Author: Rebecca

I got a great gift yesterday. I got spend almost the entire day with one of the people I love more than anything in the world. We spent the entire day talking about things and people that are important to us, and the time went by much too fast.

While she was spending the day with me, her daughter and the rest of her family were preparing a birthday party for her, a milestone birthday, so naturally that’s what we talked about.

She said her mom had told her about the freedom that comes with reaching a certain age. At some point (according to her mom it was this particular birthday) you stop trying so hard to please everyone else, stop letting what others may think matter so much, and, hopefully, begin valuing yourself and your peace of mind higher.

There’s an old adage about how you can’t please all the people all the time. It goes on to say you can’t really even please most of the people even most of the time. And yet many of us, from the time we’re small, try to do just that ~and often drive ourselves crazy in the process. We get depressed, frustrated, angry ~ and for what?

Somehow we can just never be “enough.” Thin enough, tall enough, pretty enough, dress well enough, work hard enough, make enough money. We don’t like our hair, skin tone, body shape, voice, face, eye color, fill in the blank.

The truth is, most of these perceived deficits are only real to ourselves. Those around us don’t see these imperfections, and in fact, often envy those characteristics we most despise.

Yet it doesn’t matter how often someone tells you you’re beautiful the way you are–what matters is what we tell ourselves.

What has this got to do with that “certain age” I was talking about earlier? Well, when you reach a certain age, if you are wise, you learn to seek out more positive things to tell yourself and try to avoid negativity as much as possible.

And at that certain age, you begin to realize that all of these things that you think are so obvious to other people and that you think they might disapprove of or angry with you because of don’t, in fact, exist anywhere outside your own mind.

This is something I’ve been trying to learn for a long time ~ it’s a truth expressed in one of my favorite books: The Four Agreements. And I recently discovered ~ this morning actually ~ yet another expression of the same truth in a book I’m currently reading: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. He has this to say about what other people think of us:

“I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They’re thinking about themselves–before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until 10 minutes past midnight. They would be 1000 times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.”

He was talking about worrying about unjust criticism, but the principle remains the same across the board: probably 99% of what people say or do (or don’t do) that makes you worried or upset has nothing to do with you.

More importantly, probably 99% of what you’re afraid people will say about you or think about you, will never happen — because people are not thinking about you and me.

That’s a very freeing realization. One that comes with age and experience ~ and that is the gift of that certain age, whatever that age may be for you.

I just wish it was a lesson that some of us (uh, that would be me) didn’t have to keep learning over and over.

It’s been an interesting few days, weeks, months… in that kind of Chinese curse, “you shall live in interesting times” kind of way. The most recent interesting thing that’s happened was that I stepped up on a curb sidewalk that wasn’t a curb sidewalk but actually turned out to be the edge of a (unpainted, poorly lit) concrete handicap ramp, turned my ankle and took a tumble (to put it mildly).

Long story short, I ended up with a twisted and bruised left ankle, a scraped up right ankle and shin, several missing layers of skin from my right knee, a strained and bruised left-hand and wrist, as well as a broken thumb and two jammed fingers on my right hand.

The cuts, bruises, scrapes, sprains and strains–not fun but I can deal. The broken right thumb and the lovely almost-up-to-the-elbow cast it has necessitated–not so much.

You’d be amazed how simple things like, oh, say, taking a shower, washing my hair, shaving my legs, etc. etc. become a whole new experience in flexibility (or lack thereof) when one can only use one’s left hand, and that hand is bruised and strained enough that if the right weren’t in a cast, it (the left) would be in a brace or an ace bandage. And that’s just personal hygiene stuff.

Things I need to do on the computer/laptop tend to take anywhere from 2 to 5 times as long to do, depending on the task. As for most housework–yardwork–gardening–swimming etc.–fuggedaboudit.

Fortunately for me, I have MacSpeech Dictate, one of the Mac versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, to do a lot of my “writing” or at least initial drafts.

And that’s where the rattlesnakes come in.

I’ve been reading this book by Dale Carnegie and, while some of the information and expressions and so on are dated, the basic principles remain the same. When life hands you rattlesnakes start a rattlesnake farm, selling canned rattlesnake meat, rattlesnake skin for boots and bags and whatnot, and any other usable part of the little beasties. This was his example for the (chapter title) old “if life hands you lemons . . .” adage. I liked the rattlesnake farm–less cliché, more sexy. 🙂

My rattlesnake farm is that my current circumstances are forcing me to get more adept with my MacSpeech Dictate program. And, after all, that’s what I bought it for several months ago–to speed up at least first drafts of all the writing I do.

It’s a little weird, inasmuch as when I’m writing I usually have this voice in my head that is reading, critiquing, editing, and revising as I’m typing. Writing using my MacSpeech Dictate is distinctly different as I’m not hearing that little voice or not constantly–maybe because it’s coming out of my mouth? I don’t think so because the voice coming out of my mouth is a lot slower (in more ways than one).

Still, it’s early days yet–my lovely new right arm accessory will be with me for the next five weeks–and who knows, between now and then maybe my little brighter editorial homunculus may come back. Or maybe the voice coming out of my mouth will get brighter and pre-edit, as well as write (or draft) faster.

Or maybe I’ll just go can some rattlesnake meat… 😉

Rebecca

It’s been awhile since I posted here, I know ~ a long while since I’ve wanted to do much of anything outside the routine of my days, and I don’t even know how I came upon this, but the sun shone yesterday, and I took in enough of it that it stirred some feelings of spring in me, and somehow, today, in the midst of doing something else, Robert Frost’s “way leads to way” led me here ~ so maybe that’s reason enough.

The first time I heard this song, I fell in love with it ~ and with James Taylor’s voice ~ not knowing that my own James, of whom this song in so many ways reminds me, was out there somewhere ~ loving me before he knew me, as I did him.

Now, years later, my James and I have found each other at last, and this song, written for James Taylor’s newborn nephew, still makes me think of my James and the way our lives finally flowed together and our love combined us so completely that we no longer know or care to know where one of us ends and the other begins. It’s been that way for us since the beginning. It will be that way beyond the end.

When he sings, James Taylor’s voice makes me feel that love afresh. He sings, and it flows into me and wells up and suffuses my being, the way true love always does, with a deep, abiding warmth and a richness that’s like honey on my tongue . . .