One Cobble at a Time

My Writing Excuses Cruise

By Sandra Tayler / October 2, 2015 October 2, 2015 / 3 Comments

A week ago today the island of Cozumel, Mexico was outside my stateroom window. Memories of the cruise sit in a strange space in my brain, like they belong to another life somehow. I read posts on social media from my fellow travelers about how they are sad it is all over. I haven’t been sad, but I think that is because my brain has decided that the cruise workshop space still exists and I’ve just stepped away for a bit. It feels as if I could just step back. Or maybe as if I’ve bundled it up small and carry it with me.

The trip was not made entirely of joy and awesomeness. This is because Howard and I accidentally packed along some emotional baggage. As this sort of baggage tends to be invisible, we tripped over it on a couple of days until we managed to identify it and get it safely stowed away. Perhaps that is why I’m not sad about being off the ship, perhaps it is because, when we left the stateroom, I left some of that stuff behind. I hope the porter doesn’t mind cleaning it up. Though it likely evaporated by itself without me there to sustain it. Yet the hard bits are vague in my memory and the lovely parts are crystal clear. All the photos remind me of happiness and the entire trip was a gift, one I shall treasure.

The attendees have been sharing their photos of the trip. As I flip through the folders I realize that while we were all on the same ship, each of us had an experience that was unique. I see photos of places I did not go, of people I did not spend much time with. That was one of the powers of the cruise as a location. Each person could choose what sort of trip they wanted to have. Some stayed on the ship and wrote, or read. Others went on tours and sampled native foods.

I climbed up a river in Jamaica with a group of people.

We laughed, chanted along with our guides, and got soaking wet.

I learned that building a house in Jamaica is a multi-generational project. They build a few rooms and move in, only adding to the house as funds come available. We saw lots of open and thriving businesses whose upper stories were construction zones.

I wore a silly hat and walked through a cave that has been traversed by a Spanish governor, pirates, runaway slaves, and nightclub goers. The very air of the cave reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, which told me I was passing through the original. I stared up in wonder as bats flew overhead.

Then we found a towel bat in our stateroom that night.

I walked through Mayan ruins in Cozumel, Mexico, setting my feet on a road that has endured for thousands of years.

I took beautiful pictures of ocean and beach.

I sampled Mayan chocolate made in the traditional ways.

I watched the sunset over the railings of the ship, and the clouds shift and glow in the fading light.

I found my fellow writers in the quiet corners of the ship.

And then there are the things for which I don’t have pictures.
I ate dinner every night with a different group of writers and never lacked for good conversation. I ate new foods, both on the ship and on the shore. I dressed in fancy clothes and felt happy. I stayed up late because talking was more attractive than sleeping. I participated in dozens of conversations that started “next year…” I was saved from awkward food by my waiter who showed me the proper way to go about eating butterflied shrimp. I spent time with long-known friends and acquired some new ones. I saw kindness as people helped those around them with problems both big and small. I felt an amazing sense of community among our group who was there.

As I said earlier, the trip was a gift. It is one I’d love to share. Registration for next year’s cruise will open in a couple of months, I hope that many amazing people will be able to join us because we plan to make it even better. I know I feel honored to have been a part of it.

Cruise Lessons

By Sandra Tayler / September 27, 2015 September 27, 2015 / 5 Comments

Before this trip I had never been on a cruise. I’d never been interested in them. They seemed the sort of thing that would appeal to other people, not me. And there is truth in that instinct. I would not have enjoyed this cruise as much if it were not full of fascinating writer-people to talk to. There have been times when I ate lunch with a random selection of people from the ship. They were friendly and we had a pleasant conversation, but it was not the sort of energizing conversation that I have with writers or the family members of writers. On the other hand, I suspect my experience is somewhat typical. The cruise offers such an array of activities that there are certain to be some that lie outside the interests of any particular individual.

I expected luxury, and I expected to feel guilty about having that luxury. Saying “I’m going on a cruise” feels privileged and self-indulgent, and it is, but it is also an eye opening educational experience in ways that I did not expect. Before I spent a week on a ship I was never able to distinguish port from starboard. Now that happens instinctively because I need it to find my way from one place to another. Until I stood at night looking over the railing at endless water and felt the deck under my feet moving slightly, I did not understand what was meant when people said they feel “at sea.” There were a couple of days during the cruise where I felt emotionally off balance and disconnected from myself, as if I were lost out in the ocean. Looking down at those waves I comprehended that the ship was the only safety available. If I were to go into the water I would die before I could find any other safety. My creative mind helpfully pictured that for me and I visualized myself swimming, watching the ship get ever further away. Then I stepped away from the rail and went back inside where there were walls between me and the vastness of the ocean. On a map, we’ve never been that far from land, just tooling around between Florida and various islands in the Caribbean, dodging Cuba. Looking out to sea, I realize how big the world is.

On the first day there was a paper in my stateroom introducing the ship captain and crew members. I tossed that paper without really reading it. The captain seemed as irrelevant to me as the various airplane pilots who have taken me places. Here at the end of the week, I see it all differently. I’ve heard the captain’s voice announcing arrivals and departures. I’ve heard him explaining why the ship stopped unexpectedly in the middle of the night (because some drunk guy told his wife he was going to jump off the ship, and she panicked and called the emergency line.) I’ve heard him explain that a medical helicopter would be landing to remove a very sick patient. I’ve seen him across the room as he stopped by one of our social events. Slowly I’ve come to understand that we are all in his hands, that his decisions truly matter for the course of the ship and for my experience on it. I also begin to feel connected to nautical tradition where out on the ocean everything stops or changes to help others in distress. I watch the social atmosphere and tiers of service and interaction on the ship. Then I realize that I am participating in cruise traditions that have their roots hundreds of years ago. I begin to understand in ways that I did not before.

I expected to feel uncomfortable being served and waited on. During the first day I thought that expectation was justified when I saw how much of the serving staff had brown skin and that the majority of the vacationers were white. Then I witnessed how many staff members read my badge and greeted me by name. Then a staff member saw Howard on shore and stopped Howard to make him sit down and wait for a car to take him back to the ship. The staff member realized that Howard was on the front edge of heat exhaustion. I watched native tour guides and heard their accents in context without the slight deference that accented people always display in the US. I hadn’t even realized that the deference was there until I saw Mexican and Jamaican tour guides standing strong and confident in their own countries. They were professionals, intelligent and very good at a very difficult job. All of the serving staff are smart, sharp, highly trained, and function so smoothly that most guests will never notice the multitude of ways that their stay has been made easier. I have been meeting the eyes of staff, learning their names, and giving them as much professional respect as our brief encounters will allow.

I was surprised at how international an experience I’m having on the ship. I knew I would encounter other cultures on the shore, but I find them on the ship as well. Our captain has an eastern European accent. Most of the staff are not from the US. Among the guests I’ve heard a dozen different languages. Many of our retreat attendees have come from outside the US. I love hearing voices with different perspectives. It helps me see my assumptions which had been invisible before.

The ship itself surprises me in small ways. The bathrooms all have thresholds to step over and they latch in ways that remind me I am on a ship, not in a hotel. Most of the time, I am only aware of the motion of the ship as a slight rumble, not really different than the rumble from an air conditioning system in a building. But then there will be a moment where I feel as if I am dizzy. I’m not. It is just that the room is moving slightly around me. Once I identify the motion of the ship, I can adapt for it without trouble. I brought sea sickness remedies, but I have not needed any of them. I enjoy watching the logistics of getting the massive ship into and out of a port. The sunsets at sea have been uniformly gorgeous, which has more to do with the clouds and the sea than the ship, but they surprise me and it is only on the ship that I can see them this way. Behind the ship the wake stays visible all the way to the horizon and gives me thoughts about how we all mark the world by our passing.

We have already scheduled the cruise for next year. I’ll be going again. Next time I’ll be much more familiar with how the ship works. Howard and I will not attempt to go without internet because apparently we keep portions of our cognitive functioning stored in the cloud. I did no writing until I was reconnected to the internet. I have mixed feelings about that. Things that were unexpected obstacles this time will not be problems next time because we’ll know what to expect. I do hope that I’ll learn as much next year as I have this year. I believe I will because it was other people who taught me and I will not run out of things to learn from others. I’ve learned and grown from my conversations with the attendees and the staff on the ship. It will be interesting to see how all my new thoughts settle when I get back home.

Planet Mercenary Funded

By Sandra Tayler / May 18, 2015 May 18, 2015 / 1 Comment

The Kickstarter closed at noon today. I was watching when it happened. How could I not watch those final seconds count down? It tipped over into Funded and there was this pause in my head. For a long few seconds I looked at the number of backers and the number of dollars. Well now I know. It was the first clear thought in the pause. I know what the budget is for all the things we must do. I know how many people to whom I am responsible for spending that money wisely. Hitting funded is a solemn and awestruck moment as much as it is a happy one.

I have so many fears going forward. I know some of the stressful things that are ahead. I know that there will be other stresses that I do not expect. It seems that every project we do has some huge and potentially disastrous problem hidden in it. Thus far we’ve always avoided the disasters, but it felt really close many times. (Some day I really should give a full account of how the Massively Parallel bonus story was rescued from a major misprint at the very last minute.) I’m also very excited for what we get to make.

So this first few days after hitting funded is a time for Howard, Alan (our partner and game designer), and I to breathe. We need to pause and reset our minds for the new tasks ahead. We need to pick up some of the tasks we let drop. I need to give my youngest child some attention as he nears the end of his last year in elementary school.

But while I’m pausing to breathe, I should use some of that breath to say thank you to all the people who backed our project. Thank you to the people who spread the word. Thank you to the people who wished us well. Because of all of you, we get to make Planet Mercenary, and it is going to be amazing.

Scattered Attention and Updates

By Sandra Tayler / April 17, 2015 April 17, 2015 / 2 Comments

When I wrote about how noisy it was in my head and in my house I thought the noise would subside more quickly than it has. The internet noise shifted tone, but did not cease. Which doesn’t surprise me. The internet is always noisy and outraged about some thing. It just bothered me more this time around because the arguments punched some of my personal anxiety buttons. The construction work we were having done to finish a room for my boys is complete. We now have a room that will be ready for occupation as soon as carpet is installed. The quieting of these things has been significantly offset by the fact that we launched our Kickstarter. Then it funded in less than 24 hours. Now I’m hoping very much that we reach the $150,000 stretch goal so that we can afford to create and print the in-world book 70 Maxims for Maximally Effective Mercenaries. I’m also buried under huge piles of email and the more people who back the project the more email rolls in. My email response time has gone way down and I feel bad about that because the backers deserve better.

On the parenting front, we appear to have reached a stable place. I’m no longer having to respond to emotional crisis multiple times per week. I feel a bit cautious saying that, we haven’t been stable long enough for me to feel secure. I’m also aware that this stable place is not a place we want to stay. There is a big difference between “not in crisis” and “living a full and growth-filled life.” Even with the increased quiet my time and attention are being impacted with extra meetings, managing homeschooling, and figuring out how to switch everything over to a summertime mode. Meanwhile my other son’s teacher seems determined to squeeze in all the assignments she didn’t get done earlier. The onslaught of homework is significant, particularly for my son who has been feeling overwhelmed. Also my teenage daughter has had some standard issue teen drama to work through. (Can I say how light and fluffy that felt to me in comparison to what I’ve helped kids through in the last two years? I kind of want to hug her emotional drama and shout “It’s so fluffy!” like that little girl in Despicable Me.) My college daughter comes home in two weeks and I’m really hoping the carpet is installed in time for me to move the boys out of the room where she’ll be staying.

One of the exciting things this week was that Howard and I decided that I need to be at GenCon this year. We’re running and RPG Kickstarter and then I’m helping make the book. There are things about a community that can only be understood by participating in that community. So off to GenCon I go. Hopefully sometime between now and then I’ll find a way to re-open the writer portions of my brain which have been shut down since some emotional stuff slammed me the first week of March. If nothing else, I’ll get to hang out with all the writer people at GenCon and I’ll get to see our booth crew whom I’ve only had the chance to meet once. I’m really looking forward to it.

Learning to Share Burdens

By Sandra Tayler / March 23, 2015 March 23, 2015 / 1 Comment

I was having a hard Sunday, one of many that I’ve had in the past few months. I sat on the bench at church with only half of my family. Patch had whispered to me that he didn’t feel well and lay his head down in my lap. He fell asleep curled up like the much younger child he used to be, but isn’t anymore. I sat with him, letting him sleep through that meeting and the next. I only woke him for the third hour, since the chapel gets used by priesthood during that time and I needed to be in relief society. I walked down the hall and a friend chanced to be next to me. Or maybe she walked next to me on purpose because I could tell she’d noticed I was having a hard day. We entered the relief society room, and I reached out to touch her and say “will you sit with me?”
“Of course” was the immediate answer. I don’t know why I asked. Usually I’m quite happy to sit by myself in my own little observer space. I guess I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts anymore. I was tired of my thoughts. They’d been circling in my head through two hours and my efforts to quell them were only temporarily effective. My friend sat next to me and she told me about her life, her kids, the things that are making her stressed. I kept asking questions to draw her out, wanting to hear someone else’s story for a while. Sometimes it seems like we have to do big things to help others. My friend helped me just by sitting next to me and being herself. I could feel her sympathy even though we didn’t talk about my things very much. I went home feeling better.

On a different Sunday, one that was less hard, but still not easy, there was a lesson about taking the yoke of Christ upon us. We had the usual description of what a yoke is (a piece of wood shaped to allow two animals to share a load), etymology of the word yoke (from Proto Indo European meaning “to unite”), and reading of scriptures relating to yokes (Matt 11:20-9-30 “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.) As I listened I turned over in my head my usual response to this passage of scripture, how I like that the word “light” can be read to mean the opposite of heavy, but also to mean the opposite of dark. One word, multiple interpretations. The lesson did not really go that direction, instead of discussing how we yoke ourselves to Christ and pull with him, we talked about how we as members were yoked together to carry all the things. The point being if we redistribute the load, the work becomes easier.

I’ve been thinking about that yoke lesson a lot. Particularly at moments like the one where I asked my friend to sit with me. Or when I’m walking into a pharmacy to pick up an embarrassing number of prescriptions and I meet a friend, whom I haven’t seen in years, and who is also picking up mental health related prescriptions. So then we sit and talk. We decide to get together for lunch and talk more. I think about it when I’m driving toward home and I see the mother of my child’s friend in her yard, so I stop to talk to her about our children and I realize here is yet another person who can understand my current load. Not only that, but she promises to send her kid to hang out with my kid so neither of them will spend so much time alone. In only a brief conversation, burdens are shifted, shared, made lighter.

It was less than two weeks ago when I felt terribly alone with my pile of troubles. I prayed in that hour and I was heard. Since then I have been shown that the people I need are already in my life. The support network was already in place before I was able to admit I needed one. All I had to do was open my eyes and be willing to share my struggles.

Scenes from This Past Week

By Sandra Tayler / March 19, 2015 March 19, 2015 / 3 Comments

I talked to another parent with a son who is my son’s age. “He has a job now.” This other parent said. “It’s a restaurant job and he doesn’t like it much, but its being good for him.” The parent went on to describe how this boy is part way through learning how to drive and how he complains about the homework from his three AP classes. I sat there and listened to this father describe a parenting experience that was completely foreign to me. He wasn’t bragging, he was just telling me about stuff that felt completely normal to him. It was a description which matches the high school experience as witnessed in movies and on TV shows. And I vaguely remember going through something like it. I thought of my son, who spends so much time isolated. I thought of the therapy sessions, vocational rehab, and homeschooling that make up our existence. I thought about how none of it seems like enough and how I can’t currently picture my son going to college. It was like this other parent was telling me about a work of fiction, the fairytale of high school.

***

I sat in the elementary school office waiting for a meeting. As I waited for the teacher and the principal to be ready, I tried not to think about sitting in this same chair two years prior to discuss a different child in crisis. Two years is a long time, and you’d think that I’d have had time to process and let go of all the emotions. I haven’t had the time. I’ve been pushing thoughts out of my way so that I could take care of other thoughts. Mostly I don’t notice, until I hit a moment which would be déjà vu, except that I know exactly when and where I’ve experienced the moment before. It is so very familiar, same teacher, same room, same month of my child’s sixth grade year. But things are different too. Different child, different principal. This time there were only three of us in the room instead of five. This time we didn’t have to address behavioral or safety concerns. This time I didn’t show up with a plan for how to fix things. I’m too tired to make plans anymore. All I can do is say “this is where we are.” And to let them know that sometimes the homework won’t get done, not because I don’t think it is important, but because sometimes he can’t and sometimes I can’t. And I tell them enough about the things going on (beyond the those which relate to the child under their care) that they believe me when I say that sometimes the best I can give them won’t look like much.

***

My daughter was unsaddling the horse she’d been riding, so I wandered into the indoor arena. The big space was empty and the dirt was soft under my feet. I looked down at the shoe prints and hoof prints in the dirt and thought about how we all make marks upon the world simply by passing through. I looked back at my own prints, noticing the tread pattern of my shoes. I like going to the barn with my daughter. The priorities there are so different from anywhere else in my life. People tend not to be in any particular hurry. They chat, they pause to watch other people ride. The barn cats are friendly, glad to be picked up and snuggled. It is a space where my time is free of any other assignment than to bring my daughter, wait, then take her home again. Sometimes I bring work with me. Other times I just drift; watching my daughter manage a horse, listening to barn conversations. It is a much more pleasant form of therapy than the kind where we sit in and office and talk about hard things. Instead my daughter sits on top of an animal who outmasses her ten times over and learns that if she wants to control the horse, she has to first control herself. Telling people that my daughter has horseback riding lessons feels self-indulgent. Priviledged. But it is cheaper than office therapy by half. I walked back along my footprints feeling the quiet of the big empty space.

***

The words typed themselves on the screen in front of me. Or at least that is how it appeared. The truth was that my college daughter was typing words into a shared document. I was there to help her make sure the words said what she wanted them to say. It was a difficult message trying to give someone hope while also saying “I can’t be your security blanket. Please leave me alone.” It was the third or fourth time this year that I’ve helped my daughter sort out what words she needed for a difficult conversation. She’s had a semester of difficult conversations and growth.

***

The sun was bright in the front yard as Howard held up a brochure and squinted at the colors of our house. The page of the brochure showed shingles and we examined them to pick what would be on our roof for the next twenty years. The contractor stood in the yard with us. He’d made us a good offer, still expensive, but less than I’d been afraid we would have to pay. I’m just grateful we can pay. Even the contractor told us that the current state of our roof is a bit scary. All the gravel is loose, making the walking slippery. We couldn’t afford it last year or several years before that. I’m looking forward to being able to drive up to my house and not have to think “We really need to replace the roof before something breaks.”

***

After ten minutes of idling, I turned the engine off. My son looked up at this change in the status quo. We’d been sitting, mostly in silence. I’d run out of useful words. Instead I was waiting to see if he could decide to get out of the car and go to class. I could tell that part of him wanted to. When I asked, he said he liked his teacher, his classmates. He liked learning. Yet going was hard. It had been getting harder for a while. His teacher was worried. After twenty minutes I walked him into the building. He walked slow, his feet literally dragging with every step. In the hall we encountered his teacher from last year. She just happened to be there, and she happened to have time to stand and talk to us. She named what I knew, but hadn’t consciously recognized. I hadn’t wanted to recognize it because I really wanted one of my at-home kids to be fine. My son was depressed, chemically incapable of enjoying things that he would normally love. I mentioned that he’s already on medicine. She looked at my son, who was sitting, head down, arms curled around his knees, then she looked at me and said “If he’s on medicine, it isn’t working.” And I knew she was right. It was time for doctor’s appointments and teacher appointments. I am so weary of appointments.

***

“Take all the time you need.” He said to me in a quiet voice. We were sitting across a desk from each other in his office at the church building. I was there because I’d finally come to the conclusion that I should probably let the bishop of my congregation know about the mental health struggles impacting our family. I didn’t come with plans, just to tell him where we are and what feels hard. I tried to believe that I could take whatever time I needed, but I could feel that time pressing on me. LDS bishops are not paid for their ecclesiastical time. This man put in a full day of work and then put on a suit to put in hours during the evening. His job was huge. Bishops are always over burdened. I knew that on the other side of the office door sat someone who was waiting for the next appointment. And waiting. And waiting. Despite not wanting to take up too much time, I was so full of stories that I talked for ninety minutes. He listened to all of it.

At one point I apologized for not coming to him sooner. Because I knew that I should. I knew I needed help that my ward family could easily supply if they knew I needed it. But I didn’t want to be a burden. That seems like the good and kind thing to do, carry my own stuff so that no one else has to deal with it. Except that is the opposite of the purpose of having church in the first place. We’re not here to avoid burdening each other, we’re here to share one another’s burdens. With the weight of all the things spread across all the shoulders, it can be lifted. That can’t happen if we all hold our troubles tight and refuse to share them.

***

My fingers are on the keys and I want to spin out words through them, but the white space on the screen in front of me is empty. I try to find a place to start, a story I can tell. Except it seems like each story is tangled up with two or three things which are not mine to tell. My life and mind are filled with confidences that I must keep. Some of them will be less sharp in the future, less able to hurt. They can be told then. Others… will take much longer to lose their edge. I tell the stories I can, in the places that I can. The rest I hold for now.

Being on Skype while Female

By Sandra Tayler / February 6, 2015 February 6, 2015 / 3 Comments

I resisted getting a Skype account for many years. I just didn’t feel a need for it. Then my daughter went to college and suddenly Skype offered a valuable way to keep in touch with her. I installed it and learned how to use it. That was lovely.

What was less lovely was that I kept getting pinged by strangers who wanted to add me to their contact list. The profiles all had male pictures and the messages were usually along the lines of “I saw your profile and thought you were beautiful. Want to chat?” So I removed the webcam shot of myself as the profile image. It wasn’t a great picture anyway, but it did make me visibly female. That slowed the contact requests for a while. But it did not stop them.

This past week the rate of contact requests increased a lot. I’ve no idea why. It was getting annoying. I wanted Skype to be a private place for me and my kid to communicate. I didn’t want it to be social. Blocking the requests was fairly easy, but they kept coming. So I went to my profile and set my gender to blank. The contacts still kept coming. I finally resorted to renaming myself on Skype to something that sounded neutral-to-male. The combination of all these things appears to have worked. I’m glad I found a solution to my problem. I’m sad that being on Skype while female = available for romantic solicitation.

Meetings and Guilt

By Sandra Tayler / February 5, 2015 February 5, 2015 / 1 Comment

I’ve had a lot of meetings with teachers and school administrators in the past few months. I’ve had even more in the past two years. Many of these meetings take place because I call for them. My kid is in crisis, life has become untenable, things must change. I’m always aware that urgent meetings are a disruption of the school personnel’s regular schedule. The meetings certainly disrupt my life and I know that teachers/administrators are every bit as busy as I am. This means that I enter these meetings with a strong urge to apologize for inflicting my kids on the school. I am always aware that there is more I could be doing to resolve the issue. I could support my kid more, be more regular at declaring homework time, establish a more firm bedtime. It is only recently that I recognized my deep emotional belief that it was my job to help my kids function normally in a classroom, and if they didn’t, that was a failure on my part. Pulled out into rational light, I can see how ridiculous this expectation is. Yet it was there in my head and it caused me a lot of grief.

I hit a turning point last November when I sat in a meeting with my son, his counselor, a student advocate, the vice principal, the principal, and a special ed teacher. All of these busy people sat with me and my son for more than an hour while I talked about what we were experiencing, what we’d done to try to resolve it, and expressed a need for help. As I talked, I really could see that we had done every possible thing that was in our power to do, yet my son needed more. Which the school staff identified and moved to provide. The help was wonderful. Even better was walking out of the meeting and realizing that they didn’t blame me. No one was standing in judgment to evaluate why we’d ended up in the emotional pit. They just asked if we’d prefer a rope, ladder, shovel, or backhoe as the means to get out.

After that meeting I began to stop blaming me. It was hard. I had to break long time habits of thought. As we were digging out to a better place, arranging therapy, adjusting medications, changing the school schedule, I learned that I was most helpful to everyone else if I simply said “This is where we are at today” without burying myself under an emotional load of guilt. In problem solving, how you arrived matters less than where you’re headed.

The frequency of meetings has begun to trail off. I’m looking at a March that might be completely free of teacher meetings. I would be fine with that, because it would mean that the arrangements for next year are made and no one is in crisis. In the interim, I’m glad that the only meetings I have coming up are routine meetings about school schedules for next year.

Calendars, Jumbled Thoughts, Journeys and Growth

By Sandra Tayler / February 2, 2015 February 2, 2015 / 4 Comments

Lately I’m spending a lot of time looking at my calendar. In theory I’m doing this to plan for the days ahead and to keep myself on track. That part is necessary, because I’m prone to distraction lately and I need my external reminders for what I hope to accomplish each day. But there is also something else that is driving this staring-at-the-calendar behavior. I’ve had trouble putting my finger on it, but it feels a little bit like waiting. It’s almost as if there is a coming deadline after which my life will clear of the minutia and leave me space for long and slow thoughts. I miss my long slow thoughts, the unrolling of words in my head. Everything feels jumbled up there and I’m not sure how to unjumble it.

This is one of the things I hope for from my trip to Chicago. I hope to get far enough outside my usual context that I can see clearly all the things I’ve been in the midst of doing.

I am fortunate to live in a network of friendships. I attend a church where the members are my neighbors. Most of us have lived here for many years. Many of the women here are kindred spirits, yet I often forget to talk to them. I forget to look outside the walls of my own house. When I do, my head is so full of unspoken thoughts that I’m a little afraid to start talking for fear that my avalanche of words will overwhelm my listener. So, I parcel things out. I talk of parenting to one friend. I talk of business to another. I talk writing with a third. There is some mixture in what I say, because it is hard for me to talk about any of these things without mentioning the others. Then when I’ve been talking for a while, my friend will say something like “Wow, you’ve got a lot going on.” These are affirming words. I need to hear them, because sometimes I wonder if I’m just being weak or silly when I’m being buried in the stress of my life. Surely I could have planned it better and not needed to dump on my friend. Then there is the other quiet thought in my head, the one that knows it is time for me to change the subject. Because I’ve only told part of my stories and my friend already thinks I have too much going on.

Used to know a family who always lived in emotional crisis. They were always fighting or recovering from fighting. They feuded with neighbors. They created drama everywhere they went. I would sit and talk with the mother of this family, trying to help her find peace and calmness for her household. Yet, without fail, any time peace began to be established, they would do something to create a new crisis. The family didn’t know how to exist without it. Crisis was familiar. Peace was uncomfortable and strange to them. I lost touch with this family long ago, but I expect they are still careening along, colliding with the world and being angry about it.

When I view my life and the endless stream of things I am managing, grieving, afraid of, or depressed about, I sometimes wonder if I am doing the same thing. Do I live in stress like a fish in water, so that if I’m ever at risk of emerging, I do something to plunge back in? I hope not. I want to believe that I’m helping my loved ones traverse a difficult but necessary passage. I want to believe that I am experiencing a period of stress and recalibration.

“Don’t worry Mom. It’s all going to be fine.” Link says these words to me often. Usually when I’m pushing at him to accomplish something because I am afraid of the future that I have pictured. I try to believe him and I try to stop pushing. My conversations with Link have changed in the past year. They work best when I manage to listen to Link instead of the clock ticking in my head. It is the ticking which tells me I’m running out of time to teach him the things he needs to know. As if I will have used up all my chances to teach on the dawn of his eighteenth birthday. Link says he feels like a seed, small and protected now, but ready to grow into something big and amazing. I believe that too (when the clock isn’t in my way.) I see the potential that is in him. Yet I am a gardener and I know that not all seeds reach their potential. Link is amazing, more amazing than he believes, and I want him to fulfill his desire to go out and make the world a better place.

My thoughts of seeds and gardening send me wandering out to my front flower beds, where I have pansies in bloom. We’ve had a strange, warm winter here in Utah. Most days are forty or fifty degrees. My pansies are little troopers, putting out bloom after bloom, even when the nights drop below freezing sometimes. I’m grateful for the bright color as I walk up to the house. It fools me into feeling like we’re in March, not February. March is when winter recedes and spring begins to make its presence known.

Perhaps that’s why I keep looking at the calendar. I’m waiting for spring to come, not just outside, but inside my heart. I’m waiting to see signs that the Link seed will sprout and grow. Or for green growth inside me. I am not so foolish as to think that my son is the only one with learning to do. On the calendar I look back to see how long ago we arranged for good growing conditions. I look ahead wondering when I can hope to see green. And I hope for hospitable growing weather. I have to believe it will come.

Filtering the Voices

By Sandra Tayler / November 16, 2014 November 16, 2014

I believe in being open minded. I try to look at multiple sides of an issue. I try to withhold judgement. Unfortunately this has the side effect of making my brain a very noisy place. Other people’s opinions echo in my head and they continue arguing with each other inside my head. I slowly become overwhelmed with the chaos of voices because I can see at least some validity in all the opposing arguments. At some point I have to quell the pandemonium. I have to decide which voices to listen to and which to reject. I have to make judgements about what I believe and what I don’t. This is hard, because it means not being completely open minded. It means that someday someone may accuse me of being narrow, and they will be correct. That will sting. But I can’t function as a human being if I consider all sources of input to be equally valid. I have to filter or I will go crazy with stress.

Accepting the need to filter, I then have the challenge of figuring out what and how. Some choices are obvious. I don’t want to listen to hate-filled voices. They do not make my life, or the world a better place. I don’t really want to listen to fear-driven opinions, but there are a lot more of those than it seems at first glance. I hold a slew of them myself. I try to root them out, but they’re sneaky. Ill-informed opinions can be eliminated, but I have to take the time to become informed enough to recognize them. The hardest part is when I have to filter out loving, well-intentioned opinions. There are so many of them on just about any topic that exists. I wish just being loving and well-intentioned automatically made everyone agree. But it doesn’t. And I have to choose who to listen to.

I wish I could conclude with a paragraph about how I’ve solved this problem. Unfortunately I haven’t solved it yet. I keep finding myself in a state where contrary voices are howling around me. Instead this post just needs to sit here as a marker pointing up a life thing that is difficult. You don’t have to listen to everybody. You can’t listen to everybody. There simply isn’t enough time and energy. You have to choose and that’s okay. It also means that sometimes someone will choose not to listen to you and you have to accept that as well. I do have a means by which I feel my way out of the chaos. I use prayer and inspiration to help me find my core voice. I listen to that voice first and it helps me make the hard choices about what else I should listen to. I suppose that is a solution after all, though I honestly believed I didn’t have one when I began this paragraph. Finding that calm inner voice is difficult when the world is noisy, but the effort is worthwhile.

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