I don’t envy those who try to learn the English language when it is not their first language. For example, words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same are called HOMONYMS, like the three words in the title of this post. Words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently are called HETERONYMS. Some examples of both of these anomalies:
I need to alter the arrangement on the altar. Did you develop instructions about the right way to write?
While viewing the beautiful redflower in the vase, I read the cookie recipe and opened the canister of flour. I rode my bike on the road in the desert but had to desert the area because it was close to getting dark so I had to close out my plans.
I was born in the United States to a middle-class family. My parents and my older brother and sister spoke English, so quite naturally the first words out of my mouth were also English ones. The educational system of which I was a part was English speaking only and although learning how to diagram sentences was a requirement, it was expected of me, and I didn’t have to discard any non-English rules to do so along the way.
HOW DO NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE MANAGE?
One of my nieces is from Russia and when my sister and brother-in-law adopted my sixteen-year-old niece from a Russian orphanage, Kristina didn’t speak or understand English. She is now in her mid-30s and has a successful job. Keep in mind, Kristina’s parents didn’t know or understand the Russian language either, so the challenges existed on both sides. BUT, and this is an important BUT, my sister and brother-in-law were born and raised in the United States so the biggest post-adoption adjustment occurred for the teenager who entered high school as an extremely handicapped individual and managed to graduate from her secondary school AND attend college. WOW!
The bottom line regarding the English language is that even though there are rules about how to write and speak the language, those rules don’t always apply, and when they do, they are still confusing as heck. I have deep respect for anyone who attempts – and succeeds at – learning the English language. At seventy years of age, I still struggle with discerning the correct word choices and sentence structures in any given circumstance, and I am a published author who is supposed to know a thing or two about the correct way to speak and to write! As I leave you with a few more frustration-inducing examples, think of those with whom you come in contact who might struggle with the language that comes so naturally to you. Perhaps we can all exercise a bit more grace towards them as a result.
HOMONYMS: ate or eight way or weigh aisle or isle blue or blew buy or bye
HETERONYMS: tear (crying result) or tear (rip something up); object (an item) or object (in a courtroom); lead (as in a heavy metal box) or lead (using a map to guide someone)
At seventy years of age, the end of 2023 saw me setting out to make space in my home’s storage areas. My husband and I weren’t running out of storage space, but in an effort to help our adult children should either my husband or I be out of the picture – which of course will happen eventually – we dragged out the under-the-stairs storage bins filled with photos, mementos, and journals to lessen the emotional impact on our adult daughters when the time does come, whether tomorrow or many years from now.
Doing so meant the emotions would no doubt come barreling down on me. Boy did they.
As many of you know, I was the caregiver for my father after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When caring for my father after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I kept meticulous journals on the progression of the disease from which he died in October 2007. I kept those journals so I could provide in-the-moment accurate updates to my brother and sister so those journal entries were VERY detailed about incidents I would rather not revisit.
But revisit them I did, and although the emotions that came through were raw, letting them bombard and fill me was a necessary step so that in the future our daughters would not have to wonder what they should do with all the anguish-filled words I put down on paper in those journals. You see, once I recently re-read my journals, I shredded them, knowing I didn’t need them for future reference. Over the course of several days, I digested their emotional impact and then eliminated them – remembering all that occurred, but not needing to save such records for decades to come. Bags and bags of shredded and disposed business effects and medical records were a gift I consciously gave to our daughters well in advance so they would not be put through the decision-making process of trying to figure out what the heck to do with Mom’s emotional ramblings and Grandma and Grampa’s business and health records that have been in my possession for so many years. My husband and I have already streamlined our own personal business effects so although at our passing our daughters will have to pour over them and address what is necessary at that time, at least they won’t have the much older generation’s business matters with which to contend.
But along with the somewhat devastating emotions experienced while going through the storage bins came joyful emotions in discovering decades of old keepsakes that shed a light on who my parents and grandparents were in the 1800s and 1900s. The most cherished keepsake were my parents’ love letters to each other a week before they got married in the 1940s. They were so in love with each other and did not hesitate to put that love into words as a gift to each other a few days before their May 26th wedding day. I made copies of those letters for our adult children and my siblings. Needless to say, good vibes prevailed in our hearts as a result!
Making space for storage purposes – and for emotional purposes – is an arduous task but the cleansing benefits can very much be worth the effort. I made space for the emotions to enter and pass through me and somehow or another, I survived that herculean task. Keep in mind, this is not a job for the faint of heart, but if you have it in you, you just might feel as lighthearted and/or relieved as I do now. And for me, that makes the task’s anguish a fading memory rather than a landmine waiting to be discovered.
I sometimes find myself in new circumstances—perhaps a new medical professional’s office—so that when I check in for an appointment the receptionist or the medical assistant invariably say, “Wow! You don’t look seventy years old!” Which begs the question:
What is 70 years old supposed to look like?
Aging is a strange bedfellow, isn’t it? We can’t get away from it, but would we want to? Doesn’t that bring about a lethal alternative?
Former model, Cindy Joseph said, “Aging is just another word for living.”
From all outward appearances, I look to be in good shape: I’m not overweight, I more or less stand upright (even though I’ve lost 2 inches of height over the past 10 years), I don’t leave the house in inappropriate clothing, and most of the time I remember to put on a pair of earrings in the lobes that were pierced 57 years ago as a teenager. Yep, for all intents and purposes, I present myself as being in pretty darn good shape for a seventy-year-old. But as we all know, outward appearances don’t tell the whole story, do they?
What no one can see is what is going on inside of my seventy-year-old brain. No one sees the worries and the fears that keep me awake at night or that keep me secluded in my home because I don’t feel comfortable driving long distances—especially on freeways—by myself. The receptionist at the medical office isn’t aware of my perfectionistic tendencies that create “What ifs” that need not be addressed but that I revisit over and over and over again in my effort to get things just right.
She or he has no sense of the terror that fills me when a neighborhood dog approaches me that, even though on-leash, I fear may take a chunk out of my leg like the “harmless” dog that did so in my same neighborhood twenty years before.
I am touching on these elements of my life that I am certain exist in many people regardless of their age, simply to point out that appearances can be deceiving. That just because someone presents themselves as in stellar shape doesn’t mean they are 100% healthy. Mental health is health, and without it, fullness of well-being does not exist. Thank goodness we are all becoming more aware of the mental health piece so that the stigma oftentimes attached to it is less pronounced than it was in times past.
I am not at all ashamed to speak of such matters because I know I am not alone. I take pride in the fact that I expend just as much energy to maintain my mental health as I do my bodily health, and apparently, it shows. The way I look at it—my physical body shouldn’t get all the attention, right?
My wish for you is that you nurture your mind just as much as you do your body. Aging isn’t for wimps, and I doubt very seriously that any of you would choose to fall into that wimpy category. Rock on everyone and celebrate the proof of life that your age has afforded you.
I finished off 2023 by going through numerous storage bins that were filled with photos, mementos, and historical family records. I didn’t enjoy it, but I am glad I spent the time to do so. I wrote about that emotional process in my column that appears in an online Australian publication called Grandparents Day Magazine. I welcome you to click on the link. Perhaps it will encourage rather than discourage you to do the same.
Please know that you need not overbook yourself this month – when we usually feel we have no choice but to do so – nor do you need to do so in any future month. This message is brief but I hope it lands with you. If you don’t matter, no one matters.
The writer Anne Lamott really nailed it on the head with this sentiment. I certainly get up and walk and I also fall down…fortunately not the physical type, but definitely the emotional type of falling down, but do I keep dancing through my days regardless?
I can’t say that I do.
Mind you, I always recover because after 70 years on this earth, I have proven to be quite resilient and although the recovery period takes longer than I would want, somehow or other I have survived every horrible day or event I have encountered in my life. In my birthday post, I mentioned the living milestones one encounters after 70 years which also included the number of breaths to my name as of my birthdate: 434,350,000, and the breaths keep adding up! But that’s not enough for me; what else can I do?
I can stop letting the stresses of life get in the way of my dancing.
I may not dance in the literal sense, but I can decide to shake off the intricacies of the world around me so that my health and well-being aren’t adversely affected. That does not mean that I don’t care about those intricacies – trust me, I lose considerable sleep over the caring that I harbor – but I will be a better participant in this life if I let my spirit and psyche dance a bit more than not.
And if doing so rubs off on others? All the better, so I will dance, dance, dance.
Many of us of a certain age have endured much throughout our lives, both personally and historically. I have had the right to vote in the United States for fifty-two years. Let me tell you, I have witnessed my share of elections that didn’t go my way and somehow my country has managed to survive, which for some election cycles is really saying a lot. On the other hand, some election results pleased me to no end, allowing me to endure periods of time of seeming ease.
Residents of each country reading this post have faced monumental weather anomalies, financial hardships, and devastating illnesses. If you are reading this piece, you have made it through those disasters and perhaps have wondered how you made it! I’ll tell you right now, there are individual days wherein I have questioned my own ability to do so and yet I woke up every day-after able to call myself a survivor.
As of the date I turned seventy-years-old earlier this summer, I marveled at the fact that my body had rewarded me with daily breath more than 25,500 days in a row. Astounding! And what about the heart? Given an average 100 beats per minute – at least at my age – that equated to 3,672,000,000 beats as of the date I turned 70! WHAT???!!! If that isn’t endurance, I don’t know what is! Thank you, precious heart of mine!
Now I will confess to you that I am a habitual catastrophic thinker (for me that means that I assume the worst rather than the best) so the stats I just gave you are vital tidbits of information I can now add to my evidence list that things are better than I might have assumed them to be. And perhaps such evidence will sufficiently encourage you to increase your own hope quotient so you can find the best, instead of the worst, going forward.
If that is the case, I am absolutely thrilled for you, and I’m thrilled for me as I grab my calculator to figure out how many breaths I’ve taken in the past 25,500 days and counting!
THOUGHTS No doubt you have been told that thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not facts. That’s true and we know that to be true, but do we believe it? Rarely. Instead, we let our thoughts consume us, depriving us of calm and making sleep as elusive as winning a big lottery jackpot.
WORRY. ANXIETY. STRESS. ACK!!!!! Everyone has their own “favorite” topic of the aforementioned emotionally distressing occurrences. Health, or lack thereof, is the catalyst for anxiety that is universally experienced, but one need not have that type of fear for ones’ thoughts to take center stage.
Family challenges, financial insecurities, political upheaval. Upcoming life events, whether positive or negative in nature. Socially and emotionally charged incidents. My goodness, the list is interminable! If only we could stop thinking such things!
THE BRAIN DOES WHAT IT’S DESIGNED TO DO I don’t have a magic solution to stop all thought and quite frankly, it’s not possible. Making worthless attempts to stop all thought adds stress, stress adds tension, and tension builds anxiety. Accept that you can’t terminate all thought; personally, that was a very helpful starting point. Acceptance is the key but please know that acceptance does not equate to agreement, rather, it simply means you acknowledge what’s happening and move forward through it without fighting it because…fighting adds stress, stress adds tension, and tension builds anxiety.
ACCEPT THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE I don’t subscribe to the philosophy of think positive thoughts and all your worries will disappear. Nope, but what I do subscribe to is getting to a place of understanding that nothing is permanent…NOTHING. The bad times wane and, of course, so do the good times. For me, knowing that to be an incontrovertible fact helps me realize that my thoughts aren’t worth investing in. I enjoy the warm fuzzies that positive thoughts give me while trying not to assign too much weight to the negative thoughts that occur unbidden at the most inopportune times, like when I’m trying to fall asleep.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS We know that’s true. Just as the weather changes, so do circumstances. Remember, nothing is permanent, so along with understanding that bad times aren’t permanent, we have to be willing to accept that neither are the good times, and that’s a healthy mentality to have because you can’t have one without the other. Please know, I’ve given this topic an extraordinary amount of thought and have had countless opportunities to practice letting go and letting be, but I am still a work in progress where failure oftentimes outweighs the successes, but practice makes perfect or at least as perfect as us fallible beings can be. You’ve got this my friends. Just as I believe in my ability to wade through all the positive and negative thoughts that fill up my head, I believe in your ability as well. Welcome each opportunity to engage in this practice. Eventually, you and I will get the hang of it and we’ll be better off as a result.
Even though no human being is perfect, we always have the chance to bring what’s unique about us to life in a redeeming way.
Irene says: I celebrate being perfectly imperfect. And my normal weekly blog posts will commence on August 7th. I hope you have enjoyed this Mr. Rogers summer interlude.
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us is, that each of us has something that no one else has or ever will have something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.
You are special. There’s only one of you in this wonderful world. In a way, you’ve already won in this world because you’re the only one who can be you!
I celebrate the fact that I am perfectly imperfect. I have no goal of ever being perfect. In my mind, perfection is greatly misdiagnosed when applied to human beings.
How is human perfection measured? (Humans are involved)
Whose standards are used? (Human standards)
Why aim at perfection when doing so can cause comparison and strife that individuals can certainly do without? (Yeah, why?)
Comparison. Ugh, no good can come from such a practice. Whether you compare your life to other people’s lives on social media – or you compare yourself to your neighbor, friend, or enemy – more often than not the measuring rod’s results will not bend in your favor. Why? Because we are hard on ourselves and therefore in our minds will never measure up.
We are individuals and therefore distinctly different from everyone else!
We complement each other; filling in the blanks that quite naturally exist within each of us.
And THAT, my friends, is something worth celebrating: me helping you, you helping me. A definition of:
How about family caregivers who live near their loved one?
This Spotlight on Care audio podcast, only 25 minutes in length, will encourage you greatly. I was the long distance caregiver for my father who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s disease. This recent podcast produced by the University of California at Irvine MIND institute provides a snippet of how I succeeded, or failed, in my efforts to make my father’s experience as carefree as possible. I was just like you: figuring it out as I went along, picking and choosing methods that might help both my and my father’s experience. Looking back, I can celebrate that I did my best, and that’s all that matters.
Doing your best doesn’t demand perfection, just your best.
I recently completed a guided meditation on loneliness where it was suggested that hunger and loneliness are spurred on by the same need in a person’s brain. When our tummy tells our brain it needs nourishment, we act on that need, but do we act on our need for connection when we’re lonely?
Like many of you, my yearning for connection grew by leaps and bounds the past three years. With very little recourse, my personal world became smaller and smaller, and although my husband is great company day-in and day-out (for over 23 years now) I still craved interaction with others. Then the world opened up and doing something and going somewhere finally became an option.
But I was still lonely and didn’t know how to satisfy that hunger.
I have very few friends nearby. It seems once a person no longer goes to work each day, exhausts their desirous volunteer activities, and their neighbors move away, there are fewer opportunities to make healthy connections. I have a literal ache to make friends and spend quality time with them. I am happy to say that for the past three months, I have found that connection at a weekly class offered by the city in which I live.
The class is a combination of Tai Chi with the healthy addition of maintaining physical balance in ones’ later years. I turn seventy years old next month so it stands to reason that seeking better balance would be high on my priority list. I am receiving the benefits of such exercise with the added benefit of meeting new people and spending time with them. The twenty students in the class are all of a certain age, the youngest being 50 and the oldest appears to be in their 80s.
None of us students have perfected the art of Tai Chi. We will no doubt never reach the perfection of form demonstrated by our teacher Julie, but as she emphasizes each and every class session, “You do you” and that is exactly what I am doing.
The need to connect is still there. There are some deeper connections in the class I hope to make. But if I hadn’t sought that initial connection, the possibility of gaining a deeper connection would have no chance of happening. I guess a good way of summing up matters is to say that if I hadn’t done my part, I would still be as isolated as I was before, and suffering the same mental health deficit I felt at the beginning of this year. As Yoda of Star Wars movie franchise fame so succinctly said:
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
If you don’t set a goal, you’ll never reach it. If you don’t ask, you’ll never receive. We only have one life to live. Please don’t let it expire without your participation.
Putting off matters is such a common experience for all of us. Speaking for myself, I usually adopt that avoidance behavior when I lack the confidence needed to master the task at hand. It helps to have a deadline but when that deadline is a generous one, chances are attention will be diverted for quite some time.
FOR EXAMPLE: I had 3 years in which to file our amended 2022 tax return.
I thought I had absolutely every form needed to file last year’s taxes and was quite proud of myself for electronically submitting my household’s return using the tax prep software I have used for many, many years. I mean, it was the end of February so any entity that was slated to send me a form would have already done so…right?
WRONG.
Wouldn’t you know it, an errant form from a country other than the United States arrived shortly thereafter which most definitely created the need to file an amended return for the first time in my entire almost 70 years of life.
I researched it. I looked for every possible legal loophole to not have to go down that path, but I discovered there was no way to avoid the dreaded amended tax return process. But I had three years in which to do so, so why rush?
Because the manila folder on my desk containing the 2022 tax files kept mocking me each time I walked past it.
Given the fact that I’m retired and have all the time in the world to travel down the path of tax return hell, I couldn’t even claim busyness to avoid opening up my 2022 electronic file and diving right in. I absolutely knew that the tax prep software would hold my hand through the process but I still took comfort in the fact that I had plenty of time to get ‘er done so why add stress to my somewhat calm life if I didn’t need to?
Because I needed to eliminate the fear that had subconsciously been keeping me awake at night.
On April 5th, 2023, I tackled the software, only to find that it did indeed walk me through the process, and the anticipated pain was minimal at best. Sure, we ended up owing the IRS some money, but the peace of mind experienced having finally stored that manila folder in the file cabinet was worth every penny electronically deposited into the IRS’s bank account.
What task have you been putting off? Hoping you can experience an Oh Happy Day moment to rival mine!
Both of my novels address the impermanence of life, while also addressing how difficult some situations can be when we’re fully enmeshed in them. Requiem for the Status Quo speaks of the difficulties of a dementia diagnosis on the patient and on the family members who care for her/him, while A Jagged Journey exposes the reader to life with all its catastrophic imperfections. Both novels also shine a spotlight on the fact that bad times don’t stick around forever.
The good news and the bad news of impermanence in these situations is that we have to accept that along with being in favor of bad times not hanging around forever, we have to acknowledge and even accept that good times are subject to the same fleeting characteristic.
Take comfort in knowing, however, that tomorrow – or the next hour – may reward you greatly.
What has been your experience surrounding such opposites as appear in our lives?
I’ve read lots of articles and listened to numerous podcasts the past few years wherein self-forgiveness and self-compassion are talked about at length. Intellectually, I understood the concept but my heart didn’t catch up until a few days ago so that the IMPORTANT understanding could settle in.
Self-forgiveness is not dependent on rectifying a past action or mistake.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, duh – you can’t change the past” but believe me, my previous inability to forgive myself was based on wishing I could change the past and because I could not, forgiveness was not possible. Had a friend experienced a similar faux pas as me, would I castigate her? Would I shame her? No, I would not, so why be a jerk to myself?
Indeed.
I have finally forgiven myself for previously unforgivable mistakes – the ones that still pricked my conscience – and I have become a free woman where those matters are concerned.
My shoulders and my heart have been relieved of a VERY heavy burden.
My sister, Mary, was born 8 months before me; my parents adopted her after my mother suffered three miscarriages. As sometimes happens, before the ink was dry on the adoption papers, my mother became pregnant with me. Yay me!!!
Suffice to say, being so close in age, my sister and I grew up together with the same experiences and oftentimes the same friends. We are still very close, even though we don’t live in the same state.
Several years ago, after our mother and father had passed away, my sister located her birth mother, met her, and had a few occasions to get together with her and her other daughters, even though her birth mother lived in eastern Canada and my sister resides in California.
Because I erroneously believed I would have all the time in the world to write a letter to and further communicate with my sister’s biological mother to thank her for placing my sister up for adoption, I missed out on that opportunity because Cathy died a few years after my sister first connected with her.
Cathy’s decision to provide the best possible home for my sister was an extraordinary gift for which I wanted to express my gratitude, but I procrastinated and never told Cathy what a blessing her first daughter is to me. In my recent history, this by far is the biggest regret I harbor in my heart.
The bad do not win – not finally, no matter how loud they are. We simply would not be here if that were so. You are made, fundamentally, from the good. With this knowledge, you never march alone. You are the breaking news of the century. You are the good who has come forward through it all, even if so many days feel otherwise.
Alberto Rios, from A House Called Tomorrow
I believe this statement to be true; believing otherwise would not serve me well. Be well. Stay well. You’ve got this people.
I think we can all agree that we’re surrounded by bad news stories. We need not look any further than a pop-up notification on our phones to catch Breaking or Headline news that is rarely good.
As I have stated in previous stories, including this post written this past October, it’s so very important to make note of even the smallest of victories that come our way. Here are a few small, and not so small, incidents I had the privilege to celebrate this past week.
A close family member got the ideal job for the household’s circumstances.
My local NFL team made it to the playoffs!
I received encouraging news about a health condition I have battled for the past couple years.
I was gifted with a very comfortable pair of warm slippers that I really, really needed to keep my tootsies warm…tootsies that get alarmingly cold and painful due to a health condition that is not related to the point directly above.
Despite all the wind and rain we have had in my part of Washington state, we did not lose power this week.
While shopping at a grocery store with the word Whole in its title, there were no plastic produce bags to be found. A professional shopper filling her order saw my dilemma and gave me the 2 plastic produce bags I needed.
A snack our household enjoys that has been missing from grocery shelves for a couple months has returned. See! It doesn’t have to be something major to be good news!
Majoring on the “minors” is a great way of being when those minors are positive happenings in our lives. And they’re important! Why? Because the more good we acknowledge the less yucky the bad stuff will seem to be.
Don’t let the bad stuff get you down. Being open to the many positive happenings around you is a good way to start.
Being kind to yourself is most definitely a serious matter. You deserve to be treated with the same gentleness you would treat others for whom you care.
If the Holidays have gotten to you, do what is needed to bring some calm and control back into your life, even if that means disappointing others. Again, you matter just as much as those you might have to disappoint, so I would advise you to try a little kindness toward yourself, a kindness you so very much deserve.
And if you’re doing absolutely well right now and can exercise some outward gentleness, check in on individuals who might need a reminder that they matter and that someone was thinking of them. You don’t have to make a huge effort – especially if doing so depletes your own reserves – but a phone call, a text, or a hello in passing – could mean the difference between making their day and not.
I know you’re busy, and this Holiday season has perhaps caught you unawares, so here are two inexpensive book gifts that make the gift giving so very, very easy. If you purchase the eBook version, an email is easily sent to the recipient so they can claim their book, right when you want them to!
Requiem for the Status Quo is a novel that celebrates the lives of caregivers of family members with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia. A Jagged Journey is a story about a diverse group of perfectly imperfect people. If you know someone who is imperfect, or perhaps you yourself are among the rest of us who are still trying to figure life out, this book is a perfect addition to ones’ bookshelf.
Whether it’s because the Holidays are fast-approaching, or we’re relocating to a different area, or we are faced with a life stressor that threatens life, limb, and sanity, we are oftentimes encouraged to stay calm and relax. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!!
Being on the receiving end of such an admonition is not a welcome moment, to be sure. “Try being in my women’s size 12 shoes and say that again! You have no authority here.” Boy can I relate. Given an opportunity to break down that comment, however, I might eventually get to the point of being able to at least realize that if I were to take a few deep breaths I would feel slightly better as a result.
I fully understand the impetus behind someone telling us not to worry. Certainly I have said the same thing to someone in need and I absolutely meant it. But staying calm is not an easy venture, is it? But boy oh boy is it called for.
I react and I overreact – just ask my husband. You know what they say about teaching old dogs new tricks? Well, I’ve been trying to learn the calming lesson/trick for quite some time now. The more I overreact and discover later that such a reaction was not needed, I get that much closer to learning a lesson that will most definitely help my well-being. When an overreaction takes place, the fight or flight response gets set into motion which sets in motion bodily anomalies that never do the body good: accelerated heart rate, increased pain where pain might already exist, and if you’re me, the gastric juices start churning and a sour stomach ensues.
Being able to witness time and time again that things most of the time turn out okay, that most disasters are readily avoided, and life goes on regardless of any perceived evidence to the contrary, then we can settle down and carry on. But if you’re at all like me, you will need to administer compassion and loving kindness toward yourself to attain such a state of well-being.
I hope you succeed in doing so, as much as I hope to do so myself.
I don’t envy those who try to learn the English language when it is not their first language. For example, words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same are called HOMONYMS, like the three words in the title of this post. Words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently are called HETERONYMS. Some examples of both of these anomalies:
HOW DO NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE MANAGE?
At seventy years of age, the end of 2023 saw me setting out to make space in my home’s storage areas. My husband and I weren’t running out of storage space, but in an effort to help our adult children should either my husband or I be out of the picture – which of course will happen eventually – we dragged out the under-the-stairs storage bins filled with photos, mementos, and journals to lessen the emotional impact on our adult daughters when the time does come, whether tomorrow or many years from now.
But revisit them I did, and although the emotions that came through were raw, letting them bombard and fill me was a necessary step so that in the future our daughters would not have to wonder what they should do with all the anguish-filled words I put down on paper in those journals. You see, once I recently re-read my journals, I shredded them, knowing I didn’t need them for future reference. Over the course of several days, I digested their emotional impact and then eliminated them – remembering all that occurred, but not needing to save such records for decades to come. Bags and bags of shredded and disposed business effects and medical records were a gift I consciously gave to our daughters well in advance so they would not be put through the decision-making process of trying to figure out what the heck to do with Mom’s emotional ramblings and Grandma and Grampa’s business and health records that have been in my possession for so many years. My husband and I have already streamlined our own personal business effects so although at our passing our daughters will have to pour over them and address what is necessary at that time, at least they won’t have the much older generation’s business matters with which to contend.
But along with the somewhat devastating emotions experienced while going through the storage bins came joyful emotions in discovering decades of old keepsakes that shed a light on who my parents and grandparents were in the 1800s and 1900s. The most cherished keepsake were my parents’ love letters to each other a week before they got married in the 1940s. They were so in love with each other and did not hesitate to put that love into words as a gift to each other a few days before their May 26th wedding day. I made copies of those letters for our adult children and my siblings. Needless to say, good vibes prevailed in our hearts as a result!
Making space for storage purposes – and for emotional purposes – is an arduous task but the cleansing benefits can very much be worth the effort. I made space for the emotions to enter and pass through me and somehow or another, I survived that herculean task. Keep in mind, this is not a job for the faint of heart, but if you have it in you, you just might feel as lighthearted and/or relieved as I do now. And for me, that makes the task’s anguish a fading memory rather than a landmine waiting to be discovered.
I sometimes find myself in new circumstances—perhaps a new medical professional’s office—so that when I check in for an appointment the receptionist or the medical assistant invariably say, “Wow! You don’t look seventy years old!” Which begs the question:
She or he has no sense of the terror that fills me when a neighborhood dog approaches me that, even though on-leash, I fear may take a chunk out of my leg like the “harmless” dog that did so in my same neighborhood twenty years before.
The writer Anne Lamott really nailed it on the head with this sentiment. I certainly get up and walk and I also fall down…fortunately not the physical type, but definitely the emotional type of falling down, but do I keep dancing through my days regardless?
Many of us of a certain age have endured much throughout our lives, both personally and historically. I have had the right to vote in the United States for fifty-two years. Let me tell you, I have witnessed my share of elections that didn’t go my way and somehow my country has managed to survive, which for some election cycles is really saying a lot. On the other hand, some election results pleased me to no end, allowing me to endure periods of time of seeming ease.
Now I will confess to you that I am a habitual catastrophic thinker (for me that means that I assume the worst rather than the best) so the stats I just gave you are vital tidbits of information I can now add to my evidence list that things are better than I might have assumed them to be. And perhaps such evidence will sufficiently encourage you to increase your own hope quotient so you can find the best, instead of the worst, going forward.
THOUGHTS No doubt you have been told that thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not facts. That’s true and we know that to be true, but do we believe it? Rarely. Instead, we let our thoughts consume us, depriving us of calm and making sleep as elusive as winning a big lottery jackpot.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS We know that’s true. Just as the weather changes, so do circumstances. Remember, nothing is permanent, so along with understanding that bad times aren’t permanent, we have to be willing to accept that neither are the good times, and that’s a healthy mentality to have because you can’t have one without the other. Please know, I’ve given this topic an extraordinary amount of thought and have had countless opportunities to practice letting go and letting be, but I am still a work in progress where failure oftentimes outweighs the successes, but practice makes perfect or at least as perfect as us fallible beings can be. You’ve got this my friends. Just as I believe in my ability to wade through all the positive and negative thoughts that fill up my head, I believe in your ability as well. Welcome each opportunity to engage in this practice. Eventually, you and I will get the hang of it and we’ll be better off as a result.
This Spotlight on Care audio podcast, only 25 minutes in length, will encourage you greatly. I was the long distance caregiver for my father who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s disease. This recent podcast produced by the University of California at Irvine MIND institute provides a snippet of how I succeeded, or failed, in my efforts to make my father’s experience as carefree as possible. I was just like you: figuring it out as I went along, picking and choosing methods that might help both my and my father’s experience. Looking back, I can celebrate that I did my best, and that’s all that matters.
I recently completed a guided meditation on loneliness where it was suggested that hunger and loneliness are spurred on by the same need in a person’s brain. When our tummy tells our brain it needs nourishment, we act on that need, but do we act on our need for connection when we’re lonely?
The class is a combination of Tai Chi with the healthy addition of maintaining physical balance in ones’ later years. I turn seventy years old next month so it stands to reason that seeking better balance would be high on my priority list. I am receiving the benefits of such exercise with the added benefit of meeting new people and spending time with them. The twenty students in the class are all of a certain age, the youngest being 50 and the oldest appears to be in their 80s.
Putting off matters is such a common experience for all of us. Speaking for myself, I usually adopt that avoidance behavior when I lack the confidence needed to master the task at hand. It helps to have a deadline but when that deadline is a generous one, chances are attention will be diverted for quite some time.
Because the manila folder on my desk containing the 2022 tax files kept mocking me each time I walked past it.
Because I erroneously believed I would have all the time in the world to write a letter to and further communicate with my sister’s biological mother to thank her for placing my sister up for adoption, I missed out on that opportunity because Cathy died a few years after my sister first connected with her.
The bad do not win – not finally, no matter how loud they are. We simply would not be here if that were so. You are made, fundamentally, from the good. With this knowledge, you never march alone. You are the breaking news of the century. You are the good who has come forward through it all, even if so many days feel otherwise.
A Jagged Journey is a story about a diverse group of perfectly imperfect people. If you know someone who is imperfect, or perhaps you yourself are among the rest of us who are still trying to figure life out, this book is a perfect addition to ones’ bookshelf.
Being on the receiving end of such an admonition is not a welcome moment, to be sure. “Try being in my women’s size 12 shoes and say that again! You have no authority here.” Boy can I relate. Given an opportunity to break down that comment, however, I might eventually get to the point of being able to at least realize that if I were to take a few deep breaths I would feel slightly better as a result.
Living: the ultimate team sport 