I investigated a river for a potential swim. It originates from mountain snow in the municipal watershed at a high elevation. The river is beautiful, cold, and surrounded by forest and by leafy suburbs.
My favorite way to sleep well is to get physically tired from exercise. It has to be hard. Just plain going for a walk won’t do it, even if my feet start to ache. So instead I go for walks with weights in a backpack — referred to as rucking.
We have to accept that we are creatures with limited time, and that sometimes we are subject to disappointment and there’s no way around it. Which means we have to be patient. On the positive side, we get to set the priorities that make us feel like our real self, and being patient feels good. The implications Burkeman lays out grow bigger with each chapter.
My mom had shown me over and over again that it was my own responsibility not to be bored when there were so many things I could do alone, such as read or draw or talk with her, write in my journal, or write a letter to my aunt.
I’d say the message I took in, about how to handle my loss and my new life, was “Soldier on.” The future was obscured by worry. I couldn’t afford to give in to unpleasant emotions because I thought they would churn me like a tsunami wave and never stop.
As I mentioned last week, I spent the weekend at a retreat for women who lost their mothers before age 21. I looked forward to all of it: traveling to Los Angeles, staying alone in a tiny Airbnb camper-trailer, walking each day to the retreat house, and spending all day with women who have shared this traumatic, or at least seismic, event of mother loss. And I wondered how I would feel. I had forgotten one thing. When I sign up for something, I often resist the experience when the time comes. During the past 30 years, I’ve been to…
I’ll spend the weekend at a retreat with Motherless Daughters author (and support group creator) Hope Edelman and others. I don’t know what to expect to “get out of” it. I hear my inner eleven-year-old asking, “Will I cry?” because at Mom’s death, she did not.
When I’m patient with other people, I’m more patient with myself too. Patience can mean willingness to wait, which is a virtue, and patience can also mean willingness to expend effort to put oneself into others’ shoes, also a virtue. How about expending effort to look at what’s really going on, in order to decide how to respond? To me, that’s also patience. If I scatter my speech with labels and exaggerations, I’m displaying my (impatient) frame of mind, not portraying what I want to describe. I hope I’ve never said anything like this, but as an example: “This old…
An intensive swimming course reminded me of the importance of curiosity as a driver of great experiences and learning.
