Appreciating Luxury

I have spent a good portion of my life doing what we are conditioned to do – to work, and work and work in order to achieve, to accumulate, to succeed. I spent many years working 12-hour days trying to write, edit and be generally productive and generate money in addition to keeping house, cooking, raising children and constantly worrying about not being enough in any or all aspects of my life.

It was exhausting. I was thinking last night that all that exhaustive pushing to accomplish didn’t get me where I ultimately thought I wanted to go. I worked mornings and nights, holidays and weekends, when I was sick and tired and I never had that moment when I was a NYT Bestselling author or when my bank account topped six digits.

I missed a lot of days at the park with my kids, a lot of sunny summer afternoons while I stared at a computer screen. But I was conditioned, I suppose, by that old story about the grasshopper and the ants. You work your butt off now so that you can cozy up later and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Well, I did the work. I ignored the call to play and relax and now that it’s time to cozy up, there’s still no pile of gold to lie on.

I occurred to me that maybe it’s time to start appreciating what I have instead of knocking myself out to acquire more that I will never have the time or the energy to enjoy.

I realize that I am surrounded by luxury, and I’ve been taught not to see it. I don’t mean that I have champagne and caviar at my disposal. I mean that I have so many things that in so many places on this planet are considered luxuries. I have a nice home and healthy children and a wonderful husband. I have a job and a car and clean clothes and the ability to decide to relax in a hot bath on a Saturday night after a nice dinner. I can go food shopping or clothes shopping any time I want, and if I’m not feeling well, I can take a paid sick day from my job and see a doctor of my choosing. [Granted the health care situation in this country is a big joke, but it’s better than in many places.]

We are conditioned to take all this for granted in the first world. I’m supposed to be indignant when I have to wait on line for gas, or when the local coffee shop closes down and I can’t grab a latte on the way to work or when the mail is delivered after 5:00 PM or the garbage isn’t taken off the street before noon.  But what we really should be taught is that drinking clean water from a cold fridge is a luxury. Putting on warm socks on a cold night, turning up the heat a few degrees and climbing into a bed of clean sheets and fluffy pillows is a luxury. Going to work at a job that pays me not only to show up, but to stay home on holidays and vacations and sick days is a luxury. Deciding to sit on the couch and read a book, or write a book of my choosing – is a luxury.

I’ve decided that from this point forth, I will make an effort to appreciate the luxuries I have accumulated in my life. I’m not saying I’m going to stop trying to achieve, but my priority now is going to be to enjoy what I have instead of slavishly pushing to have more before I can finally consider myself a success and enjoy the fruits of my labors.

I have decided that I have enough and I am enough. I’ve been an ant long enough. 

Now I’m a grasshopper. 

Fear for profit

The older I get, the more I notice how much of our society runs on fear. The media is the chief purveyor of fear on a widespread scale, but you can find it on a more personal level every day too.

 
 

Starting with the media, however – if you notice lately, and more so every day, the headlines, the news segments are all geared around something new we need to be afraid of: cancer, obesity, heart disease, ebola, zika…fraud, floods, freezing temperatures, a torturous commute to work, a new danger lurking in the refrigerator or the washing machine or at the corner store.

 

 

 I’ve realized that if we are, as a community, afraid of something, we are more controllable, more malleable and infinitely more profitable for business of every kind. If we are afraid of a snowstorm that will trap us in our homes for days on end, we rush out to stock up on milk and bread. If we are afraid of becoming terribly ill with the flu, we will let Big Pharma inject us with chemicals as a preventative [all I’ve ever heard from people who got the flu shot is how they ended up with the flu – yet they were so afraid of not getting the shot]. If we are afraid of having a heart attack we will modify our diet [often in ways that are actually worse for our health], if we’re afraid of being fat we will turn over large buckets of cash to diet companies who will sell us chemicals and fads that only make us feel worse. If we are afraid of cancer, we will allow doctors to pump us full of poison and radiation all the while telling us how ‘brave’ we are to be fighting for our lives.

 

 

There is always someone who wants us to be afraid of something so that it will profit them.

 

 

I had a small, brief moment of clarity the other day, and for a second I could understand and feel what it was like to not be afraid. It only lasted a moment – but that moment made me think, what would an entire life be like if it could be lived without fear?

 

 

Now, granted, fear is a necessary element of survival. If you’re not afraid of the lion, you may become his dinner. If you’re not afraid of fire, you will be burned. But how often are we told that if we’re too afraid to fall we’ll never fly?

 

 

Imagine how high we could fly if we weren’t burdened with incessant fear of everything? I’ve always lived in this state of fear that society has created. While there are certainly people who live in fear of truly horrible things that are much worse than anything I’ve experienced, I realize I’m one of millions or maybe billions of people who are controlled by the fear that’s created in order to boost the profits of others.

 

 

What would happen if we stopped worrying every minute that we might be sick and not know it, and therefore should be running to the doctor all the time for tests to prove that we are not sick? What would happen if we could vote for a president because we thought that person was the best qualified for the job and not because we are terrified of what will happen if the opponent we don’t like wins the election?

 

 

I wonder how much money would be lost if we stopped being afraid of every calorie, afraid of missing a mammogram, afraid of getting a fever, afraid of growing old, afraid of LOOKING old?

 

 

What would happen if we were too busy living life and enjoying it to worry about dying?

 

 

Unfortunately my moment of clarity was fleeting, but I can’t stop thinking about it. My hope is that I can keep working on it and maybe get to a point where I can let go of some of that fear that has kept me controllable and profitable to the fear mongers for so long. My hope is that in the second half of my life I can live it on my terms and not be afraid of what anyone else will think of my choices.

 

 

 As long as I’m happy and I can get up every day and go to work, enjoy my hobbies, spend time with my family and friends, laugh and love and look forward to things – then guess what, I’m doing perfectly okay, and NO ONE has the power to make me afraid that I’m not doing what’s best for me because I’m not a customer of their fear based profit machine.

Perspective

 

These scary giants aren't real. Well, they are real, but they're not alive. It depends on how you define 'real.'

 

 

 

One of the ways I've discovered to make life a little better is to adjust how I look at things. I've found that if you have the right perspective, something that seems bad can become not so bad or even really fortuitous. You just have to decide how you want to look at it.

 

I notice more and more that people lose perspective very quickly or never had any to begin with. For instance this winter - it's been unusually mild. Since Christmas [which was in the 40s] it's been well above seasonal temperatures. We did have a few isolated days where it was in the 30s and windy - and interestingly on those days, the people I encountered were all quick to say how 'brutal' the cold was and how 'horrible' the winter was.

 

Because it was 30 degrees one day in a week of 40-degree days.

 

Last weekend we had our first snow storm of the season. It was a whopper. We got over 2 feet of snow in 24-hours, and the cleanup was exhausting. It happened on a Saturday - which made it fortuitous because we had no plans, nowhere to be and had no reason to go driving or otherwise traveling. We stayed inside for a good portion of the day, warm and cozy with a new heating system just installed, plenty of food and TV to watch. It was the best way for a snowstorm to be. Not that I love snow, because I don't anymore. All I want is for it to be warm enough for me to go out and work in my garden. But that's beside the point.

 

Back at work, we had a steady stream of people who used those words again - 'brutal, horrible' winter. This winter has been 'so bad' they said. The snow was horrendous! It's just been awful and SO COLD. After the snow, it went back up to 40. Today, just over a week later, it's literally in the 50s outside and sunny.

 

Perspective. Why do so many people see one cold, snowy day as the defining moment for a whole season and deem an entire winter to be 'brutal and horrible' when there is no doubt in anyone's mind they've been through much worse? Can we blame the media that reports every storm these days as being 'deadly' and 'record breaking'? Or do people just have a tendency to be completely unable to see the good when the bad is so close by?

 

Today is a gorgeous day, but last week was snowing, so the winter has been 'brutal and horrible.'

 

I try to find the perspective in things, so that I'm not living in a brutal and horrible world but in a beautiful one. It makes life much easier.

 

The Statistical Truth Factory

The Internet is a dangerous place and no place is more dangerous than Facebook, but people don’t realize it.

Every day I go there [I hate it, but I go anyway. I know, that’s my bad] and I see the memes that people slavishly repost and repost, sometimes just with a thoughtless click and sometimes with their own opinions thrown in. About 90% of the time, a five-second search on Google can turn up the evidence to debunk whatever ‘TRUTH’ said meme is disseminating in the form of a poignant photo or a snappy graphic or a falsely attributed quotation.

Yet, no one bothers to check this stuff before they repost. They just bob their heads like bobbleheads and go ‘yup, yup, yup’ and post, spreading the work of trolls who aren’t ‘telling it like it is’ but telling it the way they want people to believe it is.

Today I saw a meme with two ‘satellite’ images of the earth. One supposedly from 1975 when the atmosphere was pristine and pure, and one supposedly from 2013 when the world was covered with a dense fog of pollution. Yup, yup, yup.

But on closer [and not even that close] inspection, it’s clear that the second photo is the MOON with an enlarged picture of the US superimposed over it/under it in Photoshopped layers so the craters look like wispy strands of pollution.

People reposted and reposted and reposted as evidence that we are destroying the planet.

Now, I’m an environmentalist, and I have no doubt that true satellite images might show a definite increase in pollution over the years, but jeez, trolls – there’s not anything better or more true out there to illustrate your point?

Or, is the point of these trolls that people are so easily fooled and brainwashed you can show them a poorly Photoshopped photo of the moon and they will believe it’s earth because you say it’s earth?

Sad. Very, very sad.

I have half a mind to create my own meme about why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on Facebook just because someone made a shiny graphic out of it. [And I actually did make one - seen above. I posted it to my wall. Let's see how many people repost it. Maybe it will go viral and The Statistical Truth Factory will become famous!]

Letting go

 

 

It's no secret that most of our problems in life stem from the inability to let go, and letting go can mean a lot of different things. It can mean making a change, educating yourself, walking away from something, someone or a particular belief. The reason we, as a race, remain gullible and malleable and victimized is often because we cannot get out of our own way and let go of the things that we

 

1) don't believe in

 

2) know we don't need

 

3) don't really want

 

 

We're afraid of loss, even if that loss is by our own choice, so we hang on to things because it's easier than stepping [oh, here I go] out of that comfort zone.

 

I know I just whined about wanting to actually be IN a comfort zone. But I think there are too different kinds of comfort zones. There are the ones that you're actually really comfortable in - that place where you are content, and so much of society is about ignoring contentment as a form of happiness and always striving for MORE because it makes someone else money... and then there are the comfort zones where you're not really comfortable, you just don't want to take the chance that if you leave you will be even less comfortable.

 

 

Example - a friend of mine has been talking about moving for many years. This person is unhappy in their current living situation and dreams of going somewhere else, but they continue to put up every road block imaginable. In addition to a litany of reasons why moving would be really hard, they continue to add additional issues to their life that would compound those problems thus assuring that the act of actually moving to a new place would be even more difficult than it has to be.

 

Letting go is hard.

 

One of the things I can't let go of is my dysfunctional relationship with the internet. I HATE the internet. I despise Yahoo, yet I go there everyday and read junk news. I revile Facebook, but I don't have the courage to actually just shut down my profile and stop caring what goes on there.

 

 

I blame Facebook for helping rob me of my desire to write, because I spend too much time scrolling through other people's useless flotsam. I blame Facebook for ruining a friendship because someone I used to like is a complete asshole on Facebook, and seeing this side of that person makes me less inclined to want to spend time with them in real life. I don't know if that's really a good thing or not. It was perhaps better when I thought this person was a nice person and I enjoyed their company. Now I find interacting with and thinking about this person tends to up my stress level - hence this post. In the past I have disconnected from people who made me feel uncomfortable in my own head - even if all my interactions with them were generally pleasant seeming and friendly, I would come away from every conversation inexplicably feeling bad. Not in the same way the rabid narcissist makes me feel bad, because I couldn't pinpoint anything particular this person said or did that bothered me. I just felt depressed after being around them. That friendship didn't end as much as it simply faded away, and I have never ONCE missed it. So I think perhaps it was a good thing.

 

The friendship in question today used to be my lifeline. But it's been stretched so thin, and provides me with no joy or comfort anymore, only that vague feeling of uneasiness and awkward unpleasantness that I have no need to feel. In this case there are specific things that bother me, but I also feel like there is just a general difference in this person, they've become someone I don't know as opposed to the person they used to be whom I loved and very much needed in my life. For a long time I've felt this person doesn't need me, and I see that I spent a lot of time chasing this person for attention that dried up when I stopped being the instigator of our interactions.

 

Sadly, each day brings me closer to the conclusion that it might be time to walk away from this. If interacting with someone leaves me feeling unhappy - why should I do it if I don't have to? I don't think I'll be missed by them... and while I miss the person they used to be, I don't think that person exists any more.

 

Time to let go...or at least think about it. 

Yet another new obsession

I've discovered needle felting.

Who knew? But apparently you can take very sharp, barbed needles, stab them repeatedly into pieces of unspun wool and turn them into plushy little objects.

 

 

Of course, I went a little nuts and bought some supplies and a kit online.

 

In a few hours I had a hedgehog, whom I shall name Hermione.

 

I then made a creature that might be a cat, or a dog or a bear, and a rabbit with very large ears.

 

I'm now working on a bear-rabbit.

 

It's a fairly simple but versatile craft that's oddly therapeutic, and I can do it while watching TV. [The most important rule of needle felting is don't stab yourself. The needs are scalpel-sharp and nastily barbed.]

 

Naturally I have already gone back online to order more supplies. I have no doubt I can create dozens of furry friends, but the problem is where to keep them. I need a shelf that I can dedicate to my art... that will be my next project.

If not now, when?

Since I’m working hard at getting the negative monologue out of my head, it has to go somewhere. While I’m not fond of ranting posts, I’m going to wax rhapsodic about Oprah’s new money-deal with Weight Watchers.

This is not going to be pretty so bear with me.

The always zaftig Oscar-nominated actress/talk show host/ humanitarian has publicly ‘battled’ her weight [to use industry rhetoric] for decades. She’s done liquid diets and had personal trainers and she’s made sweeping stage entrances looking slim and also made sweeping stage entrances looking like a well-put together fat woman.  I will give her that she dresses beautifully [she can afford it of course] and she always looks professional.

 She’s accomplished an amazing litany of things in her life, and she’s done I’d say 90% of it as a fat woman. Being thin was never a prerequisite for her to become rich or famous or be an activist, a voice for women, a generous giver, an industry talent… but now she’s made a deal that will put yet more money that she obviously doesn’t need into her pocket in exchange for her saying things like how weight loss can be like a game [just count points instead of calories! Isn’t that fun?] and if not now, when? I don’t know – when you’ve made enough money? When you’ve had a long-running award winning TV show? When you’ve starred in a movie? When you’ve written a book?

If you don’t get thin now, when will you do it? Why not do it AFTER you’ve done every other important thing in your life? Because doing it before might mean you will NEVER accomplish anything worthwhile.

I think Oprah has lost count of the number of celebs who have been guests on her show because of their ‘accomplishments’ in losing weight through paid advertising. Most of those guests, judging by what I read on the Internet, are the same people who have lost and gained, gained and lost, dropped one company for another and been dropped by sponsors for not keeping the weight off. Many of those celebs, having ‘failed’ after the sponsorship money dried up, have either denounced their previous weight loss plans or gone on to create their own plans, or simply, having ‘failed’ too many times to uphold the standards of the diet industry are now touting ‘happiness and good health’ as their mantra rather than weight loss at any cost.

I wonder how long it will be before Oprah’s contract runs out, or her patience with yet another gimmick wears thin. It’s very clear, having watched Oprah over the years, that she is a fat woman and will likely always be a fat woman. It hasn’t stopped her from being healthy and successful, and it shouldn’t stop anyone else. I suspect the day will come when she will weary of her weight loss partners and their shady practices and she will either jump ship as so many of her cronies have and develop her own plan, or simply embrace the truth, that weight loss is a bill of goods sold to us for profit.

I hope her disenchantment with this sham occurs soon – and I’d like to ask her, Oprah, if not now, when will you truly see the light?