I needed something light and happy today.
Hope you do, too. In any case, that’s what you’re getting.
From Reader’s Digest.
That constant companion and friend in doctor’s waiting rooms everywhere.
Well, up until COVID’s dreaded magazine-sharing buzzkill, at least.
It amuses and befuddles me how life works. Okay. How the Universe works. And even more explicitly than that. How the Universe often comes up with messages meant just for me at the very moment I need them. What’s up with that?
Lest this sound wildly narcissistic, do not imagine I believe myself to be any different than any other human being in this respect.
I believe we all get guidance and messages from “somewhere” about how best to live our lives. I am not at all certain where that “somewhere” is actually located. It might be internal guidance from deep within us. That “still, small voice” of Biblical fame.
It might be from somewhere in the Universe “out there.” Though I admit that concept is a little flaky. Especially if you think about it. Not something you can see, touch or visit.
The concept of god is equally flaky if you think about that for too long either. Explain?
“Well, he has a long grey beard and lives in Heaven and doles out favors and punishments as he sees fit in his all-seeing and all-knowing wisdom. And he makes the call about when you die.” Ya. Well. Okay.
The peace I have made with these “messages” we receive and their attribution is that “something” (not necessarily someone) created all of what is around us. Created “us,” in fact.
And I have no more insight into how it all came about and keeps going than I do into advanced calculus. Or even basic calculus come to think of it.
So I was moved to write about this subject today thanks to my friends of a couple of years now at KN Literary Publishing Services. Today in an email, they shared three quotes.
Which quote feels like exactly what you needed to hear today?
Hi Margot!
#1: “If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.” — Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
#2: “You must remember that your story matters. What you write has the power to save a life, sometimes that life is your own.” ― Stalina Goodwin, Make It Write!
#3: “The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.” — Dani Shapiro, Still Writing
I am a long-time fan of memoirist Mary Karr. Normally I would choose her quote just because she is so damn smart and most of what she writes is so totally on point.
But I chose #2. Maybe because lately my faith is ebbing a little in this blog writing exercise. Maybe because I well realize my voice is only one of millions out there.
Millions of others are cranking out musings and insights and selling their expertise and knowledge like a mid-West US land office in the late 1800s (in the “real” world and marketplace).
The last line of Stalina Goodwin’s quote served up a timely reminder for me: I write for myself. Yes, in part, to save myself.
Or maybe in the hope I will impart to nameless others how I saved myself. Like the lines on looseleaf, I write every day to capture what I need to stay within those lines.
That is the power of ritual. It is easy to fall off or away from our chosen path if we simply stop doing it. In the past, I have done exactly that. I lived for long, fallow periods in a creative desert where my most intentional act was getting up and out of bed each morning. Depression is a total creative buzzkill.
So thinking back on those “dry” days reenergizes me somewhat. I know it doesn’t mean a tinker’s dam whether I write this daily blog post or not. But here is what I do know.
I know for sure that others feel exactly the same way. Not about blog posts, perhaps, but about going to the office or factory or church or staying in their marriage or even getting up and going out of the house every day.
I know with certainty that most others occasionally question their worth, inherent value and what meaning their life has on this planet.
And just as we all must breathe air, drink water and eat regularly to survive, we need to nurture and regularly revisit what gives our lives meaning. Stop any of these actions for too long and life as we know it (as well as any hope for future creative expression) stops.
As I read further into KN Literary’s observations on the quote I chose, I learned questions of meaning is generic to spiritual writers in particular. And spiritual writers – they caution – are rarely “overnight successes.” Not that that is what I am going for.
The most resonant takeaway was that the wisdom spiritual writers share must be their own. My life has been influenced – and yes, even saved – by dozens of wise and spiritual writers whose works I stumbled across just when I needed them.
What an honor it would be to think that someone read something of mine and it gave them the insight they need to make a difficult and necessary step to move forward in their life.
The lyrics in one of the Barenaked Ladies most iconic songs, says: “It’s all been done before.” The song is largely about the cyclical nature of life and love. It suggests that everything we do and experience has happened before and will inevitably happen again.
So I know what I write about has been explored and written about many times before. So what? It is undoubtedly true, as good ol’ King Solomon opined: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Or, as good ol’ Will Shakespeare put it, “Therein lies the rub”.
But not everything “under the sun” has been explored or written about by me. So I’ll keep at it for that reason alone, if no other presents.
With that, me and the Universe rest our case.
WordPress prompt: What’s your dream job?
I‘m happy to report I’ve already had dream jobs. A couple of them.
I was a researcher and fact checker at Maclean’s newsmagazine back in the day. That was sweet. They essentially paid me to read profusely and catch errors in articles written by successful, well-known, well-established writers before the articles were published.
Wow. Prestige AND money.
I loved my colleagues in the Maclean’s research department. Each and every one of them near genius. Geniuses in that understated kind of geeky way where those kind of people know a lot but don’t flash it around. They would have made excellent Jeopardy contestants.
So if there has been a recurring theme in my favorite jobs, it has been those where I learned a ton. As part of my radio producer role with As it Happens at CBC Radio, I HAD to buy about a dozen newspapers every day and as many magazines every month. That the CBC paid for! Then I got to read them cover to cover. I felt like I was stealing.
I don’t rightly know why learning and constantly stretching my brain are so important to me. I shouldn’t dismiss it. Had I not leaned that way from early on, I would not have been able to figure out and make sense of the looniness that plagued my childhood.
Smarts allowed me to gather three degrees which did wonders for my resume. The missing link, however, was that my emotional tank wasn’t quite as full. I finally figured out that with $5 and all of my degrees, I could get a coffee at any Starbucks. Likely closer to $8 now, but you get my point.
My real life work has been emotional. I had to learn self-regulation. I had to learn to sit with my pain. I had to learn not to act out my pain or fear or anger. This was by no means a dream job. But it was a vitally important one.
In emotional healing, I had to deploy the basics of project management. I could not achieve my life goals until the foundational elements I missed out on were addressed. That was terrifying but necessary work. A successful outcome was never guaranteed.
Emotional damage cost me relationships. It cost me jobs. It took a lot of what I had been or who I thought I was and threw it out the window. It turned me into someone I am only just getting to know. This me is more stable and more cautious than emotionally overwrought me. Less impulsive than I was in my youth. That alone is saving me a lot of grief.
So growing up has been neither a dream job or a cake walk. But it has been necessary. I’ve offloaded a lot of what doesn’t serve me any more. I’ve picked up some skills and attitudes along the way that I thought would be forever out of my reach.
And I’m living a life that at one time seemed would be an unattainable dream. My learning and growing process has been erratic and full of stops/starts and highs and lows. Like most everyone, I figure
Our minds and hearts are often kinder to us in retrospect than we are to ourselves. I look back now on those dream jobs I had and give thanks that they happened at all. Even situations that went south taught me lessons I needed to learn.
We all occasionally say: “I wish I’d known then, what I know now.” But we didn’t and we couldn’t and now here we are. So, like loving parents, we must applaud and love ourselves for what we’ve learned and how far we’ve actually come in life.
As a wife in a happy marriage with a daily blog I get to write, I’d say this is about as close to a dream job as I ever wanted. A far greater purpose than I could have imagined when I was young.
At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful your work is, and how much satisfaction you get from your career, a job can’t love you back.
That was the greatest learning and takeaway from all the jobs I got to do.
And I’m good with that.
ED. NOTE: I never talk (much) or directly about political issues. Today I was moved to for a couple of reasons. The spectacle that is unfolding “out there” of unchecked evil rising to power (again) and an age-old pattern of revictimizing sexual assault victims in courtrooms, tidily presented in one offensive person.
No one likes to talk about sexual assault. Often least of all, women who have been its victims.
This week, I’ve watched and read in anger Donald Trump’s derisive and disrespectful conduct at the defamation trial brought by his rape victim, E. Jean Carroll.
For the record, can we step back for a minute and consider that Ms. Carroll is 80 years old? She’s not trying to build her resume or gain instant fame. Quite the contrary.
For me, that is significant. Society is largely incapable of handling sexual assault cases in any semblance of what might be deemed sensitivity, compassion, or a clear and collective understanding of the power dynamic that lands women in that unfortunate position.
I like that E. Jean Carroll is 80 and fighting this renewed fight against her attacker. She already won $5 million in a civil lawsuit against Trump for raping her in a department store fitting room some decades earlier.
So many elements of that victory astonished me. It astonished me that E. Jean Carroll was able to muster enough evidence to see Trump rendered accountable. It was not a criminal trial that she won, however, but a civil one.
That Trump had raped her was established and she was awarded damages accordingly.
She is back in court now charging Trump with defamation for the hatchet job he did on her reputation after she won the civil suit. Many women’s victories in this arena of the law are shaky and short-lived. People don’t like hurt women who talk about it.
I don’t know if Carroll ever saw or will see the money she was awarded. I haven’t been able to confirm that. What I do know is that Trump’s inflammatory remarks in the courtroom about her after the award made her life a living hell. She endured death threats from the lunatic fringe that supports Donald Trump “no matter what.”
There is so much that defies logic these days. Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest logical disconnect out there. I can hardly write what I’ve read. That Donald Trump is poised to become the de facto Republican nominee for the 2024 Presidential election. Please god, make it not so. At this juncture, it seems only an act of god will derail him.
Trump’s renewed rise in the Republican ranks proved and proves two deeply unfortunate things. Fanatics attached to would-be dictators have made up their minds and won’t be dissuaded by any facts that paint him or her as less than s/he advertises.
Trump’s lifelong con of projecting superior business ability and success is all that matters to many. Even more bizarre is that anyone thinks he has the best interests of the American people in mind.
This view is deeply held in spite of the economic carnage he foisted on many unfortunates – contractors, consultants, small businesspeople – who were caught up in the wake of the Trump juggernaut.
What doesn’t make sense is his supporters who come from deeply religious backgrounds. The man is a walking affront to any and all things decent, honest, sacred and, yes – religious. And yet, here we are.
I am now deeply worried that intelligent and powerful spokespeople are expressing their deep concern over his possible reelection as President of the United States. Michelle Obama. Kamala Harris.
It is akin to the feeling of helplessness watching a loved one (or in this case, an overwhelming segment of the population of the USA) battle with an addiction that inevitably will destroy them if they don’t switch tracks.
So in a New York courtroom this week, Trump continued his revictimization of E. Jean Carroll by audibly hurling insults that she could hear to the point the judge considered evicting him from the courtroom.
“I would love that,” he crowed.
He uses every opportunity employed by responsible adults in authority to check and modify his behavior as another feather in his political cap. It is not only astonishing, but, as Michelle Obama, said very recently the prospect of Trump’s reelection is “terrifying.”
A recent issue of The Atlantic magazine was wholly devoted to an analysis by expert authors in various public sectors like defense, economy, justice to opine on the likely and devastating impact of a second Trump presidency.
While I read that issue with great interest, my heart sank at the same time. The Atlantic is preaching to the choir. It is not the well-educated, socially and politically sensitive crowd who has Trump’s back. They are programmed not to pick up a copy of such a magazine but if presented with it, are similarly primed to dismiss it and its content out of hand.
“Fake news,” you see.
I am not sure how the hand at work in this particular epoch of American and global history is going to play out. Borrowing from Eve Arden’s character in the movie All About Eve, there is only one prediction I can make with certainty about this 2024 election cycle.
“Fasten your seat belts, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy year.”
Just like E. Jean Carroll, a lot of Americans are going to be revictimized if the unthinkable but possible reelection happens – whether they know it or not. Time for folks to revisit Hannah Arendt’s book, The Banality of Evil.
[If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline: Confidential 24/7 Support: 1 – 800 – 656 – 4673]
If I’m honest, coming up with a daily blog post has become a drag.
You will know if you read a recent post of mine that I am less than two months away from achieving my one year goal of publishing a blog post every day.
Looking back on my life, my ennui and that attitude is kind of predictable.
I tend to run out of gas and ambition on the final leg of any journey.
That was true in the case of coming up to completing my university degrees, pending motherhood (by month 9, I was ready to extract my baby with a vacuum cleaner (just kidding) – I think that “get it out of me” feeling is nature’s way to prepare you for giving birth), house buying (in one case, I actually bailed on the day the house deal was supposed to close – turns out that was very poor judgment), and many failed so-called intimate relationships.
Relationships broke down as I edged closer to true intimacy. I was a baby adult, you see. While I presented as a walking, talking, competent adult, I was – in reality – a mewling infant. If I started to get emotionally close to someone – that is, feeling vulnerable and safe – the infant side of me took over.
There is nothing particularly attractive or romantic about a twenty something year old carrying on like a five year old. Temper tantrums. Blind selfishness. Acting out by running away.
I was the living epitome of the hurt and angry child who packs up all her belongings in a handkerchief, sticks them on a pole, heads out the door (slamming it, of course), and down the road.
That works until close to nightfall when said child is faced with the looming cold and dark. It’s about that time of the day that your horrible parents don’t seem that horrible any more.
In truth, I wasn’t really much more developed than that. Arrested emotional development is real, my friends.
The value of a healthy family, I came to realize, was that it can (should) provide a safe container – a nest, if you will – where you can work out and work through childish emotions as they come up year after year. It’s called growing up. From about age 5, I grew mostly sideways.
This growing up business is, of course, far from a perfect science. Many people are simply shut down as children and forced to stew in their own emotional pain perpetually. They can grow up to be emotionally arrested, too.
The ideal of a safe family environment in which to take root and grow is just that for many – an ideal. None of us gets through childhood without scars.
So the urge to bolt at the gate just as things are starting to go right was habitual with me for a long time. Maybe I did that because otherwise I would be forced to acknowledge that I was a real grown-up adult. I wasn’t having it. I was still looking for a knight in shining armor.
The acknowledgement of total personal responsibility would have forced me to accept that I did have power over myself and my choices and my fate. Frankly, that seemed like way too much responsibility to take on.
And the other truth was, I feared failure and disappointment so creating those conditions myself gave me a lopsided sense of control. “See,” I could say to myself, “I knew this would never work out.” And son of a gun, I’d be right.
I call it brinking. Giving up just before you are going to succeed. Giving up just before an important goal is realized. Giving up shortly before I could catch the brass ring. (It wasn’t always that, in reality. I stuck with and accomplished a good number of goals. It’s just that the self-talk was discouraging and total joy killer.)
My self-talk in young adulthood was guided by self-loathing and a broad-based lack of self-confidence. Not exactly a loving and supportive voice. It has taken years to change it. To “grow out of it.” The first challenge was to see it, observe it as it was happening and call it what it was. Something like I am doing now.
The accomplishment of publishing a daily blog post every day for a year that I will celebrate won’t matter to another single living soul but me. But here’s the difference between little me and struggling adult me.
I now realize that the primary and only single living soul I have agency over and who matters to me is me. Not in a selfish sense but in a sense of total accountability for my own life. As poet William Ernest Henley famously phrased it in his poem Invictus:
“I am the master of my soul, I am the captain of my fate.”
I quite liked this summary of the poem’s meaning:
The last two lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus‘ contain invaluable advice to those who blame God for their failures. It is not only about God, but the mindset that makes one surrender while faced with challenges. Challenges make one stronger but mentally submitting oneself to those impediments extinguishes the inner light that one carries inside the heart from infancy. Through these lines, Henley tried to say that it’s not about how difficult the path is, it’s about one’s attitude to keep moving forward without submitting oneself to fate’s recourse.
https://poemanalysis.com/william-ernest-henley/i-am-the-master-of-my-fate-i-am-the-captain-of-my-soul/
I finally get it, Mom and Dad.
You did what you knew and the best you could.
The rest of my story and how it unfolds is up to me.
Heigh-ho.
Damn!
I would give anything to be the late American poet Mary Oliver when I grow up.
It is not the first time her words have utterly upended me.
Simple and direct, her messages always seem to go straight to the core of what living is, or should be, about.
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
~ Mary Oliver
ED.NOTE: English poet Yeats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Book: Blue Horses https://amzn.to/3NgXBzk
Too funny not to share.
A lazy day in EC blog land.
But still, funny, funny.
The young woman who submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship with her husband) presumably did it as a joke. Then she got a reply that was way too good to keep to herself. The tech support people’s love advice was hilarious.
The query:
Dear Tech Support,
“Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.
In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems but to no avail. What can I do?
Signed, Desperate
The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):
Dear Desperate,
First, keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System. Please enter the command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2. Do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.
However, remember, overuse of the Tears application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0, or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta version.
Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 as it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources. In addition, please do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.
In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Cooking 3.0.
Good Luck
Tech Support
Two months from today, I will not publish a blog post for the first time in 365 days.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.
I set a goal on March 14, 2023 to write and publish a blog post every single day for a full year. god willing, on March 14, 2024, I will have reached that goal.
I am getting close. It is still sixty days away but I figure it’s time to start thinking about what’s next.
A book was supposed to come out of, or at least be supported by, this blog writing exercise.
No manuscript yet and that goal may have changed. I am not 100% sure.
Here is what I have learned since I started publishing this blog ten months ago.
Words saturate the world like wedding confetti. Depth and valuable content, however, seem scarcer these days, generally speaking.
There has always been an inherent promiscuity in the writing game. It was the French writer Moliere who aptly said: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
I’ve learned lots about myself in this writing discipline/exercise. I am more old school than I first believed. I have actually come to cherish that about myself. Conservative and cautious at core though sometimes my decisions are impulsive and ill-thought through. It seems to balance out.
Certain life facts are immutable. Where you are born and who you are born to are among them. Choices have consequences. The world will move along, with or without you.
The most significant moments in anyone’s life are the moment of our birth and the moment of our death. Everything in the middle is… well … in the middle. Each person’s stories and paths are different. But the beginning and end are the same for all of us.
I believe only some things in life are tried and true. It is our individual job to discover them. We must meet the twists and turns life hands us and overcome challenges while learning from them. This is the process of maturing, I believe, or adulting or whatever you call it.
If you still hold the same life views at sixty that you did when you were twenty, I’d venture to guess you haven’t moved very far along life’s continuum. I have met elderly women who sport the same haircuts they had in their university graduation pictures.
They speak with the same breathless adoration of their college alma mater or sorority and use the same jargon of their youth. Perhaps I am typecasting, but those are not the type of women I usually have much in common with or want to know very well.
If you have one or two good friends in later life that you share much in common with, you are lucky. If you have a handful of friends in that category, you are wealthy beyond measure.
In our society, we have a tendency to equate happiness and success with quantity over quality. As I get older, quality is becoming more desirable and precious.
Quality time with loved ones. Quality consumables shared with those loved ones. Fine books (There are many if you but look.) Fine music. Paintings. The sound of wind moving through a stand of trees. Birdsong. Conversation.
We tend to ignore or give short shrift to simple joys and pleasures in our youth. Not enough action in them to satisfy our ambitions. Fact is, we are much too busy in young adulthood trying to build some semblance of a life based on the scripts we inherited.
We all have to keep body and soul together as best we can. And, one day, if we have a family, we have to keep their bodies and souls together, too. It is all very distracting and energy intense.
I have learned that universal truths remain universal. And for all of us, one day, everything will come to a screeching halt. I have tried to wrap my head around that certain eventuality.
It is either life’s kindness or built-in denial that serves as a survival mechanism. We generally find it hard to imagine ourselves not being here any more, in this body, and on this planet.
Who knows what happens when we depart this mortal coil? Certainly not I. I have some theories but they are only that: theories. So the seeker in me will no doubt continue the hunt for answers to life’s “big” questions when this blog posting goal has been accomplished.
I may do something different with my writing. Or I may focus the writing on something similar. Who knows? I may actually bear down and write that novel/memoir/novella. It all depends.
The question I have yet to answer is, on what exactly that new path going forward will depend?
Here’s to having hope and keeping faith that I will eventually find out.
Yesterday, I connected with my roots at the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games.
My middle name is MacPherson, you see.
I am descended on my maternal side from a line of Scottish soldiers who served in the late 18th century in the Eastern outreach of the yet-to-be confederated British colony that would eventually become Canada.
The retired soldiers settled on land that would become the province of New Brunswick in 1867 with the confederation of the Canadian Dominion. It is one of the four so-called Atlantic provinces that hug the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
That burgeoning colony produced sailors, boatbuilders and farmers aplenty in the early days of British colonialism. Scottish soldiers who had faithfully served His Majesty and were honorably discharged were given tracts of land as payment.
In the case of my descendants, they settled along the banks of the Nashwaak River in what is now central New Brunswick. Many of their descendants still live in the area today.
This was the 46th edition of the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games held in Winter Springs, Florida.
Spread across a number of fields were border collies demonstrating their sheep herding skills, men in kilts tossing cabers which look like old wooden telephone poles, and a changing program of Scottish bands that boomed in the background.
The bands were no match for the Pipe and Drum bands that paraded on the field in front of us. Bagpipes are not to everyone’s musical taste. People either love or hate them. The crowd gathered yesterday were in the former category. I am firmly among them.
The sound of bagpipes and bass drums stir something in me that is either memory based or stuck in the ancestral echoes of my DNA. I am not quite sure. But I quite love them and their oddly grating sound. It is an acquired taste for many.
So when the announcer said the Parade of the Clans was beginning, my ears perked up. I was wearing my newly acquired MacPherson Clan T-shirt. Would my ancestral crowd be represented? I should never have doubted it.
When they rounded the corner of the entrance to the field and began marching my way, I jumped up to show them the credentials emblazoned on my shirt and was welcomed into the parade. It was oddly moving and restorative.
It was fairly astonishing to watch competitors (male and female) in the “Boulder Boogie.” Any and all comers could jump in to pick the large granite boulder of their choice. Carrying heavy boulders or tossing a caber were prized demonstrations of strength and necessary skills back in the day.
The goal was to hoist it up and carry it as far around the field as possible. A dutiful handler with a measuring wheel followed behind them to record the outcome of their effort. The lightest boulder, I’m told, was 98 pounds. The heaviest was 178 pounds. When they start competing with a handful of river rocks in each pocket, I might consider participating.
Out here in the middle of the sun and fun state, I encountered a bit of the “old country.” I am no longer immersed in the daily reminders of that culture like I was, say, when growing up in Newfoundland. To be fair, that was mostly Irish based music but I dare you to try and tease out the difference in tone or tempo during a pub crawl.
Reconnecting with my Scottish roots was more soul-restoring than I had imagined it would be. Something that mattered to me in my environment when I was younger is still healthy and alive out there. It heartened me.
It was fun to connect and engage in the ages-old argument of the differences between “Mc” and “Mac” in that old and historical family name. It was fun to smile and celebrate our shared family motto on the MacPherson crest.
“Touch not the cat without a glove.”
It is a motto that has served me well and often many times in the past. I intend to hang onto and refer to it a little more often thanks to the weekend refresher course.
I look forward to what future Highland Games hold in store. I’ll be signed up for the Parade of Clans beforehand and be totally “ready, aye, ready.”
I like sharing the work of insightful writers here. I usually share their work because I have learned something. I have taken away from someone else’s writing something that I need to practice and focus on.
So I share the wisdom of Avery Hart today. She says “out loud” what I am frequently guilty of. I spend so much time worrying about small things, I can miss out on the big things.
My priorities can go badly out of focus. While trying to set up a workable bookkeeping system for daily expenses, I let my taxes go unfiled. I scurry around trying to find every possible deduction and then pay a penalty because my taxes are filed late.
This is a real and nagging real-world example in my life. I have always struggled with accounting and financial management. Not that I am that bad at it, per se, but I could do a better job. I am solvent and financially comfortable. I should start acting it.
My takeaway from Avery Hart’s insightful piece is that maybe I should just get the damned returns in. The weight of carrying the task of filing them corrodes my spirit. As it is such a stumbling block and bugbear in my life, that sure sounds to me as if there is something fundamental there to investigate.
Avery Hart puts it this way. She’s talking about spiritual growth. And what else is our life purpose if not that as its fundamental underpinning?
Have you ever heard the saying “missing the forest for the trees”? It may be a cliché at this point, but I feel like this is something we all do on occasion. It’s easy to get so caught up in the smaller things to the point that we completely forget to attend to the big important things. This is especially true in our spiritual and emotional life. After all, what even are the big things when it comes to spirituality and emotions? How are you supposed to make sure that you’re getting the big things right if you don’t even know what those big things are?
I see far too many people focusing all of their time and attention on tiny details while the greater foundation of their spiritual life is crumbling, and I don’t want this to happen to you. Today we’re going to talk about why this happens, how you can recognize if it’s happening in your spiritual life, and what you can do about it.
Do You Get Caught Up In The Small Details?Have you ever spent so much time trying to pick a guided meditation that you end up not having enough time left to meditate at all? Or maybe you’ve taken the time to set up the perfect altar and get every crystal and candle in exactly the right place, only to realize you have no idea what to do at this altar. Maybe it’s even something simple, like focusing too much on trying to pick out the exact right crystal to wear that day and completely missing the fact that you’re bulldozing yourself in every situation you run into. Whatever it may be, it’s all too easy to fall into this trap of focusing on the minutia to the point that we start missing how much we are letting the big stuff slip.
There are about a million examples of how we can get our priorities mixed up in this way.
You can see it in the yogi who meditates excessively even while their relationships are crumbling around them.
It’s trying to learn every esoteric skill and psychic ability out there while completely ignoring your real life.
It’s striving to create a picture-perfect image of yourself as some spiritually enlightened being while paying no mind to the way that this cuts you off from the people around you.
Getting caught up in these less-than-important details isn’t your fault. It happens to all of us on occasion. The problem is simply that we don’t know how to recognize what is truly important and what is a distraction. There is one easy way to begin to decipher the important things from the not-so-important things.
Spirituality, at its core, is meant to improve your life. It’s not meant to make you feel better or to distract you from your life, it’s meant to make your actual, mundane, day-to-day life better in very real, observable ways. If your spiritual practices are not supporting this basic goal, then you are focusing on the wrong things.
What’s more important, learning astral travel or doing inner child work? Reading tarot cards or meditating? Working with crystals or communing with your ancestors?
The answer is that it depends on your intention in pursuing each of these practices. The practices themselves are not necessarily better or worse, it’s what you intend to do with them that matters. Inner child work may seem more important than astral travel at first blush. I mean, what do you actually gain through astral travel? But astral travel can be used to do deep shadow work and at a certain point, inner child work can become a distraction from taking real action in your life. In contrast, astral travel can be used as an escape to experience a fantasy reality while inner child work can be used to heal the beliefs and patterns of behavior that are creating problems in your relationships.
It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it and why you’re doing it.
This, unfortunately, means that there is no easy answer to whether you are really focusing on the important things. I can’t tell you which of your practices are important and which are distractions. You have to evaluate for yourself what your intentions are in every practice that you do and how these practices actually benefit your life. Does your meditation practice help with your anxiety, or are you simply using it as a way to feel better about yourself as a more spiritual person? Are you using your tarot cards to evaluate your life direction and gain real insight or are you using them to avoid making decisions and shunning responsibility off onto the universe or some other nebulous power?
This honesty is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. It’s one of the few things that will accelerate your spiritual growth exponentially.
Expressive Compulsive 