Fish and Company

The last time I felt like this I was three days into a two week vacation sitting on a round trip ticket wanting nothing more than to turn around and fly home.  My ticket was nonrefundable, and I was stuck.  I learned several things during that ill-fated trip: there's an art to knowing when you have worn your own welcome out, sometimes you have to make the most out of a sucky situation, and spending a lot of money doesn't actually make you feel any better.

I do believe that there is a fine art to visiting a place.  You want to stay long enough to fall in love with the place you're staying but short enough that you want to come back for more. I think about it like eating until you're 80% full.  Stay until you're 80% done with the place, then move on. It'll be there when you want to come back, and once in a life time visits are rare and usually only exist as a marketing scheme to sell overpriced tickets to exotic locations.

There's nothing quite as bad as getting done with a two week sabbatical in three days.  The hollowing feeling in your gut when you realize that, yes, you have ten more days stuck here.  Ten more days to wish you were anywhere else but where you are. Unless you're me-then you wish you were home.  I don't travel nearly as much as I used to and part of it is because I have become an insufferable homebody.

Why all the rain motifs?  It's been raining here for nearly two weeks.  Much like my vacation that I would like a refund on, I feel very trapped.  I can't get outside, and having holiday guests I can't go about my usual routine inside. Anyone who has had long term guests know that while things can go back to a sort of normal, it's an abridged normal.

I suppose this is the part where you expect me to give you a list of five ways to beat the rainy guest blues? That's what a good blogger would do. Unfortunately for you, I'm not a good blogger.  I don't have a magic set of steps you can follow or a cheery list of suggested activities to get your mind off of your situation.  I can offer you my condolences.

What I am going to do is lots of research on ocean conservation and watercoloring.  I'll tune into some British gardening shows on Youtube to get  gardening juices flowing for Spring, and I'll think to the moment when the sun is going to come out again, and I'm not sharing my bathroom with other people.

One bite at a time

I am a habitual gobbler.

Admitting it is the first step.

Today at lunch, I was multitasking like I actually had to.  I was carrying on a conversation with my mother, surfing online, and eating a tuna sandwich.  For me to eat a tuna sandwich and fries, I have to first make sure I have mayo.  If I don't, I have to make some (or rather my mother does since, as a stay-at-home daughter I have a deal worked out where she makes the mayo and I make meringues with the whites).  Then I have to bake fresh buckwheat flat bread.  And I have to chop and bake the oven fries.  I can only eat one brand of tuna, so I have to make sure that I have that on hand.

That's a lot of work for one tuna sandwich.

And here I sat, distracted, gobbling up a meal that took me nearly and hour to make.  I wasn't enjoying it.  I wasn't even really tasting it.  I was just shoveling the food in to my mouth without a second thought.  It doesn't seem fair, does it?  I had put in all that work, and now I wasn't enjoying it. This has become my habit.  I don't chew and enjoy my food any more.  I seem to be racing against some sort of time crunch.  There's a food quota I gotta make today, and I gotta eat fast to do it.

I put my sandwich down and thought about it.  Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I was just doing this to food.  Sure, not chewing my food  as well as I should certainly can lead to some mild digestive discomfort.  This is just a symptom of a much greater problem.

I have nothing to do right now since I'm unemployed.  I can do anything I want to do.  I can meditate at 2pm, nap until sunset, and I can go out star gazing until 4am if I want.  And, yet, I rush around mentally.  I'm not living in the moment or even in the day.  Most of the time my brain is far away in a future that may or may not be.

I am gobbling up my time the same way I am gobbling up my food.

I want that to change.  The only way I can make that change is just to do it.  I want to move towards a more mindful approach to my life.  I only get this one, and I've already lived 28 years of it.  I'm not sure what my future will hold, so there's no point in fretting about it or even looking forward to it.

I think Master Oogway said it best in Kung Fu Panda:

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery.

Today is a gift.

That's why it's called the present.

To look ahead. Looking behind.

Every year I make myself a calendar on a large sheet of watercolor paper.  I draw everything out by hand, individually inking each square (366 this year).  I hand write the dates, the day of the week, and the moon phase.  Eventually, I'll draw out a design around the calendar and mark each special occasion with a little doodle.  I pick a color of each month and paint each day as it passes.

This will be the third year that I make myself a calendar like this.  I can't help but think of how fast the year goes while I'm making it.  Didn't I want to lose weight this year?  Wasn't I going to be happier?  What happened to all of the time I had?  There were days full of hours and hours full of minutes.  Where did they all go?  At the end of the year, what am I left to show for all of this time?

This was an exceptional year as far as my schedule went, but there was so much more I wanted to accomplish.  No one stood in my way but me.  I went into the year already writing it off.  It would be the year I finished grad school, and most of the year would be tied up in that.  I had blinders on allowing me to only see this year as something to be survived, not something to thrive in.  I just had to make it through.

Would it be too much of a cliche to say that I want to be a better me in 2016?  I know this is the time of the year where everyone, blogger or not, is thinking about what they need to do in the year to come.  And would be it be too much if I said that this year I'm going to make a solid effort to make this a better year?  Honestly, I could do nothing, and this year would be better than last year.

I'm not joining a group or starting a book.  I think this time needs to be me exploring what I want, not what something is telling me to do.  Finding my own prompts and finding my own way. I've spent the last three and a half years of my life learning how to help other people figure out who they are.  It's time I spent some time on me.

Golden Buddha Memory

I've had a lot of time to think lately.  About what?  About everything.  And, unfortunately, my monkey brain likes to take over and ruminate.  I find myself recalling past hurts, disappointments, and issues.  I don't like to ficus on the negative, but I find my mind sneaking back to it.

What does this have to do with a gold Buddha?  Last year, my sister-in-law and I went to a small, local brick-a-brack store to look for Christmas presents.  It's one of those stores packed with little nick nacks and things you really don't need.  In the Asian themed room, I spotted a pretty gold Buddha statue in the room.  It was about 18" high, and it was holding a lotus.

Today, I went back to the store to buy it.  I called ahead first and described this Buddha to the clerk.  She asked me twice if I was sure it was gold. I told her, yes.  Of course I was sure!  I loved that Buddha the second I laid eyes on it. I knew what it looked like.

Except I didn't.  Do you see a golden Buddha above?  Me neither. I had a crystal clear memory of this statue.  I could see details clearly in my mind, and yet, I was totally off.  On the way home, I began to think about all of the ruminating I had been doing.  If my memory had been so off on something I loved, could it be off one a memory that hurt?

I went to the store to get a Buddha statue to hold my jewelry and ended up with a lesson in perception.  Memory is flawed.  Even when we think we remember something so perfectly we could recreate it, we might just be off.  Maybe those memories are as painful as they seem in my memory, but maybe not.  Maybe like the golden Buddha, I am remembering some details that are mutations of reality.

The next time my monkey brain wants to take over and naggle in my ear about this hurt or that slight, I'm going to remember how my golden Buddha isn't golden at all.

Tree Lady Lives Again

As I type this, I’m sitting in a dark room because my power is out.  And, for the last two days, I have not been able to access anything other than a few webpages because my modem has finally gone senile.  I was in the middle of cooking my lunch (my big meal of the day, which today consisted of steak, salad, baked potatoes, mushrooms with onions, and split pea soup for supper) when the power went down.  According to the power company’s robot, my power should be back on in an hour.

This has left me with an hour to think.  At first, I was filled with mild panic.  My meat wasn’t in the pan yet, so I wasn’t worried about it spoiling.  It was just mild panic that the world was suddenly devoid of power and internet.  As suddenly as the panic hit me, the realization how ridiculous that panic was also hit me.

I have never lived in an era without power.  I heard stories from my grandparents about their lives without power.  Those stories were filled with times around campfires, wienie roasts, walks back and forth to town under the stars, and adventures in the woods.  While I’ve always had power, I am old enough to have had nearly my entire childhood internet free.  I was born in the late 1980’s, and the only contact I had with computers until I was a teenager was at school.  My mother was adamant about not having the internet in our home until it became necessary (which was when middle school and high school reports because mandatory to be typed and researched online).  Even when the internet finally arrived, we were restricted to two hours a day that were to be broken up into thirty minute duration.  The only computer we had was a huge desktop that sat in a corner of the living room.  I usually spent less than the two hour limit on the computer and found it pretty boring.

Looking around me at the new generation that has grown up on computers, I realize this was a blessing.  My entire childhood was spent outside in nature or inside being creative.  Sure, there were vegged out afternoons in front of the television watching movies.  Saturday mornings were spent watching cartoons without fail (do they even have Saturday morning cartoons anymore?).  The vast majority of my time was spent in the yard or with a book. 

Now, though, things have changed.  I graduated from grad school in the summer, and I’m still on the hunt for a job.  Instead of my days being filled with creating all of those little crafts I find myself constantly pinning, it is filled with more pinning.  I get up in the morning, tell myself I should work out, get my tea, and turn on my computer.  Two hours later, I drag myself into the shower, and get right back to my net fix.  That glowing LED screen attracts me like a moth to an open flame.  Only at night when I get sick of it can I put it down and walk away.  That’s not to say that I don’t check it every hour or so to see if someone has sent me a message or a new comment has appeared on my Facebook.

I cannot help but believe that this is not what life should be.  This constant checking and clicking.  Our brains don't even recognize any of this as interaction with another human being.  Some how, my life has become this cycle of internet (over)usage. The new year is approaching us pretty quickly, and with it always brings about tons of resolutions.  This year, I'm going to resolve myself to using the internet less and using life more.

I have a neglected home, a neglected garden, and a neglected sense of wonder that are calling my name.  I know it seems counter intuitive to be starting a blog right when I am taking a pledge to lessen my time online, but the time seems right to me.  No one wants to read about me sitting at my computer all day pinning things.  

So, here I am, about to start out on the adventure of reclaiming my life.  There's a wide world out there, and, while it's many blooming things insist on accosting me, it's high time I got back out there in it.