Category: Life Lessons

Good Thinking

My friend Margo Talbot https://margotalbot.com/ is a world-renowned ice climber, author and mental health advocate.

Margo has led expeditions in such far-flung locales as Antarctica and the Arctic. She is a motivational speaker and writes a powerful blog about her insights along the road of life. She promotes women’s personal empowerment through workshops and coaching.

Her book All That Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression, is a story of healing and redemption; a story about losing oneself, and then finding one’s way back home. https://margotalbot.com/book/

Margo writes about family dysfunction and healing from it and regaining/preserving mental health. She once gave a powerful TED talk on this very subject. https://youtu.be/kayj6oew9_M

In her youth, Margo got into trouble with drugs. She was eventually arrested for drug dealing. She has spent most of her adult life figuring out how she got there. She helps others to get out or stay out of similar places.

I met Margo Talbot as the group leader of an Outward Bound survival course I took in Ontario, Canada over a decade ago.

Margo taught us how to live survive in the woods. We chopped a lot of wood that week. We made a lot of fires out of forest detritus. We took a lot of swims in a cold and uninviting (but admittedly invigorating) lake.

Margo organized a solo camping trip for each participant on the final night. That was the “big finish” to the course.

Mid-afternoon on the next to last day, each of us were taken by canoe to separate remote campsites. We were left alone to spend the night with a tarp, some rope, a box of matches, snacks and a barebones breakfast. My nerves were pretty steady until nightfall neared.

I went wandering once I landed onshore. I came upon a derelict and uninhabitable shack in the woods with a two-hole outhouse beside it.

On the side of the shack hung a sign. In huge letters, it proclaimed: “Bear Country.”

I can’t even pretend I slept well that night. But I did survive. Bonus.

Margo once shared this wisdom below in a post and it has stayed with me.

I share her perspective.

Make lemonade.

“Things you don’t see coming in life: your sister trying to legally prevent you from seeing your dying father.

Your brother taking your father’s hearing aids from the nursing home to prevent you from having conversations with him.

Your mother defending both of your siblings and their actions.

Your extended family standing by doing nothing to prevent these emotional crimes.

The upside is, I don’t know ANYBODY who gets handed such PRICELESS stories to fill their books with!“

– Margo Talbot

Wait One Day

TRIGGER WARNING: This post describes attempted suicide and discusses suicidal ideation. If this topic distresses or otherwise triggers you, please don’t read further. Thank you. ED. NOTE.

When I was eleven years old, my mother made a serious and life-altering suicide attempt. She slit her wrists, was somehow rescued from the brink of death (I never knew the exact details), and landed in a mental hospital an hour’s drive away. For months. That was memorable.

My mother tried to escape the misery of her life and mostly her marriage, and by so doing, she altered the course of her children’s lives. Well, this child at any rate.

My mother’s way of handling her suicide attempt when she and we got older was to ignore it. She had a whole quiver of dismissive sayings to lessen the gravity of her failed attempt at self-annihilation. She referred to it only as “the bad thing.” The strong, unspoken proviso was that this was not something we should ever talk about.

That event, much of what led up to it and most of what followed shortly afterwards was a blur. No details. No one to ask. A mere blip and black hole in the narrative of our family’s life. By my mom’s account, it was nothing. Inconsequential. The addled addict is nothing if not cunning.

I grew up in the shadows of domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction and sexual abuse. But to hear my mother describe our childhood, it was a happy, sparkly place of constant love and adventures and fun and parties.

Which doesn’t exactly ring right considering the dark activities going on under our roof. I remember the first time I tried to engage my mother in an adult discussion about my childhood. After I brought up one or two uncomfortable memories, her facial expression aghast, she stopped me: “But Margot… don’t you remember all the parties?”

She emphatically didn’t like my refusal to go along with the sunny, cheery, “We’re all right, Jack” narrative she so carefully cultivated. If there was a poster child for positivity and “survival- at-all costs”, it would have been my mother.

When a former neighbor brought up their mutually unfortunate marital choices many years after the fact (“Didn’t we pick ourselves a couple of dandies?” she is said to have said), my mother demurred and coquettishly replied: “I only remember the bright years.”

Clancy Martin is the author of a new book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind. He has solid credentials as someone who attempted suicide ten times. His book strives to educate the reader about suicidal ideation and how an individual can be pushed to such an extreme.

Martin takes pains to assure survivors that there was likely little they could have done. Suicide is primarily about the individual and their very personal inner struggles – often chronic. When you live in unrelenting internal pain for so long, suicide can look like your only escape.

I’ve been there. I was flailing badly as a young adult. First year of university was proving to be a challenge. It offended my ego that I did not effortlessly master the academic format and content.

I was madly in love with a boy I had no idea how to be a partner to. I could feel us falling apart and I was panicking. I was drinking excessively. I could not see any way out.

My mother and I had never became confidantes. There was no one I could trust to talk to. Actually, there was simply no one. One night along with the booze, I managed to ingest an unreasonable quantity of sleeping pills. In the hospital, all I wanted was my parents to rescue me and tell me what to do.

My father called from several provinces away and talked to me long enough to ensure my care was in somebody else’s hands. My sister ran into my room beseeching me on behalf of my mother. “She feels so bad and needs to see you.” By then, I knew my mother well enough to know she likely only felt bad because what I did made her look bad. I eventually saw her and I was right.

I was surprised at how little follow up there was on me after I was discharged. I guess I’m still surprised at how unsophisticated and ignorant the mental health system is. The mind is mysterious enough that most people don’t much care to look closely at its darker, deeper aspects, except in the guise of TV crime shows. And most especially in themselves.

Martin’s book seeks to address some of those issues: people’s inadequacy in dealing with such a sensitive and big a topic as suicide; the general mess/clusterfuck that is the mental health system. His most important message is, if you are considering or have ever considered suicide, wait one day before you act. A lot can change in twenty-four hours.

Martin is forthcoming when asked why he writes as honestly as he does about his own suicide attempts. He explains that coming from a background of addiction and abuse promotes secrecy and lies as adults. Secrecy and lies kill people, he asserts. He said people need to hear and share their truth without judgment and rejection if we ever expect suicide rates go down.

Suicide, they say, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

When you lay all your cards on the table and say, look what a mess my life is, look how much pain I’m in, look how much self-loathing I’m dealing with—but if you feel like I do, trust me, you can wait another day. 

https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2023/11/interview-clancy-martin-author-of-how-not-to-kill-yourself-a-portrait-of-a-suicidal-mind/

I concur. My own “suicide attempt” (basically very poor judgment after a night of heavy college drinking) was the proverbial “call for help.” In truth, no help was forthcoming. But I got lucky. I made my own luck.

Oprah and the self-help movement were taking off about the time I was trying to heal and move on. My childhood experiences eventually triggered a lifelong healing journey.

Today, life is good. I am at peace. I am grateful.

There are so many other places I could be other than I presently am.

Thanks to some extraordinarily gifted and insightful counselors, self-help authors, dumb luck, children and sobriety, dead isn’t one of them.

NATIONAL SUICIDE HOTLINE:
988
(the new national mental health crisis number: call if you need to)

Selling Instant Happiness

The high road is always an option. Finding a way out of difficult circumstances may not be easy but it is available. Usually with hard work and commitment. But let’s not get carried away. Radical transformation of your life or person is not possible for everyone. If it is, it is rarely easy.

And not always logistically possible at a given point. I was a single parent. My options were limited. Every parents’ options are limited if they are serious about being good parents. Kids are a major and serious time suck.

It taxes my patience to watch the endless carousel of “better you, better life” salespeople online. What bothers me most is the “one size fits all” approach that most of them take. Or worse, the purveyors of instant, easy healing tell us “YOU TOO” can be whatever you want to be.

Seriously? Endless possibilities may be a great message for the young and unformed. Who wouldn’t want a fast and easy ticket to “instant fame, success, happiness and wealth”? The problem is, life doesn’t work that way.

The message that “good things take time” doesn’t seem to be delivered much these days. Maybe it is but is just isn’t getting through. How can it compete with the messages of the fast, easy and no-fail crowd?

The notion of taking life step by step seems old-fashioned and irrelevant today. The rules for building a life and a family and wealth have been shaken to the core. Everyone is looking for a shortcut or fast track. Because they have been repeatedly told and reassured it is out there.

I believe there is a rude and widespread awakening coming. Time runs out. Responsibilities and urgent demands – emotional, professional and financial – increase exponentially as we get older. Or they should. Life closes in.

If you are still working as an Instagram influencer in your late 40s without a family or assets or anything else to ground you, there is very likely some harsh reality ahead.

I get angry because so many are pushing a “bill of goods” at us. The consequence is that instead of setting and pursuing concrete goals for self-development and self-improvement, many opt to take a shortcut to their dreams. So what happens if those dreams of “easy, instant success” don’t pan out? What is Plan B? Your fallback? Does anyone even think like that any more?

Physics has immutable rules. Life has immutable rules. Consequences are real. Life is finite. I have apologized to myself for pursuing the path that most of my peers elected to follow, instead of the road less taken. My loss. I was only half-brave, half-confident, half-committed to my own happiness. I didn’t believe I deserved it.

I am now at a place where I realize I deserve happiness (aka peace of mind) and getting there is up to me. I recently did some stock-taking. The track record of my life is a little spotty but it held me together for as long as I needed it to.

So my rant (and this IS a rant) is this. The madness of the world today needs a major course correction or it needs to come to an end. The extreme disconnect from reality and sanity we are living through today is unsustainable. Sadly, it is usually catastrophe that brings us to a screeching halt.

Teasing out a human-focussed, self-directed life of your own choosing is a hard slog. But the formula is pretty easy. Put yourself at the center of any discussion about what happiness is and what you want your life to be. Steel yourself for pushback.

My idea of happiness is a life awash in books and flowers and great food and loving, lively relationships (well, maybe that is your idea of happiness and if so, email me). But that may not be yours.

And if it isn’t, then what is? Only you can answer that and it is the main question you must answer and frequently come back to. Set your path and life will cheer you on even as it is putting every imaginable challenge in your way. For some incomprehensible reason, that too is part of life’s rules.

You are the center of your own life. Examine your idea of what “selfish” really is because that is what they will call you.

Everyone else has an opinion of you that suits their own experience and agenda. It is up to you to establish the life and goals you want to pursue during your precious time on this planet. When you do, then be prepared to do whatever it takes to reach them.

Is your main life goal is attracting two million followers on TikTok and reaping the financial rewards well into your 50s and 60s? Are you 35 years old and setting out to give me financial advice that will “turn my life around”? Are you telling me what I did and didn’t do wrong in my life and what I should and shouldn’t have done?

If so, don’t bother to send me that email.

I can already tell you we have nothing in common.

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.

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