Category: Life

150 Years Ago

I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.

How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.

My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.

My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.

Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.

Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.

Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.

People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.

I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.

And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.

Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.

Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.

In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.

I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.

One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.

Proviso

I write about overcoming a difficult childhood and healing from it. I credit many self-help books I encountered along the way. They often had the right message for me at the right time.

I have also written that I write – I believe – from a place of privilege. Healing is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Let me explain. Most who are drawn to the healing path have come to it because life, as they are living it, has become unbearable. Most important, they believe there is a better way of doing things. That there is a better way out there for them to be.

I don’t shy away from the source of my perspective on healing and dysfunctional families. I was raised in a classic. And like most dysfunctional families, they didn’t get that they were doing anything “wrong.” In fact, they would have been horrified to learn that they had.

That awareness kept me plugged into a family I should have walked away from with love much, much earlier. They meant well.

So in the backdrop of people’s lives are a host of agendas and subtexts. Their belief in the vows of marriage keeps them in an abusive or unsatisfying marriage. Many continue to preen and seek approval from parents who are not worthy of the label, regardless of their biological role in your birth. We are also loaded with a host of other beliefs and constraints that are loaded on us from birth onward.

“Daddy doesn’t mean to hurt me.” “My husband really loves me but he has an anger problem. It’s not his fault.” “I’ll become a doctor even though I want to be a pilot to keep the parents and extended family happy.”

Self-negation is insidious like that. Whenever we deny what really matters to us to “go along” “fit in” or “be loved,” a microscopic portion of us erodes. Sometimes whole chunks fly out of our being. Some people live their whole lives like this. Bland and colorless and safe.

As a result, they never get a clear picture of who they are or what matters to them. They roll along in life – neither satisfied nor dissatisfied – until their lives are over.

So-called seekers know better and want better. It is the wife who – in spite of her low self-esteem – knows she shouldn’t be beaten and called down. It is the adult child who painfully realizes that though Daddy might not have meant to hurt them, his continued toxic behavior is doing just that. If he will not acknowledge this behavior and take steps to change, you must walk away to protect yourself.

The lucky ones who seek a healing path do not have an easier life. In fact, pursuing the healing path can lead to a whole host of upheavals and painful estrangements, and changes you didn’t expect.

And a commitment to healing and self-growth can only come about in an environment of safety where basic needs are met. In spite of the stereotypes about the writers and artists living in poverty while cranking out great works of fiction and philosophy, at minimum, they must have shelter, clothing, and enough food to keep them reasonably healthy.

My proviso is that. Attempting to heal while you are in the middle of something can be futile. You may have to accept that whatever you are doing today just to survive is the best you can do. In fact, it is mandatory.

With luck and time and the right environment, you may wake up one day in a place where you can commit to living life to its fullest. As with most things, it is a process. One day you may finally feel the urge to jot down and share the learning you picked up along the path of your healing journey.

Basically, you get to unpack and settle in. Speaking personally, it is an outcome that almost makes all of the pain and struggle worth it. Almost.

Perchance to Dream

The vital importance of sleep is often underrated. My friend chiropractor Rabia Barkins is writing a whole book about sleep and sleep disorders. She has so much material, she is already thinking about a second volume. She endured sleep disruptions for some time and knows the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation.

I am not well-conversant with what goes on in the brain during sleep but what I do know makes sense. Sleep is R & R for your brain cells, as well as the rest of your body. With all the work it does for you during the day, and the garbage it picked up, sleep is akin to a four-to-eight-hour detox.

In an oxygen therapy program I did last year, the staff talked about “clearing out the senescent cells” your brain has accumulated over your life. As I understand it, senescent cells have stopped growing and just hang around cluttering up your brain and decreasing your overall brain performance.

So our oxygen therapy program sounded a little like clearing out an attic. Like your brain is a place that you keep throwing stuff up into year after year as a matter of living. What accumulates there gets dusty and starts to break down. Like we all do.

That is my layperson’s interpretation of senescent cells. Like any good decluttering, getting rid of them makes good sense.

Most of the time I love dreaming (nightmares excluded) and again know very little about what takes place during REM sleep. But it is this phase that is supposed to do a deep dive into whatever issues you are wrestling with.

I don’t put a lot of faith in believing that my dreams really sort out major life issues. It sometimes seems quite the opposite. They often make me more confused, if entertained. So if you look at dreams as some sort of arcane theater that none of us understands very well, then you can become more of an observer of your own dreams. Don’t ask me how that is possible. I just know I have done it from time to time.

I love the sheer lunacy of some dreams. Often they seem a lot like Alice in Wonderland without the Red Queen and a far less organized storyline. Dreams are so random. Stories about people I know or would like to know predominated for a time.

When she was still here, I frequently dreamt of Princess Diana and how she and I had become best buddies. I think I related to her vulnerability and disrupted childhood. The similarities ended there.

But they were great dreams. Lots of garden parties on bright sunny days on big estate grounds and delicious little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Vistas all around of lovely well-dressed people gossiping and socializing as only the Royals and their society might do. Diana would occasionally ask me for fashion advice which I would occasionally give her. This absurd memory still makes me chuckle.

It is noteworthy that those sorts of dreams occurred most frequently when my life circumstances were such that I was the last possible person on Earth to be invited to a Royal gathering. Pure escapism.

But as a television reporter, I had a genuine interaction with Prince Andrew. It was on a Royal tour he was making of Canada at one of those chi-chi garden parties on the lieutenant governor’s estate. I got a full-on view of the kowtowing and pandering around him, especially the media.

As history would have it, I am very lucky I didn’t get to know him one whit better than I did. Ew. Saved by destiny and his utter disinterest in a commoner news reporter from one of the Commonwealth’s “provinces”.

So whatever else I may dream about tonight, it likely won’t be the struggling Windsor family and their issues’ issues. They’re still working to find their feet it would appear. The harsh light of media and incessant exposure has taken considerable bloom off the Royal rose.

Tonight, I will head to sleep with another famous Brit in my head. “To sleep, perchance to dream”. Unlike Hamlet’s fear of what may plague him after he slips into unconsciousness, I rather enjoy my dreams.

I know piteously little about the mechanics or intricacies of sleep. I just know I like it and I need it. Off to find out what my brain intends to share with me tonight.

Disconnecting to Connect

It is mighty hard to escape the internet. For me anyway. I am a bona fide, non-apologetic, drank-the-Kool-Aid “interweb” junkie.

So when I am forced to forgo internet access, I get spleeny. Like someone has taken away my favorite toy.

I find compensation since I have to. Without electronic entertainment, I have to devise my own. Without the illusion of connection to “everywhere, everything, all at once,” some familiar old friends come into play.

Imagination for example. I sit in my living room devising scenarios about how to alter it, improve it, change it more to my liking, or, most aptly put, make it more like me and my taste.

Much as I experience when sitting down to write this daily blog, disconnection from external stimulants allows me the luxury of enjoying my own internal dictates. My own thoughts.

I love to read, for example. I am thrilled by the right books and happily transported to worlds other than my own, filled with characters facing challenges I never hope to encounter.

Reading deepens my compassion for the human condition without the messy and distracting emotional work involved in real-life people dramas. To that end, reading is also finite. People dramas – as we who are raised in less-than-ideal families know – can last indefinitely. Or they can repeat predictably and tiresomely for years.

In good books, the protagonists are forced to deal with whatever situation it is that they were flung into. What would be the point of the book otherwise? For those who well know the classic, if now formulaic, Hero’s Journey, there is an identifiable story throughline in these books.

The hero is born and separated by the fates from all that is familiar. S/he prepares for and meets challenges. S/he is close to being completely undone by the magnitude of the challenges but s/he perseveres. S/he emerges, in the end, changed and triumphant by the growth experiences s/he has had.

So the current challenge this “hero” (i.e. me, if we rightfully assume we are the heroes of our own journeys), is battling a dead internet. Fortunately, like other heroes, I am forced to draw upon previously untapped internal resources to rise to the occasion and surmount the problem.

I have prepared this blog in MS Word. I will soon head out looking for alternate internet sources: the library, Starbucks, or most reliably, McDonald’s. All the while riding the telephone and Xfinity gods for a quick and speedy resolution to this grievous inconvenience.

Which, if I’m honest, isn’t all that inconvenient. I am rather enjoying the disconnection and downtime away from the incessant demands of the internet, email, and plowing through unwanted sales pitches.

Maybe I won’t dog those nice people at Xfinity too fiercely, after all. Maybe this temporary disconnection is a blessing in disguise. Heading over to my reading chair to see what might suit me to fill in the deliciously disconnected mental space.   

So Many Feels

When I came across this in a recent Facebook post, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. If these analogies had been created deliberately, then they are brilliant. However, I fear that was not the case.

The wonder of words. I write about them a lot. But in response to these, I don’t exactly know what reaction is appropriate.

Decry the state of high school education? Argue forcefully for the continued inclusion of English language classes in all secondary schools? Or pack it in, move to a desert island, and accept that the future is doomed.

Or maybe have a laugh at these earnest and well-meaning if seriously off-the-mark young people’s attempts at expressing themselves.

You decide.

Actual Analogies Used by High School Students in English Essays

  1. When she tried to sing, it sounded like a walrus giving birth to farm equipment.
  2. Her eyes twinkled, like the mustache of a man with a cold.
  3. She was like a magnet: attractive from the back, repulsive from the front.
  4. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
  5. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
  6. She had him like a toenail stuck in a shag carpet.
  7. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

Crimping the Crust

This metaphor may be a stretch. However, I have lately started to compare my life to an apple pie. Not my absolute favorite pie but apple pie is among the top ten pies I love and easiest for most to identify with.

So let’s say our lives start out with your standard issue pie pan. Round and made out of glass or metal and in the case of one pan I have – cast iron. That one is a doozy.

The bottom crust is the environment you are poured into at birth: your family, your environment, the house you live in, whether you have or don’t have grandparents and extended family, and whether you have or don’t have money. All of these extraneous factors contribute to how you mature and grow.

Some elements are positive and support your growth. Like attentive grandparents or a kid-safe and friendly neighborhood with good schools and lots of activities to take part in. Your parents’ ability to pick and choose what you can experience is based on a lot of these things.

Other bottom crusts are not so nurturing. There not be enough money. The parents may have to work multiple jobs just to keep body and soul together. The kids’ needs get scanted or are simply not there. And add to that any afflictions: addiction, mental health issues, or a neighborhood awash in crime and violence.

Kids learn in this environment, too. But the lessons learned in this environment are usually more focused on survival and managing the negatives in their environment than striving for personal growth and maturity.

The filling is your life. As you get to adulthood, you begin to pick and choose what to put in your pie. Apples is an obvious choice. But you pick a career. A spouse. A home. A community. Your choices are more or less based on what the bottom crust of your life was.

People tend to stay in the same socio-economic group they were born into. Though the choices being made are shifting dramatically, people usually picked spouses from the same race or culture they came from and the opposite gender. That is all up for grabs and discussion these days. I am talking about a certain demographic.

As we mature and grow in our jobs, our marriages, and our communities, our choices may be challenged to conform more closely to who we are. Switching careers in mid-life. Choosing to end an unsatisfactory marriage. Maybe marriage to the wrong person and gender in line with who you really are.

As the filling is being made, there may be all kinds of additions and subtractions over the years like that which goes into any kind of baking or building. As we sift through life and get more certain about what stays and what goes, what works and what doesn’t – exclusively for us – our apple pie may be very different from someone else’s apple pie. Even though the basic ingredients are the same.

Eventually – if we’re lucky – we get to a point where we are comfortable putting on the upper crust and closing the pie to ready it for baking. We know who we are. The important choices have all been made. We allow into our lives who and what works for us. We kindly but firmly resist the intrusion of people, things, and experiences that we know will not serve us.

We get better at discriminating between what works and reinforces what is important to us and what doesn’t. Eventually, we learn we are satisfied enough and comfortable enough to stop striving and start fully enjoying our lives.

We crimp the crust of the pie – our lives – and contain what is important and reject what isn’t. Of course, this is not a perfect science. It is a crazy metaphor. The pie can fall and shatter. The crust might burn in spite of putting aluminum around the edges to protect it.

But lately, I have been thinking of it more and more about my life this way. I have put apples and raisins and walnuts and butter and brown sugar in the filling of my life. I am at the stage where I am ready to crimp the edges of the crust and enjoy the final product.

Crazy as the metaphor may be, I love apple pie. My mouth is watering at the thought. That suggests a life tolerably well-lived to me.

Shout Out to Relief

There’s no denying that when bad things don’t come to pass – as you feared they might – relief floods in with a welcome physical response.

The shoulders drop. The breaths get deeper again. The nerves – if you are prone to them – begin to quell. I tend to tears sometimes. Pent-up emotion seeking an outlet.

So if you have been following me at all in the past few days, you’ll know I just faced what was in my life a barrel drop over Niagara Falls. With me in it, if that isn’t belaboring the obvious.

How many of these periods of terror and relief have I gone through? Seems like thousands but was probably only a few hundred or so.

The exam you are sure you weren’t well enough prepared for. The first date with someone that you really, really like. Sitting in the doctor’s office fearing the worse but hoping (praying) for the best. The interview for that job that you really want.

I am reminded of Sally Field’s Best Actress Oscar win for Norma Rae. In what was possibly the most public display ever of insecurity and vulnerability, she spouted out to the august assembled audience from the podium, Oscar in hand: “You like me. You really, really like me.”

Full confession. I know the feeling.

So today when an important meeting determining many of my future choices went very well today, I was tempted to blurt out those very words to the interviewer.

But given the stakes and a certain sense of decorum I am able to deploy – if and when necessary – I did not do that. I shook hands, walked out, and did the secret Laura Linney happy dance from Love, Actually in my mind when Linney actually manages to get Hugh Grant home.

I mean, I am not quite foolish enough to ACTUALLY get into a barrel and – as it were – barrel over Niagara Falls.

I like myself way too much for that. And for what I was able to pull off today, I like myself even better.

Big Leap

Today I am going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Okay. It just feels that way. Going to a meeting that will change my life. I am an emotional creature. Prone to mild, if controlled, hysteria, under pressure. Mostly I grin a lot when I’m stressed. Me and Adrenaline are old, long-term buddies.

Me and Adrenaline have an implicit, if unspoken, agreement. You keep me moving forward, I tell it, and I will do my level-headed best not to screw things up. I will not do anything to sink this ship we call a body or beach it on some desert island without water, shelter, or hope. Deal?

I grant you there is some hyperbole in my metaphor. But not a lot. I have another object lesson I am living through about managing stress and keeping cool. I have little control over the outcome and that makes me a little nuts.

My husband is a former commercial airline pilot. He is the very definition of cool. Nothing rattles him. Not even me. I guess when you are at the helm of a 747 with 300 souls in the back of your bus trusting you with their lives, you learn to chill. I can imagine no scarier image than an airline pilot with a bad case of nerves. It is their job to keep us calm. Not the other way around.

So it probably won’t be as bad as I imagine. It might, in fact, even be quite civilized. The chicken little types out there in the world make a fortune out of capitalizing on our fear of almost everything. Body odor, as an example.

The profit numbers around products and packages that are designed to keep us “safe” are staggering. The insurance industry is a multi-billion dollar behemoth. Fear is an inherent and instinctual survival tool. In moderation. But here we are.

I wonder what our Neanderthal ancestors would make of us now. I imagine they would long to go running back to their caves and dirt floors rather than face the daunting maze that society has become.

For my part, I’d rather be making preparations for the slaughter of a good-old fashioned sabertooth tiger than trying to navigate modern bureaucracy. Sharpen the spears and the flint arrowheads. Make sure the loincloths are well-secured. Wrap your feet in enough banana leaves to safely stalk the elusive tiger through an ancient jungle. It was so much simpler then.

Good Enough

Over the years, I have expressed countless prayers of gratitude to the late Janet Woititz, whose seminal book Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) was first published in 1983.

The publication of Woitiz’s book, led, in large part, to the creation of a similar but separate entity affiliated with the successful self-help group Alcoholics Anonymous (“AA”) called Adult Children of Alcoholics (“ACA”). ACA followed the traditional Alcoholics Anonymous model and attendant groups like Al-Anon and Ala-Teen.

If you know anything about AA, you will know its members follow “The Big Book” for guidance. The 400-plus page Big Book not only details the difficult personal histories of AA’s founders, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, but the personal experiences of some alcoholics, as well. The book presents a series of solutions that evolved to become the twelve-step program.

In 2006, ACA published its own 646-page text for its members called “The Big Red Book” mirroring AA’s “The Big Book.”

ACA is more of a therapeutic program that emphasizes self-care and re-parenting one’s own wounded inner child with love and compassion. It aims to build individuals up, encourages them to assume personal responsibility by standing up for their right to a healthy life, and then actively work on the necessary changes inside themselves in order to heal.

ACA’s overall approach is to move its members away from the temptation to “become a victim” and help them see the family dysfunction of addiction that they were raised in as an affliction that can be overcome and healed.

I learned the hard way that adult children of alcoholics are prone to develop unhealthy personality traits and coping mechanisms as a result of their growing-up experiences. While an individual personality is influenced by genetics, environment, and personal experiences, so-called ACOAs commonly exhibit certain similar and dysfunctional personality traits.

One common trait is a tendency towards over-preparation and perfectionism. Growing up in an unpredictable or chaotic environment, constant vigilance and preparation for the unexpected can be a child’s fairly normal response. Into adulthood, overpreparation can be an instinct that developed to control their surroundings and avoid any potential disruptions in their present surroundings. Or as we often put it in the business world, to avoid being blindsided.

And so the tendency is working through me at this minute. I am in the midst of preparing for an important personal meeting tomorrow. I have rarely felt a stronger need to be fully prepared, have my ducks in a row, to yield no quarter. In the past few weeks, I have been trying to impose an unrealistic level of order on the preparation I had already completed. Yesterday, I had a word with myself.

Take a breather. Stand down a little. Whatever the outcome, you will live another day. If you’re lucky. All to say I am someone committed to thorough and professional preparation. But I am no longer prepared – as adult children of alcoholics like me tend to do – to stress myself and anybody nearby dithering over details that cannot be controlled and that likely won’t matter.

It is tough as hell for me to say something is “good enough.” Excellence. Perfectionism. Overpreparation. These were my watchwords. They also keep lawyers in business by warning you about all of the possible “What ifs.” Don’t get me wrong. Their counsel is wise and for the most part, I heed it.

But the most perverse lesson I have learned in life is that what ultimately blindsides you is something you never dreamed would happen in a hundred years. You could not have prepared for it. There was nothing that would have altered the outcome. Whatever that blindside was, it emerged only in an alchemy of circumstances that didn’t exist before the blindsiding happened. It is what it is.

So as I check and recheck the lists I’ve made and the order of the documents I have collected and if they have all of the required elements they need, I am giving myself permission to ease up on myself.

A famous quote (apparently falsely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt but still a very good one) goes: “Women are like teabags. The only way to find out how strong one is is to put her in hot water.” I’ll stare down this challenge as I have stared down dozens of others. What I have done to date is good enough. And if it isn’t, they will let me know.

Cuppa tea, anyone?

In Retrospect

There is a separation in my emotional life now so far removed from how it and I used to be. This fascinates me. I have lived through many rough patches in my life.

There were times when money was scarce. People were unkind and unfriendly. Doors shut when I desperately wanted them to open. At each and every challenge in the past, I was convinced “this was it.” Whatever state of distress I was in, I convinced myself that was my life forever. Thankfully I was wrong.

A friend and I were talking about childbirth the other day and all of the unnecessary drama that often surrounds it. No doubt childbirth is a dramatic life event. But I was somehow attuned to the messages of unbearable pain during labor, so intense, in fact, it made women wonder why anyone would undergo it more than once in a lifetime. Which is ridiculous when you think of it. Pioneer women and Catholics thought nothing of going through childbirth a dozen or more times.

Here’s what I learned about all the doomsaying around labor. It is a natural process. It was set up that way. By no means necessarily pleasant for mothers, it is a universal experience. Nature sets up most women to get through it successfully if they are lucky.

Childbirth is fraught with risk, I realize. But the “ain’t it awful” mantra around childbirth’s unimaginable pain is largely fictitious. Nature prepares women. At a point, nature takes over. Babies are rarely “willed” into being by any individual mother though I must say, it kinda felt like that at the time.

I was thinking something similar thing about having a painful past. From my present vantage point, all of the painful events of the past seem almost dream-like. As if I were being led through circumstances I needed to stare down and get through. That is not to say I can’t remember them vividly. I do.

What they no longer have the power to do, however, is to buckle and derail me. I can’t fully say how I got from a place where shame led me to wish the earth would open up and swallow me. Or how anxiety and insecurity would cause me to tremble with fear before opening my mouth or speaking up for myself.

It was a process of facing head-on and facing up to the demons that were resident inside me. I drank to excess. No one forced me to. No one forced me to stop. I fought the addiction until I was driving my own life and not the other way around when it was driving me.

There were dozens of helpers and guides along the way. My other insight is that I never stopped looking for answers or relief. I am what you would call a “seeker” I guess to the extent that I know what that is. I haven’t quit. Slowed down my pace a little but never quit.

That would have been the greatest failure. It is often said that it is not so much the things you have done in your life – even bad things – that you regret on your deathbed, but the things you didn’t do. That is arguable but I do know that pursuing what moves and drives you to the fullest extent is usually better than doing nothing.

I did not have what most would call a “conventional” career with thirty years at a desk and ending with a pension and gold watch. I traveled to many far-flung places in the world when I was fit and strong enough to do so. There are very few places today that call me strongly enough to actually pack a suitcase for.

I have culled through and chucked enough of life’s flotsam and jetsam to appreciate what I have. To live comfortably with what I don’t. And to put experiences of success and failure in perspective.

Rudyard Kipling said about reaching a goal of maturity in his classic poem, If: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” “If you can fill the unforgiving minute, With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Well, I do that most of the time these days. I figure that means I have finally become a man.