Evenings

Evenings ... I love evenings.

Let me count the ways!

Nobody wants anything from me.

Husband goes to bed around 7:00 pm.  

My grand dogs are early to bed types.  

Even my adult kids hit the sack early
 - mostly because they have to go to work the next day.

  Nobody calls - my friends all seem to be early-to-bed types. 

I control the TV remote.

I get to choose the TV shows.

I can choose Netflix.
I can choose Amazon Video.
I can choose Verizon on Demand.
I can turn it on!
I can turn it off!

I don't have to talk to anyone.

Talking is over-rated.

Silence is golden.

My own company is the best company.

Night time is quiet time.

The world is pretty quiet at night.

Animals are quiet.

People are quiet.

Traffic is less.

I can sit and do nothing and not feel guilty.

I can knit.

I can read.

I can listen to an audiobook.

But I can do nothing. 

I can sit on the balcony and

watch all the folks coming home from work

grateful that I am not one of them.

I think everyone needs a quiet peaceful time during the 24 hour cycle that measures our life ... time without regard to the needs of others.   It is hard to carve out that time when you are younger with demands of job and family.  I was never successful before retirement.  Having it now is a simple pleasure I look forward to every single day.

Do you have a favored time of day

that is just yours without demands?

#11 Personal Peace

We all know people who seem happy and sunny all the time, as well as others who never seem to have a good day and always see the unhappy side of life. Whether these two sides of the coin are the result of habit, or chemistry or genetics is the discussion of many self-help books.

Being happy and peaceful mentally is usually my default state - what my personality eventually settles down to unaided - regardless of the stress trigger. I would like to say that I am fully responsible for my generally happy and positive outlook on life, but I also guess that there may be a genetic "gift" involved in the mix as well.

But life can send you a massive unexpected curve ball or a loss from the most unlikeliest of places, and that happy state of mind is extinguished in the blink of an eye. All of us have experienced this situation to a greater or lessor extent. You struggle to find answers, adjust your thinking and move on. From my perspective, adjusting and moving on has never required much effort - now I find it requires purposeful action. It should probably be on my list of goals.

That is where I am now: adjusting and accepting a new reality, working my way back to a happy, peaceful state, and moving on. And each day I make progress and the moving on gets easier. These activities help.

• Think things through and make positive choices for yourself (sometimes very difficult ones), and then live your life with those choices in mind.
• Time - time is my friend. No matter what the problem is, time and space usually heals.
• Exercise - walking almost always makes the unbearable - bearable. It doesn't "fix" things, but it provides a brief respite when the world seems better than just a short time ago.
• Cleaning - when I am unsettled, I find myself ... (I know you will find this unbelievable) ... I find myself cleaning house. Even aggressively cleaning bathrooms becomes a barometer of my mental state. Right now my bathrooms could be cleaner - guess that is a good sign. :-) De-cluttering becomes a focus - simpler environments always settle my mind. Lately I have been a de-clutter maniac.
• Listening to audio books and pod casts and reading - these mental distractions are effective as well.
• Seek the company of friends. Thankfully I have an abundance of wonderful people in my life.
• Pray.

So what do you do when you are looking for a way to redirect your mind and to cope with stress or a loss?

To keep or not to keep - such a question.

Once again I am focused on de-cluttering.

My de-clutter history is limited to infrequent clean outs, sort throughs, pitching, donating re-org days. Whole days. Those days would be preceded by some big emotional event, a bad mood, or a major frustration that would launch me into a whorl wind of activity aimed at lighting my "stuff inventory". Lightening my stuff made me feel lighter and less overwhelmed. My stuff inventory still remains frighteningly high even after years of such frantic episodes. Obviously these clean out episodes haven't come frequently enough.

So I am breaking the "whole day" clean outs, and doing some stuff each day - areas that randomly come to my attention.

In addition, my previous habit of doing a "once thru" on evaluating what stays and what goes and calling it finished seems faulty for me. I did a once-through on books recently - got rid of alot. And when I looked at the "keep" books again a few days later, more popped out asking to be sent to a new home. I believe I get emotionally attached to stuff which clouds my decision making on "to keep or not to keep" and once I thin the crowd of things under review, doing a further review of the same stuff makes tossing stuff easier. And I always feel good making space, thinning the "stuff load" at my house.

Feeling good in getting rid of things is probably just a personal quirk of mine, but how do you handle the act of shedding stuff? How do you decide what to keep and what to toss? Are you a keeper or a tosser by nature? And how does it make you feel once you have lightened your load?

I am off to tackle some other areas that have come to my attention - pockets of belongings that are no longer needed in my life. And while I am doing this physical de-clutter task, I am doing a mental inventory of the same kind - deciding what to keep and what to discard so that I can lighten my load mentally and emotionally as well.

Today's walk and Today's lesson

The walk today was beautiful. The snow still clings to the all the trees and plants in a way that is reminiscent of a holiday card. This storm surely did cause havoc in our area, but it left beautiful scenes behind. My walk today was very hit or miss. Most side walks were cleared in my area, but sometimes I was forced to step into the street. It wasn't a major problem.

And the walk gave me some very needed private time to sort through my turbulent thoughts. December and January have been difficult months in our household. So much of this time has been spent sick, fatigued, worried, angry, or upset. It has drained me so much that I hardly sleep at times, and find keeping focused on the regular things of life difficult. Peace has been missing, and I wanted to find a way to get it back. Strangely, the answer didn't come in my walk.

I read a posting from a blog I follow: The Totally Together Journal by Stephanie O'Dea.

http://totallytogetherjournal.com/permission-granted/

I encourage you to check it out. Stephanie O'Dea is also the author of two crock pot cooking books (Make It Fast, Cook It Slow and More Make It Fast, Cook It Slow - both excellent books.) The focus of this post was to be happy! In fact, the title "Permission Granted" refers to permission being granted to be happy! Her blog post reminded me that happiness is a choice. And recently I was watching an old Monk TV show and the same theme - Choose to be happy! - was part of the story. Both the blog and the TV show seemed to have a message directly aimed at me.

By nature I am a happy person. I have had times in my life when the problems have seemed overwhelming. I have always found a way to bounce back. Big changes are happening in my life once again, changes beyond my control - and change always carries its own stress. I need to stay focused on the gift nature gave me, the ability to be happy, to choose happiness and then peace will return. I am sure of it.

Thanks, Stephanie.