15 Minutes to Live – trust30 Domino Project

I accepted the challenge from the Domino Project of #trust30.  It is described as a, “30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. It’s an opportunity to reflect on your now and create direction for your future.”  It is 11:13 pm and I haven’t made my post for the day.   I took the challenge and I don’t want to blow it off on the first day just because I was “busy”.  Today’s challenge is that you have just found out that you have 15 minutes to live.  Set the timer and write the story that must be told.  When I first read the challenge I interpreted it as how I would spend the last 15 minutes of my life if I knew it was the last 15 minutes.  As I re-read the challenge now, I can see that it can be interpreted differently. Since it is late and it has been a long day I am sticking with my first response.  Given 15 minutes to live I would…..

My first task is to let my siblings know so they can take over caring for Mom.  Mom is in assisted living and I am responsible for paying her bills, going to Dr.’s appointments and overseeing her care.  My first 5 minutes would be sent composing an email to my siblings to indicate that they need to look after Mom and make sure she is well cared for. That may mean moving her to a facility nearer them, working with the lawyer to get the power of attorney changed, etc. etc.  All of the information is available for them to take over.   Make sure they explain to Mom that I love her very much and am sorry to leave so soon.

My next big challenge is how to talk to my husband.  Do I call? If I call, how do I explain?   I don’t want to waste time explaining why I will only live a few more minutes (I guess I would know  since there is a count down).  The most important thing to me is that he knows he is the most important person in my life and I love him dearly.   He can grieve but he will have to move on and continue to live his life.   He is and will always be my best friend.

If I am able to hang up the phone with my husband, I want to be outside.  I want to feel the sunshine, warmth and breezes upon my skin (luckily for me today is a beautiful day). The last thing I would want is to leave this world sitting in my office at work.   My existence didn’t change the world, I can accept that.   I can only hope that knowing me  was a positive influence on the majority of people I interacted with.   I hope I would be able to remain calm and accept my fate with dignity.

I still have a few minutes to spare.  Take a deep breath relax and let life happen.

I’m certainly relieved that this is a “what-if” scenario – I’m not planning to go anywhere!

Deception

Why do people who love us, deceive us?  There are many forms of deceit but it especially hurts when it is from someone you love, and who you believe loves you.   How can you comprehend?  Was the deceit to maintain privacy,  to manipulate,    maintain pride, or just plain ignorance?     You  try to help someone financially, only to find that your help has only allowed them to dig the debt hole deeper.   They let you believe that your assistance was making a difference when it was only prolonging the inevitable.   It hurts even more when you suggested actions and requested information to help alleviate the situation  but the responses were  all lies.  It hurts even more when those lies were from a parent – why would they lie to you when you are trying to help, trying to avoid a crisis?  Suddenly you find that your “help” was wasted and the crisis you were trying to avoid has only increased in magnitude and has hit like a tornado.  Now you can only react to a disaster and take any solution available.   It hurts to realize that you have been betrayed and can’t understand why.  It is even more confusing when you don’t even know if the person who betrayed you even understands the extent of the hurt and the harm they have caused.  Why is honesty so hard?  I’m not just speaking of a contrived example – this is a real situation in my family’s life.

Another real scenario I am living through is giving someone a boost financially hoping to get them on the right track only to find out that the money was used to purchase items they can not afford to maintain. Or even worse, to support an addiction that was well hidden.   Thus, in the end the financial help did not help at all. The person is in the same situation as before.   That leaves a sour taste and bitterness.

Is it a character flaw to want to help people, to believe what people tell you?   My husband and I are not independently wealthy – but we certainly will help out family when we can (financially or otherwise).   But it really hurts to think that our generosity is not respected.  I also believe that when you give something, be it monetary, a physical object or actions there should be no strings attached.  However, it is a bitter pill to swallow when someone lets us invest in a situation while hiding the pertinent facts that ulitmately renders our investment nearly useless.   Had we been given the facts we asked for, we might have been able to have a substantially better impact.   Now the recipient needs even more assistance  when things come crashing down because they didn’t trust us enough to let us know the full situation.  We feel cheated and betrayed and it hurts even more that it was perpetrated by our parents.   We’ll do our best to help in this crisis but our trust is broken and we feel used.

I guess if we could wrap a morale around the situation we could make this into a movie.  But somehow life isn’t that easy.  This saga will continue.   We’ll get through it – there is no choice.

Meditation

I keep reading about Meditation in the mainstream press. It has been touted as a simple way to  help people overcome stress, improve happiness and improve brain function.  I certainly don’t think I am unhappy but I am certainly stressed out.   I definitely could have used a calming presence  when I was dealing with my parents’ failing health and father’s passing.   I even took a class in meditation but unfortunately, did not follow through.   Now things are heating up with my husband’s parents so it is time to take meditation more seriously.   And, I have to admit that I am feeling overwhelmed at work.  Don’t get me wrong, I love learning new things and tackling hard problems, but lately my insecurities are starting to get the best of me .  Do you think that comes with age?   Does it have to do with being a woman in a still relatively male dominated field?  Is it genetic (my dad was notoriously insecure)?   I don’t know but I do know that I get far too upset when programming tasks at work take longer than I think they should.  I want to know it all, NOW!   I need to get my emotions under better control.  Time to give meditation a serious try.

My yoga instruction recommended the book, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg so I bought it for my Kindle app on my iPad.   I’ve read the first few chapters and I’m started on week 1.   The goal is three sessions of meditation this week, preferably each 20 minutes long but any time is better than none.    I’m a bit disappointed that the book seems to focus a fair amount on improving happiness or correcting some “problem” in life.   I don’t believe that I am unhappy, have a particular character flaw or problem to solve so I sometimes take offense at the suggestion that I need to “fix” things in my life.  But, I am willing to overlook what I feel to be the more “touchy-feely”  parts of the book and focus on the positive suggestions.

I figure I should be able to find 3 twenty minute time slots this week to give it a try.  Well, that is probably easier said than done.  I guess one has to commit time and energy to exercising the brain just as diligently as one commits to exercising the body.   I sit for at least 5-15 minutes every morning an evening with one of my cats.  She is very skittish but loves being patted so I sit down with her in a small closet with no door each morning and evening.  She feels “safe” in the closet so that is where I must go to interact with her (read about her at Simon & Shelby Mew-sings).  I’m hoping that at some point in the future I can turn these petting sessions into meditation sessions – the theory being that I should be able to mindfully pet the cat rather than focusing on breathing.  At any rate, I managed a 10 minute meditation session last night.

I’ve read that you shouldn’t meditate before going to bed. After all, you are going to sleep, why bother the relax the brain?   But, this book suggested that anytime you can fit it in is fine and that was the time I had.  I focused on my breathing and followed the instructions to aknowledge my wayward thoughts but come back to my breathing.  When my back got a bit sore, I tried to send my energy there to relieve it.   I was pleasantly surprised that the 10 minutes when by faster than I expected (I set up a timer on my iPhone) and I slept very well!  Work went very well today, too!  I was able to keep my frustrations and bay by taking a break when necessary and got quite a bit accomplished.

Tomorrow I’m going to try a session in the morning.  Will post my ongoing results!

Another blog

Seems that when life gets unsettled, I feel the need to write about it!  So, here I go again sharing thoughts and feelings.   More to come – unless of course life gets boring!