A Wise Geezer Once Said...

'It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.'

Anyone know what great brain said the above?

Yep. Albus Dumbledore. A truly excellent man. Shame about the 'not being a real person' bit.

JK Rowling gives a lot of good advice via ole Albus. Sure, they're great stories with great characters, but she sneaks these bits of wisdom in without us really noticing until later. And I like that.

But I think it's worth giving that quote from Albus a chew every once in a while, just to make sure it's front of mind. And believe me, it's so easy for a whole load of the daily shite to get in the way, and block out the important things.

The choices our parents make for us when we're too young to know better are one of main things that determine if we're fuck-ups in our lives, or end up decent people. And if your parents make half-decent choices for you, and teach you how to do the same, then you're in pretty good shape. At least until you go off into the world where you can do what you damned well please without them harping at you about stuff from dawn to dusk.

My parents did a pretty good job, especially considering that they were practically CHILDREN when they became parents. And they each had their issues, which, alongside all the good stuff they taught me and my brother (i.e. Don't litter. Don't be a jerk. Clean up after yourself. Don't hit. Tell the truth. Apologize. Say please and thank you. Be nice, etc.), we also absorbed. And it's really an eye-opener of a day when you suddenly realize that you do stuff, or act a certain way, or think about things in a particular light, because you subconsciously learned how to mimic your parents along with all the shit they inherited from their parents.

But I think I need to start taking a good look at the choices I make, rather than question my abilities. And that means abilities across the board - as a parent, a spouse, an employee, etc. I'm VERY able and I do what I do well (most of the time). But it's the choices that are under fire here.

I have a really short fuse when it comes to my youngest. She's amazing -- smart, funny, cute. But boy is she a pain in the arse. And she's a typical four-year-old kid. Her attention span is great if she's doing something she likes; not so great if she's uninterested in the activity at hand. She faffs around with eating her meals. You've got to ask her to put her jacket on about seven times before you can walk out the door (this is especially effective when I'm trying to get her to school and me to the train on time every morning). So I shout. LOUDLY. And I hate it.

But it occurred to me tonight that I'm establishing the dynamic of our future relationship here. She acts out, I shout, she cries, I get stressed out, and we all end up feeling rotten. And none of it changes the fact that it still took 15 minutes for her to take her socks off.

So -- choices, not abilities. I need to choose to change how I interact with my kids. With my husband. Friends, mom, brother, sister-in-law, job. I've never been a good chooser. I've gotten a few choices right (hiya, Boss). But generally speaking, up until about ten years ago, I've been a bit of an ass when it comes to making good choices. I think my mom and dad tried to help me when I was younger, but I also know that they had their own issues and lives and thoughts to sort out.

I'm also very aware that I'm genetically programmed to make shitty choices. I've unlearned a lot of this behaviour (thanks, Valerie Brucker -- I miss you). And I know my nuclear family has done some good unlearning, too. See? It's never too late to think about choices.

I have a lot of abilities - I can do a TON of stuff. But it's the choices that I've made across almost my whole life, in conjunction with my abilities, that have come up a bit flat. It's almost as if by the time you reach your 40s, you've got a good enough idea about how it all works to actually be ready to be out there in the world. You Get It. It Makes Sense. You've Got A Grip On Things.

The sad part is, there's no do-overs. Not a one. The best you get is a clean slate.

It's not about a mid-life crisis (I had mine at about 28 years old, I reckon). It's about understanding how to make choices that turn you into the person that you want to be -- now, tomorrow, next week. And hopefully, those choices will allow a bit of retro-fitting, so you can try to see your former self as the person you wanted to be, too.

My husband and I were just talking about sticker charts - you know the ones? Where your kid gets a sticker if they [fill in the blank] for a whole day/week. When they get a week's worth of stickers, they get a [fill in the blank with treat/item/event]. So we were talking about creating a sticker chart for the youngest, to see if we can get her to try to not be so utterly bonkers.

I think the person who needs the sticker chart is me.

Vinyasa

I go to yoga class every Wednesday night. My teacher is a super woman named Sara. I'm so glad I have her as a teacher.

She's funny, has great hair, good ink, and never teaches a class the same way twice. It's pretty great.

There have been times when we've done partner yoga (not my fave, but it helps put you face to face with your space issues), and then classes that have been all about balances, or hip stretches, or abs. I swear to you we once did (once the warm up was over) an entire class of pigeons. If you've done yoga, you'll know what I'm talking about.

To crib a statement my grandma used to say all the time about food, 'there are asanas that we like, and there are asanas we are learning to like.' I'm learning to like pigeons. I know they're good for me, but they're uncomfortable as hell, and about as intense of an asana as you get. However, as someone who carries a very large percentage of stress and tension in her hips, the more pigeons I get in a class, the better, really.

Tonight was a great class. Lots of vinyasa (dynamic flow) going on - it gets the blood going, and really helps me to turn my head off. I'm grateful for the time I have every Wednesday night to go.

Because part of what I'm attempting these days is to increase my mindfulness, I think the yoga really does help. I've got a few other things I'm doing (trying to focus on what I'm doing at the moment, trying to see things as they're unfolding in front of me, trying to spend time with my kids and really listen to what they're saying and to really play with them, etc.), but of lot of my mindfulness education is learning to let go.

That's the most difficult thing of all.

I'm a major control freak about a lot of stuff. I can't stand a messy house. It drives me nuts when my husband never puts his stuff away. He's constantly leaving his wallet somewhere in the house instead of always putting it in the same place, or he'll wander round trying to find his car keys, instead of putting them on the key hook. And it's like fingernails on a chalkboard when I go into my kids' rooms and find four days' worth of dirty clothes lying around (I know. It's just going to get worse.).

But where I used never to be able to go to bed without doing the dishes, now (sometimes) I can. And I've gotten a lot better about just scooping up all the junk that gets left round the house and dumping into the little green basket at the bottom of the stairs, instead of putting all their shit away for them. Now if there's something that's missing, I try to say 'Have you checked the green basket?'

So the yoga thing helps with that. It's pretty good exercise - strengthening, limbering, that sort of stuff. But a lot of it is for my mind too.

So Namaste and all that. We had a pretty good class tonight with a good extended relaxation bit at the end. I'm off to bed.

Doing the Build

I woke up this morning feeling absolutely wretched.

I get headaches. Big, bad migraines. I hate 'em. And I have meds for them, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. This morning was a don't.

So I got up with the rest of the family, did the ponytails and sorted out the toothbrushes. Then when they all left to go to school, I took a shower, and then went back to bed and slept until 11am. Which was great, because by the time I got up, the headache was mostly gone. Like Westley, in The Princess Bride is 'mostly dead', which means he's a little bit alive. So the headache was still a little bit alive, too.

But by about 1pm I was OK. So I decided to do a couple of things that have been collecting. I recycled the old batteries, took the small, broken electrical things to the SBET collection facility (see you, Obnoxious Laughing Santa thing - it's been real), did the charity shop drop, went to the ironmonger, and then home again. Which is when I decided to finish the wood storage.

My husband has been telling me for about three months that he wasn't going to buy any firewood for our house until we had a place to store the firewood. We DID have a place to store it last year, which was just piled crazily against the house about as far away from the back door as you can get and still be on a paved surface. Sort of a long way to go when it's pelting down rain and you're in slippers. But he wanted a REAL place to store the firewood. And when he investigated about how much it'd cost to buy one (150 quid or so), I just said in a casual way, 'Honey, I'll just build you one'. Of course, this was one of those times where he was actually listening to what I said, so he said 'Great idea!'.  Figures.

When I was at the ironmongers, I bought some self-tapping screws (IS there any other kind to use, really?), and some nails (oooh - it's like pick and mix, but for building supplies!). I got a few other things, too, but that's for later.

Armed with a hammer, a chisel, my electric drill (clever me I charged the battery up last week), and my electric saw, I took apart two pallets, and with the bits from those, and various pieces of scrap wood we've been hoarding from a building project last summer, I made him a wood storage. It's pretty great, if I may say so. I think I want to say so because it's made from reclaimed wood, and I like that. It also sort of looks a little bit like something you'd see in R.A. Miller's back garden -- it's not perfect, and it's very rustic, but that's why it looks so cool; at least why I think it looks cool.

So I think that being outside in the cold (2 degrees C today) and doing something physical, but not formally exercise, helped get rid of the headache. It's a bit meditative, actually. There's an end result that I'm hoping to gain, yes, but it's also a task that has to be done in a completely mindful way - there's no room for thinking about something else when you're busy using an electric saw. It's the same frame of mind I can get into when I'm following a really involved crochet pattern - you can't think of something else, or you end up with a completely wonky piece of unidentifiable yarn thing.

So I did a bit of letting my mind wander (in an 'I'm very much paying attention to the electric saw' kind of way) and did a bit of mulling about The Carrot thing. It's still very much front of mind. But I find that I'm able to think about The Carrot when I've got some peace and quiet. It's a drag that the peace and quiet was precipitated by a monster of a headache, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

I've still got some serious thinking to do. Certainly nothing is going to be discovered in a day, or a week. But just going outside, and working with my hands, and starting with a large pile of odds and ends and leftovers, and ending up with a wood storage thing and a much smaller pile, was good. The coldness of the day, and the quietness that was so quiet that I could hear the echo of the hammer hitting the nails, was a good place to be in for that couple of hours.