Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Gratefully Aware

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” 
       ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

I spend a lot of time pondering.  My mind can wander and travel through time and space and back without me even realizing it.  Some call this ADD, I call it awesome.  Something I've been thinking a lot about is how easily bitterness can be nourished within a person.  The truth is that we all experience moments in life that could change us for the better or for the worse.  What is the defining difference in our experiences?  What is the piece that is present in an experience changing us for the better, that is not present in an experience changing us for the worst?  That's what I've been thinking about lately.  When I struggled the most through my decision to place my baby boy for adoption, I used to do posts on gratitude.  I haven't done a post like that for a while now.  I'm going to start doing that more frequently again.  And I'm starting it right here, right now.

This week, so far, I am grateful:

-For rain clouds.  I am in love with rain.  I love the smell of it, I love the feeling of it, I love that it can be torrential or soft and quiet.  Summer has come quickly to Utah, and this week, today is the second day in a row of overcast weather.  I love Utah's rain season because it is an interruption and refresher to the consistent heat.
-My cat.  Dang it, she's ornery and aggressive, but she is also the cutest furry gremlin I've ever seen.  She is healing from being spayed and she is such a trooper.  I'm grateful that she is strong because I've grown attached to her and I want to keep her around for a while yet.
-My family.  We've had our differences in the past, but no matter how opinionated and passionate we can get about our differences, I know that they will always love me and watch my back.  I know people who can't say the same about their family, and so I am truly blessed for my family.
-Air conditioning.  End of story.  Period.  It's a wonderful thing.
-Antibiotics and Modern Medicine.  You remember my experience of nearly slicing my finger off?  Well, it became infected and it hurt.  I called the hospital and talked to them about it and was issues and antibiotic which I have now taken for 2 days.  It's helped tremendously.  I can't imagine living in a time where this kind of injury and infection could lead to the loss of a finger, simply because there was no medicine to counteract the infection.  It really is something to think about. Two-hundred years ago, the near slicing off of my fingertip and rehabilitation from said accident could have resulted in something quite different and not good.

What is the benefit of finding silly things to be grateful for?  Well, before I wrote this post I was feeling pretty aggressive.  I don't like my clients.  I'm not grateful for them, and at the same time I am because they are a perfect road map to me of what I want to avoid and by acting as a microscope to their lives, I know the warning signs and how to avoid what their lives have become.  So, for as much as I don't like them, I'm grateful for them... in a disconnected kind of way.  Their drama has put me in an aggressive mood.  But, by focusing on the pleasant things of the week, for as long as it took to focus and recount them, it took me away from the drama which is pretty great.

It's simple and it's easy to forget to do, counting my blessings, but it's absolutely necessary in order to stay grounded and focused.  I won't always work with these types of clients, and as crazy as it sounds, there will probably come a day where I will miss this job because of all I've learned from it and will continue to learn from it.  I've noticed that with my past jobs.  There have been so many days where I've said to myself, "Holy crap, self, I would so take working with drug addicts over [insert client name here]."  In reality, though, my life was often threatened at my last job, so do I really miss it?  Not really.  As cliche as it sounds, there really is a time and a season for everything.  I don't pretend to believe that our lives are pre-destined, but I do believe in a greater power, even if I don't know what to call that greater power.  The choice is ours but it doesn't mean that there isn't a more supreme being who looks at what we've chosen and given us specific opportunities to make the best of it.

I'm meant to be "here" right now.  You are meant to be experiencing what you are experiencing now.  I realize that my saying that could ruffle some feathers because I know there are people out there who are fighting through Hell right now and it's not fair that life can be so rough.  I know that feeling.  But, I also know that I wouldn't be who I am now without facing those moments that hurt the most.  The defining difference on whether or not I choose to be bitter or happy is in me.  It's my choice.  I've had moments where I've felt that to close off and be bitter would be preferable because it felt the safest at that time.  I can recall when I've said to myself, "Anger becomes you, so wear it."  And I did.  For a while, I wore it, and I liked it.  And then it didn't feel right anymore.  It was my decision.  Maybe it served it's purpose, or maybe it just prolonged the lesson from being learned that I ultimately ended up learning.  Either way, the decision was mine.  We can choose to be grateful or we can choose to be angry.  The decision is as individual to us as our unique experiences.  Some experiences are harder than other's, but for every person who is struggling, their experience is the worst it could be.  How we come out from it all, is under our control.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Thoughts About Love

"The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along."   
    — Rumi (The Illuminated Rumi)

I've been thinking lately a lot about love.  Truth be told, I've always thought about love.  I remember as a child that I thought love was Maureen O'hara being dipped and passionately kissed by John Wayne.  It always made me blush.  And then when I was a teenager, I thought love was something that happened at a football game; the quarterback eyeing the water-girl as she tends to his injury, and she is clueless all the while of his feelings for her.  And then they marry after graduation and have babies.  When that didn't happen, I started considering that maybe love was scientific and mathematical, and that was pretty depressing as I've never been good at arithmetic.  And then, in my early twenties, it occurred to me that love was a whirlwind.  It happened faster than you could determine the time of day.  And then the whirlwind ended and love was over and replaced with something quite different.  At first it felt like hate, but in time I learned to recognize it as hurt.

Now, I don't know what love is or how it is found.  I'm 28 years old.  I've lived a lot of life and I've learned from living.  Outside of my own dating mishaps, you wouldn't believe how many times I've had conversations with other women my age where love just eludes.  Or conversations with women my age where they truly thought they had love and everything was so great and then one day, it was no more... it was just gone.  It's all very disappointing.  And then there is my job.  I see divorce every day.  Not just divorce.  I see bitter and hateful divorce every single day where people who once loved each other deeply, only want to hurt each other.  And I wonder, how does that happen?  It's crazy.

I used to think that I was incapable of love.  Seriously.  I used to think that love eluded me because I didn't know how to love.  And I used to think maybe it was a good idea that love has eluded me for so long because then if I can't find it, then I can't lose it.  But, never once have I stopped looking for it.  It's strange.

And I'm not done looking for it, because I know more now than I did when I was 5, 17, and even 25 years old.  What I do know is that I am very capable of loving.  My mission in this world is to love loyally and passionately.  Everyone.  Family, loyal friends, children, and my future love.  I advocate for children.  I don't just stand up for them, but I advocate for them when they have no voice.  And I advocate fearlessly and fervently for them.  I spent 2.5 years in a relationship that I fought for tirelessly, just to learn that it was a lie.  It's taken a lot out of me but I also know that the next one is going to be pleasant and not filled with fighting from the beginning, and I look forward to that.  I also know that to fight that long and that hard for something I believed in, a future with this person, was both foolish and also proved the level of my devotion.  I am not void of love.  I am love.  I just need to find that person that it's worth devoting my love to.  Find.  As if to say, that the person I will "find" is hidden away from me, or lost.  I don't believe they are either.  

Maybe love is about recognizing something of yourself in another person.  And, also recognizing what you lack and desire in a person who has the qualities you can learn from most.  Maybe love isn't about wanting more or any less, either.  Maybe love is about acceptance.  I think that for love to happen, that there needs to be a degree of transparency.  To allow one deserving person to know the hurts of the other so that they know the vulnerability that grows the strength that they love.  Does that make sense?  The hitch to it is knowing who deserves to know your vulnerability in order to understand your strength.  Cause there are a lot of jokers out there, people who pray on the most sacred parts of people and then use those parts against a person to hurt them.  And it seems that there are more jokers than there are princes. And maybe that's the problem.  It's not a matter of what love is in comparison to what it is not.  And it's not about whether love is lost to someone, or they don't know how to love.  Maybe it's that love is used as a weapon in the hands of those who have no desire to love.  

I don't know.  I just know that I'm ready for love.  No more pondering it, but ready to actually find it and experience it on my terms.  The real deal.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

It's Been A While

It's been nearly 3 months since I last posted.  The major things to catch everyone up on is that Spring semester is over by a month now and I'm glad for it!  That was a long semester.  I ended up passing my math class which means I never have to take another math class again (YAY!)  I actually passed it with a whole grade better than I thought I would, so that's cool.  I did what I set out to do when I signed up for my first math class; I made it through every single one of my math classes without having to take any of them again, which is not the standard at UVU, so that's an achievement of it's own.

My Rhetoric and Grammar classes went well.  What I know is that I don't like rhetoric and grammar can go to you-know-where, which is pretty much where it's going now days, anyway.  Seriously, college grammar is an unpleasant way to torture oneself.  Truly unnecessary in my opinion.  If you can't tell, I'm really glad this last semester is over.  The classes were difficult, my work schedule was not pleasant, and I came out of something in December that truly messed with my mind and there was no time to "work through it" before Spring semester started and so I was working through the residual emotional stuff the entire semester.

All in all, I'm in a great place right now.  Truly.  I:'m going to Iceland in November with my best friend and I can't wait.  My cat has survived her boosters and being spayed, so she's a strong one and I'm glad for it because you all know I haven't had the best luck with kittens.  I live alone which is so nice, and my best friend lives right next door and we have lots of fun all the time.  

I've spent so much time thinking about what I've wanted to write about, and true to form, the thing that is inside of me that I need to "write out" of me is difficult to say simply.  So, I'm just going to write and hope it is cohesive.  

This last winter lasted forever and it really took it's toll on me emotionally.  The thing I "got out of" in December and that followed me all through this last semester was another really deep betrayal and it's really messed with me.  I've been angry.  I'm sure you've noticed it in the timbre of my writing.  And I will never understand why this person did what they did to me, let alone the man I spent a good amount of time loving and how he betrayed me as well.  The thing that happened to me has no rational explanation and in trying to rationally understand it, well that's the thing, how does a rational person learn to understand an irrational thing?  It's a mind-trick, over and over again.  And I've spent a lot of time obsessing about it.  And I'm done obsessing.  

Yesterday I came home from work and I started thawing out some ground turkey and I got an onion out and a cutting board.  I was dicing the onion when I cut a portion of it unevenly, so I went to correct the cut and I put my entire hand underneath the onion and sliced down and cut very deeply into my finger.  My neighbor-friend was talking to me when it happened and she saw the whole thing and she covered her mouth and screamed.  I immediately pulled my hand back and looked at my finger which hadn't started to bleed yet and I told my friend, "It's okay, I just nicked it."  And then blood just started pouring profusely from my finger.  I put my hand under cold running water and the water ran red, at which point I calmly said, "that's not good."  My friend was pacing and asking if she should take me to the hospital.  I told her that wasn't necessary, because it was just a little cut.  She told me she would get me a towel and I thanked her for that.  I pulled my hand out from under the faucet thinking the bleeding would stop.  I watched my hand as blood ran down my wrist and forearm and elbow.  It wasn't stopping.  My friend got back and we decided that maybe I should have it looked at.  We ended up at the hospital and in true form when I am afraid or nervous, I was cracking jokes right and left with the staff and we were all laughing as I was holding my hand up clasped with a towel. Long story, short (too late), the emergency room doctor ended up poking and prodding and causing all sorts of discomfort before he determined that my fingertip could just be glued and stitches weren't necessary.

What does any of that have to do with winter and obsession, or even the color pink?  When I got home from the hospital last night and I was laying in bed thinking back on the day, the shock wore off and it occurred to me how bad the situation could have been.  Had I cut a little deeper, the situation could have been so much worse, I could have chopped the tip of my finger clean off.  And that's when it occurred to me that everything I'd been obsessing over up until that moment was really quite unnecessary.  Since I got out of this "thing"/situation in December that I was in, I've felt like the betrayal I experienced took a piece of me.  And that piece, I didn't think I would ever reclaim.  And that is what had been making me so mad.  What I realized is that in the case of what I escaped from in December, I can reclaim that part of me.  I can take it back.  But, the incident that happened last night, that could have literally resulted in a piece of me being separated from the rest of myself and that would have sucked big time and would have been instantaneously more painful than the entire betrayal leading up to December and the residual anger that's occurred since then.  Good Heavens, I hope this is making sense.  

Betrayal is cold like winter.  Betrayal blocks out light and peace and happiness and it can last as long as the night for a child who is scared of the dark.  And in that dark lies obsession, a drive to understand what we will never understand because we aren't meant to understand it.  That obsession can blot out the morning when clarity does come because we don't see the blessing before our face because we want to understand the betrayal, so we are blinded to the joy.  That's where I've been.  My pink has been muted and made dingy and it no longer radiated light.  But, I saw the red last night for all that it was and it was cleansing.  I didn't lose my fingertip and I'm really happy about that.  And while the pain of accidentally cutting into my finger was blocked until I had a doctor poking and prodding at it, once I felt it, while it hurt, I was glad to feel it because I could feel.  How is that for a metaphor?  The physical injury to my finger last night acted as a ginormous metaphor for the last 2.5 years of my life.  And while I've been more open to feeling this year, with pink being my theme, I was only dabbling.  

For the first time in a very long time, I'm back.  It's been growing delicately, but I've got a new drive and a new passion.  This is my year to radiate love and life and I haven't done that for years.  It's scary, but it's good too.