When we look around the world it can be difficult at times to figure out how to remain positive. All one has to do is watch the news, fall ill, contract a disease, have a disaster befall those we love, have another person lash out at us from their sources of pain or frustration… or even much smaller things on a more consistent repetition in daily life.
Before I lay out some things that assist me in staying somewhat sane (sane being a relative word that others may or may not tag to my existence keep in mind
), let me first briefly touch upon balance.
Far too many people these days push the positivity and light message as if all else is wrong and should be avoided. How many times have I written about this before? Many. Light is only balanced by dark, and dark is balanced by light. Sadness is balanced by happiness. Anger is balanced by contentment, and so on. Too much grief harms the lungs but too much happiness actually harms the heart. There is pessimism, optimism, and realism. The first two ongoing are states of imbalance. Realism embraces the acceptance of both positivity and negativity as equals.
We are human beings, and therefore we have a full range of emotional capacities. It literally rules our existence here. To try to stay in one small range of that emotional spectrum is forcing oneself to exist abnormally and in a state of chronic imbalance. Even attempting to stand in the middle and remain neutral to everything is a state of imbalance. We are mammals and we are here to feel like the entire mammal kingdom.
As living beings, we go through phases. Think of the famous Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. He went through a yellow phase, a red phase, a blue phase, and so on. During those phases one color range consumed him and that was all he painted. He honored those phases, let them express themselves freely through him, and created masterpieces because of it, and the phases flowed naturally. Yes in time heavy metal poisoning drove him mad, but we won’t go there…
Another great example is the seasons. Our far northern and far southern ecosystems have emotional phases as well. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Each one runs its course and expresses during those times. Even close to the equator there are seasons of wet and dry. We have night and day also.
Our emotional phases are no different and are there for the purpose of our experiences and expressions. Sometimes winter is extra long and summer is short. Likewise, some people phase through darker emotional states longer than others. Is that “wrong” or unacceptable”? Of course not.
Many people like to try telling other people how they should feel, and what they should focus on too. How is someone else to know exactly what another person is supposed to be feeling and experiencing at any given time? If someone told another to stop being unhappy, many would think that was great advice. But if a person told another to stop being happy, it would be looked at as a remark of insanity. Nobody can tell others how to feel and how they should be feeling during their sets of experiences. We can support others by helping them through whatever emotional sets they are rolling through, but to tell them to feel otherwise is ridiculous. If we are not living someone else life and doing so inside their mind and body, then we are in no position to tell another how they should be feeling about anything.
Remember, balance isn’t a commodity. It isn’t something we can buy and possess for all our time here. Balance is fleeting, moody, and a lot like air; everywhere, but since it is always in motion and unseeable, we cannot hold it for long. Even our breath we can only hold for so long. Balance is individual moments we attain and then lose. We are always seeking it, but can never in this world possess it. All life is in a constant state of falling in and out of balance, from atoms to ecosystems. That falling in and out creates movement, and movement is life.
~~~~~~~~~
How Do I Stay Sane?
Well, some would argue that I don’t, but what do they know?
It is no secret that my life has gone any-which-way but smoothly, like so many others. I have also not kept it hidden that between my past trauma, and physical health issues plaguing me today, it can be difficult to remain positive. Yes, I can be a moody bastard, but also forward-seeing and hopeful. I can be a frigid bleak winter as well as easy going lush summer; the birth of spring as well as the downfall and decay of autumn. I go through… phases. These phases always fluctuate in a timeframe. Sometimes a phase will last days, or perhaps only fleeting moments scattered throughout a day. But they do ebb and flow, they move.
I don’t much like making lists of these things, but I find it helps express them more clearly in writing to others.
1- At the top of my list and the most powerful point for me - I have an exceptionally loving, caring, and understanding wife. She, of course, goes through her own phases, but we both accept each other's phases and do our best to support one another as we are flowing through them; positive or negative. As difficult as some of those phases are to see the others going through, we understand they are a necessary expression of the internal experience sets we are living at any given moment. They are natural and necessary.
2- I am realistic about gratitude. As grateful as I am for my life and all the positive things in it, and I’m grateful for the challenges as well, I’m not grateful for everything. Realism comes into play when I am not at all grateful for many things I am going through, see happening, or have otherwise affecting my life. I don’t pretend to be grateful for everything because I am not. I find I need to be very realistic about being grateful, rather than lying about being grateful for things I am not.
3- Supporting others is very rewarding and uplifting to me. Of course, the realism comes into play here as well. I enjoy supporting people I care about rather than total strangers, or people I don’t like. Supporting others is an energy investment. Like anything, investing energy is an investment in your own life force. To invest energy into things that do nothing to support your life force seems wasteful. Some like to say everything is connected, so expending energy into anything will support you as a whole. I never did buy that. You can give away your last piece of food, clothing, and shelter, and exhaust yourself to support people around the world you don’t know, and will never meet, and your efforts could very easily claim your life. Helping others in ways that tear you down isn’t productive in my opinion.
4- Increasing my mind has always been important to me. I love to learn. I love learning about the world I call home. I find the energy investment to study things that interest me to be highly worthwhile. I find this pursuit to be both mentally rewarding and physically uplifting. Even if I am so physically weak to be bedridden, I use what I am able to study, write or listen to. I always have an audiobook on hand. And even if feel miserable and can do little else beyond sitting in bed, I may have ideas running through my head that I just need to write out.
5- That brings me to the sharing with others piece. I’ve always been big on sharing with like minds, and or people I care about. I like to converse with others about ideas, things, and observations. Many people today find themselves scattered thin, focused on too many things, overworked, and stressed out. Good olde fashioned communication slides by the wayside. Distance doesn’t help because our best and most rewarding communication is face-to-face. Then you have some who hate phones, emailing, or texting… and I don’t think there are many of us left who even know how to write a letter and put it in the mailbox anymore. Anyway, sharing, and being realistic about it helps to support my moods.
6- No matter how badly or how well I am feeling, I try to take a small bit of time each day to acknowledge things I accomplished, or that went well on the last day or night. It used to be that this was a long list as I was always busy doing, doing, doing! It took me a while to accept and become accustomed to my new phase of life (within the last 4 years), and acknowledging accomplishments was more difficult. Slowly that began to shift, and I learned to pat myself on the back for ANY accomplishment. On really rough days that could be as small and simple as taking a shower, or putting away a pile of clean clothing. I found and find it a very important habit to praise yourself for anything you were able to accomplish in the last day or so, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. It is far too easy to forget or to focus on everything that didn’t go well.
7- Finding joy in things is an essential aspect of staying sane. For some life just seems to roll along peachy as you please. But for most, it is filled with pitfalls, struggle, frustration, doubt, and so on. At times having fun and finding joy is easy. Other times it is far more challenging. If you are ill, bedridden, have just had an animal companion pass away, or have any other seemingly endless plights plaguing your day, finding joy can take effort. Unlike what the media tries to make everyone think, joy doesn’t have to be a daily orgasmic experience filled with fireworks and body racked pleasure. Joy can be as subtle and simple as how good it feels to lie down a weary body, the taste of a small treat, watching how a dusty-colored light slowly dances upon the ceiling or the sound of a bird singing. It can be the playing of a happy memory in your mind. Joy can be found not only in huge life-sweeping events but also in the subtle passing moments of our day and night. Joy is important, but I’ve learned to be realistic about what can bring it, and how powerful even the smallest moments of joy can be.
8- Being connected is a big part of feeling fulfilled, belonging, and lifting one's mind, body and spirit. No matter how much of a loner someone might be, the feeling of connection is just as important to them as anyone else. We were not born into an empty landscape void of color, shape, texture, sound, taste, smell, and other forms of life. We have all been born into a very diverse and highly complex world, and therefore it is impossible to remain disconnected from everything. Connection feeds us, builds us up, and sends our minds and spirits soaring. Once again, being realistic about connections is important. Not all connections are supportive. Some are just the opposite. We must learn to ascertain the difference. I have a core group of friends as close as kin that I stay connected with. My closest family of course as well. I have some very supportive acquaintances that I also stay connected to because I feel our connection is mutually beneficial. I enjoy the elements, weather patterns, the seasons, “wildlife” and plants, and so I focus on all of those connections. I enjoy good food, good stories, and so on. Any connection that feeds me and supports me I honor. Any connection that does the opposite I try to avoid. And of course many times we just don’t know until we try, but that is one way we learn.
9- Honoring the positives and negatives of my daily life is realistically important. Like I started this newsletter off with, balance is key, and that doesn’t mean staying neutral or cramming oneself into one side of the emotional spectrum. Many people try to only see and focus on the positive in their life. I don’t find that beneficial or realistic. For me focusing on whatever arises is not only important but beneficial. Seeing what comes for me at any time while doing anything helps me navigate myself and the life around me. If I only focus on the positive and always push the negative way, I get nothing but an unrealistic skewed view and message about myself and the world. Life isn’t all sun rays and roses. Much of it just plain sucks. Forcing myself to only see the positive just put blinders on and removes me from reality, and thus removes me from myself.
10- Lastly on my list of staying sane comes self-acceptance as I am in every moment. I am what I am and that is that. I don’t need to prove or justify myself to others. I don’t need others telling me what I should and should not do, how and how not to live. At times I am high-spirited, full energy, humor-filled, positive and forward thinking being. Other times I am a brooding, angry, pain-filled moody bastard. Sometimes I look forward in hope to the days when I can hike up mountains again. At times I just appreciate the small things of comfort. In other moments I simply want it all to end because I feel so horrible and can barely sit myself up in bed. But through it all, I’ve learned to accept ALL of what and who I am, the good the bad, and the ugly.
November’s moon, the Hunting moon is about Relationships. In this case, I’m speaking about your relationship with yourself.
Remember, balance isn’t a commodity. It isn’t something we can buy and possess for all our time here. Balance is fleeting, moody, and a lot like air; everywhere, but since it is always in motion and unseeable, we cannot hold it for long. Even our breath we can only hold for so long. Balance is individual moments we attain and then lose. We are always seeking it, but can never in this world possess it. All life is in a constant state of falling in and out of balance, from atoms to ecosystems. That falling in and out creates movement, and movement is life.
Before I lay out some things that assist me in staying somewhat sane (sane being a relative word that others may or may not tag to my existence keep in mind
), let me first briefly touch upon balance.Far too many people these days push the positivity and light message as if all else is wrong and should be avoided. How many times have I written about this before? Many. Light is only balanced by dark, and dark is balanced by light. Sadness is balanced by happiness. Anger is balanced by contentment, and so on. Too much grief harms the lungs but too much happiness actually harms the heart. There is pessimism, optimism, and realism. The first two ongoing are states of imbalance. Realism embraces the acceptance of both positivity and negativity as equals.
We are human beings, and therefore we have a full range of emotional capacities. It literally rules our existence here. To try to stay in one small range of that emotional spectrum is forcing oneself to exist abnormally and in a state of chronic imbalance. Even attempting to stand in the middle and remain neutral to everything is a state of imbalance. We are mammals and we are here to feel like the entire mammal kingdom.
As living beings, we go through phases. Think of the famous Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. He went through a yellow phase, a red phase, a blue phase, and so on. During those phases one color range consumed him and that was all he painted. He honored those phases, let them express themselves freely through him, and created masterpieces because of it, and the phases flowed naturally. Yes in time heavy metal poisoning drove him mad, but we won’t go there…
Another great example is the seasons. Our far northern and far southern ecosystems have emotional phases as well. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Each one runs its course and expresses during those times. Even close to the equator there are seasons of wet and dry. We have night and day also.
Our emotional phases are no different and are there for the purpose of our experiences and expressions. Sometimes winter is extra long and summer is short. Likewise, some people phase through darker emotional states longer than others. Is that “wrong” or unacceptable”? Of course not.
Many people like to try telling other people how they should feel, and what they should focus on too. How is someone else to know exactly what another person is supposed to be feeling and experiencing at any given time? If someone told another to stop being unhappy, many would think that was great advice. But if a person told another to stop being happy, it would be looked at as a remark of insanity. Nobody can tell others how to feel and how they should be feeling during their sets of experiences. We can support others by helping them through whatever emotional sets they are rolling through, but to tell them to feel otherwise is ridiculous. If we are not living someone else life and doing so inside their mind and body, then we are in no position to tell another how they should be feeling about anything.
Remember, balance isn’t a commodity. It isn’t something we can buy and possess for all our time here. Balance is fleeting, moody, and a lot like air; everywhere, but since it is always in motion and unseeable, we cannot hold it for long. Even our breath we can only hold for so long. Balance is individual moments we attain and then lose. We are always seeking it, but can never in this world possess it. All life is in a constant state of falling in and out of balance, from atoms to ecosystems. That falling in and out creates movement, and movement is life.
~~~~~~~~~
How Do I Stay Sane?
Well, some would argue that I don’t, but what do they know?
It is no secret that my life has gone any-which-way but smoothly, like so many others. I have also not kept it hidden that between my past trauma, and physical health issues plaguing me today, it can be difficult to remain positive. Yes, I can be a moody bastard, but also forward-seeing and hopeful. I can be a frigid bleak winter as well as easy going lush summer; the birth of spring as well as the downfall and decay of autumn. I go through… phases. These phases always fluctuate in a timeframe. Sometimes a phase will last days, or perhaps only fleeting moments scattered throughout a day. But they do ebb and flow, they move.
I don’t much like making lists of these things, but I find it helps express them more clearly in writing to others.
1- At the top of my list and the most powerful point for me - I have an exceptionally loving, caring, and understanding wife. She, of course, goes through her own phases, but we both accept each other's phases and do our best to support one another as we are flowing through them; positive or negative. As difficult as some of those phases are to see the others going through, we understand they are a necessary expression of the internal experience sets we are living at any given moment. They are natural and necessary.2- I am realistic about gratitude. As grateful as I am for my life and all the positive things in it, and I’m grateful for the challenges as well, I’m not grateful for everything. Realism comes into play when I am not at all grateful for many things I am going through, see happening, or have otherwise affecting my life. I don’t pretend to be grateful for everything because I am not. I find I need to be very realistic about being grateful, rather than lying about being grateful for things I am not.3- Supporting others is very rewarding and uplifting to me. Of course, the realism comes into play here as well. I enjoy supporting people I care about rather than total strangers, or people I don’t like. Supporting others is an energy investment. Like anything, investing energy is an investment in your own life force. To invest energy into things that do nothing to support your life force seems wasteful. Some like to say everything is connected, so expending energy into anything will support you as a whole. I never did buy that. You can give away your last piece of food, clothing, and shelter, and exhaust yourself to support people around the world you don’t know, and will never meet, and your efforts could very easily claim your life. Helping others in ways that tear you down isn’t productive in my opinion.4- Increasing my mind has always been important to me. I love to learn. I love learning about the world I call home. I find the energy investment to study things that interest me to be highly worthwhile. I find this pursuit to be both mentally rewarding and physically uplifting. Even if I am so physically weak to be bedridden, I use what I am able to study, write or listen to. I always have an audiobook on hand. And even if feel miserable and can do little else beyond sitting in bed, I may have ideas running through my head that I just need to write out.5- That brings me to the sharing with others piece. I’ve always been big on sharing with like minds, and or people I care about. I like to converse with others about ideas, things, and observations. Many people today find themselves scattered thin, focused on too many things, overworked, and stressed out. Good olde fashioned communication slides by the wayside. Distance doesn’t help because our best and most rewarding communication is face-to-face. Then you have some who hate phones, emailing, or texting… and I don’t think there are many of us left who even know how to write a letter and put it in the mailbox anymore. Anyway, sharing, and being realistic about it helps to support my moods.6- No matter how badly or how well I am feeling, I try to take a small bit of time each day to acknowledge things I accomplished, or that went well on the last day or night. It used to be that this was a long list as I was always busy doing, doing, doing! It took me a while to accept and become accustomed to my new phase of life (within the last 4 years), and acknowledging accomplishments was more difficult. Slowly that began to shift, and I learned to pat myself on the back for ANY accomplishment. On really rough days that could be as small and simple as taking a shower, or putting away a pile of clean clothing. I found and find it a very important habit to praise yourself for anything you were able to accomplish in the last day or so, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. It is far too easy to forget or to focus on everything that didn’t go well.7- Finding joy in things is an essential aspect of staying sane. For some life just seems to roll along peachy as you please. But for most, it is filled with pitfalls, struggle, frustration, doubt, and so on. At times having fun and finding joy is easy. Other times it is far more challenging. If you are ill, bedridden, have just had an animal companion pass away, or have any other seemingly endless plights plaguing your day, finding joy can take effort. Unlike what the media tries to make everyone think, joy doesn’t have to be a daily orgasmic experience filled with fireworks and body racked pleasure. Joy can be as subtle and simple as how good it feels to lie down a weary body, the taste of a small treat, watching how a dusty-colored light slowly dances upon the ceiling or the sound of a bird singing. It can be the playing of a happy memory in your mind. Joy can be found not only in huge life-sweeping events but also in the subtle passing moments of our day and night. Joy is important, but I’ve learned to be realistic about what can bring it, and how powerful even the smallest moments of joy can be.8- Being connected is a big part of feeling fulfilled, belonging, and lifting one's mind, body and spirit. No matter how much of a loner someone might be, the feeling of connection is just as important to them as anyone else. We were not born into an empty landscape void of color, shape, texture, sound, taste, smell, and other forms of life. We have all been born into a very diverse and highly complex world, and therefore it is impossible to remain disconnected from everything. Connection feeds us, builds us up, and sends our minds and spirits soaring. Once again, being realistic about connections is important. Not all connections are supportive. Some are just the opposite. We must learn to ascertain the difference. I have a core group of friends as close as kin that I stay connected with. My closest family of course as well. I have some very supportive acquaintances that I also stay connected to because I feel our connection is mutually beneficial. I enjoy the elements, weather patterns, the seasons, “wildlife” and plants, and so I focus on all of those connections. I enjoy good food, good stories, and so on. Any connection that feeds me and supports me I honor. Any connection that does the opposite I try to avoid. And of course many times we just don’t know until we try, but that is one way we learn.9- Honoring the positives and negatives of my daily life is realistically important. Like I started this newsletter off with, balance is key, and that doesn’t mean staying neutral or cramming oneself into one side of the emotional spectrum. Many people try to only see and focus on the positive in their life. I don’t find that beneficial or realistic. For me focusing on whatever arises is not only important but beneficial. Seeing what comes for me at any time while doing anything helps me navigate myself and the life around me. If I only focus on the positive and always push the negative way, I get nothing but an unrealistic skewed view and message about myself and the world. Life isn’t all sun rays and roses. Much of it just plain sucks. Forcing myself to only see the positive just put blinders on and removes me from reality, and thus removes me from myself.10- Lastly on my list of staying sane comes self-acceptance as I am in every moment. I am what I am and that is that. I don’t need to prove or justify myself to others. I don’t need others telling me what I should and should not do, how and how not to live. At times I am high-spirited, full energy, humor-filled, positive and forward thinking being. Other times I am a brooding, angry, pain-filled moody bastard. Sometimes I look forward in hope to the days when I can hike up mountains again. At times I just appreciate the small things of comfort. In other moments I simply want it all to end because I feel so horrible and can barely sit myself up in bed. But through it all, I’ve learned to accept ALL of what and who I am, the good the bad, and the ugly.November’s moon, the Hunting moon is about Relationships. In this case, I’m speaking about your relationship with yourself.
Remember, balance isn’t a commodity. It isn’t something we can buy and possess for all our time here. Balance is fleeting, moody, and a lot like air; everywhere, but since it is always in motion and unseeable, we cannot hold it for long. Even our breath we can only hold for so long. Balance is individual moments we attain and then lose. We are always seeking it, but can never in this world possess it. All life is in a constant state of falling in and out of balance, from atoms to ecosystems. That falling in and out creates movement, and movement is life.
