Reply #4: Know what, I have the same inertia sometimes. [View All]

[InkAddict]

I tried the exercise approach the other day. Hate running, and I haven't ridden the bike in a long time and remembered what a great sense of freedom there was in the movement so I made an executive decision to spend the funds to get the old bike rehabed with a new tire, a helmet, and some riding gloves. Took it for a spin the other day, but instead of that "free" feeling, all i felt was the discomfort, in a Prep-H kind of way, from hitting the bumps. Oh well, I was much younger then. It was a short ride. (I see an elderly couple gently riding around every day, and that should be an inspiration to me-ahhh more shame to kick out of my life!)

Is there something such as a new life situation to which you are adjusting or are you seeking some empathetic "this too shall pass-let's...." type of relief? Are you sure you're not passive-aggressively over-acting out that good coping "control over yourself." You are allowed, you know, to have emotions and feel sadness, fear, so what about joy?

When the budget no longer allows for one's favorite recreations or when every "here's what I'd like to do; here's what's right for me to do" no longer matches, i.e., I'd like to bake some cookies, but that needs ingredients for which I did not budget; what am I willing to sacrifice to buy the ingredients and if I turn on the oven it will heat up the house and the A/C will unnecessarily go on costing me even more.

Also, I like to garden and I used to have a nice yard with good dirt--now I have a postage-size cement patio with a single rock-hard flower bed that I nicely planted with perenniels to save future dollars in plants that need to be replaced every year) and it takes a whopping 10 minutes to maintain.

I'd like to paint some rooms in the apartment just to eliminate that "white" feeling, but that would involve expenses, hard-to-agree-on choices, it's not my walls, and I'd need to return them to white before I leave, which could be on any given day since the cursed lightening bolt of outsourcing/merging/relocation/downsizing seems to find this family regularly and there's little to fall back on now and I'd need to either live in a cave or give up eating to save the recommended "rainy day fund." As far as I'm concerned, all days will tend to remain rainy for the rest of my life now that BushCo has declared "Mission Accomplished" in creating the situations that demolished Plan A, Plan B, Plan C ...to rescue my little life's liberty and happiness.

I'm thankful for my PT job in the new city in which I live (4 hours M-F) since my field has been largely exported (Supposely because they're younger, smarter, and lower-maintenance), and I haven't been at it here long enough to do anything meaningful toward improving my resume. Not that the resume is bad, but I'm just not sure those kind of doors open to my age group anymore. Grandmas are unpaid laborers of love, but I'm not one of those yet either.

Meanwhile, the routine things go undone--they'll just be there again/still tomorrow and I spend the hours checking the Internet for news for something...anything that gives me hope that I'm either not living my worst nightmare or that TPTB will just let up and leave our little family alone for a while so we can accomplish at least a single dream without their constant policies of obstruction and WMD's on our finances. If I actually did things, it would cost lots more than the cost of my Internet connection).

Meds seem like such an artificial way of improving one's outlook. Could improving one's outlook lead to frivolous actions that I would likely be made to feel regretful for having done in the future--i.e., sorry, you don't qualify--why the heck did you do that--type of thing.

By the grace of God, or through being aware of what's going on, doesn't always mean one can control things in a timely fashion toward a positive outcome--(bad things happen to good people, and I know that it's happened to a whole lot of good people). All too often this relies on another party who is all too often just not on the same page. I've done my best, but it wasn't enough to save some of the temporal things I loved, and at this time of year I'm reminded of Frost's poem:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

However, I'm closer now than ever to the kids in miles and still have them in my life, and we're all pretty healthy -- and that's what's really important, whether or not I bake cookies, iron shirts, paint some one else's walls, or plant flowers in MY yard. Things won't be the same; they may not even be better, but I'm going to fight to CHERISH what good remains and endures and when I think about it long enough, it's plenty.

Now, I gotta go do something productive and useful - Cripe, even self-talk takes time. :hug: