After a terrible week, these thoughts and feelings
I was going to write on a different topic for my biweekly blog, but I am postponing it for another time. For the past week I have been in Pennsylvania visiting family. I am not in the Pittsburgh area, but I could feel the shock waves here in eastern Pennsylvania nonetheless. Of course, I mean the Impact of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. I listened to a news conference this morning. The chief of police, a spokesperson from the FBI, mayor, medical examiner, and the president of a local Jewish organization all spoke. To a person, they stressed working together and being one as a community to confront the hatred and violence perpetrated at the synagogue. Sadness and anger welled up in me. I have just had enough of these expressions of rage, anger and violence. Earlier in…
What else could be on my mind?
Last week the United Nations published an extremely alarming report on climate change projections. It was in the news for several days. The seriousness of the information was shocking, even for those of us who already thought of the situation as dire. Now other stories are capturing the news cycle and the focus on the report has faded. To date, our government has not responded. That leaves any work and responses up to us, the ‘public’. There are several issues that I do not understand. I think that it’s obvious that climate change is occurring as do almost all scientists. I see the differences in the climate here where I live. There are different animals and plants, and the season of winter has changed. There are more severe storms, more frequent flooding. Another argument against confronting the problem that I do not understand is this; It’s too expensive to…
Becoming and Being Grounded
My thoughts about the importance of and the ways to feel grounded emerged from a week of change and stress. I traveled over a thousand miles by car, I assisted a close family member having major surgery, and later in the week I facilitated a meeting at an event I had never attended before… You get the picture! And it was a good week, a successful week. The surgery went well, my relative is recovering on schedule, and the meeting was a success. And I am not even mentioning how stressful the past week has been for our nation. And I can only wonder how difficult it would be to maintain a sense of being grounded after a major disaster or fleeing as a refugee. But… all my personal experiences were demanding in multiple ways. I had to be present, aware, anticipate, ready to improvise, and expend my energy…
Relaxing Life Balance
When I was growing up my mother had a system for managing household chores. Each day had particular chores associated with it. For example, Mondays were laundry days. We stripped and changed the bed linens, gathered the soiled clothing, and washed and dried the laundry. Each week I could count on Monday laundry day. The house ran smoothly with no sense of stress or pressure to fit every that had to be done into that day. This sense of order and ease stays in the back of my mind and has informed my concept of having a ‘life balance.’ It has meant getting everything that needs to be done, whether work, education, household chores, or appointments, and everything that I would like to accomplish contained in a smooth running and relaxed cycle of accomplishment. Ha! I did some research on the topic of life balance. Here are two definitions,…
A Loving Equation
Here I am, back from my vacation and a month off. I learned some meaningful things during the past month. I plan to explore these in upcoming blogs. In this blog, I reflect on one of them. While away, someone told me about a famous cook from the region where I was vacationing, and the secret of her amazing recipes and cooking. “She loved to cook, and she loved the people she cooked for.” How simple. A double dose of love. Parsing this, it seems to begin with loving what you do, and then loving the people that you do for. This formula or equation can be used for all sorts of activities. For example, cleaning houses, or parenting, or lawyering. Really, any work or pastime can fit this equation. I realize that I have not always been able to follow this in my life. Considering the first part,…
Why Take a Break, and Why I‘m Taking One
Why Take a Break, and Why I‘m Taking One A long-planned vacation is almost here. I will be away from my computer, emails, and texts for several weeks. As I thought about this, I realized that I would not be able to post a blog for a while. At first I was concerned, how could I find a way to keep my posting schedule? Publishing a blog every two weeks is now automatic for me. Then I thought, wait, I’m going to be on vacation! The meaning of vacation began to sink in. Let that responsibility go – for a while. I checked and I have published a blog every two weeks for almost four years. This blog is the seventy-third in that two-week sequence. So, now thinking vacation, I have decided to take a break for a month and come back to my blog writing on September…
The Value of Dialogue to Understand Perfectionism, Change, and Maturing
Yesterday I experienced a dialogue with an old friend. We were musing about frustrations with our own versions of perfectionism, how to manage change, and the meaning of maturing. This sounds like an unlikely combination of concepts, but we did easily flow from one concept to another. My friend, I’ll call her Wanda (not her real name), lamented her partially unconscious urges to control life situations so that events would conform to her desires. Life would then be, for her, ‘perfect.’ When events did not accommodate her desires, she felt anxious and down. So we talked through ways to root out this pernicious, negative, old thought habit. I noted that this habit was learned. I had observed the same behavior in Wanda’s mother. First, I noted that Wanda needed to catch the automatic thoughts she was saying to herself. While we talked, I heard one of her thought-traps,…
Taking Care of Yourself Right Now
I just read an article by Zawn Villines on taking care of one’s mental health and personal wellbeing in today’s difficult climate. No matter which side of the political divide, these are trying times of rapid change and uncertainty. In my lifetime, I have never lived through such a long and sustained period of national stress/distress. The list of the events and policies that give me stress is long… Here are several off the top of my head, how our country is engaging/not engaging North Korea, Russia, Iran, and the EU, handling immigrants and asylum seekers and their families, making trade policies or imposing possible tariffs, and degrading and neglecting our environment. Villines’ article gave me food for thought. She focused on taking care of oneself mostly from a political perspective. Interestingly, just the other day, someone asked me what I do, how I handle the anxieties that we…
Which Is It, Too Soon or Not Ready?
Friends told me about a recent editorial by Dana Millbank in the Washington Post, entitled “Obama was right, he came too early.” After the 2016 election, Obama purportedly wondered to an aide if he had been president 10 or 20 years too early, implying that an African-American man as president would have been less disruptive in 2026 or 2036. The article went on to cite all the ways that our current president is encouraging the rise of white nationalism and disparaging minorities. The editorial does conclude that this current fomenting of difference and splintering of our citizenry will not last. Inevitably, according to the author, the country will become majority-minority in the next 20 or so years. The suggestion is that a larger diversity of people will be accepted into and accepting of the mainstream in our cultural life. I was disappointed with the author’s easy riff on, I…
Where I Live is a Linking Verb
Where I live, spring is becoming summer. It is a beautiful time of year filled with birdsong and flowers. The hardwood trees have recently leaved out. For a week or so there are seemingly an infinite number of shades of green on the hillsides. Gradually this array becomes one robust, forest green. I am also fortunate that I grew up on a working dairy farm. As a child, I remember heading outside as soon as I could after breakfast, unless it was raining or very cold. Outside, I soaked in the natural world, the plants, animals, birds, insects, weather signs, seasons, and the passage of the day from morning to the end of the afternoon. Recently, I listened with interest to an entomologist explain why people should not kill the spiders they find in their homes. When he was pushed to explain why, not only did he say…