TIME FOR TALKING
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Welcome back.
Welcome home.
Hello stranger. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you – you didn’t call or write, and we fell out of touch. I heard you got caught in supply-chain gridlock, protestors and vaxxers (pro and con), global confusion and tension that pulled so many people apart at a time when they needed to be close and unified in so many ways. I wondered if you’d perished somewhere along your path or that your life took a different track – and I’m glad to reconnect. You were off-course but not lost, you see …
Let’s talk, have lunch, or at least do a Zoom call.
Let’s talk lots and often, please. I’ve missed you.
You look like I used to look and how I used to feel – down, sad and seeking validation of your choices. Well, I’ve found some new direction – so step out of that mirror image reflection of who you used to be. Instead, be who you wanna be ..
~~~
We’ve all been on a strange journey, so let’s reconnect.
I’ll start: “Hi, I hear you just got back from world tour – was is it called, the Pandemic Polka Tour?”
Seriously, we’ve missed you – that joyful, relaxed style, the endless pursuit of adventure and happiness – you’ve been away, in hiding, or just too pooped to go on.
The person you used to be, the person we all used to be, was both young and old, warm and cold. We were all different, and yet we lived in the same place; we breathed the same air, used the same water, walked the same trails in cities, towns and countryside, we lived from sea to sea, from beachfront to beachfront – without hesitation, we crawled as children, we shuffled into elder-ness.
In between, we ran and jumped and played. There has been no beginning; there will be no end.
We can relive our best of times. We can live now the times we missed – time and age don’t matter, a lost patch of time was lost, but there is no need to give ground, give up, give in – because life is not measured in length, but in depth.
It is not lived or measured in much or little; it is lived in the why and the why not …
You can recover elements of your old self and create new parts of a renewed you – you can reach us anytime, wherever you are in the universe. We live at the corner of the universe where Learning Street intersects with Curiosity Avenue, right where you used to live. It’s not too crowded; there is room for your return. We have to put fresh sheets on mattresses, tidy up, and run the vacuum around until that crunching underfoot abates.
From here, we can see scary reality and sweet hope instead of gloom, doom, or our best-before date.
We see new frontiers on the same day we see despots take lives away, and still, we have hope. We witness horrific consequences of layoffs, starvation, and disease on the same days we read of politicians putting their thumbs on justice’s scales and hear of billionaires losing billion and still having billions – and still, we have hope.
The days of youth, career and asset building days, travelling modestly but never dreaming of a jet set lifestyle – and we managed hills and valleys, raising kids, managing our topsy-turvy lives without losing sight of who we were. Well, it’s time to do that again, to buck up buttercup, and grit your teeth.
You must laugh.
Because you must keep your sense of humour alive and intact, It is the essential lubricant for every dry patch we encounter so that we can skip along from day to day and we can manage the rest of our lives that way.
We realize we cannot change much about the world, much less ourselves, yet we hold hope close to our chest. We have lived through a difficult time and now recognize it was less scary in some respects, far scarier in other concerns now than we did in our earlier lives.
We are not as troubled now and have experience supporting our case for hopefulness. We realize that historical things like that pandemic we’ve come through – like wars, depressions, drought, and disease waves that tested past generations – teach lessons and impact so many people in heart-wrenching cruelty, yet we keep a grip on hope.
Hope is an emotion, not something we hold in our hand or borrow a cup of something from our neighbour.
You can’t buy hope in a store or online.
It doesn’t come from governments, society, employers, spouses, disagreeable clients, or a best-seller self-help book.
It’s not just the lines but reading the unspoken words between the lines too.
You can’t stream it or beam it to anyone …
Self-help is two words pushed together that should be separated. The self can be helped, and the self is its own helper, just as this is not a letter to a stranger but a letter to MY self.
Hope isn’t something we reach for when everything else has been exhausted; it is what we feel when we have it and something we struggle to summon when our landscape is at its bleak-most point.
Hope is a state of mind, mine for me.
Yours, for you.
What do you wish for, long for, cling to, or need most of all?
Recent experience tells me that not-talking is counterproductive, and doesn’t prevent confrontations, wrestling with issues, or with each.
I don’t think there is a smooth road ahead until we make it through the lumpy-bumpy parts, any more than a farmer turning a stubble field into one of waving ripe grain. There is plowing, work, time, rain, warm weather, and sunshine – easy-peasy.
Attitude drives whether we smile or frown at life, and at death. If we choose bitter now, it will be bitter to the bitter end.
On the other hand, if we choose sweet, we can make the most wonderful life whether we have plenty or nothing because it doesn’t matter if we can’t find the humour in every sadness, if we cannot find the joy from every troubled learning curve, if we cannot turn toward the sunny day ahead, we cannot grow.
Reader feedback:
Good Morning Mark: Thank you, as always, for the subtle reminders. Have a great weekend, KK, Calgary, AB
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