Eleven Days

That’s how long it’s been since I wrote anything here.  I’ve been in a coma.  Okay, that’s not really true. 

Let’s see.  Work schedule changed all around so that I could take this past weekend off, and I’ll be messed around with that for awhile, because now I’m working a weekend for Laura, who is going skiing.  But not really, because she doesn’t ski, so she’s going to sit around in the chalet and drink.  Sounds like my kind of ski weekend.  Jen and kids arrived last Wednesday night and were here through to Sunday.  And Kenzie spent Friday night and Saturday here before going off to a Christmas concert with her other grandma.  So this lucky grandma got to spend a lot of time with her favourite little people, being pulled in three or four different directions all at once.   There is a very good reason why old people don’t have small children around all the time – they would be hospitalized for exhaustion.  No matter how angelic the children.  Because they were all SO good I still can’t believe it.  What wears anyone down is the noise and the non-stop activity and the constant worry about what they may or may not be swallowing or sticking up their noses.  I’m just so out of practice at being on the alert for hours at a time.

But here I am, more or less rested, thankful that they all survived and that we had some fun.  And Kale saying to me “Grandma, you’re the best!”  made it so absolutely worthwhile you cannot even imagine.

My daughter is going through some life altering changes.  She is my child, and it’s hard to fight those mothering instincts that make me want to jump right in there and try to ensure that everything gets better for her.  But she is also an adult.  W. and I are both trying hard to stay supportive but in the background while she makes her own decisions.  She will also survive, and she will be happy.  We do not doubt this. 

I’ve read some interesting articles on my lunch breaks lately.  One was from the August edition of O magazine – 21 Things You Can Stop Worrying About Right Now.  Ready for some inspirational quotes?  Well, too bad, here they are anyway.

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.“  Mahatma Gandhi.

“Finish every day and be done with it….You have done what you could:  some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in:  forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day;  you shall begin it…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.  It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.” Dorothy Dix. 

“It ain’t never no use puttin’ up your umbrell’ till it rains!”  Alice Caldwell Rice.

Haha!!  I like that last one the best.  Then I read some Deepak Chopra,  who says that the mind and the body are the same thing.  “Your body is the battleground of the wars that you wage against yourself in your mind.”   That is so exactly what the psychologist was trying to say to me that it’s freaky. 

Then there’s all this stuff about a quiet mind.  “A lot of people try to be positive all the time, but they’re not, and they become tiresome to themselves and others.  They get so stressed about trying to be positive and think positively that they do more damage.  A quiet mind is much more realistic.  You just exist without getting caught up in the drama around you.  The drama is where most of people’s fatigue and energy loss comes from.”

We’ve all encountered those exasperatingly positive people, haven’t we?  Where they’re so sweet and polite and smiley and gushy you just want to grab them by the necks and give them a severe shake.  I almost prefer the complete grumps who can’t direct their anger inward or they’d explode, so they spew it out to whoever will listen. 

I guess that’s enough (or perhaps entirely too much) psycho babble for one day.  I’m here.  I’m alive.  I’m meditating to obtain that much revered quiet mind.  Last night I fell asleep repeating the phrase “I am.”  Breathe in on “I”, breathe out on “am”.  It works.  You will either bore yourself to death or clear your mind of all those annoying voices and exhausting dramas that want to replay themselves endlessly in your head. 

Hopefully my mind won’t become so quiet that it stops functioning altogether.  GAH!  Another thing to worry about.  haha.  Whatever.  A non functioning mind has never stopped me from blogging.  Well, for longer than 11 days at a stretch anyway.  

We have snow at last!  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!  Life is good.