It feels amazing when you have energy and you’re getting a ton of stuff crossed off your to-do list, doesn’t it? If it were easier to keep a balanced perspective, those times would probably keep you going during the times when making even simple decisions felt exhausting and you were staring down your third day of laying on the sofa all afternoon because you just couldn’t get up.
Maybe that’s just me.
My mom taught me a way of thinking about purchases when I was a kid. I think it was part of my Real Life Math homeschool learning. She said that when you buy something, you can divide the price by the number of times you use it to figure out how much it costs per use.
Of course, more expensive items or seasonal items that only get pulled out at certain times of the year take longer to bring the per-use cost down.
In 2014, I climbed Mt. Hood in Oregon with my dad and my sibs. It was in celebration of my dad’s 60th birthday.
It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. Despite it being June, an icy wind was blowing when we started the climb in the middle of the night. The tiny crystals were flying in our faces, and I felt like an ant clinging to the surface of the impossibly huge face of the mountain. Our crampons kept us from slipping off the slick surface of the icy snow, but it felt like we could fly off the slope with next gust of wind.
The fancy hiking boots and ski-grade mittens I’d purchased for the climb kept me warm and dry. When I came back to New York, I didn’t need them anymore. While it was winter up on the mountain, it was spring back home.
I went to high school at a tiny seventh-twelfth grade school in the Southern Tier of New York State. With 96 students in my graduating class, we got pretty close over the course of the four years I was there.
High school is an interesting testing ground for relationships. As teenagers, we kind of know we don’t know everything. We also think we know enough, and more than most of those around us.
Self-knowledge is tough because with all the new hormones, we’re still getting to know the person we’re becoming.
I had some memorable friendships in high school. One was a frenemy, if you can have a guy friend who’s a frenemy. We were often at odds, always fighting like siblings, and we drove each other crazy.
Even then, we both realized the reason we rubbed each other the wrong way so often was that we were very alike, and we saw in the other person things we hated about ourselves.
This post picks up where this one left off.
The night I wrote the post about finding healing, I sat hunched on the sofa over my laptop, with terrible posture.
I’d been resting my stiff neck on a hot pack all afternoon. I had tried to meditate it away, pray over it, and medicate it. I’d talked with the Chaplain about the stress I thought was causing the pain. I’d slept flat on my back to reduce tension, and had done every other thing I could think of, including giving the rest of my family massages. (Fellow women may understand this subtle form of communication?)
I was pretty sure I was going to have to seek professional help in the morning.
Today was a real Sabbath.
We finally got our first significant snowfall for the year, in the form of a huge winter snow that cancelled church services, and left us home with nothing to do on a Sunday.
It could have gone either way. Often, when all the kids are home on weekends, the noise and fighting increase. With no structure to their day other than quiet time, they can end up engaging in attention-seeking behaviors with both their siblings and their parents.
Today was different.
