The Repair of Human Beings

This page should be blank. She has died and she has been buried. I was there for both. Yet, it is impossible that my sister is not in the world. Why should this be so hard to take? Sometimes the loss is a shock, a jolt of adrenaline. Sometimes it is what it is now: a suffusion of gray bleakness seeping from my pores, my bones. It is neither regret…

My god. I don’t understand what has been happening. I have been to the emergency room, spent a night hospitalized, spent time with my sister in a hospice, spent time with what feels like dozens of relatives. The last week or so has lasted two years. I am trying to keep myself away from a breakdown. This is strange. Where is my gratitude. Can I find some way of making…

One of the strongest arguments for faith to me, has always been the presence of doubt. Acknowledging that the belief you hold on to only works in the presence of doubt is an essential component to authentically holding that belief. Faith needs doubt to exist. I distrust any belief system that has no room for doubt. To my mind, such as system is just nonsense. Doubt, though, on its own…

And lizards and frogs and spiders and bugs. This winter, here in Florida, I wiped ice from my windscreen, and watched as all the lovely brilliant color faded from the front garden.  They survived the first days of frosty chill, and then collapsed a week or so later as a new blast of cold blew in. But it has been warming up. Life has reset. In that same front garden,…

Although I spend many hours each week talking to hundreds of people, I don’t often see them in person. Today was a not an ordinary day. With enough elbow room that we don’t need to whisper or smother out sneezes, it is easy to not see my nearest neighbors for days at a time, but today I spoke with three of them. The first was amusing, and odd. With him,…

Gratitude 2: A smile. During my training to handle customer support requests by phone, an admirable man told me to smile to through the – on average – 90 second call. Unsurprisingly, he pointed out that the caller would be able to hear it and would therefore improve the quality of the call. More surprising to me is how much of an improvement that makes to my whole day. I…

In this moment of disappointing health, my sister talked about gratitude and finding things for which to feel fortunate. When I got home from visiting her today, I looked at the images I snapped. This is Gratitude 1: I can (and am) storing thousands of images on Google. I make images and I keep them. I press the shutter to record a memory, freeze a moment. I do not worry…

One of the consequences of stress is that pinning the mind to something feels hugely difficult. Mastering the mind is my central goal in the repairing process. In that vein, I started a bullet journal today to become more structured and focused. This will enable me to feel less overwhelmed and will keep all my mental and physical lists and goals in one place. I’m also taking the approach that…

I had a thought just now that I want to be crushed by the fall of a giant redwood tree. This tree should be 3000 or so years old and would fall upon me, the forest lightening and the sky shuddering with the sound of its magnificent demise. I had this thought after looking at hundreds of my nature photographs. My mind is a unmixed paint – swirls of colors,…

Here I am. I have just reviewed my output for the first part of this month. I have, I think, given up the notion that I have failed if I don’t write/reflect every single day. This is a challenging time and I can only do the best that I can do. I was so unwell this month  that it feels like breaking through a vat of molasses, straining through the…