Month: August 2020

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Piles

When I was working I accumulated piles.

No not, hemorrhoids!

Actual piles of ‘to do later’ stuff.

Piles of ‘I can’t deal with that now’ stuff.

And mental piles, virtual to do lists that clog up the brain like sludge.

Come to think of it, they are sort of like hemorrhoids. Ugh.

Piles destroy your quality of life. You cannot live well when you have piles, of any type.

I quite literally had decades of stuff piled up. The actual piles of stuff like paper etc. were annoying to clean up and time consuming but once all was sorted, trashed, cleaned and put away, I could start working on the mental piles.

Things that are stashed away in your mind are the things that make you exhausted and irritable and sometimes crazy. They are unfinished business, and your brain hates unfinished business. It will work 24/7 to solve your problems, to get what you want, to complete your lists whether you are conscious of them or not. This is what your brain is suppose to do; think, solve, plan, organize, be a manager of the rest of you. So mentally file something away and your brain is on it! And no, writing them down does not quiet your brain. It will work even harder on those because they are in writing

The tasks of finishing the unfinished, loving the unloved and the neglected is gut wrenching. From the simple things of sewing a bra strap back on, to finally writing a thank you note (it is never too late for either, your bra and friends understand) I gradually cleared all those mental to do lists out. In the process I discovered many things I’d forgotten about. Embarrassing stuff. Silly stuff. Oh, that would have been great to do stuff.

The great thing about being retired – no matter how short term this may prove to be (money!) is I seemingly have vast expanses of time to do more. Seemingly, because now I really don’t want to do more. I’ve stopped collecting piles, real and imagined and just live for the moment. If something catches my attention, well, if I don’t do it now, I probably will never do it. I will not file it away as a to do later, or sometime if I feel like it.

I am happy to be free of piles for the time being. Life gets so far ahead of you when you are working. Your life belongs to the office and everything else is neglected. So glad those days are OVER.

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Near Death Experiences

Many years ago, at the dawn of Harry Potter, my friend and I, being of an older generation, were intrigued and wanted to discover what all the fuss was about.

Now I know at the moment J.K. Rowling, Harry Potters’ author is getting some bad press about something she posted that I have not read, nor do I even want to go there, but at the time, she was high priestess. So it was pretty close to sacrilege to not take Harry Potter seriously.

Knowing this, we decided to take in the movie, the original, at a big theatre in town. The place was packed. We took a spot among the throngs of mostly youth and settled in with popcorn, not knowing what to expect. We had not read the book, nor had much clear idea of what we would see other than wizards and some special effects.

It was enjoyable and fun, until we met the dog.

The dog in the movie is a massive, menacing, drooling, outright terrifying 3 headed cerebus from hell (but not that scary really). But when the keeper was asked what the dogs name was, well, my friend an I literally fell out of our seats in hysterical laughter at his reply.

“Fluffy”

When we composed ourselves that theatre was so quiet it was like a morgue, but with a thousand eyes all trained on us. For a moment I thought they would stop the movie, turn on the lights and throw us out!

We stayed to the end, frozen in our seats, daring not to even sniffle. At the end we slunk out like a couple of felons on a day pass.

Our apologies to Fluffy et al.

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Only WE

Often lately I’ve been hearing we are in end times, and over the last few years, it definitely appears to be. I have been surprised that even atheist friends have mentioned we are stepping into the Book of Revelation. This is not said glibly, but with some panic and belief.

I once read a book about the Book of Revelation that suggested this is a period of enlightenment as opposed to wanton destruction. That all of these problems; fires, floods, pollution, corruption, poverty, suffering, political upheavals, all this chaos, is a call for us to embrace love. It is meant to open our hearts and make us see the truth.

That is what Revelation is, an awakening. Enlightenment. The truth revealed.

The truth is, there is no US and THEM. There is only WE. We are one.

We are all humans, living in the same place, with nowhere else to go, despite what Elon Musk might envision for Mars (an entirely hostile place. WHY would we leave this Eden to live there?) We are a global community. You can’t separate one place from another. Not with walls, moats, fences, hedges, conspiracy theories or hoaxes! All other living creatures, plants and lo and behold, viruses, understand this. It is just humans with our little egos that don’t. The sooner we get this, the sooner we can fix the world.

My cat is a cat, and I don’t have any prejudices against tabbies, or tuxedo, or persians, or scottish folds or . . . they are all CATS.

We are all humans. It does not matter what we look like, where we live or what we think. We are all the same! We share the same world and the same problems. Why can’t people get this? Because they are not enlightened. And this is what it is all about.

This age of Revelation is going to continue until we smarten up. Our resistance to our problems perpetuates them. And that is probably why the Bible gives us such a terrifying account. It shows us what our ignorance is capable of, and it ain’t pretty.

The sooner we all return to love and oneness, the quicker our suffering will end. The faster our global disasters will subside. We created our own messes, we can clean them up.

There is only WE.

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Small Things

In my working, pre-covid days, each morning I would encounter the same people and have a brief chat before I caught the bus. A man waiting in the lobby for his ParaTranspo pick up, the man walking his big dog, the pony tailed young woman returning from her run, the retired bus driver out for his morning walk, the woman playing fetch with her corgi.

All these encounters and more, that I took for granted were a pleasant start to my day. If I didn’t see one of them, I would wonder about their welfare and ask the next time I saw them. Likewise they often enquired about me.

After several months away from this, I do miss it. I don’t go out very much, due to bad legs, a condition and age that ups my covid risk, and of course, I am now unemployed.

How greatly, in small ways, our lives can change in an instant.

Even when they told us to close our office in March, we never foresaw this. We thought, oh, a couple of weeks and all will return to normal. We had no idea.

It isn’t just the big things that changed, like quitting my job of 15 years, but all the little things, like my daily routines and encounters that I didn’t pay much attention to.

I don’t long for the past by any means. I am still processing the shock of huge changes, adjusting to a new way of life I was not prepared for.

In a strange way however, not being ready has made this a grand adventure, where I have no idea of what the future holds. In the past, whenever I have made big changes I spent a long time planning and working them out. I am not a risk taker. This time, I had no plans, only vague ideas of what I might do with lots of time. And I certainly did not envision the changes in the daily small things.

Making this a grand adventure, from my own self inflicted house arrest keeps me from freaking out.