Happy New Year!

 

Happy New Year, readers, listeners, friends, family, and anyone else who happens to stumble across this blog! I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I hope 2023 will be better than 2022, and that all the blessings, luck, fortune, and opportunities will come to all of us.” We need it.

Last Sunday, I was reflecting on everything that had come to pass in 2022. I was wrapping up my One Little Word and PowerSheets projects in anticipation of starting a new One Little Word and goal-setting system for 2023. As I read through my workbooks, rereading all the journaling, reflections, poetry, and quotes I had written and collected, I kept running across little nuggets of wisdom and insight that showed me just how much I have changed and grown in the last 12 months, and I found so much I wanted to share, that I thought I would offer some of it here as a sort of recap of our year together.

Those who’ve been reading and listening to Modern Musings all year probably know that it has been challenging for me. After caring for and losing a dear friend to cancer in January, I had thought the worst was behind us and I was on track to my best year ever. But then, in July, my husband, Mark, was diagnosed with lung cancer, and the tribulations continued to mount. Around the same time, Mark also lost his job of more than 20 years. All the while, I was still struggling to rebuild my little travel agency, and hoping to turn a part-time hobby for fun money into a full-time, bring home the bacon cash cow. And lest I forget, I need to mention my mother, who has Frontotemporal Dementia and who needs to move to a Medicaid skilled nursing home before she runs out of money.

All this to say, “Whew! It’s been a lot!” And I have been quite remiss in sharing with you any sort of progress with my goals or my One Little Word since we first introduced the concept on our podcast in late 2021. Amber, Christen, and I chose words for 2022 that reflected the goals we wanted to achieve in the coming year. We talked about “why”, and even mentioned a number of ways “how” we develop our words, but we never came back to share progress or results. For that reason, I have created this flip-through video to share my personal journey with my word, “now”, which was inspired by my reading of Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth.”

I know you can’t see all the detail in the journal, but I hope this video will help you see the merits of doing your own One Little Word project, whether it’s through Ali Edward’s workshop or even just working on your own. I do feel like it has been a life-changing experience for me, and I highly encourage everyone to give it a try. If you’re still on the fence, here is a recording of Ali Edwards in a Zoom with her instructional team as they discuss choosing their word.

I announced my word back in December, but I actually chose it much earlier than that. After the challenges of 2022, I thought it might be nice to choose something easy and fun. My word for 2023 will be “Light”. What will yours be?

Heard It on the Podcast - March 9

Did you miss a link we mentioned on the podcast? Here's a quick post we'll do every Wednesday to share any links or information from the podcast. We'll also keep a running post on the "Links from the Podcast" tab so you can refer back to any previous episode. Here's the links for this week:

9-MAR-2022

S2E11: A New Earth, Chapters 3 and 4

• Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth": https://amzn.to/3hblVm4

And don't forget our sincere thanks to:

• Creative Audio Tech/Red Door Studios: http://www.creativeaudiotech.com

As an Amazon Affiliate, Modern Musings earns from qualifying purchases. 

Things Remembered

If you’ve been reading the blogs or listening to the podcast for a while, you know we’ve touched on a lot of topics. And sometimes, after we’ve posted, we think of something we should have said or we suddenly remember something we haven’t thought about in a long time. Like how after talking about the relaxing YouTube videos, I was reminded of the sound of my oral surgeon’s voice when I had my wisdom teeth pulled a few decades back. At first, I thought his quiet drawl was annoying because I just wanted him to say whatever it was he wanted to say and be done with it. I’m blunt. I’m loud. And I hate it when people talk under their breath…usually. But then, during surgery, I found that his calm, soft voice was quite soothing, and it reassured me that I was in safe hands. It’s a silly example, I know, but it’s sometimes the kind of thing that comes up after a podcast recording session or after reading the blogs Christen and Amber wrote for that week.

Memory is funny that way. Little bits of things that stay hidden away for years and years will suddenly jump forward as though they happened just yesterday, triggered by some odd encounter or a random sound or smell. Sometimes, we forget things altogether. Things we should remember, even things that did happen just yesterday, but have evaporated like the morning dew when the sun comes up. The older we get, the more often it happens. And sometimes, we remember things wrong. My husband and I had an argument about this very thing not that long ago.

If you were listening to the podcast a while back, you might have heard our discussion about the fallibility of memory during one of our Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth debates. I mentioned an episode of New Amsterdam in which one of the characters, Dr. Helen Sharpe (played by Freema Agyeman), misremembers an incident from her past, illustrating the fact that our memory is often tainted by our emotions and the limitations of our immature and/or egoic comprehension. My mother is a perfect example.

I’ve probably mentioned before that my mother has dementia. At 74-years-old, she is impaired by Fronto-Temporal dementia, a neurological disorder that affects her memory, judgment, impulse control, emotions, and all kinds of higher functions. She often tells me misremembered stories and tall tales. For instance, one of her frequent narratives is the account of how she lost the toenail on her big toe. She has repeated multiple times that a man stepped on it, and then, before it healed, another man stepped on it. The truth is, she had a horrible fungal infection that we spent over a year trying to treat before the podiatrist finally decided to remove it. No one stepped on it. There was no man. Where she came up with that story, we will never know.

I’d like to write that story off as dementia, and I’m sure it has a great deal to do with it, but truthfully, she’s been telling wild tales for decades…long before any possibility of dementia being responsible. She’s told my niece repeatedly that her mother favored her older sister and would let her go outside to play while keeping my mother inside. Punishment? No. When she was 7 years old my mother had a serious hepatitis A infection that put her in the hospital for months. Her mother wouldn’t let her go out because she was ill, but she doesn’t remember that. A child who can’t understand why she can’t go outside is not going to remember why she can't go outside, and thus, faulty memories are created. My mother has spent her entire life resenting her sister for a perceived privilege that didn’t really exist…or at least, not in the way she thought it did. And that brings us back to the argument between my husband and me.

I won’t get into the specifics of the argument but suffice it to say that it was over a conversation that we had. In hubby’s recollection, we had discussed a very serious matter and he had brought me around to his way of thinking. I didn’t remember the conversation at all… or rather, I remembered a very different conversation that took place months before when I had convinced him to agree with my way of thinking. This was a very serious matter, and so we continued this argument for quite some time, each of us sure that the conversation had ended in our favor. But then my husband described the scene of the conversation, and I realized…we were actually talking about two different conversations! Once I realized what conversation he was talking about, I realized that I didn’t even remember discussing that topic at all during the conversation he remembered. I do remember the conversation and the circumstances around it, but I have absolutely no memory of discussing that topic at that time.

So, who is right, and who is wrong? I don’t know. My memory of that conversation is obviously very different from my husband’s memory, and we are both sure we are right. Maybe we are. Or maybe we are both completely wrong. Or maybe the truth lies elsewhere. I’ve often been told that there are three sides to every story: two points of view and the truth that lies in the middle. So that begs the question, how much of our memory can we trust? It certainly makes me want to revisit memories of pivotal events in my life…did I totally misread things? Am I angry at this person for no reason? Did that really happen?

As we continue our readings of Eckhart Tolle, I am reminded that the past is the past, and that to spend too much time dwelling on it does not make us happy, nor does it ever resolve anything. The past is done. Gone. And it should not affect us one iota. If it does, then we are allowing it to do so. The only time that exists is NOW, and what we do with this time is entirely up to us in this moment.  NOW is the word I chose for this year, and it’s something I am trying to embrace wholeheartedly. NOW is all we have, and I’m ready to make the most of it, but in order to do so, I have to let go of the past. Let go of the hurt. Let go of the anger. And let go of whatever impression or misconception might be clouding my judgment or affecting my behavior. There is only NOW, and everything else is just a mark left on my psyche that may or may not be real.

If you haven’t been reading with us, I invite you to do so. I also encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your own life. Have you ever misremembered something? Have you ever made a decision based on something that turned out to be false? How would you do things differently if you were not affected or influenced by your past? Join us in our Facebook chat group and share your thoughts or add your comments below.

Resistance is Futile

“Resistance is futile.” Pardon my inner geek as I appropriate this “Borg” catch-phrase from TV’s Star Trek, but I just couldn’t resist. Some could argue that no truer words have ever been spoken. In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle talks about the detrimental effects of resisting change versus yielding to it, and we’ve talked a bit about that on the two-part podcast episode that we wrapped up today. In our discussion, we mentioned Tolle’s belief that there are only two options for coping with change, trauma, grief, and other life-altering events; you can resist, and thus remain stuck in the negativity that comes with it, or you can yield and pass through it, which can actually make you stronger in the long run.

Resistance requires energy. Resistance consumes resources. You can’t keep fighting without exerting tremendous amounts of energy and burning through resources. Think about an army that needs manpower, food, weapons, armor, and the money to buy those things. A successful army needs morale. So, too, does resistance to change…to grief, to trauma, to progress. The more a person fights these changes, the more energy and emotional resources they expend on it, the more angry, exhausted, and negative that person becomes. All that negativity takes its toll (no pun intended). Negativity rebounds as anger, stress, physical ailments, isolation, blame, and what some might call bad luck or karma.

But what does it mean to yield? The New Oxford American Dictionary has several definitions that apply. In the first sense, to yield is to produce or provide a product, generate a (financial) gain, or to deliver a result or gain. This is certainly true of many kinds of change when you look at the bigger picture. What do I have to gain from this? What message does this teach me? What positive outcomes have occurred because of this? In another sense, to yield is to give way to arguments, demands or pressure, to relinquish possession, to give something up, to cease to argue about, or to give something (as in traffic) the right of way. In this form, yielding is the act of going through the trauma or the change and coming out the other side, much in the same sense as Christen described going through the Swamps of Sadness in the Neverending Story without becoming part of the swamp. 

It should be noted that to yield often has a temporary connotation. When we yield to traffic, we give up our right of way until it is safe to proceed. It is not the same as giving up or giving in, which is what happened to Artax when he and Atreyu went through the Swamps of Sadness. When making that distinction, I like to think about quicksand. It is common knowledge that panicked flailing (resistance)  in quicksand can rapidly make the situation much worse, but the answer isn’t to give up either, because then you’ll just sink and suffocate. The answer is to move slowly and deliberately. Toss away anything you can to make yourself lighter. Keep your hands above the sand as much as possible. Reach carefully, for a branch or a helping hand, and pull yourself to safety. By accepting and adapting to the situation, you can move through it and come out the other side. Life is the same way.

Last month, I got a little first-hand experience in yielding. I’ve talked about my love for Christmas and holiday traditions of all kinds. I have some pretty well-defined notions of what that is supposed to look like, and because of the upheaval of the last few years, I’ve taken it upon myself to try and make those holiday experiences as normal as possible, which hasn’t been easy. My Christmas merry-making starts the day after Thanksgiving when my husband sets up the Christmas tree and gets all the decorations out of the shed. In recent years, Christen, her daughter, Reyna, and I spend that Saturday listening to Christmas carols and adorning our family tree. It’s part of the ritual and it helps set the holiday mood.

Unfortunately, this year, we were in the midst of home renovations that were supposed to be completed before Thanksgiving, but actually didn’t even get going full-swing until mid-December. We dutifully cleared out half of our belongings in preparation, and thinking the project would resume any day, we were reluctant to put up the tree or start any decorating for fear we’d have to take it all down. They finally finished the flooring on December 22nd, and they informed us they would not be back until after the 1st of the year to finish the rest (yes, they are still working on it as I write). So here we sat, on December 22 with no tree, no stockings, and I really didn’t even feel much like celebrating Christmas at all. My niece, Ashley, kept telling me she was going to print a photo of a tree and pin it to my wall if I didn’t do something. I wanted my Christmas to look a certain way, and if I couldn’t have it the way I wanted it, well then, I just wasn’t going to have it at all. I was resisting the change, and I was making myself miserable in the process. To make matters worse, my bah-humbug attitude wasn’t just affecting me…it was felt by everyone in the house.

Ashley's cute little tree.

Ashley was the one who had the answer that turned it all around. She wasn’t asking for my tree…she just wanted a tree. And so a tree we gave her. I had a small tree that I usually set up in my kitchen, and I put Ashley in charge of decorating it. I found some fairy lights I had bought for my craft room. One set was broken and didn’t work, so we cut off the battery pack and used the wire-strung bobbles as a garland on the tree. The other set was so long it covered the tree twice. Rather than pull out my fragile ornaments for this wobbly little pine, we used another goodie from my craft room – a pile of pompoms I had been making for a garland. Ashley tied them all over the tree. It was very cute in its own Charlie Brown sort of way.

Creamy pumpkin soup in fine china on the patio.

I don’t tell you this to brag about how cute this sad little tree came out, but rather, to illustrate the point of yielding. In the end, we wound up decorating my back porch with lights, setting up a few folding tables with pretty tablecloths and my fine china to enjoy a fantastic dinner with family and friends. I won’t say it was all smooth sailing; I definitely had a little meltdown when I got frustrated with my husband, Mark, for not doing what I asked. It wasn’t the Christmas I imagined, but it was good. The weather was perfect (we were in the ’80s here), it looked nothing like my traditional Christmas feast, and it just felt right for this time in our lives. 

Stockings hung on the banister instead of their usual place.

The lesson I learned is that resisting the change only made me (and everyone else around me) miserable. When I embraced the change, found a way to work through it, not by insisting on doing it exactly as we’ve always done (resistance), nor by giving up (staying miserable by refusing to yield to the change), but by really embracing the singularity and uniqueness of the situation, we all found a happy place within the change. We found happiness in what is…in “now”. 

Acceptance – yielding to what is – is not a form of defeat. In fact, it is the only way to win. A battle is not won on defensive maneuvers alone. Winning requires acknowledging our circumstances, accepting our situation, and adapting to it. To make the most of what we have, and to keep moving forward…to remember the objective. To not give in or give up, and certainly not to keep struggling to make things happen on our terms. A good general knows this. The Borg know this. 

So the next time you are in an untenable situation, the next time life throws you a curveball, step back, take stock, and ask yourself, “How can I move through this? How can I yield? How can I turn this to my advantage?” Because to fight it, to resist, will only make you (and those around you) miserable. Remember, resistance is futile.

The tree with gifts for scale.

Christmas lights strung between the trees
made this very pretty after dark.