Taking a Walk

Motivating! Must keep going....

Sunset

While trying to accomplish eight hundred thousand things today, I passed by the kitchen window and caught a glimpse of a deep red sunset. The photo didn't do it justice at all. It was unexpectedly beautiful. 

Thank you, Mother Nature. Lovely. 

Birthday Buns

The buns are three today.  Happy birthday, bunnies!!

Laze

The buns just lie about sometimes. 

It's a nice life they lead. 

I am happy for them. I do the best I can to make sure they have a good life, within the confines of my own life.

Good buns.

Sands of Time

Herself speaks.

Yesterday marked one year since my lovely Daddy's passing from this earth.  It's hard to believe it has been a full year, and yet only a year. 

It has been a long, terrible year. For many reasons, including the absence of my beloved, lovely Daddy.

-----

I drove out to White Sands. It was cool, and cloudy, and ever so quiet. I took a walk out, careful to mark my path lest I get lost in the sea of dunes. I sat for a while. I tried to talk to Daddy, but I didn't really know what to say.

I'm taking care of things.

I've tried my best.

I hope you are at peace.

I wrote, I miss you, into the sand.  The winds will blow it away in time. 

I walked back through the dunes. Back to reality. 

On we go. 

Dune

Flashback Trio

Facebook flashback reminds me of this lovely photo of our once-upon-a-time canine trio, who were all quite mesmerized by the cheese a family member was consuming. The photo is fuzzy now, but the memories are still all quite fond. I hope that, wherever their spirits are, they are enjoying endless amounts of cheese.

Good pups. 

Whither Weather

Yesterday, my phone randomly provided the weather in Xangri-lá. Perhaps it feels I need to do more traveling? 

Rabbit

Facebook Flashback reminded me that I posted this meme one year ago today. 

Well played, year of the rabbit. We now know that rabbits are fearsome, and not to be taken lightly. At all. Ever. 

On we go.  

Classics

I found this quote online the other day. 

It sounds like I need to read some Classes. Starting with Frankenstein. 

CHAIR

The buns have enjoyed hopping on the furniture lately. It's quite amusing. Good buns. 

Neurotypical Crystal Ball

 Herself speaks.

As we approach the anniversary of my lovely Daddy's passing from this earth, I find myself spending time thinking about my last visits with him and my mother. Sometimes, little snatches of conversation come back to me, and enlighten me in new ways. 

One evening, for example, we were talking about the various restaurants in the complex in which they live, and Daddy commented that the shuttle bus that makes circuits around the complex is a convenient way to get to some of the farther away ones (especially now that he was having some difficulty navigating the long corridors due to fatigue).  My mother interpreted his comment on the shuttle bus as a passive-aggressive statement about what needed to be done; I interpreted it as solely a factual statement about the available amenities. There had to be more discussion about the bus-the dinner places-the means of locomotion before things were ironed out. I professed my personal need to take statements at face value, and not be reading into statements because I was not a mind reader. 

It was a small moment. I am sure that it was a time that was hard for everyone -- for Daddy, who wanted more than anything not to be a burden on anyone; for Mom, who was extremely anxious about Daddy's declining health; and for me, too, as I was trying to balance their needs while also navigating being away from my own children and husband over the holidays for the first time ever. The smallest statements had the potential to inadvertently set nerves on edge. Best to speak plainly, was my modus operandi. Avoid misunderstanding. 

The insight I learned, in retrospect: some people impart information, and some people read in to information, and some people expect others to do the reading in to the information that they impart. 

------

I am a slow thinker. 

I am absolutely terrible at reading in to information. Subtlety escapes me, every single time. (It's like sarcasm: it just FLIES RIGHT OVER my head.) It takes me forever to ascertain someone's point, and I need time, and contemplative space, and the absence of other distractions, in order to arrive at a conclusion that would take a typical person mere moments. I might never get there -- I might blissfully skip off into my own world, having missed some critical suggestion entirely. 

This is why I value words so highly. 

And why I use too many of them whenever I try to explain myself: let there be no misunderstanding. Let me repeat myself in a hundred different ways, upside down and backwards and forwards, until you can See Me clearly, in all my words. 

------

I think that I might need to make Speak Plainly, my standard modus operandi.  After careful deliberation and contemplation, I would like to stop trying to read in to what other people say.  It is not in my skill set, and when I do it, I do so with poor results. No thank you. I turn in my neurotypical crystal ball for reading in to what everyone says. I'm not sure it has ever worked properly. I resign.

This will require certain changes to my behavior, no doubt. It will require more questions, for starters -- because I am not guessing what is happening or what I should be reading in to a particular situation any more, I will have to ask if it seems like there is a subtext that I need to be aware of. It will also require not taking responsibility for things other people do not tell me. For example: it's not my fault if I do not do something, if I didn't know it needed to be done because someone did not tell me so, and I did not think to guess or ask. I cannot go through life trying to imagine all possible permutations of every possible situation, in order to try to capture every conceivable scenario and read in to what is happening at every moment. Can you imagine the exhaustion? 

The hardest part will be trusting that others will provide explicitly, what they tried to suggest implicitly.

I cannot fix, what I don't know about. Can I absolve myself for the unknown?

I will try. 

Bonfire of the Vanities

A bonfire of the vanities (Italian: falò delle vanità) is a burning of objects condemned by religious authorities as occasions of sin.

This will be vague, because the details are not worth sharing. Yet, I think (hope) that I will feel better if I write about it. 

Once upon a time, there was a thing (an ongoing activity) that I always aspired to do. I tried very hard, I thought, to do that. And I thought that I did a good job. Despite hardships, obstacles, I continued to give it what I thought were my best efforts. I was self-satisfied. I didn't talk about my success at this effort, because it was a private effort, but I was nevertheless, secretly proud of myself. Ah, vanity. 

Pride: one of the seven deadly sins. 

Pride goes before a fall.

I learned recently that, although I thought I was being successful at doing the thing (according to my standards), I had not, in fact, met standards that were in fact critical to the job at hand. I had been painting with primarily two colors, and had been expected to paint consistently with three colors. There was an entire part of the rubric that I had not realized was important; my work-product, so to speak, was disappointingly inadequate. And had been, for ages. And I had smugly, vainly, continued to do a shoddy, incomplete and unsatisfactory job, for ages. I did not know. No one told me, until now. 

It was an earth-shattering, terrible realization. 

I have tried to move forward since then. It has been hard. Everything rings hollow. I continue to paint with my two colors, but the motions seem fruitless and insufficient now. I add the third color here and there, as I have done on occasion, and I resent that third color's importance and am bitter about my lack of knowledge about its importance before it seemed Too Late. I do not trust my own instincts any more. I am almost unbearably sad. 

Vanity number two: thinking that I was strong enough, self-sufficient enough, that nothing could break my heart. 

-----

It all seems quite melodramatic as I type it out like this. I don't mean for it to be that way. It is hard, as an adult, to move through life with so little positive feedback -- we don't get gold stars for accomplishing things any more -- and simultaneously try to tackle private failures while mustering a public brave face. 

Time heals all wounds. Or, at least, attenuates the impact of a blow enough so that we can correct our course and move forward again. 

At this point, all I really want is to feel as though I have managed to be a good human being.  A good mother, a good wife, a good friend, a good sister, a good daughter. I am doing the best I can.  Will it be enough, in the end?  

My epitaph should read: I tried. 

Box

Let's peek out cautiously and see what 2024 has in store for us.