My father worked at the Central Experimental Farm for many years in Technical Services. He helped design many of the laboratories on the farm and invented machinery.
His work there has just disappeared. Not a mention anywhere.
Granted, my father was not the most liked man on the job. His previous occupation was that of a Sergeant Major, so he was a tough lad at six feet and didn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all.
But he was an exceptional hard worker, and brilliant. He contributed a lot to the farm.
His co-workers got streets named after them. Many got articles written about them. But my father has vanished into history. Even though his name is not there, he left his mark on numerous buildings and projects.
It has been almost 40 years since he left this planet, and in my old age, I have wished that my Dad had of received some kind of recognition on the farm.
But I guess every daughter wishes that for their Dad.
Ah, it is January and you’ve made New Year resolutions once again.
My condolences.
Temptations are going to happen.
But here is what I learned about temptations.
They are showing you that you have a repressed emotion. It is the emotion you need to address, not the temptation. Not the cupcakes, the potato chips, ice cream. Not the cigarettes. Not the distractions. Not your procrastination or so called weak will. These are stories that point to an emotion not acknowledged. These things make you feel something. It is not the craving or the longing or the resistance that you need to fight, it is the underlying emotion that you need to recognize, accept and love.
Temptations purpose is to show you something. Not defeat you.
They cause an emotion, and emotions never, ever, ever, ever, respond to logic.
Emotions need to be felt, and this is the tricky part. To allow your emotion, to accept it, on its own, without judgement, detached from the story of why you have it.
If you rehearse the story of why, and judge yourself, you are forever trapped in your emotions and temptation will defeat your best efforts. You will stay forever angry, or sad, or whatever you are feeling. The feelings are not wrong. Emotions are not wrong. They are energy that needs to be felt and released. It is only your judgement of them that makes them wrong.
Forget why you feel something.
To resolve your issue you must sit with it, by yourself. Quiet. Feel it. You will find that your emotion evolves, it may start out as anger but becomes sadness. I found the issue I had with overeating had many different emotions attached to it; anger, self loathing, worthlessness, boredom, feeling deprived etc. But if you focus on the ‘why’ stories attached to those you never get out of it.
However, a good cry does wonders. Just be careful you don’t stay at the self pity party too long. That is a story of why and is self defeating to say the least. Whenever you act out an emotion you need be very careful you don’t rehearse the story of why you feel it.
I learned that when I did bag boxing. Boxing is a fabulous stress reliever, providing you focus on the blows you inflict to the bag, and not the problem you are beating up. You are not punching your boss, you are releasing the hurt you feel. This is not about your boss, this is about your sadness. Keep your mind off the story and on what you feel. It is tricky to do. But like all things, practice makes it so. The punching bag also got a lot of hugs while I cried.
Rocky has no worries with this one.
So I learned it is better to sit quiet and locate the emotion in your body. Is it in your throat? Stomach? Legs? Where ever it is, focus on that and feel it until it gradually disappears. This has to be done every time you are triggered, and it does not matter if you succumb to the temptation confronting you the first few tries. Eventually you will no longer have the desire to fulfill the craving or longing, or to resist. It goes away.
This is very hard to do. It requires a lot more effort than just lacing up your running shoes and going to the gym. But the effect is a lasting one, and makes going to the gym for the long term that much easier. It is a whole lot better than padlocking your frig. A whole lot better than beating yourself up with guilt and shame.
And the side effect of this is, you will then make the right choices in your life. They will be love based choices, not fear based. You will respond and not react to situations.
Later you may learn why you feel certain things; for instance a past hurt, a rejection, homesickness, loneliness, worthlessness, and a whole host of victimhood stories from your past. But if you dwell on these stories and not allow yourself to feel your pain, without judgement, you will never be free.
It is called self love.
I have said this often before. If you use any of the above wisdom to do or justify something evil, to act out your rage on others, to harm anyone or anything else, you are not understanding and I will not condone your behaviour on any level.
Oswald Chambers said something very wise and I paraphrase: “The devil does not tempt usjust to make us do wrong things, but on the premise of shifting our point of view.” Then we will be trapped in sin and not see the damage of it.
Worth thinking about the next time you are faced with temptation and where that might lead.
Since I have a cat, my celebration of Christmas is severely limited. I cannot put up decorations or have a tree or wrapped gifts, it is just too much temptation for a happy feline!
So I bought myself some cheap pins and put them in a box and look at them once in a while.
My box of Christmas cheer!
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
And be sure to get your booster as soon as you can! Three’s a charm!
For my birthday I bought the original Carl Sagan Cosmos TV episodes on DVD. (Thank you Bill and Carol for the Amazon gift certificate!)
When I first watched this series, Dr. Sagan got me through a hard time in my life. There is something very soothing and comforting about Carl Sagan.
Young people would find the series boring. Dr. Sagan talks slowly with dramatic pauses. The episodes are long drawn out affairs with lengthy special effects overlayed with music crescendos. Nothing moves quickly in Cosmos and that is what I love about it.
Dr. Sagan gives you plenty of time to think about what he is saying and conveying. Those lengthy pauses are pauses for thought. The music and special effects stir the imagination. Cosmos is a meditation.
The show originally aired on PBS and every so often they had telethon fund raisers, where you could pledge money to this organization. They had great commercial free TV, non interrupted episodes of Cosmos and Nova, as well as sitcoms and other programs like Sesame Street. During one telethon, they were offering to the first 20 callers or so the album, The Music of Cosmos. Well, I dialed my finger to the bone to get one, and I did! Not only that, I got to speak with the President of PBS. I still have that music record today! I wouldn’t part with that for anything, even though I no longer have a record player. My next gift to myself will be the CD.
Watching the series now, it is eerie the accuracy of Dr. Sagan’s predictions for the future. I don’t currently agree with everything he believed, but there is nothing outdated in his commentaries.
I have a beautiful view of the Experimental Farm from my apartment, and most days, I can see the Gatineau Hills. Then there are other days that I cannot see the hills at all, and downtown is smudged out.
This is smoke from the terrible fires consuming our beautiful north lands. It gives me chills to think of how much forest is being wiped out by flames. It is devastating. It sickens my heart.
On my dog shit day, I also had an interesting nectarine purchase.
I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the library and my adventure of being smeared with dog poop. See previous blog about that. My strange day had not ended.
I selected two nectarines along with a bunch of other produce and waited at the designated spot for nice cashier to ring it up.
The fruit slipped out of the bag as the cashier weighed them. She attempted to put them back in the bag and one escaped and rolled down the counter. She fumbled the next attempt and said fruit found the floor and scurried under the checkout.
Nice cashier searched for it. Found it. Wiped it on her pants and put it in the bag for me.
At the end of the summer the libraries opened and I resumed reserving and picking up books when they were ready.
One beautiful day at the end of August I took my bundle buggy and headed out to get my books and do some grocery shopping too.
Since the cart was empty, I tucked it up under my arm and carried it, cursing the wind that thought my bag was a sail and kept pushing on it. I held it in tighter.
As I got near the library I noticed something brown on my leg. When I stopped, I noticed something brown on my shirt. I noticed something brown and slimy on one of the wheels of my bundle buggy. And when I stopped to further examine this brown something, I discovered I had it ALL over me. My shirt, my pants, my legs and my purse!
That brown something was dog shit that I must have run over with the cart before I picked it up to carry it!
Fortunately, I always wear latex gloves. Double fortunate it had rained the night before, and I found a puddle in a parking lot and well, with a little ingenuity, that did the trick, more or less!
Lately weird things like this have been happening to me. Makes me laugh!
I am one of the most cautious persons on earth. I hardly ever take risks. I know, yawn, boring.
Yet I fell for a computer tech scam.
Yep. I did.
And like countless others, I knew better. But it hit me when I was tired, not feeling very well and at one of those, ‘I lost my mind’ times, that seems to happen a couple of times a year.
The emotional aftermath of this is something few people write about. There are countless articles on how to avoid scams. Some outright terrifying shame on you articles and the like. All of which do not serve a woman who just wants to create stuff and live happily ever after.
Women process these situations differently than men. Men would be angry and attack. Women go into the ‘shame-blame’ mode. This is just a general observation of people of my generation.
We also take this very personally. It is computer rape. I feel violated. It severely altered my perspective of the world. It is going to take a long while to come back from this.
I immediately took action to correct my faux pas, all the time battling the shame and blame I felt for having so easily been deceived. Damage control took a week. A week of not much sleep, no exercise, poor eating and feeling BAD.
No one but myself shamed me. Not the police. Not the Fraud Protection Centre. No one pointed fingers at me and went TSK TSK. No one rolled their eyes up at me and groaned. No one blamed me or said I should have known better. The turmoil was within.
You cannot be proactive about everything in life unfortunately. You can’t know every damn thing. And even if you do, you forget most of it. Most of us just bump along this rough old road called life and dig ourselves out of pot holes and messes.
A lot of good came out of the ordeal, as I find most things have a silver lining. It forced me to get things up to speed. To examine areas that need cleaning up in my life. It taught me that computers are like swiss cheese and colanders and almost impossible to completely plug up. I have a new and deep empathy for fellow victims. I learned an awful lot. The HARD way.
The best thing is it convinced me to work even harder on my creative stuff. I’llshow you! Youscammers who try to steal my joy!
I received a knockout punch. Now I get back up, dust myself off and get back into the ring. Life is too short and too precious to lose your joy and your reason for being. You have to get back into the game.
