Category Archives: truth

My world smiles at me

6 Comments

4.2

There is a story told of two dogs. Both, at separate times, walk into the same room. One comes out wagging his tail while the other comes out growling. A women watching this goes into the room to see what could possibly make one dog so happy and the other so sad. To her surprise, she finds a room filled with mirrors. The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him while the angry dog saw only angry dogs growling back at him.

What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are. ~ Author Unknown

(image credit)

The perception of time

2 Comments

“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” ~ John Lennon

Time is a less of a constant than it is an illusion.  Although it seems linear, it can deviate from its path if  you are not keeping track of it at every turn.  Time can occasionally seem like it is a figment of your imagination.

clock

Yesterday, I experienced time on a whole new level.  My hour-long drive seemed to take a week and the four hours I spent catching up with an old friend was gone in the blink of an eye.  And although twenty-five years have passed since we last saw each other, the ease of the conversation made that twenty-five years feel like only one year.

Time has a unique way of showing us what really matters.  The faster those seconds tick by, the more you want to make that clock stop and hang onto those moments.  Because time really is measured by those moments and not by a clock.  You will never remember the counting of those seconds, but you will remember the company you shared and the laughs you had as those seconds unknowingly ticked by.

I can only hope that the time that passes between now and our next visit doesn’t feel like another twenty-five years.

 

The long journey of picking up the pieces

6 Comments

“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.” ~ James William Elliott

I would never describe myself as a wallflower.  I’m very willing to stand out, stand up for myself and take charge of my life.  If something is not working I will give one hundred percent to fix it but, if it is beyond repair, I’m not afraid to walk away knowing I gave it everything I could.  Thus was the lesson it took me half a lifetime to learn and thus was the story of my marriage.

Hindsight is a giant pain in the ass.  I don’t care if it is 20/20, it still sucks.  If I were completely honest with myself, I should have known better before I made that march down the aisle, with my brother on one arm and my mom on the other.  As I stood waiting for the music to start, I looked at him waiting for me at the other end of that runway to my future.  I really looked at him.  And for the first time I could see how truly broken he was.  I knew in my gut that this would not be my forever but I wanted so badly to fix him.  I wanted to be enough to make him want to change but his demons were bigger and far more powerful than any strength or love I could throw at them and I finally had to admit defeat.  It was time for that broken duck to find a new pond and keep himself afloat without using me as his water-wings.

After he left something happened that I had not anticipated – I immediately found my joy again.  The saddest part of that statement is that I didn’t even know it was gone.  I was so lost in the spiral of break and repair, I didn’t have time to notice that I was unhappy.   It’s sad to say that it took him leaving for me to be myself again but that is exactly what happened.  When that reality hit me, I cried.  I cried for the pieces of myself that I lost through the process and I cried because I had just given myself permission to get those pieces back and put myself  together again, to become whole.  If I performed an autopsy on the relationship, perhaps I would realize that the cause of death was that I was the one that had become broken.  Somewhere, in what should have been wedded bliss, a small crack had pierced my armor and my happiness began to seep through that fissure. I was like a tire with a slow leak that you don’t notice until it is completely flat.

love puzzle

(image credit: vi.sualize.us)

A very wise fellow blogger once said something that has always stuck with me “the steeper the climb, the better the view”. (Thanks Ned)  I began my journey back to happiness by taking that first giant step and, although my gait was awkward in the beginning, I continued to put one foot in front of the other to reach that summit.  The pieces of myself that I had lost were scattered along the path to the top and I collected them as I endured the uphill battle.

During the climb I paid money for my property (again) but that money also paid for my peace of mind, my dog’s happiness and well-being and the key to the door that had kept me locked away from my true happiness.

Being on the pinnacle of that mountain I am now able to clearly see the type of love that I want, the type of love that I deserve.  Never again will I give away the pieces of myself to try to fit them into someone else’s unfinished puzzle.  After several years of restoring my sense of self, I am stronger than all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.  I was able to put myself together again.

Finding the courage to find myself

19 Comments

This is really a post for myself, perhaps to hold myself accountable for all the things I wish I had been doing differently lately but have not been doing.  It is a kick in my ass, a wake-up call, a reminder that I shouldn’t feel guilty about putting myself first.

I have been feeling lost lately.  It could easily be the November blahs, the thought of our first Christmas without my mom or the fact that I have been ignoring my health and putting on the pounds that I worked so hard to lose.  Whatever the reason, I am not myself.

Up until now, I have spent a great deal of my life trying to “fix” other people – it’s just the way I am, the way I survived my youth and part of my failed marriage.  But it’s time for me to realize that I am the one who is broken.  It’s time for me to learn from my past and realize the only person I can fix is myself because I don’t like this feeling of being broken.

The nagging feeling in the back of my mind is not depression but the lethargy I am feeling is a warning sign.  I need to start participating in my life.  I need to sum up all of those lessons I learned from my past and use them to forge ahead into my future, a future where I am the driver and not the passenger.  A future where I make my own map and am not tagging along on someone else’s journey.

dear past

With a little bit of effort on my part, I can harness that energy that is lying dormant and forge boldly into my future.  The slate is blank and I can make of it whatever I want it to be.

Dear Future, I AM ready.

How a funeral home typo helped us get through our grieving

11 Comments

Dark red carpet and stained wood encased the visitation rooms in the funeral home.  The atmosphere was quiet, somber.  The air had an icy quality to it.  But beneath that chilled facade was a team of people full of emotion and empathy – a staff that was ready and willing to guide us through a tumultuous but necessary experience and to find the right way to help us get through a difficult time.

Butterflyinthesky1

There is no one way to grieve.  Each person will find their own way to overcome the loss of a loved one and each experience will be different based on the circumstance of loss.  When my brother and I lost our mother in March, we had been mentally preparing ourselves for the day that we would have to face the news that our mom was no longer going to be a part of our daily lives.  The phone call with the news was a still a shock, but we were grateful she went peacefully and no longer had to suffer the effects of her illness.  What we had not prepared ourselves for was the way that we would be able to celebrate her only 36 hours after we were told she was gone.

We received the news on a Friday morning.  The rest of that day was a blur.  Phone call after phone call was made to tell family and friends that she was gone and then Saturday morning was upon us.  My brother and I made our way to the funeral home to make the necessary arrangements and have the notice printed for the paper.  Upon proof-reading the notice, I realized that the funeral director had mistakenly typed my mom’s name as “June” and not “Jane”.  It was a simple fix and seemingly a forgotten mistake……until we went to my Uncle’s cottage for dinner that night.

There were six of us.  My brother and I, my mom’s two siblings and their spouses.  When I regaled my aunts and uncles with the story of the misprint it was, not offensive but, really amusing.  We raised our glasses and had a toast to “June”.  Thankfully we all knew my mother would have seen the humor in the mistake and toasted right along with us.  For the rest of the memory-filled evening, through tears and laughter, we continued to raise our glasses and make the heart-felt toasts to “June”.   If I listened really hard I could hear my mom laughing along with us.

We had mom’s celebration of life two months later.  I had gone into the funeral home to have the notice done for the paper and the same funeral director asked if I wanted it to say “June” or “Jane”.   We both had a good laugh and I felt comfortable telling him how his simply typo had made our evening so much better than the sorrow-filled night it could have been.  During the course of the evening, we changed my mom’s siblings names as well.  (Eight months later I still refer to my Aunt Carol as “Cheryl” and my Uncle Peter as “Proctor”)

The simple change of one vowel that day gave us permission to laugh that night.  It allowed us to hold the grief close to our heart but let our minds remember all the good in the world when my mom was still in it.

 

 

 

 

The art of procrastination

4 Comments

procrastination

I am not usually one to procrastinate.  I like to take the bull by the horns and just get things done.  But more and more lately, I am putting things into piles and some of those piles are collecting a great amount of proverbial dust.

The piles of tasks that I am pushing to the side are things nobody can see because they are in my head.  But I seem to have a found a wonderful corner of my mind that has a giant rug and all of those things I want to be doing have been swept under that giant Persian beauty!

It’s unlike me to be this unmotivated.  I’m not going to be in that deadline-induced panic but I am going to be disappointed if I don’t lift up that rug soon and deal with what is hiding under there!  I guess I’m going to have to buy some steel-toed boots and give myself a good, swift kick in the ass.  (another of my mom’s great sayings)

What do you do to get yourself back in the saddle?

 

If I had a million dollars….

15 Comments

For those of you familiar with the song of the same name by The Barenaked Ladies (yes, a Canadian Band), you’ve undoubtedly heard what those crazy Scarborough guys would do if they were blessed with that amount of money.  This song was obviously written in their early days before they earned well over that amount.

one million dollars

(image credit: quickmeme.com)

The song always makes me think about what I would do with a million dollars (buy a Morgan, write my book).  I have seen several stories, one just as recently as tonight, about people who win large sums of cash and continue to work at the job they have been doing for years.  On one hand, it makes me happy that money will not change the winner of the money and they will remain at their job.  On the other hand, if the winner is able to invest their money wisely, I always think there is someone out there that could truly benefit from having a chance to do that job so they can pay their bills and provide for their family.

I have always been on the fence about this situation and wanted to put the question out there.  What would you do?  Would you quit your job or continue to work?

Would I hit the button and turn the chair for MY voice?

10 Comments

Lately I have been going back through past blog posts and reacquainting myself with some of the words I have thrown out into the eternal abyss known as the Internet.   After spending time digesting my previous musings, I have come to a great awareness about the novel I am attempting to finish.  Unless I just keep writing the damned thing and stop editing as much as I’m writing, I’m never going to finish the book in this lifetime!

From two years ago, when I began this blogging journey, to now, my writing voice has changed.  That same voice that was so timid in the beginning has grown and evolved into someone different.  It has gone through that rite of passage to be comfortable in its own timbre.

Looking back on some of my earlier posts, I am so tempted to edit and repost some of those phrases and paragraphs but I would be doing myself a grave injustice.  I would be denying who I was when I wrote those posts and not allowing myself to accept the voice I had when I began.  The same holds true for those chapters of my novel that were written from that less experienced recess of my brain.  While the characters will evolve with my determination to finish the book, those first chapters speak volumes about the beginning of their journey as the cast and my journey as a writer and their director.

chair on the voice

(image credit)

I’m glad my voice is different now.   It sounds more experienced.  It is comfortable being heard by others.  It has a more believable quality to it because it has faith in its ramblings.  If I were a judge in that chair, I would hit the button to see what my voice has to say next!

 

Sunny day, sweepin’ the clouds away?

4 Comments

pot of gold

I’m sorry if the theme song from Sesame Street is stuck in your head, but I couldn’t help but sing it when I saw this landscape greeting me on my way to work this morning.  But Nature is a fickle thing….five minutes after I passed under this skyline the black clouds fought back and the snow flakes liberally spilled onto the ground.  Welcome to November!

My “get-up-and-go” got up and went

7 Comments

The subject line of this post was always one of my favorites of my mom’s strange sayings.  Whenever she was feeling under the weather or she was just exhausted she would pull out this beauty so we knew her true state of mind.

Yesterday and today I really empathized with this statement and its underlying feeling.  I feel like I have lost my mojo.  I’m sure it is nothing more than a case of the November blahs but getting out of bed the last two mornings has been a struggle.  The bleak grey landscape and bare branches hold no promise of those sunny, warm days that are a thing of the past.  I may regret typing this next string of words but I really can’t wait for the ground to be blanketed with snow.  That is a bold statement taunting the God of weather since this was the view from my living room last winter!

trapped

At least that fresh fallen snow is beautiful to look at and, if nothing else, it makes my dog extremely happy which, in turn, makes me happy.

In the interim, if anyone has seen my “get-up-and-go” could you please send it home to me?  It’s time to kick November’s arse and I could use the back-up!