Tag: life

How will today change you?

01/15/2018 / Laura

Life is busy. Life is difficult (as Scott Peck reminded us.)

Life is unpredictable. Life is filled with too many lists.

Too many emails.

Too many distractions.

Too many thefts of our time, our minds, our need to actually live the moment. Weeks fly by and we can’t remember what we did. Yesterday goes by in a flash and we aren’t even sure what we had for lunch.

Yet I’m sure in every 24-hour period, there are countless opportunities when we can think of another person. Be kind to a stranger. Refrain from scowling at a bad driver. Actually notice how the sun is reflecting off a flower petal.

Remember that we are alive, we are fragile, and we want every second to count. Especially as we grow older…we boomers and beyond understand how rich life can be if we are present.

Quaker poet Jeanne Lohmann invites us to pause and just be alive in her wonderful poem, “Questions Before Dark”:

“Questions Before Dark”

“Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down,

consider your altered state:

has this day changed you?

Are the corners sharper or rounded off?

Did you live with death?

Make decisions that quieted?

Find one clear word that fit?

At the sun’s midpoint did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites the possible?

What did you learn from things you dropped

and picked up and dropped again?

Did you set a straw parallel to the river,

let the flow carry you downstream?”

Jeanne Lohmann

So many good things here. We do, especially as boomers and beyond, live with death. Our friends, our families, our own mortality. But I don’t see this as a depressing thing; more as a call to life.

Especially when she quickly brings up the idea of “bewilderment”.

To me, that’s a wonderful way to describe the natural world around us. So many miracles. Yet unless we make a conscious effort to see them, we walk right past them.

I love the idea of contemplating how each day changes us. As Buddha said, we never enter the same river twice. And there’s a lot to be said for occasionally noting where we are on our journey.

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

Parker Palmer

Acting your age?

05/23/2016 / Laura

Do you laugh out loud as much as possible?

Do you ever dance with the broom to your favorite song?

Do you pause to admire a cherry 57 Chevy when it rolls by?

Do you occasionally wander into the children’s book section just to revisit old friends who used to take you on adventures?

Do you ever watch Bugs Bunny alone and roar with laughter?

Do you sometimes reach down to feel soft, green grass, and remember what it was like to lay there for hours as a child?

Do you like to try new things, like hang gliding or zip lining?

Do you choose the most colorful hat in the store just because?

Do you buy peanuts at baseball games?

Do you eat ice cream cones at the beach?

Do you still gasp at great fireworks?

Do you put your toes in wet sand and wait for the tide to wash over them?

Do you sign up for classes just to learn something new?

Do you play golf with your pals and giggle when one of you misses the ball?

Do you ever roll down the windows and turn the music way, way up?

Do you still order fries?

Do you love how a swimming pool feels on a hot summer’s day?

Do you take a nap when you feel like it?

Do you kayak, hike, fish, bike, paddle board, roller blade, or anything else just to get outdoors on a beautiful day?

Do you still enjoy flirting?

Do you smuggle candy into a movie theater?

Do you ever draw, paint, or write just for fun?

Do you try to really enjoy every moment of your life?

What age are we? Whatever we feel at the moment.

(Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

Rock that wrinkle!

“We turn not older with years, but newer every day.”

Emily Dickinson

Wild and precious life.

05/04/2015 / Laura

Remember being a child and lying in soft green grass…looking up at clouds as they lazily drifted by…making necklaces out of clover…playing softball with makeshift bases…waiting for the ice cream truck to come by on a hot afternoon…drinking water out of the garden hose….really taking in the joy of summer, or any other day…the sights, aromas, sounds, feelings.

Long before we all learned how to be more “efficient” with our time.

Maybe it’s good to occasionally go back to those days.

Become a swan. Or a grasshopper.

It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be older. And maybe sometimes best of all, it’s good to just be. To, as poet Mary Oliver says, “know how to be idle.”

Otherwise just think of what we are missing.

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

“Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

As boomers and beyond, we understand more than ever how valuable life is, and how fragile. How friends leave us. How grandchildren and nieces and nephews grow up so fast. How pets age as well and remind us we’re not so young anymore. In some ways it seems like forever since we played hopskotch or hide-and-seek in the evenings. But in other ways, it feels like yesterday.

One of the best-selling books right now is a coloring book for adults. What bliss! If you don’t believe me, go buy a new set of crayons. Open the box. Close your eyes and sniff.

Tell me that doesn’t take you back to a part of you that’s been quiet a long, long time. So go ahead. Be a grasshopper. Lie in the grass. And by all means, color outside the lines.

****(And gentle friends, in the spirit of being creative as well as efficient with your time, you may be relieved to know that RockTheWrinkle.com will now be updated weekly (as opposed to 2x a week) unless the spirit moves me otherwise. Get out there and enjoy the season!)

“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”

John Lennon

Are you where you thought you would be?

02/05/2015 / Laura

Ever have a moment when you really stop and think about where you are in life?

It can be kind of scary, especially if you’re well over 50 and sometimes it feels like the hourglass is running a bit too fast.

I confess to these moments, which seem to come in clusters. I’ll be going along without a bump, and then have one of those afternoons or weekends that makes me stop and think too much.

How did I get to this age this fast?

When is my “real life” going to start?

How much time is left, and what do I want to accomplish?

Then all the doubts come in, like the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz. What if I’m too old already. Too tired. Not smart enough. Not in the best shape. Short on cash. Lack the confidence. It’s so easy to go global on self-doubt, and it can be particularly frustrating because now that we’re older, we’re supposed to be wiser about all this stuff, right?

Sometimes.

Part of me knows that wherever I am, what I’m right where I am supposed to be. Author, philosopher, and scientist Emmet Fox calls it your “right place.” Your actions have brought you here, so it’s not “wrong”.

But Fox also talks about our “true place”…where our soul hungers to be. That’s the hard one sometimes. Because, as a quote says that I have on my wall, “if you find a way of life you love, you have to have the courage to live it.”

I understand that. You can answer that calling inside of you and take that daring step…move across country, completely change professions, end or begin a relationship…get past the fear, get settled in, know it’s right, and then….

Now what?

The days of doubt still come. The fearful thoughts still pop up like uninvited guests in your dreams. You start to wonder if being so brave was really foolish. Maybe you should have stayed where you were. After all, you know how to do that. This new stuff, this living your dream, is something you weren’t trained for.

Thoreau talks about building castles in the air. Goethe says genius waits for us. Joseph Campbell tells us to go forward. Eleanor Roosevelt said we must do the things we think we cannot do.

Quite a heady group. Still I wonder, surely they had their moments of “did I do the right thing?”

Maybe it’s all part of being human, while trying to connect with our spirit. And maybe the bravest thing of all is to realize that we always have freedom to change our path. Go a different direction. Even if that sometimes means going back…that’s not the same as going backwards.

Because we’re not the same person we were when we started this journey.

What do you think? How do you handle your moments of doubt? I would sincerely like to know, because I think these are things we are often afraid to talk about, yet they can be the important questions we face.