social media bombards us with an endless array of opportunities to connect and share and communicate with others. Quantity has won the day over quality.

So embracing my inner Luddite, I am better and happier generally when I carve out tranches of silent “me time.” Early mornings are good for that. And what is it I do in that space? Nothing.

I try doing something that is very hard for me. Just being. I ignore my devices, TV and my phone. No reading or writing emails. Not even writing this blog until I have had some nurturing quiet time. I like to sit and absorb what the world around me is offering me in those periods.

Birdsong in nearby trees. Jet planes flying overhead. Squirrels scuttling at top speed across the wooden fence in our backyard. I often do a body checkin at the same time.

How does my tummy feel today? Are my muscles aching from that swim yesterday? Am I hungry? Or thirsty? The body chatters away incessantly, if wordlessly, with us if we just tune in to it.

Odd admission for a writer, no doubt. But I believe in the underlying logic. By carving out time to card through my thoughts and reactions, the output of words is a little clearer and more focused.

As Vipassana aims to teach, I feel more confident emerging from silence that I am seeing the world as it really is, rather than how I want to see it. Maybe the world would be kinder and more sane if more people did.

Illogical Conclusions

I once read about a woman who had the peculiar habit of cutting the ends off a ham before roasting it in the oven. For no good reason. When one of her children finally asked why she did that, the woman didn’t have an obvious answer.

“It is what my mother always did,” she replied. “But why?” her daughter insisted. So the woman asked her mother. “Why did you always cut the ends off the ham before you put it in the oven?”

“Well, it was the only way I could make it fit in the baking pan I had.”

Have you ever explored where your personal beliefs come from? The ham roast example is pretty specific, I realize. Need a more generic example?

“Girls aren’t good at maths.” “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” “No one in my family ever went to university.” “A woman’s place is in the home.” Granted, those “beliefs” are all a little dated. My age may be showing.

Be that as it may, there are still a whole bunch of people who earnestly believe, “A woman can’t do … [fill in the blank].” It is such small and limited and exhausting thinking. Exhausting because it is an uphill battle to confront and overcome such thinking. Not only in others but often in yourself.

We conduct our lives and do certain things we do based on our beliefs. What we believe, guides and informs our daily life. To keep things fresh, I find it a good practice to challenge my beliefs occasionally.

I have had a nagging belief in lack for my whole life. The belief was instilled through suffering traumatic losses in my young life. That pain and chaos created all kinds of dysfunctional issues and drama around acquisition and money.

I would spend, then regret my spending, then take things back to the store and then get mad because I either needed or really wanted what I’d bought. I’d go back to the store.

I’d have a full-blown argument in my head about the merits of either buying something or saving the money right there in the women’s clothing aisle. Talk about exhausting. I was lucky I wasn’t committed.

Make no mistake. Letting go of our beliefs can be painful, too. No one likes being “wrong.” Or even if we inherited the belief and are merely following the dictates of the family and culture we grew up in, it can still hurt.

Aside from your whole guiding belief system, there are millions of lesser beliefs we might take a look at and toss. A timely one for me is the fear and losses of aging. I am at that juncture but have never been more happy and at peace with myself and my life.

Yet I am bombarded daily with a dazzling array of products and procedures that will reverse this dastardly process and vague hints of irrelevance and looming discard that accompany my advancing years. Poppycock.

Yesterday I watched the movie, Nyad. Starring powerhouse actors Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, I first noted how lined their faces have become. And that there weren’t heaps of make-up applied to cover that.

Nyad is the story of marathon swimmer Diana Nyad who – at 64 – managed to swim from Cuba to Florida, a distance of some 110 miles. The producers took great care to make it not look easy.

In fact, Diana Nyad eventually only succeeded after four previous failed attempts over as many years. The online movie bumpf around this film makes a lot of noise about Nyad’s achievement breaking down stereotypes of age and gender.

The other word it uses – and I encourage my female friends to consider adding this to their own personal belief system – is that older women can be pure badasses. The stereotype of sweet little old ladies (SLOL) who quietly fade off into the distance is a belief worth tossing.

I take heart from the great ladies and role models out there who have turned the SLOL archetype on its head. Old AND sexy. Betty White. Carol Burnett. Sophia Loren. Ann Margaret. Helen Mirren. Judi Dench. Elizabeth Hurley. I could go on.

Overriding beliefs I’ve had all my life, that I have looked at closely and see no need to let go of are these: never give up and never say never. Because by giving up it is then and only then, that you are done.

I believe then as I always have that “what will be is up to me.” You should, too. As for society’s insidious perception that we may getting too old to take on new challenges, I like to quote my Dad in response to the naysayers and feet of clay people: “Up ‘em.”