Our Minds

Image: When the creek rose in 2019.

At the beginning of the week, I wanted to show someone a contract signed by myself and management regarding the TNR (trap, neuter, release) program for the small group of cats I care for. I couldn't find it. HOW CAN I NOT FIND IT? It's supposed to be filed in the TNR folder. I am supposed to file every piece of paper in the correct place. I caught my old sabotaging inner voice saying... "If you filed this one in the wrong place, what else did you file in the wrong place? What if you file something else in the wrong place?"

The next thing I knew, I was pulling out file folders, one at a time, one day at a time, looking through them, and asking... "Why am I keeping this? And this? And that?" And I started a pile of all the pieces of paper I no longer needed along with manilla filing folders I didn't need to reuse. Many of these pieces of paper only had one line underlined (think travel and finance). 

The next thought that popped into my head was Google Docs! Google Sheets! I can create documents with all this information instead of saving all this paper. In addition to all the Google Docs I already had, I created one for all my travel information and history. Yes, I had saved all my airline and amtrak tickets as well as itineraries, notes, and articles.

Just like I obsessively work on a jigsaw puzzle until two in the morning until every last piece is in its place, I found myself going through every sheet of paper... in my whole filing cabinet. But I must tell you that I recently completed a volunteer project that included doing the same thing for four crates of file folders full of paper. You could say I got hooked... although I still haven't located the piece of paper I was searching for. 😞

I got to a folder with writing projects. I found two pages from a journal I kept when I was a teenager... that included poetry I was writing. I had published most of my poetry in my two poetry books, but I evidently missed these. 

Our Minds. I was 17 when I asked all these questions. I am now 65. I can't comprehend being 17... before I read all the books I have read... listened to all the webinars and videos I listened to... took all the classes I took... discovered all the wise souls I discovered on social media... met all the people I have met and gotten to know... to know to ask the questions I asked to begin with. And all these years, I have been seeking the answers to them all. 

(I originally wrote the following in multiple lines as poetry vs the prose it is here.)

Our Minds

A young mind is as changeable as the weather, as fluttered as a bird learning to fly, as open as the air, as deep as the sea. What does a young mind become in days gone by? Does it become weary with age, hardened by time, or frozen in its ways? Were we made to understand or to accept, listen or be heard, sacrifice or save? What is in a young mind? Is it young forever? What lives in a young heart? Were we meant to be taught or to learn, fight or surrender, come together or apart? What do we do with our love, with loneliness and hate? When do we reach the top of the mountain so we can start down again and be happy with what we’ve found? When is it too late? 

No wonder I didn't have any friends. I couldn't find anyone who could connect to my thoughts. I didn't know anyone I could share philosophical ideas with. I was a 65-year-old 17-year-old. Imagine what life could have been like if I found a community of poets back then. I've met many young poets who have minds like I did... and still do. 

I am going to attempt to answer my own 17-year-old questions... as if I am talking to my younger self. 

What does a young mind become in days gone by? Does it become weary with age, hardened by time, or frozen in its ways? I don't know. I am the age I am and every age I ever was. There were times when my mind was weary due to illness, brain cells destroyed by prescription medications, times when my mind was hardened due to difficult experiences, and the part that froze were based on conclusions I made that I eventually found out weren't necessarily true... which led to my challenging those conclusions. Question everything. Keep a journal.

Were we made to understand or to accept, listen or be heard, sacrifice or save? All of these. Life gets complicated. I wish I was taught these concepts when I was in school instead of history, science, and geography.

What is in a young mind? Is it young forever? It is apparently ever-changing depending on the people we spend time with and the stages of life we are in. My mother is now 90... childlike with dementia. I pray I don't end up that way. And then I question... if I pray I don't end up that way, am I making judgments about how she is? I haven't been able to see her as my mother since this happened to her ten years ago. She is a sweet, very young child.... one who can also have tantrums when she is tired or hungry. She has people taking care of her. I doubt anyone would be taking care of me. The health care agency I have now is already short-handed. The media published recent articles on elder abuse and neglect awareness. So to ramble on, this points out to me that I have a fear of being alone and isolated when I am old. I've already survived many years of being alone and isolated so I know what that is like. I never want to experience that again. And like many other people, fear of the unknown can get to you. OK. Back to the present moment.

What lives in a young heart? Were we meant to be taught or to learn, I wasn't interested in being taught what I wasn't interested in learning. I enjoyed seeking out what I was curious about and learning at my own pace. I wish I had been home-schooled and didn't have to deal with the discomfort of public school. 

fight or surrender, Sadly, I surrendered. I didn't know I had the right to fight. I didn't know how to fight. I internalized my need to fight which resulted in autoimmune reactions. I am learning to be assertive... but it takes an adrenaline rush of fight or flight each time I take assertive action. I want some kind of magic to have the ability to just plain be assertive without the fear and adrenaline rush. Or otherwise... I want a personal bodyguard to do this for me.

come together or apart? Another complicated question to answer. Sadly, with each attempt at coming together, I mostly came apart... although life has been much more stable for the last few years. I have since learned about introverts vs extroverts (extroverts like to come together and introverts prefer to stay apart), Myers-Briggs personality types (some personality types love to be around people and some don't), DISC personality types (same as the one before), being an empath (I was unknowingly coming together with everyone I was surrounded with as well as everyone they were surrounded with and had to learn the art of recognizing when this was happening, centering, and coming back into myself... separate from everyone else. Apart.)

What do we do with our love, with loneliness and hate? I have read a lot of books on this subject. I sought love in all the wrong places... outside of myself... instead of looking within... which resulted in loneliness because no one outside of you can make you feel loved if you don't love yourself... and the hate is a natural consequence of feeling abandoned and abused by others who weren't capable of loving you because they don't love themselves. 

When do we reach the top of the mountain so we can start down again and be happy with what we’ve found? I don't know about you, but there was always another mountain to climb. Happiness was fleeting... a sense of excitement about a new discovery... only to fade away until I found the next treasure, person, or situation that would make me happy. Of course, now I have learned this is normal for my personality type.

When is it too late? Mmmm... maybe it is never too late. This is a topic for lots of philosophical discussions. There are moments I wish I could go back in time and say or do something different. What would have happened if I did? Would my life have taken a completely different path? In some cases, when I thought it was too late, I was surprised to find out it was not... so it depends on the situation... like growing lots of new brain cells after I thought they were permanently damaged and gone... and being able to walk again after five years of not... and watching the plants I thought had died coming back to life in the spring. What if "too late" is just an illusion? It's all in OUR MINDS.

My Views on Childhood Education

While I continue to learn more about the Mind-Body-Spirit connection to illness and chronic pain, while processing the controversy around public education vs. vouchers for charter schools, I wonder how my life could have been different if the subjects I was taught in grade school through middle school included psychology, sociology, communication, relationships, finance, and self-defense.

I wonder if instead of biology, social studies, and political science -- and all the FACTS I had to know (which I didn't) in order to get good grades on tests, I had the opportunity to learn all the aforementioned topics instead. As for sex education, this wasn't offered back when I was in school and I'm not sure it would have been beneficial to me if it had.

Learning about psychology, sociology, communication, and relationships (all topics I didn't get until I got to college) sure would have been an extremely interesting way for me and my classmates to learn about each other. Instead of feeling isolated, I could have felt connected.

I was one of the quiet bashful bullied children and I wonder -- if I had a voice -- and heard the other children's voices -- if the issues I faced would have existed. If my classrooms had a Toastmasters format, I would have heard my other classmates tell their stories and developed compassion early on instead of the effects of isolation and depression.

Children who are listened to and understood are less likely to become bullies and the number of people who develop substance abuse issues would be minimized. Children who are listened to and understood are less likely to develop chronic illness, disease, and pain - including mental illness.

We get hearing tests, vision tests, and all kinds of other tests. Why aren't children getting psychological testing? Why is it that only the children who are diagnosed by their pediatricians as needing said testing are being tested and getting help? (I have a friend who works for a psychologist who does this type of testing.)

What if the children who were classified early on as high-risk were put in separate rooms just like special ed rooms are for the developmentally disadvantaged? There are actually children who experience depression from a very young age which isn't caught by parents or pediatricians -- and I was one of them.

It would have been nice if I could have learned about basic psychological problems, including how we decide who we are by the time we are about six years old and whether this identity is true or not. Unfortunately, not every child has a safe start with mentally fit, healthy parents or they only have one parent who has no choice but to work, leaving their child(ren) to fend for themselves. Not every child has a 'church family' to provide structure nor do they have an extended family to be there when their parents work.

It would have been nice if my fellow classmates could have explored cultural and religious differences (sociology) early on instead of historical textbook facts we can't relate to as well as how wealth or lack of affects the livelihood of families. Not everyone goes to college where sociology is a basic subject requirement. This one class made a huge difference in my view of the world.

It would have been nice if I could have learned about stress, how we react to stress, and how to manage stress. Many children DON'T handle stress which results in numerous problems they take with them into their adult life like I did. Because I didn't have a voice, I internalized everything. I'm still in the process of working it all out as each new day leads to a new discovery and a new light bulb of awareness comes on.

It would have been nice if I had more than just crossing guards to protect me on my journey to and from school so I wouldn't have been subject to bullying (by both boys & girls). When I took the bus from first through third grade, I was bullied by nearby students. When we moved to a new town, I had to walk because my mother didn't drive and we didn't have neighbors who could drive us. We lived in New England so regardless of weather conditions, we had to walk. I was in pain as far back as I could remember and pain is stressful by itself. Perhaps children in need of protection (who are free to have a voice) could be assigned older 'qualified' mentors to look after them and protect them from bullies. The older neighbor girl who walked with us was one of many bullies I had to deal with. I wonder how things could have been different if I had learned it was O.K. to speak up and defend myself.

Perhaps had my education in psychology, relationships, & communication had begun much earlier, I wouldn't have fallen so heavily infatuated multiple times (like so many females do) with all the wrong boys and later men. I was only 12 when I became infatuated for the first time. In a class on relationships, I could have learned the difference between infatuation and love as well as what a healthy relationship looked like -- and would have learned that my parents had serious problems. Perhaps I wouldn't have believed I was a bad person - never good enough - when they yelled at each other or me because I would have known it wasn't about me.

Perhaps if instead of studying Shakespeare, we could have been analyzing Disney movies and fairy tales. Right? Like what happens after infatuation? It would have been nice if we had REAL stories to read instead of romance fantasies which always had happy endings.

I can just imagine if instead of blindly falling in love, I was classifying the boys/men I met according to what type of psychological problems they had and how their lives would turn out as a result of those problems. And perhaps I would have developed the insight to know (ahead of time) who would be abusive, alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, liars, cheaters, and worse yet -- sex offenders. (I've known all of the above).

I certainly wish someone had educated me about how much trouble I could get into if I 'date' someone unsupervised until I got to know them, no matter how old I was.

Oh, yes, I'd make self-defense as one of the mandatory classes taught in P.E. Boys weren't the only people I needed to learn to defend myself from. There were bully girls, too. I so wish I had learned how to defend myself verbally and physically before my body 'froze up' with Fibromyalgia. Mmmm.

I wish, even more, I was taught that you don't try to love boys/men who are messed up by being in a relationship with them.

The more people I've talked to over the years, the more I have found out that no one is really immune to the kinds of emotional issues that I personally experienced in my own life and within my own family. Men, women, and children in our country are getting away with the murder of fragile hearts and souls. Sometimes, the murder includes the entire human being which includes school massacres. NO ONE is safe from predators unless they are specifically trained to protect themselves. So why aren't we learning how to do this from the very beginning instead of developing overwhelming helplessness - feeling powerless - which is the root of all illness, disease, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, and more?

I think I've experienced quite a variety of infatuations which in every case left me heartbroken, losing a job, or suddenly moving (which I've done 43 times). In spite of the fact that I kept telling myself 'never again,' there was another 'again.' I never understood what was happening until I read "Count Your Blessings" when I was 57 years old. In Chapter 16, Dr. John F. Demartini begins with:

"Are you busy building pedestals? Generally, the people who build the tallest pedestals experience the deepest resentments down the road, and the bigger the infatuation, the harder it falls. When you see a person, a situation, an object, or a possession, as all good, you're in a temporary state of infatuation and illusion."
I refer to this illusion as 'rose colored glasses'. This leads me to the next subject: finance.

We don't just become infatuated with people. We become infatuated with THINGS. And we want the things NOW whether we have the money saved up for them or not. And we've been taught from early on, that we can have just about anything we want... when we buy it on credit. And this is why our entire country is in such deep debt. We try to fill emptiness with things and wonder why after we have them, we still feel empty.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to take one of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University classes. Imagine if we began learning how to balance a checkbook in grade school as soon as we learned to add and subtract. If parents couldn't afford to give their children allowances, the school could give them monopoly money to pretend with.

Next, we'd go on field trips to the grocery stores (with calculators) and calculate costs per ounce and which products are the better buy. Instead of history and social studies, learn about nutrition, what GMO's are, the toxic affects of sugar and food coloring, and where the meat we eat and the milk we drink come from. In biology lab, we'd experiment on how roundup as well as other chemicals affects our food and our bodies.

Children need to learn how to calculate how much things will end up costing us if we take out loans for them (yes, credit cards are extremely high interest loans).

I was one of the few people who learned about money while I was still in high school because I took business courses which included bookkeeping. By the time I graduated high school, I knew a lot about income and expenses ... with the exception of the credit card thing. My father liked buying things with credit cards and taught me that it was the thing to do. He never figured out that buying things on sale on credit resulted in paying more than the item would be at full price. He even taught me that I had to buy cars brand new when I could have bought a perfectly good used car for a lot less.

In conclusion, I believe childhood education should include psychology, sociology, communication, relationships, and finance from the very beginning... with self-defense in P.E. And if they were, don't you think our world be a better place?

Then again, if our government is such a mess, and religious organizations are all clashing with each other, who do we trust to decide which psychology and finance specialists get to write our textbooks?

What do you think? If you could return to grade school, which classes do you think would have been more beneficial than the ones you had to take?

Contrast, Triggers, and the Law of Allowing

I subscribe to Christy Whitman's newsletters which include videos. In a recent one about the Law of Allowing, I felt an additional 'ingredient' to recent moments of synchronicity. One of those is the slowly deflating tire on my car. How very 'coincidental'. I'd been losing 'air' in the form of energy because I was letting someone I know suck it out of me. I was feeling 'deflated' by some of the words she had been telling me over the last year, while I replayed them over and over in my mind. Perhaps my tire situation wasn't so coincidental after all!

I also saw the following quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." Did I really want to give this person permission to hurt me?

Over the past year, someone I know, who I'm sure had my best interests at heart, was very careless with her words. Each time I was assaulted by something she said, texted, or messaged me, I felt angry. I also asked myself if what she was saying was really true. I was free to accept them or reject them. Just the same, the words were leaving new wounds on top of old ones. The fact that I was dwelling on them confirmed this.

In applying everything I've been learning over the last four years, I kept hearing the voice of my younger sister telling me to silently say, "Thank you for letting me know I still have this issue to heal." My sister had taken Christy Whitman's Life Coach program and was applying the concepts to her own life while passing the wisdom onto me. Indeed, I still had memories and childhood wounds that were affecting me. The only way I would know, is if someone triggers them. I even wrote a song about this... the first two verses go like this:

"If someone pulls a trigger, 

you may see my cry, 

sometimes I know the reason, 

sometimes I don't know why. 

I've been hit with the meanest words, 

that were curt and they were cold, 

so be careful what you say, 

words can hurt my sensitive soul."

I love my older sister (five years older). She was like a second mother to me. She was, however, a Leo and a very bossy, controlling one. At some point, I had to grow up and figure out what was right for me as I had always been the docile, accepting one... accepting whatever I was told as the truth.

There are way too many people in this world who believe their 'truth' should be the same truth for everyone else... including in politics and religion.

Here I was, last week, still dwelling on the words spoken to me. Then Friday afternoon, I overheard a woman preach the hell and damnation scenario. If you don't accept Jesus as your savior, you're going to hell! At one time, I had wondered whether this was really true so I embarked on a religious journey of my own, studying all the religions of the world. I concluded that as long as people had a belief in something, that was what mattered. I am just sad for the ones who like I was at one time, buying into their narrow point of view.

Here I was, hearing this speal, when I began to smile inside. The people who had spoken so many hurtful words to me were no different than the religious person who speaks theirs. I didn't have to let it affect me.

What's more, I realized the more I heard the degrading words of my former associate, the more I knew they were not true. She was speaking them from HER perspective. As I digested this, looking down at the bigger picture from my home in the sky (from my post on Skydiving), I thought about everything in life being created for a purpose, including the contrast that the world offers so we can learn about ourselves by both what we want and what we don't want and by what we decide is true for us.

As for synchronicity, a new video landed in my email inbox from Christy on the Law of Allowing. She said when we no longer resist contradictory circumstances that trigger our emotions, look at them as an observer, ask what they are trying to tell us, we can learn from them. As Teal Swan says in her videos, use emotions as your compass and let them flow through you. They don't have to live in your body and drag you down to the bottom of the sea like an anchor.

Where in your life are you begin triggered? Is there someone who spits words that hurt without any regard to your feelings? If you could step back as an observer and look at the bigger picture, can you see lessons you could learn from the experience? Please comment below.