Life

There are a lot of reasons to be reflective this time of year. The year is winding down; just a little over a month is left in 2018. The holidays are upon us and in the ever more frantic swirl of holiday activities, I find that as I age, I am also taking more time to stop and look at where I’ve been.

This year has gone by in a flash. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t mentioned that at least once this year. I look at my calendar with all the days carefully crossed out in the previous months and I wonder where it all went. I only remember a couple of days clearly, the rest are a blur of work commitments, sewing commitments and housework. Ok so maybe I exaggerate a tad, but I’m doing so to make a point. In order to be grateful, there needs to be an awareness of things qualifying for gratitude. If I can’t remember what all happened this year, how am I going to keep a grateful outlook on my life.

As humans, I think we have a tendency to remember the bad things more readily. Anyone else still easily call to mind those cringeworthy memories from 7th grade? Yup, me too. Like they just happened yesterday. I guess this goes back a long time in human history. I mean if you can’t quickly bring to mind the horror of a wild animal attacking your village, you will find it difficult to be wary of future encounters with that animal. I’m not saying my 7th grade classmates were animals, but in our modern society, the dangers we face are more likely from those around us and our daily situations, as opposed to the dangers that faced prehistoric man.

I’ve also noticed that a large part of my daily life is spent checking for things I’ve missed. At work, what have I missed on my action plan or my check list. At home, what have I missed getting into the laundry or chores around the house, or bills that need to be paid. Our lives are focused on what is missing and remembering what is missing.

It is not a natural thing to immediately pull to mind memories that are really good, or to look at the list of things we have in front of us, yet those are the seeds of gratitude. For a while I kept a gratitude journal. It’s an easy enough thing to do, once a day write down 3 things for which you are grateful. They can be anything – big or small. Some days I was grateful to wake up without a headache. Other days I was grateful for friends. Every day I made myself write down 3 things, so that in addition to all the negative lists I have to keep going, I was actively keeping a positive list. I need to go back to this practice. It is easy enough to fit in my bullet journal, and I find the act of writing with a pen and paper really makes my brain sit up and take notice of that information.

This holiday was based on the Pilgrims having food for the winter. I’m thankful for the roof over my head and food on my table. I’m thankful for my friends, be they local or electronic in nature. I’m thankful for fabric and yarn and color and a chance to smooth my soul with things that I create. I’m blessed a thousand times over, and I need to remind myself of that every day, not just once a year.

I have had a blog for a while now. It gives me an interesting snapshot into my life. I have noticed two very big patterns. First, I have goals that never get realized and second, I always come back to this blog in November.

On the first point: goals. Goals are interesting. Just having a goal doesn’t make anything happen. You can own a car, but you won’t go on a single road trip if you don’t make some plans, get in that car and turn it on. My blog has been like my car sitting in my garage. It’s there but it’s not going anywhere. Without me putting some planning and effort into this, it will be more of a dream than a goal and nothing will ever come of it.

On the second point: November. I know this is when fall starts to show its face in Texas. Sometimes we get lucky and get touches of fall in October but November is when it really settles into fall here, and I get re-energized again for my quilting and my knitting. Part of that rejuvenation is my desire to write and communicate about what I’m working on as well. So every year around this time, I start to ramp up again both in my studio and at my keyboard.

I have decided that this year is going to be different. I have to be the reason that it is different. I have to take my dream of an active, regular blog, and turn it into a goal that has a plan. I have been learning a lot about blogs the last year – especially how I can write content ahead of time and schedule it to be posted. This should make my blog much more flexible in terms of fitting into my schedule, but without a plan, this hasn’t happened. So I’m going to try something new this November. I have laid out a plan for blog posts for the next two months. One post a week – I don’t want to get so overzealous here that I push myself to the point where it’s not sustainable. I have come up with a post topic for each week. There’s 9 of them! (December has 5 Monday’s so there’s a “bonus” post in December). If this goes well then I will continue the plan and continue to post and see if this coming year will be any different.

The one thing I do know, is that if I don’t make a plan and take action, I will arrive at November 2019 writing yet another “I really want to write this blog” post and that’s not in my plan.

In times of great sorrow, we turn to many things in life to deal with that sorrow.  This weekend I dealt with the loss of two friends, one very close, the other was the husband of a close friend.  I am about at my breaking point this year.  There has been so much loss.  Loss of lifestyle, loss of relationships and loss of friends.  Monday dawned with a new kind of horror.  I will not make any political commentary.  That’s not what this blog is about.  What I will say is that through this weekend, and now through this week, I plan to stitch my way through my sorrow.  This weekend I found great comfort in sewing.  I made things both for myself and for others.  All of the items are useful, but with a touch of whimsy, trying to bring some light into the darkness.  With each stitch, I found myself sewing my heart back together, one tiny stitch at a time.

We will all get through this.  Be kind to each other.  Be kind to people you don’t know.  Take a deep breath.  Sew a little.  If you don’t know how, go learn – it’s a useful skill to have.  Keeping your hands busy through all of this can help calm your mind and sooth your soul.  I don’t have any other answers, believe me I wish I did. In the mean time I will just keep sewing.

I see a lot of people post on social media these days about ‘adulting’.  While I abhor that word, I’m not even sure it really is a word, I completely comprehend the sentiment.  There is the list of things that I really want to be doing, and then there’s the list of things that I ought to be doing.  If you have an avocation, like I do in quilting, then there’s a list of things in between that is things that I like that I ought to be doing but still get passed over for the list of responsible adult activities.  This blog somehow often falls into that category.  No matter how good my intentions are to write and share on a regular basis, life manages to show up like an octopus and wrangle me into the depths and it never happens.

I have now, at least, reset my password, and am putting some words on to paper.  I have this grand plan to install WordPress on my iPad so that I may write from anywhere.  I have this wonderful fantasy of sitting at a little cafe in Rome, Italy, sipping an espresso and typing away on my blog.  It’s much more likely to be me sitting at a Sonic in Rhome, Texas, sipping on a diet limeaide and typing away on my blog but both have their own appeal.  I will get there; as my sister often says, it’s a process.

At least I’m sewing again.  I have gotten things together enough and my health has stabilized enough that I am sewing again and enjoying it again.  That’s a beautiful thing.  For a while I was really worried that I would not be able to get back to the hobby that I have loved so well for over 25 years.  I need to get pictures and get things posted, but that’s another day.  After more adulting.