Sunshine On My Fingertips

There is a strip of sunshine running across my fingertips as I type. It makes me smile.

A year ago tomorrow I stepped away from blogging, unsure of whether I'd start again or not. It took months for me to stop looking at happenings in my life as bloggable moments. The break has been good.

But here I am, giving it another go.

I don't know what exactly I've learned in the past year. I do know I'm further down the road including the times when the road has seemed to circle around to the same stuff. My spiritual director would say that even though the view sometimes looks the same it's from a different place on the road.

Deeper awareness. Hopefully, deeper acceptance. The more layers that get peeled off, the deeper the hope. Funny how the more aware I've become of my humanity, the more I've been able to accept myself. And then when that happens, change not only becomes possible, it happens.

I spent so many years fighting to distance myself from my humanity, protesting that "no, I'm not like that", whatever that was in the moment. Whatever I see in others is in me, too. I'm much more the same as everyone else than different.

I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to accept that reality. I was never going to be human. I was aiming for super human, better than, better. These days I am content to be me.Yes, there are moments what seems like long stretches when my ego runs the show. Sometimes I recognize it in the now and sometimes after the fact.

Yesterday I jumped off a diving board. Water went straight up my nose and burned like hell. I coughed and sputtered when I surfaced and swam to the edge of the pool where I heaved myself up and rested. One of many who jumped. No need to be the only one, the best one. Just me. Being a kid in a middle aged woman's body.

It's Time

I've known for a while that it's time for me to step away from blogging, be it for a time or permanently. I haven't wanted to heed that nudge so I let it sit until I could feel peaceful about it. Peaceful and a bit sad. You have no idea how your comments and readership have influenced my life for the better these past six plus years.

I started blogging to prove to myself I could write. Blogging regularly has improved my writing, there's no doubt about that. I learned to delete whole sentences, paragraphs and posts. Before blogging I used to fall in love with every single sentence I wrote. Not so much anymore.

Today I celebrated with my home group 23 years of sobriety. Technically my sobriety date is another 5 days away but my home group celebrates birthdays on the last Saturday of the month so today was the day. The picture with this post is a reflection of some gifts I received today. I feel blessed to be loved so much. And not just because people buy me stuff! But because they continue to walk with me in the fullness of my humanity. Like you folk have. I am grateful.

For now, I have other writing that I want to focus on. Maybe in time that will bring me back here. Part of me wonders if I have it in me to shut my mouth or the ability to stop looking at the world around me outside the realm of whether or not it's bloggable. If I can't then I might reappear tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year.

Whatever it turns out to be I'll catch ya on the flip side.

Way Too Fuzzy

I keep thinking that I'll write a post when I'm not so darn tired. Dearest one and I used to have a joke that we would spend time together in 1992. Then that year came and went. So waiting for something to change isn't the answer. Showing up is. I'm having more days with less spoons lately. I do hope that changes soon.

I'm hedging my bets that I'm going to graduate from reading glasses to all day glasses today after my eye exam. I've been waiting for this appointment since June. Not that it's so hard to get an appointment but that's about the time I realized that without my reading glasses some things were way too fuzzy. Oh, couldn't I make an analogy of that sentence?! Insurance only pays for eye exams every two years so I had to wait until today to make it past that 2 year mark.

Youngest son and I deactivated our social networking accounts while we were on the phone together last night. Let's see how bad the withdrawal is, for me anyway. Our decision followed a lengthy chat about relationships and the false sense of depth to them when we know what someone is doing but not how they are doing. Sometimes I wonder if blogging can be like that, too. I've been having those what's the point of this again? conversations within myself about blogging lately. I still can't tell you what the point is but here I am anyway.

Dearest one is still home recuperating from surgery. I am missing commuting back and forth to work with him. It feels like a much longer drive when I'm traveling solo. We used to dream of working at the same place, different departments. What we have is so close to that we can hardly believe it some days. My office is less than a five minute walk to his. I have this pair of shoes that make a nice clicking sound as I walk. I am embarrassed, but not too much obviously, to admit how much I like that sound. Maybe it's because I spent my whole childhood trying to make as little noise as possible so I wouldn't get noticed and therefore not get in the line of fire.

Tired or not, there's lots to be grateful for today. Shoes, work, relationships, choices, sleep, eyesight. You.


Photo Credit