Embrace The Suck

Yesterday I had the house to myself for a couple of hours. My kind of "pause!" I spent the time reading the daily love notes my daughter and I had exchanged in 2015. Yup, we committed to writing everyday and with the minor exception of a few days here or there, we accomplished our goal. It took me almost an hour to read them all. It was the perfect way to end the year. After reading, I decided to write about the project, which I named Operation I Love You More Than ... (ILYMT). For the next hour, I wrote. Sometimes writing is a chore. Sometimes when the words flow almost without thinking, writing is easy peesy. That's how it was for me yesterday. I was very pleased with the way the whole post read and looked, so I pushed the publish button. Let me re-phrase that. I pushed what I thought was the publish button. Then I went about closing out a bunch of windows that I no longer needed. This included a partial post of said article. Click went the delete button. I didn...

"When you wash your hands when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence." Eckhart Tolle I thought I'd put my word into practice today. Actually, I was waiting in a small room for my doctor to give me the results of a recent MRI and getting pissed off that the wait was so long. About 20 minutes into the wait, I closed my phone and told myself this was the perfect time to sit with the stillness and see what comes of it. I lasted about 5 minutes. There's only so much going on in an orthopedic office to take note of - really old magazines, diagrams of vertebrae and labeled pictures of all the bones in the human body, a computer, two pens on the desk, and nurses laughing outside the door. I checked my phone a couple more times before opening up the door and letting the laughers no I was getting antsy. "I've got you...

Before deciding on my word for 2016 I spent some time with my 2015 word - threshold. For the first few months of the year, it was everything one would want a defining word to be. It motivated me to paint my front door and sweep away the cobwebs. I contemplated the threshold between earthly things and spiritual places. I looked for thin places. Like opening a brand new book, with the pages crisp and clean, I eagerly anticipated that first step you take when crossing into a new place, endeavor, adventure. Then, as it has a way of doing, life intervened and thresholds became less fascinating. One step was pretty much like every other step.  Halfway through the year, I stepped down on un-solid ground and broke my ankle in three places. Talk about new thresholds - a ride in an ambulance, pain like I've never known before, surgery, letting go of control, becoming a care receiver instead of a caregiver, learning to walk again. Needless to say, I pretty much had to hit the pause button...