A new decade approaches. To look at my life in terms of ten is something I have never considered doing. However, if I give myself a moment, then it feels like a progression to mark my personal growth that way. The next decade...hmmmm...all one knows is that you know nothing (John Snow) you want to afford the future. You want to be healthy, happy and confident that life has given you more successes than losses.All of a sudden life seems so damn fast. It is as though I cannot keep up ,and I am being pushed along with the crowd. More than ever I am conscious about taking care of my thinking... I have to work on maintaining a good attitude about things. I cannot go through life using my thinking to perpetually hash up the past. I cannot live there. I am now also finding myself asking what is happiness? I don't have to be constantly entertained? Solitude is very enriching to me. After a year of uncertainty for a large part of it, and watching people plot and scheme to insinuate themselves into positions, I am entering the next decade with a shift in my focus of what matters to me and how I am going to work now. A dear friend very kindly told me that what I experienced is not as uncommon as it feels.I just felt let down and tired...overworked, underpaid and under appreciated. The situation I realized was a wake up call. I can be doing other things, and that's the direction I will be taking.

Devastated

Over the last month my family and I have been faced with coming to terms with the swift yet slow, painful death of my mothers youngest sister. One year ago she was diagnosed with Liver Cancer. From then on we all formed a group for prayer and support. My middle Aunt finally travelled to see her a few months ago. We have been communicating with them all of the time, and as they news became more and more bleak, we spoke hourly. and then half hourly and then fifteen minutes apart. We have been devastated by this death. My Aunt was never ill. She had retired from Nursing, and was one of those people who was always so conscious of her health. She ate organic stuff before it was even popular to do so. I shall be writing about what her death means to me for a long time to come. ............

debris

I was speaking with my mother a few days ago and I was telling her that she and dad brought us up to feel very optimistic and confident about the world. I internalized everything as terrifying though, and very early my sense of perfection coloured how I viewed my own efforts. I believe that only now do I feel the confidence that came from theorizing things, Life and experiences gave me a sense of the pessimism I expected. I see it in others too. I think it comes from a number of places. Internally from family experiences, but also from what you are listening to and reading at home and then hearing from people in and around your family, including Teachers and aquaintances. I think that the subtle self talk and ambient noise of the world can settle like silt at the bottom of your consciousness and get stirred up whenever another type of stress gets to you. It is a constant struggle. I have written here over the years of looking in on the lives of people I know and of strangers, observing the knowing smiles, the everyday normality of a hug, a good talk producing laughter, a parent lifting a child into the air, and wondering about the fragility I felt at being on the other side of that. I asked myself many times what was it about me that was leaving me feeling as though my world of happiness had been blown up and I was sitting in the debris. I was sitting in it. Most definately. My mind was sitting in it, trying to find the horizon that shone through it. I kept asking myself, when would I become friends with the only person I could not ignore? When would I just trust myself all of the time? When would things someone said off-handedly not wound me and leave me in a ball of pain? When would I take up those great moments of confidence as a permanent battle cry? Then, very, very slowly I saw myself as a person for real. I saw that I will have moments of doubt, of setback, of pain, of confusion...but it would not have to hang around me like a bad smell. It is life happening, and I am inside it and part of it and I am a shard of that energy and refraction and reflection and I am right where I need to be.

bright lights ahead

The year is nearly at an end and I am looking back at it. What I did, what I didn't do (yet) and what I want to do soon. This year my time has been cut down by scheduling between my mother and aunt regarding my fathers health. The time that I get with my daughter has also arbitrarily been cut down by her father. As usual, I have had projects that I have wanted to establish this year. I would say that I have had this same mood about that for the last five or so years. I always feel that I am so close, and then things have not worked out. I feel that closeness again, as I am presently waiting to get an email from a company specializing in something along the lines of my big project. I am very excited about that. I know that as soon as I have something that I can see as consistent, I shall feel much better about all of the things that presently stress me out in that area. This year I had to confront so much about human frailty in myself and others. I had some breakthroughs with travel and looking in on my self confidence and goals. It has not been a bad year. I could always use more money. Lol. 2020..... I would like to travel more, particularly to somewhere I have never been and want to experience. I have the group show to work on, as well as three books to complete. The months ahead can be filled with everything I want to achieve and then some.

Questions

A friend of mine is currently abroad for three months, she does that every year, so we end up speaking via Skype or Whats App. After one of our chats, she mentioned something that has made me curious. She stated that I know very well that I give myself my own issues to deal with. I agreed, but now I want to take a closer look at that. Time flies, I remember being twenty-one and wondering about this future. I certainly did not see any of this ahead of me. I wonder as well about the next fast twenty years ahead. What will I grapple with, what shall blindside me? What will bring me joy? What am I doing now that I shall look back on and wish or honor having done? Suddenly there is no more time sometimes. Suddenly, the fears are so great that acting in any direction leaves me un-mobile in my mind, but somehow, I want to have these conversations with myself on paper. I would say that 2019 has brought me to a place where I am willing to dream again and to set forward plans based on pure speculation for a change. I finally understand that the planning does not have to be perfect, or even long term. As to the question my friend put to me, I will write that if I give myself these tests, then I shall continue to write them and respond to them the same way. What matters to me now is the times in between. The times when I am not being predictable. I know that I am being a bit of a smart-ass here...about time. I have some set ways, and this year I have been very confrontational with the parts of me that I usually downplay. I have noticed them piping up and have been feeling a lot more balanced for it. The messy and not so messy sides are facets and assets. It is also so funny, I could intellectualize all I want, but there is much to be said for experiences. For whatever is ahead, that freedom to THINK for a moment, to rest in an assurance of your next step...that is so important. You make the best plan or you wing it from thing to thing producing....what? You at this moment. I saw it in an article in "O" magazine once....the actual number of brushed teeth, sleeping, eating, walking that one will do in a lifetime. All life times add up. We all impact each other. It is wearisome for me at times to consider that I am creating my experiences to "feel' something I need to prove or disprove. To add or to subtract. Why? Because I feel everything in the end...and I go straight into analysis mode...why, how? What was the point of doing that? All of that is me. I sit at home and I plot the course and I hurt my own feelings and I get up and do everything all over again in a different type of sequence that makes me feel that it is all new to me....again. What a life?!? Yet, can there be anything better?

Overwhelmed by it all

Today I am feeling a little down and stressed. But I shall be fine. I am just aware of some things that I want to achieve and some changes are happening and I am trying to juggle everything. I had planned to write yesterday, but I got all caught up with some work and thus, I am only now getting to this entry. I was in a very different mood too. But what is good about this is that I know that I shall be alright. I think that that is big for me. I would say that I used to get into a funk and never really gave myself a space to say, ok, this is how it is at this moment, but it will pass. This year I find that the learning has been largely about myself and coming to terms with things that I sometimes cannot change right away, and more so, aspects of my personality that I have watched almost like an out of body experience, feeling out what a circumstance can make me focus on. My level of dis-satisfaction is something that I embrace now, because i know that it means that I will somehow, some way find a way to produce a shift and a change. What I do know for sure is this sense of discomfort is a huge yes to who I am and want to be. The things that seem like a stack of no's and don'ts over the yes's are all telling me that I see myself and know what I do want. There are things that I can no longer tolerate. My sense of neutrality is all well and good, but shit! Come on now, I also see that I deserve so much better with so much that matters in my life.

appreciation

This could be a long entry. But I won't do that. Last year and year before at this time, I remember being very frustrated with where I was. This year I appear to be in the same position again. However something has changed for the better. It started out with the usual sense of frustration and trying to figure out how to move forward. After much effort, I just decided to surrender to what I was feeling, and low and behold,I realized that what I feared most had no power to move me one way or the other.With that understanding, I was able to breathe out. It was as though the ending I was expecting suddenly was the end of one book and the opening of another. That achieved, old considerations came to the fore and I saw that whatever I choose to do next is simply a matter of deciding. I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be large and elaborate either. I don't even have to make it a permanent situation. The wash of relief was blissful once known and once I discovered that what I was doing was embracing myself as good enough.