Friday, January 31, 2014

Change

You guys, you keep coming back here. You read old blog posts, and I don't know what else you do but since you keep coming back I promise I will make more of an effort to post regular blogs! Even when, as today, I don't really have much to say. I'll let my fingers sort out the words in my head and I'll be just as surprised as you all when I get to the point of todays blog...

It's been fairly quiet in the life of me, relatively speaking. My issues are still here and still giving me grief, some days more than others. The space bar on my computer is sticking which is causing me superficial angst. Gamer son's pet rat is growing ever larger and begs for treats in quite an adorable way. We have a foster kitten which is a tiny tortoiseshell female with a highly engaging personality. I have had an unexpected day off work due to a little cyclone called Dylan. Dylan incidentally means 'son of the sea' and it turned out to be less damaging than expected and also brought less rain than expected. However you don't know beforehand what a cyclone will do and so I had the day off to prepare in case of flooding. Fortunately said flooding did not occur to the extent feared so it's all good.

I am still working through the English course and enjoying it just as thoroughly as a word nerd would be expected to do. I have not written anything book wise, but inside my head there are many book related snippets coming together. When I do find free time which coincides with alertness instead of end of day exhaustion there will be a volcano of words shooting out of my head, through my fingers and onto the screen. Better get this space bar sorted before then or I will toss the computer through the plate glass door.

The kitten, which bears the temporary name of Smidgeon, has had a rough start in her life. She was found, so I have been told, tied to a box at the local harbour. She had a temporary home for a short while but those people were unable to keep her. I agreed to foster her, and so she has taken over the house. I expected a little mite with her past experiences to be timid or unfriendly, but this little creature has no fear, and loves everyone. She is quite adorable and when she finds a forever home she will bring much joy to the people she owns.

She is a living lesson in miniature size. She has every reason to be suspicious of people, yet she expects everyone she sees to love her, and consequently everyone does (at least in this part of her life). Something we all should remember. People tend to treat you how you expect to be treated. If you like yourself you will expect people to like you and to be kind, and generally speaking they will. If you have no sense of self worth, again generally speaking, people will treat you accordingly. You have to love yourself before anyone can love you, and you have to love yourself before you can form a healthy, equal relationship with somebody. You send out subliminal signals about yourself and they are picked up on by the people you meet. This little kitten seems to know that instinctively. Mind you, most cats are supremely confident in their superiority over all other living creatures!

So; kitten, rat, space bar, English course, cyclone, exhaustion. The exhaustion comes from insomnia. I wake usually at 2am and lie awake worrying about all the problems in my life and even worrying about the changes I am making to overcome those problems and to move forward into a new and exciting life. Why do I worry about changes I have put into motion in order to live a new life that I want to live? I worry about that too and here we are back at my resistance to change. Even when the change is healthy, when it is positive and I really want it, still a tiny part of me resists - the part that wakes me at 2am and keeps me awake the rest of the night. This I am sure is how the saying 'better the devil you know than the devil you don't know' came about. Although this saying is about sticking with the problem you know rather than changing to a potentially worse problem I have come to realise it is really more like negatively resisting the changes needed to move on.

By saying 'better the devil you know' you are making the assumption that change is going to lead to something just as bad or worse. You don't know that, change is just change, but assuming change is always going to be for the worse is the best way to make sure of it. Negative thinking produces negative results and a negative life. So think positive like I am always saying and which I learned from the most positive person I know.

I say this, I try to do this, and every day I am better at it. As an example, I now actually truly do believe that I deserve a better life and I didn't really believe that six months ago. Because I believe it I know it will happen. So why am I still resisting? Language resonates with sayings for a very good reason. They are succinct ways of stating truisms of life. Old habits die hard is one, and they do. My habit of worrying about change, worrying about everything in fact is proving very difficult to break. So even though I am committed to the change necessary to bring about a new life I am still freaking out about change.

Change necessarily brings with it loss of control and that is my big problem I guess. If things stay the same I am in control even if it is only false control. Change means things are different and there is no routine and I war with myself about it all the time. How much of this is who I am and how much is a result of my past experiences and the necessity of becoming invisible I am not sure - and it's something else that keeps me awake for absolutely no good reason. Sometimes I sense within myself the person I was meant to be and that person is adventurous, a risk taker. I have in the past taken risks on impulse and those are the ones that have worked out well for me. As I have said before, my impulses are my instincts telling me what to do. It's when I think too much that I make the wrong decisions.

The changes I am implementing are the ones my instincts are telling me are the right ones for me. Indeed, I feel that there is a higher intelligence pushing me into this new direction by closing all other possible doors. Whatever name you wish to give to God, I am sure that is what is basically shoving me onto the middle of my new path. So I am following this path, knowing it is where I am meant to be and knowing that somehow all my problems will be resolved because this is what I am meant to do. And yet, still I am resisting the change. Maybe it's just part of being human, maybe all of us resist change, maybe it's part of our ancient DNA - something to do with survival. I can well imagine that change could have  been fatal in the ancient world - but without change we would still all be living in that world and whether that would have been better than the world we are now living in is another topic altogether. For me, I will accept that I resist change, but I will not allow that resistance to stop me from making the changes to bring about a better life :)

Three pics today - one of little Smidgeon feeling completely confident that the table is a good place for a cat. The others are self explanatory.







Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Time gets away...

Wow, I didn't realise how long it's been since I was here last. My apologies to all of you that have been coming here checking every day. Time sometimes just gets away on me, as I guess it does for all of us.

I had planned to write a New Years blog but as you can see I totally didn't, and it's not because of any New Year resolution guilt or anything like that - I didn't make any resolutions this year, because I have already set my course and that has not changed.

I did however do a lot of soul searching during the time I've been not writing this blog - not sure whether it was due to the last vestiges of my need to control causing it or my struggle with change. But I did decide in the end that my instincts are correct and the choices I made are the right ones, and the past belongs right where it is. And change is my new mantra...

I've also been immersed in an English course and I've been plunged into the deep end of grammar. Of course I know all the rules of grammar - I apply them automatically and have no difficulty with it any more than any native speaker would. I did, however, find that the actual names of the rules and the various parts of speech had basically slipped out of my mind. Gone, not hiding in any deep crevices of the brain but gone as though they had never been.

So, me being me, I have been completely engrossed in the parts of speech and rules of grammar. The result is that now the script in my head comes complete with parts in italics and underlined parts and the abbreviations of nouns and verbs etc. in brackets behind the relevant words. And because I second guess myself all the time I find that I am googling some of the words from the script in my head to be sure I am correct. I dream about grammar, and because I haven't been writing it's confusing dreams with the werewolf pushing in reminding me that I need to write. There just aren't enough hours in the day!

In the midst of this grammar immersion and soul searching life has been going on, my life changes have been continuing and I am walking my forward path. Granted, some days it has felt like three steps forward and two steps back, but I am still going forward. I have the occasional dive into the well of lost hope and despair, but on the whole I believe I am getting better at positive thinking and I really do believe that I will reach my goal and my life will never be the same.

I also had something of an epiphany while pulling stubborn nut grass from my garden beds early one morning. This may not be news to many of you but it was a point of view I had never thought of before so I'm going to share it with you. If you roll your eyes and think I'm an idiot, well that's fine, I probably am :)

I was thinking vaguely about how life experiences are different for all of us, even when we share the same experience. I then started to think about that, things like siblings going to the same event, or friends going on holiday together. People have similar and yet at the same time such different views of the same moments in time.

So I was wondering why that is so. I know all of our experiences are affected by what we have gone through before; our perception is altered by past events in our lives. This led me to thinking about seeing things from different sets of eyes which of course are not in exactly the same physical space even though they might be side by side. That was when I had my epiphany.

Not only do we see the same places through different sets of eyes connected to different brains that have been wired up by different experiences, we also literally have memories of different people. Because when we experience something with another person the memories - the pictures in our minds - contain the person we are with. I have memories of places and I have memories of the person I was with. I have pictures in my head of places and people and the things people said. So a person I was with will have memories of things I said, pictures of me and where we were together.

For all of us this is true. Siblings, friends, lovers - whoever you have shared an experience with, they have inside their memories pictures of you and words that you said. So if you want those siblings, friends, lovers, whoever, to have good memories you have to contribute to those by trying to make the experience or event a good one from your input. I guess what I am trying to say is that if you are grumpy, sad, irritable or annoyed then the person you are with will not have good memories. If you are the opposite then that person will have good memories (unless of course they are grumpy in which case they are giving you bad memories!).

Obviously I am generalising here greatly, but the general theme I was thinking about was that to make the world a better place, we can all start simply by being nicer to the people we are with at any time or place. And if that spreads, if everyone starts to do that, can you imagine how much brighter the world will be :)

Short and simple today, grammar and werewolves are calling...