I can’t say for sure, but I think most of the people reading this have edge and sometimes overheated minds. It’s a condition of living in America in 2019 in the age of Trump and the Left and the Right and of Facebook and Social Media and the disturbing excesses of visual news.
I believe spirituality enriches my life, but how, exactly, am I to nurture a soft or gentle mind in very a very hard, angry and edgy world.
I believe the best way to deal with a fear-and-conflict mongering world is to learn to live in the present, in the eternal now, to meditate in the presence of silence and solitude, where I can really think.
This morning, my meditation instructor asked this: “Before you go to bed tonight, take a moment to write down three things you’re grateful for.”
It’s hard to imagine a better way to stay grounded than to be reminded of the things you are grateful for. Three things doesn’t begin to cover it.
First, I am grateful to Maria.
Then to my writing, and my blog.
Then to the farm.
Then to the dogs.
Then to the donkeys.
Then to my photography.
And the doctors (now all women) who keep me healthy.
I notice that I don’t mention friends. Sad, but important.
I find as I grow older, that my idea of friendship has changed, I am not in need of friends in the way I once thought I was, I have always had more trouble than nourishment from friends.
I have what I love. I have what I need.
Most of all, I love my life today. Right now. The past is no longer important to me, I can’t know the future.
Gratitude for the things I have now grounds me in the present. I think this is something I wish to do every day.
Jon, I was glad to read about your view of “friends”. I, too, am finding my friendship with my two oldest friends (one since we were in Grammar School and the other for over 30 years) more and more troublesome and draining of my emotional health. My husband is my very best friend and the person to and for whom I am most grateful. I know that most people “in the know” say that your social connections become more important as you age, but I guess I’m beginning to take a second look at that. I do have lots of friends with whom I have a good relationship but who are not as close to me as these two. I don’t find myself drained after visiting with them as I do the other two. Thank you for your insights every day.
This comment was helpful Laurie, I feel you sister!
I don’t do western medicine and at 65 I can’t join in old talk or pharma comparisons so don’t have much skin in the game. I did meet someone recently built more like me, there is an amazing sense of recognition when we meet someone at least more basically wired like us. We can talk and raise our vibration and that is appreciated.
Feeling drained is a great barometer of who feeds us and who doesn’t. I wish I had a husband who was a best friend but we all get our gifts.
By the way – what a great picture of Maria – she looks so sparkly and bright in this photo. Love her smile and the love in her eyes.
I used to have my children tell me one good thing that happened to them each night when they went to bed.
Even on a really bad day we all could find one sweet thing to think about as we headed into sleep. Sometimes it was just “I saw a yellow butterfly”. Nothing major. My now adult girls tell me they still do this. The boys-not so much.
Such a simple thing makes such a difference.
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Don’t think I’m synical but we have this picture on the bulletin board at work, and it says,”people are no damn good”
Some days we believe it!
Universally no, but there are times when we laugh and point to the bulletin board.
You began your words with a dynamite picture of your farm goddess, so at least you began on positive note!!
Jon, not just a beautiful photo of Maria…well done…Maria IS beautiful, as you know first hand! 😉
LOVE this photo of Maria!!!
Love this picture of Maria- she looks so happy inside and out
I so appreciate the talk about friendships, I think this is a bigger topic than is given attention. The combination of aging and the social media “disconnect” is potent, esp. if you have some baggage. It is a subject I sit with a lot and have a lot of pain around.
I left my husband after a long marriage so I really have to look at solitude. And the few people I consider dear friends still feel very frayed in terms of real connection, I think everyone’s central nervous systems are just fried. Add to that I love holistically and eat well and take no pharma drugs at 65, and it is hard to hold nice peers who still are into old talk, congratulating themselves for signing up for assisted living for their future, and just not in the same lane I am.
I had a best friend I knew from 10 to 50, when she left the planet from cancer. That is my view of friendship, someone with whom one needs no words. Even when we were young we spent a lot of time communing in silence. And one of the gifts of the long cancer journey was that we got to a place of just pure trust and nothing more, no past, no future, just our complete love and trust for what the present was dishing out and that I’d be there until her last breath.
I’m always so aware of my trust issues, but then I remember I have experienced true deep trust and pure love. And dabbling in coffee dates just doesn’t do it. 14 years later I am able to accept that all the other friendships were icing and that without cake, it leaves me empty and with a sugar rush metaphorically.
So as above, and as i think you are doing, I am reframing friendship. Service makes more sense to me as a connection.
I have a beautiful Wall hanging in my bathroom..it is fairly large..it says ” If you love what you have, you have everything you need”..that can be taken in many ways I suppose, but for me it is less about material things..but the life that we have however simple..