Walking it out

Growing older is serious business, for humans and our beloved canine companions. Dogs have aging symptoms that resemble some of the ailments people suffer: chronic aches and pains, arthritis, vision problems, bladder control issues, joint stiffness, changes in appetite. I have two older dogs, ages 14 years and 9 years (I think). Between the two, they hit every symptom on this list. The older guy really does suffer from painful arthritis and takes prescription meds twice per day to regulate it to a tolerable level. But sometimes it flares up and he is just plain uncomfortable. So much so that he can’t bear to keep still, so he just paces around. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to help.

When my mom visited us at Thanksgiving, she noticed it and said: I know how he feels. Sometimes you just have to walk it out.

Recently I decided to put this observation into practice. The last two times that my old guy had a flare-up, I gave him an extra dose of medicine, but that didn’t seem to work. He kept coming over to me, asking for comfort. So I decided to walk it out with him. We walked through the house, room to room, on a circuitous route until he got tired and stopped. Then he was able to lie down and rest. Finally.

Me too. Finally.

Share the love

Many years ago I read something in the Ann Landers column about her participation in Valentines for Vets, a program that distributes valentine cards to patients in VA hospitals across the country. Apparently any kind of valentine was appreciated. I thought it sounded like a worthwhile effort and decided to give it a whirl with homemade valentines.

Perhaps I was remembering fondly the homemade Valentine’s Day boxes my mom helped me make for school, or some other homemade valentine lovely crafted from red paper, doilies and pink sugar hearts. The project of making the valentine was all about love and sharing that time with my mom.

I think I made about 12 valentines for the vets that year. Large format red paper with a white crepe ruffled edge, glitter painted greeting on the front and a hand-written note inside. The fact that I remember these valentines so clearly is significant proof that I loved that project, creating the pretty cards. I don’t remember anything else about Valentine’s Day that year, but I remember making those homemade cards and mailing them off to their destination.

So this year I think I am going to resurrect my creativity and assemble a few pretty valentine greetings, using the supplies I have at my disposal at home: ribbon, buttons, paper, elmer’s glue, pencil, fabric remnants, needle & thread. Surely the results of my efforts will be at least as good as any Valentine card I might find at the Hallmark store. But the big plus, is that it will again connect me to those precious valentines memories, expressing love through simple creative expression.

Every silver lining has a grey cloud

I attended a personal relationship workshop once and one of the topics addressed resolving conflicts productively. It is such a happy set of circumstances that I sometimes recall these bits of minutiae from years ago because it gives me pause to consider how to process circumstances that trouble me now. As I have gotten older, I’m more at peace with taking my time around suboptimal circumstances. There’s always more to the picture than my view permits, but often, even within my view, there are probably things I don’t see because I fail to look closely enough. Taking extra time helps me focus more clearly.

Often, when faced with a conflict, I am tempted to focus largely on the perceived failings of the other individual in the conflict: the things that they are neglecting to do or say, the things that are inaccurate, unrelated, perhaps even fictitious. I am likely to take personal offense, and unfortunately, adopt a slightly (dare I say it?) rigid attitude as a result. My skills of perception start to shut down as the flashing-red-light-buzzer begins sounding in my head, a warning that conflict is approaching.

Back to the workshop. The relevant lesson is: how many of the perceived failings, of which I am quick to assign to the other party, are also true about me? Probably more than I care to admit.

I’m having a bit of a conflict with my boss at the moment. Actually not so much of a conflict as a falling-out. We are communicating less and less. She is busy-busy-busy. I perceive that her lack of attention to my work indicates that its importance has diminished in her opinion, and even worse, in the opinion of the rest of the organization. She praises the quality of my work but doesn’t read it, doesn’t provide the substantive feedback and direction that I need to make progress in this highly conceptual task.

I am having a difficult time seeing the larger picture since my inclination is to focus on my perceptions of her negligent management skills, where my personal job is concerned. Because, naturally, it's all about me, right?

Is her busy-busy-busy schedule affecting the other staff members that report to her? Well, yes.

Is there anything about my behavior that might be contributing to the circumstances? Well, maybe.

Is there anything that I could be doing that could possibly lead to improvements? Well, probably.

But I don’t know exactly what. Yet. I need to go back and reflect on that question from the workshop.

Integrating the past with the present

Before I moved last year the gigantic task of packing my belongings loomed vaguely in the path ahead. As I started tackling that activity, the task loomed even larger; it seemed to block out the sun. I found things I had forgotten from years before stashed away in little pockets of my tiny universe. I threw things away that should have been thrown away years before. I boxed and bagged and lifted and carried. Several times – it was a multi-stage process.

Along the way I decided that the things I took with me to my new residence should have a useful place in my home and in my life. I would prefer not to stow these things away again, unseen, for another 20 years; that just doesn’t make much sense.

So far, so good. The most obvious items of furniture found a home first, that was the first layer of things settled into the house. The second layer was the contents of closets, pantries and drawers – utility items that we would need to access on a regular basis. The third layer was largely visually decorative. Books, pottery, seashells, vases, photos, a collection of items that by themselves, are not necessarily beautiful, but together, form an appealing backdrop for our rooms.

But still, some straggling things remain. Two weeks ago I opened one of the bags that I had placed temporarily at the bottom of a closet and decided to filter through these things and bring them into my daily existence. They were things that belonged to my late father. His college degree, professional engineering certificate, numerous awards, interesting artifacts, memorabilia. Three of the items were already framed, so I hung them immediately and then purchased a few more inexpensive document frames for some of the other honorary certificates.

And today, the box arrived with the sturdy new frames and their crisp white mats. My father was an humble man and did not find much reason to rejoice in his accomplishments. He rejoiced in designing an innovative solution to address the problem at hand. But now, all that remains are the artifacts that point to these successes.

So a portion of these artifacts from his life are now living anew in my home. And I continue to make my way through the stragglers little by little, calling upon imagination, love and inspiration as a guide.

Living from scratch

I read a very inspired essay by Anne at life in pencil the other day all about the concept of living from scratch. In other words, starting anew, paving a new path in any part of our lives. And oddly, my father’s voice appears in my head when reflecting on this idea: the words inertia and trajectory. He was a scientist and his work dealt largely with mechanical physics. But these two familiar subjects of physics apply to our lives, perhaps in more ways than we care to admit.

Inertia tells us that an object will continue to move along its current path unless acted upon by an external force. A human-life example of inertia is the person who remains in an unloving relationship without taking proactive steps to make a change for the better. Or a person who has an unfulfilling job but makes no attempt to change the situation. A couple of less obvious examples might be the person who does make an attempt at change, but upon meeting the first obstacle, decides that change is impossible and accepts inertia as inevitable, or the person who selects a change strategy that turns out to be an unsuccessful approach at achieving the desired change, but continues to make the same unsuccessful attempt time after time.

How many of us have fallen under the spell of inertia?

The term trajectory refers to the direction of the new path of an object once a force has been applied to initiate movement. In mechanical physics, we have to compensate for the effect of gravity in order for our object to reach its targeted destination. In life, we have to compensate for other unquantifiable factors, if we hope to succeed in our quest to make progress along a new path. These factors are things like the seductive comforts of our old habits and the voices of fear and shame that play inside our heads.

Creating change in our lives requires some amount of fortitude, perseverance and vision. We need to be able to visualize that the difference we are seeking will prove beneficial and hopefully, increase our level of happiness.

How many of us have stumbled along a new path because we were ill prepared to expend the energy needed to compensate for the unforeseen roadblocks to our visualized success?

I am personally able to check both of these boxes. Time and again I can recall complaining about some circumstance in my life that caused me dissatisfaction, but I made excuses to myself to justify living with the inertia. Or opened the door to a new relationship without acknowledging the need to clean up my behavioral mistakes from the past.

Change is work. It is not as simple as deciding. In physics, there is a formula for computing work, a function of force and distance. In my own life, change has been successful through humility, gratitude, imagination, forgiveness and perseverance over a span of time. The force applied, in this case is not physical at all. A difficult lesson to grasp.

I don’t know if my dad ever thought about physics in these terms, but I am finding comfort in deriving abstract life lessons from the concrete principles he applied in his life’s work.

Science of the survey

I participated in an employee survey today. Advance notice encouraging my participation arrived in my email inbox last week. And I received another reminder on the daily Employee News link too. So I went ahead and opened the link first thing this morning with the best intentions of contributing to the collective knowledge that is our institutional workforce, at least, in terms of this survey.

Truth is, I’m more than a bit dubious about surveys. Most surveys provide an answer array to allow respondents to shade their answers from middle-of-the-road, to extreme. I tend to be a middle-of-the-road girl, regardless of the relative width of the survey’s answer array. I figure that even if I had a single isolated negative experience pertaining to a certain question, I’ve also had at least one good experience, so in the end, it pretty much all averages out. But some people like to click the extreme buttons. So I am not sure how the answers are compiled in a way that recognizes and accommodates the variations in the answering style of the respondents. I can't help wondering about things like this.

I’m also curious about what the survey is attempting to accomplish. I know there is a method to survey design such that the assembled responses boil down to a set of basic feedback indicators. If the indicator is below expectations, then the framework of the survey will also isolate the offending problem area. The science of survey building is as mysterious as it is interesting, at least from my own perspective.

Today’s survey seemed to be about employee satisfaction and retention. Half the questions seemed to be lifted from the standard employee satisfaction survey menu, but the other half were new. They came from the exotic Dim Sum style menu of hypothetical HR benefits, programs and compensation packages. More than a little complex and more than a little tiresome to wade through. This was, after all, purely hypothetical. I found myself clicking, clicking, clicking, wondering if I had stumbled into an endless survey loop or if they were merely trick questions.

Then, just like that, it was over. Until next year.

High school musical

It was a relatively quiet weekend. It began last Friday; the opening night of Cristy’s nephew’s high school performance of The Music Man.

In an unspoken sense, attendance is mandatory at most functions where an audience assembles in the school auditorium, unless we have a very good excuse. So this was not the first trip to the high school to witness the collective dramatic and musical talent of the student body.

During one of the previous performances, we were squirming in our seats, longing for the concluding selection. I remember hearing a baby start to whimper somewhere in the audience. Then the sound of that whimpering retreating as the parent carried his or her child out of the theater. It seemed like a golden opportunity, the answer to our quandry. I remember whispering to Cristy: if you just start crying, I could escort you out… She lowered her head in muffled laughter.

I think that audiences attend student performances in order to see their own children. We see them on stage and notice, from afar, their grown-up appearance, their poise and the results of many, many hours of rehearsal. We hear their strong singing voices and marvel at their dancing ability. But still, it is tedious. We are transported back to our own experiences with school musical productions. I wonder what it was like for my parents and all of the other audience members to suffer through those performances with smiles on their faces.

The final scene arrived, there was applause and cheering, then the students appeared and there were hugs and congratulations. Then it was over and the students were off to Denny’s to celebrate over pie and coffee. And we went home, reminding ourselves this will be our last year for attending school performances.