Preservation

Yesterday, I read through all the posts I have written for this blog.   I found that I go back to a couple of overwhelming themes.

1. Life is all about relationships
2. You end up living the life you create
3. There is always the option to be kind
4. Everyone lives in their own reality

This morning, I read a very interesting article in the New York Times, about a man who died alone.

The Lonely Death of George Bell

The author wondered about those people we have all read about, those who die alone and it takes days, weeks, or months for someone to notice.   He wanted to document the process that happens after one of these deaths, and what he could about the life of one of those people.

The article is an amazing read - and it impacted me profoundly.  I found myself feeling very sad for Mr. Bell,  that he died so alone.

Then, I thought maybe he lived and died exactly how he wanted to.  Everyone lives in his or her own reality.  Maybe some people like to be alone and disconnected. 

But as much as I preach we are all different, and we all have our own reality, I just can't make myself believe that someone would live alone, surrounded by garbage and hoard things if they are happy with their life.

I think some people prefer solitude, and are more comfortable alone.   I think that even these people need some close relationships.   I think if a person has no close relationships, it can be very difficult to see when an unhealthy behavior starts getting out of control; like eating too much, or drinking too much, or hoarding things.

And I think once an unhealthy behavior has become a habit, and there is a big mess to clean up, no one can tackle that mess without help.  From the story, it looks like once George's mother died, there was no one close enough to try to help.

One of the most poignant things for me about the story of George Bell is it seems he never forgot to always be kind.

So, my mind will stay troubled by the story of George Bell.  An ordinary man who was kind to others, self-sufficient, who created a reality that manifested in him dying alone in an apartment full of stuff, with no one knowing he passed away until a neighbor noticed the smell.

The lesson for me my friends is to keep building relationships.  Keep opening myself up to the other universes you all live in.   Keep interacting, and allowing people in, so that if I start to go in an unhealthy direction, there is someone to help me right my course.

The other lesson is to continue to call and write to my friends, even if I am always the one making the overture.  I never want to find out that someone I loved died alone and unnoticed for days.  I will continue to treasure my relationships, and I am rededicated to invest the time needed to keep them healthy.

Because, after all, we live in the life we create, and life is all about the relationships we have and preserve.

The rest of the green bathrobe story

There is an important aspect of The Green Bathrobe story shared yesterday that might not be inherently obvious, so I thought it was important enough to talk about it today.

Had I gotten the baby blue bathrobe I coveted, I wouldn't have a story.   That bathrobe would have been one of many gifts I have received in my lifetime.  When we get what we want, it often does not differentiate itself in our memory.

My daughter and I moved 17 times before I married my current husband.   It takes effort to not lose track of things when you move that much.  The green bathrobe was symbolic, and treasured, so it made every move.  I may have kept the baby blue bathrobe (because I still would not have had the money to replace it), but it would have been just one more thing I owned.

What is the point?  When life is going well, when we get what we want or expect, it is kind of bland.  The great memories, the great stories, often come from the moments when we have a choice to make.   When the dichotomy between what we want and expect and what we are presented with is the greatest.

And, when presented with those moments where we can choose ourselves and our feelings or the feelings and well-being of another, those become pivotal moments in who we continue to be.

Each choice to preserve someone else's feelings, each choice to recognize the loving intent and not the less than perfect effect, strengthens the brain's patterns for that choice and increases the probability that you will continue to preserve others feelings, and see their loving intent.

The very existence of the green bathrobe, and the green bathrobe story, has allowed me to strengthen the pattern in my brain to see the intent and not the effect of loving actions.

So, I would ask that you think about the green bathrobes in your life.   Think about the times when you were disappointed, but chose to hide your disappointment so that someone else's joy would be preserved.

Create your own story around the time you chose preserving someone else's joy while sacrificing your wishes.  Tell that story to yourself, and to others facing disappointment and challenge.   Strengthen the pathways in your brain to see and appreciate loving intent.

So much conflict and hurt can be avoided if we train our brains to see the love instead of the disappointment or hurt.

We all end up living in the world we create.   Create a world where love is filter you see the world through.

The Green Bathrobe

This should really be a Christmas blog, but this story is very much on my mind, so I think that means someone out there needs for me to share it.

When I was in middle school (6th to 8th grade), my mom encouraged us kids to go through the Sears and Montgomery Ward and JC Penney catalogs and mark the pages of things we would like for Christmas.

You never knew what you marked that you might get, and you never got everything, but it was my Mom's way of making sure that the little money she and Daddy had for presents went to gifts that made her kids happy.

So, the Christmas I was 13, and in the 8th grade, one of the things I marked in the Montgomery Ward catalog was a beautiful baby blue bathrobe.  It was fleece, and had a zipper closure, and it had some embroidered flowers on either side of the zipper.  I could just imagine how cozy it would be in the New Jersey winters.

We always opened our presents on Christmas Eve, after Christmas Eve mass.  Mom and Dad, and my grandmother, and great aunt, and my mom's brother and sisters (no one but Mom married) would all be there for the opening of the gifts.

As I was opening my presents, there was a large box, and I was certain it was the baby blue bathrobe I wanted.   I opened the box excitedly, and inside was a hideous fluorescent green bathrobe, kind of like a fake fur texture, with a button closure and a belt.   My heart sunk.  I looked up, and there was my Mom, looking at me with excitement shining on her face.  "It's just the one you wanted, right?"

There was no way I could throw cold water on her excitement, so I lied.  "Yes, Mommy, it is exactly the one I wanted."  And I proceeded to take it out of the box and put it on over my clothes to reinforce how much I loved it.

In retrospect, it was a perfectly legitimate mistake for Mom to make.   I have always loved psychedelic colors.  Right now as I type I am wearing a fluorescent pink shirt and a neon blue skirt.  So to have picked that wild bathrobe fit my style.   But at thirteen, I wanted to try on being less out there, and more girly.

Well, that bathrobe sure was warm and cozy anyway.   And, my life took unexpected turns, and by the Christmas I was sixteen, I was a young mother.   The green bathrobe stayed with me.   At a point in time, the belt got lost, and so I used an old pair of panty hose for a belt.  

And then I lived in an apartment that only had a small electric heater in the bathroom, and one time the robe got too close to it so it had a brown scorched patch.

But whenever I put that bathrobe on, I knew my mother loved me, because I could always see in my mind's eye how happy she was that she thought she was making my dreams come true that Christmas.

The curtain fell and time passed, and at twenty-seven, I married my husband.  I still had the green bathrobe.  You see, when you are struggling to make ends meet, and you have a child to buy clothes for, a new bathrobe is just never going to make it to the top of your priorities list for purchase.

So, when my new husband saw the green bathrobe, I had to tell him the story.  And eventually, I got a new bathrobe.  But I kept the green bathrobe, and now, my daughter has it.

Because the green bathrobe wasn't about whether a garment was pretty or ugly.  Or whether a present is just want you wanted or something entirely different.

The green bathrobe is about love.  And about recognizing that when someone does something for you out of profound love, it is always beautiful, and should always be treasured.

So, when someone you love gives you a gift, just see the love.   The rest of it doesn't really matter at all.

Perspective

For those of you who read my blog regularly, you know that I know that I had awesome parents.   There are pieces of wisdom that my dad passed on to me that deserve to be shared with everyone.

One of the most important things my dad taught me was that while it was great to have a job you liked, and even better to have a job you love; that was not a guarantee.  Don't get me wrong, he pushed us to think about what we wanted to do, and how to make the best contribution to making the world a better place that we could make, but cautioned us that life sometimes gets in the way of the realization of dreams.

So, he counseled us to do the best we could to find a job we loved, and a career that we could be passionate about.  But to always remember that your work is not your life; your work is what you do so that you can make the life you want.

I deviated from the easy life path early on, as getting pregnant at 15 in the 10th grade is on no "how to succeed in life" list ever made.  So, it was an uphill battle to get to the work I loved.  But all the jobs on the way were OK, because I knew they were a means to an end.

First goal, a job with benefits.  I wasn't going to get one of those without a skill, so I went to New Jersey Job Service, and they put me through a battery of tests and placed me a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) training program.  I got a job with benefits.  As a payroll clerk.  It was the first step in the direction of great life.

Every subsequent job I learned something.  I tried to enjoy every job I had, but the early jobs were not very fulfilling.  But, they were helping me build a life.  And I was garnering new skills.  And I was forming new relationships.  And I kept moving forward.

I was fortunate to have come of age in a window in time when companies offered tuition reimbursement.  So I was able to go to college at night and finally obtain my bachelor's degree.

My goals back in 10th grade were similar to most adolescent goals, very unfocused.  I wanted to be either a neonatologist, a teacher, or an editor.

I ended up a safety professional.   So, I got to fulfill the nurturing, caretaking, teaching, creating and polishing dimensions of my 10th grade goals in a totally different way.

And I always remembered my dad's advice.   Because the thing is, when you finally have that career you are passionate about, you can focus too much on it and leave your family out. And let your life take a back seat to your job.

This is especially seductive if you are good at what you do and receive a lot of praise for it.  And if your home life is going through the inevitable tough times that all good lives contain.

So dad's advice was my compass.  It kept me true to what is really important.  The relationships and people in my life.

Perspective.   Your work, your job, your career; however important, is not your life.   Remember to keep things in order.  Your work provides the means to create the life you want.

The everlasting benefit of this perspective is that retirement doesn't create a vacuum.  It just is a new opportunity to live out the dreams you have that work hasn't allowed time for.

For me, that is my crochet, my book and this blog.

So, if you are stuck in a job that is not fulfilling, focus on what you can make of your life with the income from that job.   And think seriously about your Vision.  It is the lifeline you can hang on to in life's most troublesome waters.

Accepting Alternate Realities

Last night I watched a program on PBS, which was one installment in their series on the brain.

The Secret Life of the Brain

I really enjoyed this installment, which was primarily concerned with vision, and how complex the vision system is, and how it informs our unique reality.

The moderator of the program continually reinforced a concept those who read my blog know I support, that we all live in our own unique reality.

As the science of vision and it's complexity was explained, I wondered if my innate acceptance of the concept of unique realities is the product of the multiple realities I experience every day.  Let me explain.

I am extremely near-sighted.   The level of near-sightedness I experience dictates that I live in at least two distinct realities every day, the one without visual correction, and the one with visual correction.

It is for me, an entirely different reality.   The unfocused world isn't frightening to me, unless I can't find my glasses, and then it is terrifying.   I always carry a spare pair of glasses to keep my fear in check, because I truly have very limited function without my glasses.

The unfocused world does open up new possibilities for me.  I have learned to tell my dogs apart by the feel of their fur, Beaux is coarser, and Scarlett is softer.   I use my feet and hands differently to navigate without my glasses so that I don't bump into things or trip or fall.

I am never fully awake until I put my glasses on.   As long as I keep my glasses off, I stay in a state between asleep and awake.  I am way more in my head than outside it, because there is just light and color outside, unless an object is within inches of my eyes.

I discovered that I lived in a different reality from other people when I got my first pair of glasses at seven years old.   That was the first time in memory that I saw individual blades of grass, and individual leaves on trees.   I may have seen those things as a very small child, but my earliest memories of the world are like an impressionistic painting.  All light and color and soft edges blending together.

When I got my glasses, I found out that the world I had been living in was different from the world that normally sighted people saw all the time.   So, it never seemed foreign to me that we all live in our own reality.

I wonder if the softened world of my early childhood contributed to my idealism and overall optimism.  My world was soft and colorful, and by holding any object very close to my face I could turn it into something else.   Magic, simply by changing focal distance.

I wonder if this magical, but distorted perspective while my brain was learning to process information changed the way I process information.

Maybe I believe in magic so strongly because I witnessed it regularly while my brain was developing.

The point folks?  Whatever the unique circumstances that informed the development of your particular reality, they are yours.  Accepting that you are living in your own reality that never can be fully understood by anyone else provides the opportunity to accept that everyone is living in their own reality.

Arguing about whose reality is more valid is a waste of time, as each reality is the product of the way each individual's brain developed.

Just think of all you can learn about the alternate realities around you if you suspend judgement and listen, instead of argue.

What a wonderful voyage of discovery that could be!

Autumn

Autumn has finally arrived.   Most everyone I know loves this time of year.  I think I have more of a love/hate relationship with Autumn.  I'll explain, but first, I want to mention a few things.

I think whoever decided that the school year should start in September was really smart.   That way, as Autumn arrives and things start to die or go dormant for Winter, there is a new beginning to get excited about.

My daughter was born in Autumn, so the only time I personally experienced babyhood firsthand was in Autumn, so there is an intense personal marker for me in this season.

My beloved Labrador Retriever, Burt, died in Autumn, creating another intense personal marker for me in this season.

Now, on to my love/hate relationship with Autumn.

I love cooler days, and nights chilly enough for a fire in the firepit or fireplace.

I love sweaters and jeans and boots instead of shorts and T-shirts and sandals.

I love the blue of the sky in Autumn.  It has a different hue then Spring, Summer or Winter, and it is brilliant.

But mostly, Autumn makes me melancholy. Ever since my daughter grew up, I don't have beginnings to celebrate, so Autumn makes me acutely conscious of the passage of time.

I am aware of another year rapidly coming to an end.

The days are shorter, and the balance of light and dark hours slides into darkness.

I am acutely aware of the cycle of birth and death, and of my place in the cycle.  If I am middle-aged, I will have to live to be 110.

I don't know if what I am about to share is unique to having one child, or if every parent goes through this, but each year as my daughter's birthday comes and goes, I miss her.

I love the woman she is, but I miss all the children she was.

I miss the baby smell of her skin, and her delight when I would come to her crib to pick her up in the morning.

I miss the toddler concentrating on stacking blocks, and putting the shapes in her Tupperware shape toy.

I miss the little girl belting out the songs from "Annie", who said the funniest things simply by observing the world without all the necessary background information.

I miss the eight year old who loved Rick Springfield and Duran Duran.

I miss the emotionally perceptive 10 year old, who knew when I was having a tough day and always did something to make it better.

I miss the snarkily funny teenager.

Autumn seems to make the missing of all those children she was more acute.

I miss my Burt dog more in Autumn.   He was a big guy, and tolerated the heat well, but he loved the cooler weather so much.   Even when he was a very old dog, the very cool days had him attempting to cavort like a puppy, and it was marvelous.  I love the little dogs who share my life now, but a piece of my heart will always beat for Burt.

I know that as surely as the days will grow shorter in Autumn, and still shorter into Winter, come Spring, they will lengthen again.

I know that Spring will bring rebirth, and for some reason, the birth phase of the annual cycle of birth and death doesn't provoke the same melancholy in me.

So, I'm trying to appreciate the melancholy.  I'm trying to lose myself in the memories that make me happy, and live in them for a moment as if they are now.

And then I'm trying to make new memories today, so that the precious present isn't ever wasted.  

For those of you that love Autumn, your good cheer snaps me out of my melancholy, and I appreciate you for that.

For those that share my melancholy, I'm sending good karma for good memories to lift you up, and help you get through this season of change.

The Hate Project

I really believe that this exists.   Maybe no one has named it.  And maybe the organizers would claim I'm wrong, but for the past approximately 30 years, I think a great social experiment has taken place in the United States.  I'm calling it the hate project.

In 1980, CNN - the Cable News Network began 24 hour news coverage.   There really isn't that much news people are interested in, so a lot of discussion of and opinion about news was included in the broadcast.

With the success of CNN, other 24 hour news networks were born.  Soon, to differentiate themselves, and to gain market share, the news outlets targeted certain demographic groups.  Since the fastest way to make friends (or gain market share) is to identify a common enemy, each network seemed to find a way to tell us who was responsible for whatever was wrong with our lives.  In other words, who to hate.

This wasn't done overtly at all.  Most of the hate mongers start out like drug dealers.   They give you something that makes you feel good.   Then they seduce you with half truths, then you're hooked, and they amp up the dosage until you are a shell of who you were before.

In 1988, the Hate Project really took off when Rush Limbaugh's radio program went into national syndication.  Behaving like an immature, unthinking, unfeeling buffoon became popular, and many rushed into the ratings war to prove they too could hate with impunity.  Instead of articulate, informed, debate; ridiculing anyone who didn't agree with you became the norm, and the in-your-face ridicule was often followed up with additional name calling after the caller or guest was no longer on the line.  Civility became an arcane ideal, and very difficult to find on talk radio or on 24 hour news stations.

And unfortunately, many previously nice, decent, thinking Americans descended into caricatures of themselves, and parrot the hate speak and half truths as if they are absolute truths.  We seem to have forgotten that there is no "them"; just individual humans trying to make our way through life on the planet.

I have to admit, it is a constant struggle for me to not hate the hate-mongers.  But if I fall into that trap, I am part of the problem.

So, I'm going to ask everyone reading this blog to do me a favor.   Stop hating.  Turn off the haters and hate mongers and don't support them.  Don't post hateful things on social media.   If you have a positive data point to support a position you believe in, by all means share it.   But calling anyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or demonizing the poor, or glorifying revenge, those just bring bad karma to the universe.

Try as hard as you can to see everyone as what they are, an individual who should be treated with kindness and given human dignity.   No matter what an individual has done, you are diminished when you are unkind, not the individual receiving your meanness.

We can be a great nation again.   But we have to stop the yelling and name calling and start having reasonable discussions about how to become a great nation again.   We need to agree to disagree, and find a compromise position that everyone can live with, even if no one likes it.

I know very few people who would proudly say at the end of the day, "Well, I've been cruel and hurtful to at least 100 people today.  I did good."  But I know many people who post memes, and quotes and links on social media that are cruel and hurtful to many that see them.

Think about it.  Think about turning off the radio or television, or signing off social media when something makes you angry enough to want to hate someone.

Think about what positive proactive thing you can do about making the world a better place.

We need a love project.  And it has to start with each one of us.