I would describe myself as a peaceful and content person and mostly pleased about life in general. I guess I’m a happy person. I have had many MANY failures in this life and I suppose I have always used them to inspire changes as I am forever fond of seeking the silver linings. I used to be mad, a lot, about a lot of things. It’s only natural that once and a while I still find myself an angry woman but as I have grown into the person I am still in the process of becoming, I have found myself filled with compassion more than anger, empathy more than annoyance, understanding more than conflict…to write that I believe, TRULY BELIEVE that I am a perpetual work in progress is no joke…I am in the process of working on myself every single day…what can I do that is better than the day before?? Day after day…My list is long, like, really long…the number of things about me and my life that I am working on changing is in itself constantly changing, but I suppose being a work in progress definitely keeps one from ever feeling bored!

I can’t think when the last time was that I felt really angry or super mad. I am annoyed a lot, but that isn’t at all the same thing, that sort of rage/fury/elevated heart-rate kind of mad is just something that I don’t feel like I’ve got time for anymore. It might sound silly but it sometimes comes down to simply a quote that says something like ‘being angry at somebody is like holding a hot coal and wanting the other person’s hand to burn‘…the only person getting hurt is me, and so I have really been working on this for what feels like a really long time. I have been VERY ANGRY MANY TIMES over my decades of adulthood but to be perfectly honest, this last “event” that happened to me, happened to my life, or “The-Summer-That Must-Not-Be-Named” as I sometimes now put it, completely wore me out, and even though it’s been almost two years since the ball of anger inside of me was so intense I thought it might kill me, I have learned that holding on to all of that does me no good…it exhausted the very last of my energy, and I came out on the other side a person who feels so much more calm, more at peace with what is, accepting that I can’t make people do what I want them to do, or think like I want them to think, or change like I want them to change…no, no I cannot, BUT I CAN CHANGE MYSELF and I can change how I respond, or not, to what other people do and say.

At this stage of the game, when I feel angry, if I pause long enough to evaluate the anger, it is most of the time (other than when it is because of terrible drivers) nothing to do really with ME at all but how I am thinking about somebody else, or some situation, or some series of events or circumstances…when I try to narrow down the feelings or rate the intensity, most of the time it’s simply because of the way I am thinking about the thing, not because of the thing…it’s me, it’s always me…You see, I have come to the realization that all of us can be, would be, better off, if we just worried about the words that were going back-&-forth in between our ears. I am not writing here about ignoring things that make us furious, like the wage gap or income stagnation, or the shrinking of the ice shelf and the warming of the planet, or the mites that are decimating the bee hives, or the loopholes and laws that make corporate greed so prevalent… THESE upsetting anger inducing issues are absolutely worthy of our action and attention, but I am mostly thinking about the day-to day-moments where we find ourselves wishing for things to be other than they are, and getting annoyed by it, and I am hypothesizing that if we only worried about fixing our own selves, our own minds and habits, or bodies and our choices, cleaning up our own messes so to speak, that how we deal with ALL OF THE OTHER stuff will become remarkably easier, and I feel like we could tackle the big things better…ch-ch-ch changing the world by first working on ourselves…I used the cumulative “we” here but as always, I am pretty much thinking about myself…if I clean up my own messes by starting with how I think about stuff, I think I will be onto something!!! Some real changes and some real growth that sticks! oh boy!!

I know it will sound very hippie-dippy to some but I have to be honest with myself here at the end; learning how to breathe in yoga class over these last years has SO MUCH to do with how I now handle negative feelings, negative people, negative emotions, negative situations, and negative events…finding the magic in the breath has been life changing…the silliness in scenes of movies where a woman is in labor and some doofus is yelling, “BREATHE BREATHE” is annoying, but here’s the thing, learning how to breathe though unease or pain or discomfort or anger is empowering. There are so many techniques and forms of breathwork that make your body and your mind feel better that to not do them, to not employ them as a tool when you feel your blood start to boil, would be silly. The way that I breathe now when something annoys me is like medicine…it’s like a soothing tonic for my spirit!! Let’s hear it for the hippie-dippy breathing!! The-Summer-That Must-Not-Be-Named, terrible events of my younger years, things I wish I had said, or stopped myself from saying, oh too many things I wish I had not done… there are too many angry times to count and it turns out that none of them really matter now at all to me, the past is the past and what is over is over and what’s been done has been done…it’s just the frequency of being annoyed with drivers that I guess I have to work on now, this me that is ever improving, this updated version of this mind and this human vessel. How could I have been so angry about ____ or how did I let ____ make me so mad??? These are questions for which there are no answers. Changing can be really painful, repair and growth can be so difficult that you might find yourself thinking, “why bother?”…you hurt your shoulder painting a ceiling or you hurt your back cutting down a tree or you hurt your brain by being mad at your ____ (fill in the blank here for any person of interest that fits) the fact of the matter is that fixes can cause unease, but it’s only temporary and the improvement can last forever! Fix yourself and the whole world feels like it’s fixed might seem too easy and simplified, but I am trying it out and liking it so far, a lot.

Patti Smith, inarguably one of the coolest rock chicks of all time, recently lost a beloved friend and wrote; “grief is not an affliction, it is a privilege” and I found it so moving and timely…this was just days before my father was turning 81 and I had been thinking, too much probably, about the future, and more specifically the depth of grief I will be suffering, sometime… It seems I have been dealing with something called Anticipatory Grief. It’s real, and basically means being sad about something that has not even happened, yet, but that I know is going to happen, eventually, and it makes me feel sad, and frankly overwhelmed, and I get upset and sometimes even will cry, as if I were suffering literal grief, but am actually just thinking about it! It’s terrible, and a waste of energy but it exists and I am experiencing it, often, these last months.

I am WELL aware that many people my age don’t even have parents anymore but I am struggling, if I think too often about it, with how I will go on living in a world without my dad and mom in it…I guess that is why keeping oneself immersed in the present tense is the best way to have a peaceful life!! Don’t worry about what will eventually happen, and don’t dwell on what has already happened, right??!! Also, it’s time to note that our family motto is “tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon” so it is also possible, because ANYTHING is possible, that I could very well die before my parents do! That would be easier on my suffering, but I feel pretty sure that it would make my granddaughters suffer mightily, so I shall not wish for one way or the other, because all of it will happen, but has not happened yet…

It seems so silly, I mean if we are alive we all die, eventually, we all know this, but I suppose because I have had so little experience with death I am now scared because it is coming. I am not at all afraid of death or dying, I am afraid of losing people I love, & they are not at all the same emotions or feelings. It started in November when my beloved aunt took a terrible fall and cracked her head and was lucky that it did not kill her…but seeing how hard her recovery has been, from an unexpected fall, really threw me for a loop. I have always said she was like or second mom, so losing her is in my mix of future worry too, and then last month an older gentleman who I really liked, a lot, the dear companion to one of my clients, took a fall and died from complications a week later, and it all happened so fast and I suppose made my thoughts about losing my family the front and center of my musings…perhaps if it were sunny and 87 degrees I would not be having such dark and gray thoughts these last weeks!!! That’s it, I will blame the weather!!!

…But back to my point…I was thinking a lot this last week about how lucky I have been to have family like I do…if you follow my blog or have ever read other essays, you will know that we are a family that does not agree on very much, at all, BUT the things we do agree on are sufficient to keep us having good and friendly relationships and frequent interactions. I talk to my mom and my sister and my aunt almost every single day and I see my family at least once a week or more, we are all fully IN each other’s lives. We don’t talk about that which divides us, period. I have two degrees in feminist theory/women’s history and criminal justice, I am the single blue M&M in a bag of only red candy if you get my drift, but there is no yelling or arguing like in some families or like in the movies…I do me and they do them, and we just find a way to get along. We do not listen to the same talk radio station and we do not watch the same news channels, and we are of opposite opinions about most subjects, but we find a way to have common ground and that really is a privilege isn’t it??!! I love my family very much and they provided me with one of the best childhoods of pretty much most all the people I know, and continue to be good to me, to my daughter, to my granddaughters…it is undeniably hard sometimes, to know that what they think is so different from what I think, and how completely and utterly impossible it is for me to comprehend, but then I remind myself that they probably feel EXACTLY the same way about me!!! “How could we have raised someone who thinks like she does??!!” is probably EXACTLY what goes on in their minds!!! My dad, my mom, and my aunt & sister all probably think this every day! Tit for Tat!!!

Over the last seven or so years I know so many friends who have lost friends, and family members who have stopped seeing or speaking to one another because they have such different opinions about so many things. It’s true that the orange president we got for those four years was one I never wanted and certainly did not vote for, but he was one my family did want and did vote for…not begrudgingly, like they actually liked him and supported him, AND still do (I know) which was actually very hard for me to deal with, in too many ways to mention…that he was such a gruesomely terrible public speaker was only one of the countless things that I loathed about him, and when it became abundantly clear to me that what I read, and heard, and watched was completely different from what my family read and heard and watched, I had to make a choice, and my choice was to find common ground and stick with that. I used bold lettering here because it is part of my past, my present, and my future. I will stick with common ground for as long as I live. I literally chose love; the love I had for my family was bigger than any issue or circumstances or period of time…I was not going to let their flags and bumper stickers and autographed postcards and hats (seriously, yes it’s true) ruin the otherwise good relationship I had with all of them. I cared too much about how much I loved them and how much they loved me to let anything divide us…from womb to tomb they are my family and I have never once, not even for a day, felt unloved, in my entire life…what a privilege to have ALWAYS KNOWN I WAS LOVED…I could have been born to some real loser/out of work-abusive-angry-in debt-alcoholic family, but I wasn’t, and for that I am lucky, and I know I am lucky, and continue to feel grateful for all they have done, and continue to do, for me…The older I get the fewer friends I have who have any family at all & I don’t take it for granted. They can tell me the sky is green, and that purple is the worst color in the world, and that my silver roof is stupid, and that my house and daughter are ugly, and that my job is meaningless, and I would still love them and want to have a relationship with them…what I mean is that I made a choice to NOT LET ANYTHING ruin what I had with them. Womb to Tomb commitment to love.

I went to see my dad on his birthday and to deliver the homemade macaroons I make for him. He looked like he always looks, in his work clothes (11 years after retirement) happy with a smile, and busy in his garage working on some sort of project, build, repair, or tinkering. On this particular morning he was rebuilding the pump on his log splitter and also working on the design for a head and foot-board modification on pieces that I got for free from a friend’s storage unit and that we want to make fit with my current bed (which he made for me in 1999) He is one of the happiest and most content men you will ever meet and I have never, not once EVER, gone to my mom and dad’s house and found my father sitting in front of a television! He stays busy from the moment he wakes up until it is time to sit and watch some news after dinner…surely this is where I get my work ethic and energy from!!! My mom too, always cheerful and chipper and running errands or reading a book or working at her desk…When I arrived with the cookies they were their usual smiling selves and greeted me warmly and while I am sure they have ZERO interest in my sculpt and strength workout that morning, they let me blabber on about how much I love that class, and while I am sure they have ZERO interest in, well, probably most of the stuff I say when I am with them, they act like they are interested in my life and that is one of the biggest ways that they love me. It is a privilege to be their daughter and the grief that I will eventually feel might very well kill me, but it’s not today, it was not yesterday, and so that is it I guess…I just “press on” as my mom says and keep “making plenty of deposits in my karmic bank” as my dad says…I guess it’s just the circle of life that none of us can do anything about, womb to tomb in a big round circle and some circles last a few years and some last a century…time will tell…they are my people and I am part of their world, no matter what kind of flags they fly.