Why do we have to wait for someone to die before we let them know how much we appreciate them and how much they mean to us. Why do we have to wait for someone in our lives to die in the midst of their struggles before we realize that maybe there’s something we could have done to make their lives a little bit better, even if what we can do is only in small measures.
A lot of times we shy away from helping others because we are so caught up the quicksand or miry bog of our own issues and life’s challenges that we lose patience with anyone else who comes to us with their problems. We love success stories but never the messy journey that led to the success, and sadly, if someone is not a ‘success’ based on parameters set by society, they often get lost and forgotten in the midst of a crowd.
In this week alone, I have come across posts of people’s passing – known and unknown – some were under very pathetic circumstances and caved under the weight of their struggles.
You don’t have to do so much to make a difference in someone’s life today. Let those you care about know how much you do care about them. Buy them flowers whilst they still live and not a bogus wreath to place on their tombstone or shallow grave when they are no longer there.
It’s been ages since I participated in SOC’s and this prompt ‘left alone’ for the stream of consciousness that I just came across made me laugh out loud and sigh as well, as it pretty much sums up my situation at present. Though I have been dodging writing about this situation due to my mixed feelings, but I guess this is my prompt to talk about it.
These past couple of months, we sent off the children to continue their schooling in Canada as college fees in these parts are literally untenable and you need to have heavily lined pockets to afford putting your children through college/university here. For nationals it is freely funded whilst immigrants have to sell some vital organs in order to get their offspring educated in the higher institutions. So, being that my kiddos are Canadian citizens, it’s far more reasonable for them to continue over there, to reacclimatize and to start charting their course in life.
Whilst on one hand I feel relieved that we have this major aspect of things sorted, I feel bereft at being left alone in the interim. I have never been apart from my children and their physical absence leaves the house far too quiet for my liking, that I have taken to leaving the TV on for background noise which is simply out of character for me as I am not much of a TV person.
Thank the Gods of technology that we can make video calls and talk for as long as we want. It helps to take the bite off the ‘flown the coop’ feeling that I keep having, but it is not the same at all. I feel lonesome and I miss being needed. I miss the warm hugs. I miss their squabbles and laughter. I miss the ‘mum I am hungry’ requests. I miss the delight that they express after enjoying a nicely prepared home-made meal. I miss listening to their ideas. I miss my shopping companions. I even miss having the kitchen dirtied up when they try their culinary fingers on one recipe or the other. I miss many things that a list would be endless.
I presume this is a precursor to what it means to be an empty nester and I can categorically state that ‘I don’t like being left alone.’ I look forward to joining my kids in some months down the line and I will savour all the moments spent together.
For those of you who are empty nesters, what are your coping mechanisms?
Laughter. Music for the soul that’s absolutely contagious. When you see someone laughing at a joke that you can’t hear, chances are that you will smile anyway – even if you don’t realize it.
You do know that laughter improves your overall health? It is a strong medicine that triggers healthy physical and emotional changes in the body. It is a stress buster that diminishes pain, boosts mood and improves our emotional health, strengthens the immune system and grants us a better outlook to life – it even adds more years to our lives.
When we were younger, we laughed over little things countless times a day but adulting makes us become unduly serious about life, with laughter growing less frequent in our lives. Just like the way that we seek out food to fill our belly’s we must seek the nourishment of humour and laughter. Have you ever wondered why comedians never go out of fashion? People pay them to make them laugh.
Sweet peals of laughter trigger the release of endorphins – the body’s natural feel-good chemicals and these endorphins promote an overall sense of well-being. We cannot undermine how much laughing is good medicine for the mind and body. A powerful antidote to conflict and stress. These peals lighten your burden, uplifts your spirit, relaxes your whole body, helps you connect to others, inspires hope and lightens your mind of anger and unforgiveness.
A recent fad I learnt off boasts that laughter burns calories, though I wouldn’t ask you to quit your gym subscription, your daily dose of walking or to join a laughter fest, but finding ones’ funny bone is worth its weight in any priceless gem that you can think of. This priceless serum is absolutely free. It comes without any manual and fun to use.
How to bring more laughter into your life Laughter is your birthright. Babies start smiling during the first weeks of life and laugh out loud within months of being born and even if you did not grow up in a household where laughter was a common sound, you can learn to laugh at any stage of life.
Set aside special times to seek out humor and laughter, as you would with any hobby that you are interested in cultivating. Eventually, you’ll want to incorporate humor and laughter into the fabric of your life, finding it naturally in everything.
Spend time with fun, playful people. Those who laugh easily at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious. Even if you don’t consider yourself a lighthearted, humorous person, you can still seek out people who like to laugh and make others laugh.
An essential ingredient for developing your sense of humor is to learn not to take yourself too seriously and laugh at your own mistakes and foibles. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, we all do foolish things from time to time. Instead of feeling embarrassed or defensive, embrace your imperfections.
Life brings challenges that can either get the best of you or become playthings for your imagination. When you “become the problem” and take yourself too seriously, it can be hard to think outside the box and find new solutions. But when you play with the problem, you can often transform it into an opportunity for creative learning. It is important to use humor to overcome challenges and enhance your life. Laugh out Loud!
I know that millions of us have faced this dilemma and sometimes, we are not sure which way to take out of the quandary. You are in a scenario where you are working just to make ends meet and find yourself stuck in a job rut for years on end. You are afraid to quit – because bills have to be paid, you don’t feel like searching for a new job – because you are comfortable in your stagnation and the uncertainty of starting anew occupies space in your mind, hence, it’s a case of the evil God known is better than a good God unknown. You are not particularly enthused with your colleagues maybe because of so many reasons better left unsaid. Simply put, the job has lost its allure.
There are ways to pick yourself up, to boost your mood and to get past the difficult period at work.
Take time away from your desk
Doing so does not equate scrolling the pages of social media, surfing the internet or idling by the water cooler when you should be creating a document or filing a report. Ensure that you take the necessary breaks owed to you and use them diligently. Try and fit in something that you truly you love during your lunch break whether it’s reading a book, going for a cup of coffee at the café in the neighbourhood, meeting up with a friend, heading to the gym, taking a walk, or a Zumba session, the time spent away from your desk will become something to look forward to and will boost your spirit.
Friends
In this aspect you can apply a two-pronged approach. Firstly, create time for your buddies no matter how tied up or how down you’re feeling. It is pretty easy to throw a pity party, retreat to the sofa and vegetate with a tub of ice-cream, pizza and what not, but at this point in time, what you truly need is to spend time with the people you love, people who love you and uplift you. Even a brief chat will remind you there’s more to your life than your present job. You can even pick up an activity, hobby or class to attend together and create more bonding time.
Additionally, make the necessary effort to build friendships with worthwhile colleagues. Though we are to remember to create the right boundaries in our workplace, It’s very rare that there won’t be even one person you get on with, and getting closer could make things more fun. Ask if your friend would like to go for lunch or borrow your book – anything to forge a bond.
Find laughter
Don’t be too glum faced and grimly serious about your job with your mouth turned down or in a straight line and a permanent frown on your face. Indeed, work has its serious aspect, but when you develop a playful aspect for yourself, you will be more lighthearted whilst accomplishing your set goals. As we laugh, we are better able to enjoy things. We release that sense of anxiety, frustration, pressure and undue stress.
Try harder
Truly, it’s a challenge not to develop an apathetic mindset when you’re interest in your job has waned, but don’t forget that at some point in time, you wanted this job. Putting in extra effort can be the difference in feeling bored at work and also makes time go quickly, besides, it gets you noticed. Portray yourself as someone who gets things done and others will be interested in offering you different projects etc. You really need to take things in hand and it might lead to a new, enjoyable and rewarding path.
Furthermore, you can think of better ways of improving your work processes and make suggestions to your boss or those who need to hear your thoughts. It will show that you are someone who thinks outside the box.
Personalitypep-up
Though the workplace is an arena where everyone has to temper themselves a bit, but it’s vital that you don’t go too far to dampen your lively or interesting character. If you someone who never has anything to contribute or interesting to say, as a matter of fact, people will be least interested in talking to you or being around you. Engage in work related social activities, share your thoughts of interesting outside the job related topics when discussions are being held. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Inasmuch as you are unique, also remember to be a part of the whole.
There are those times when we think that things are not going the way that we hoped or planned. Our plan(s) seems to fall apart instead of coming together and as humans, sometimes, that sense of frustration sets in.
Countess times, our most important journeys becomes the ones that seem to lead us on a winding path that seems like the dead-end cul-de-sac, but to the glory of God there are no dead-ends. Adversity offers us opportunities to learn, to hope, to be patient, to trust, and to grow. Such seasons are inevitable in our lives and how we navigate them matters most.
When next you are experiencing life’s inevitable disappointments, don’t despair or panic. Never be reluctant to switch to plans, approach but don’t lose sight of the goal. Consider such setback as an opportunity to choose a different, more appropriate path.
Always have faith that God may actually be guiding you to an entirely different direction, a direction of His choosing and in line with His purpose for your life.
A dead-end to you may in actual fact be a highway set by God for you.
I find such questions like ‘who is your favourite author and why‘ truly mundane and it almost seems as if eclectic, voracious readers like me are strange. I had to give this a hard thought and sadly came up short in choosing a favourite fiction, non-fiction author or writer.
Again like colors’, it makes me wonder why I can’t simply be simple in my choices and just pick a name. I usually don’t sit on the fence when it comes to voicing my opinion even if it is a dissenting thought and I can be a bit too straightforward in saying what I think or feel.
I love reading and when I was pretty young, I stuck with my Enid Blyton’s and my teenage years were spent reading uncountable numbers of Harlequins, Mill & Boons, Hadley Chase, Tom Clancy, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and many more.
My reading tastes has been generally diversified and having taken an in-depth look at why this might be so, I have arrived at the conclusion that it is because I like multiple things, I see the world from multiple perspective, that I am a pluralist and many things are good and not just a singular thing.
I also see that liking different things will ultimately improves my social life and that’s fine not to fit into a mould clustering around any particular taste. Liking multiple things makes me, me.
Without trying to sound proud, I think that a wide taste in reading is a sign of intelligence, of intellectual curiosity, open mindedness, and a willingness to absorb new ideas.
Sometimes, I find that though a lot of people can be extremely intelligent but have very closed minds but the love of all kinds of literary genres implies the love of creativity, of actively seeking out new approaches and ideas and the ability to appreciate different paradigms.
In all sincerity, I can’t recollect any specific day so far that I can count on as the happiest day of my life. On my wedding day, I think I was a bit anxious about my guests having a good time and hoping that the wedding ceremony goes as well as planned to classify it as my happiest day. In retrospect, if I had to redo my wedding, I would do things a whole differently and have less crowd.
I have come to see happiness as a state of mind that persists in one’s life based on several factors such as being present and finding peace and joy in the moments that we have and not a temporary product of a specific event. As such, I work consistently to maintain as much level of contentment, fulfilment, joy and satisfaction as I possibly can by eliminating negativity and negative energy, by staying positive and doing those things that bring me that sense of happiness.
I have experienced great moments of joy when I gave birth to my babies, a sense of fulfillment when I published my books and beautiful memories of sublime moments with family and friends but there’s no singular day in life that I can pinpoint as the happiest day in my life. It is still non-existent, but who knows, maybe sometime soon in the near future such a day will come.
I truly come short attempting to dig into my family tree and see how far back I can go. I recall my maternal and paternal grandparents very easily as I got to know them well enough before they passed on. I only have a fuzzy recollection of my great-grandparents on both sides, a couple of great grand uncles and aunts who were already long in tooth and wizened in age when I was still pretty young.
It does make me wonder what I would find if I embark on the journey of tracing my family tree/ancestry several generations back. I am doubtful if any concrete information will be there to guide one’s search or if any one amongst those living will remember. A lot of one’s history does get lost with the passage of time and honestly speaking, this exercise truly brings home the thought that when we die, our loved ones mourn us for such a time, but within decades or less, we become mere memories that fizzle away like the mist and some may never even recollect who we are at all.
This also makes me realize that one day when the sun sets on our lives, we will also become the ancestors, and though it is sad that our progenies may never get to know who we are, we can leave indelible marks behind that will make them proud if and when they discover that we shared the same roots.
There’s a lot of power in living in the now. but a whole lot of times we are so focused on the past; reliving events that have come and gone, living in the regret land of ‘I wish’ I should have, I could have, I would have… which is a sheer waste of our limited time and energy. We can never regain the past as it is more or less a memory trace and the more we sit in the past, the more we lose the power of being fully present and enjoying the ‘now’ that we have.
Again, a lot of times we spend enormous time and energy planning and projecting for a future and a tomorrow that we don’t have in hand whilst at the same time losing steam and failing to ensure that we are living our best lives moment by moment.
When we know better we do better. Wishing that I had understood this concept earlier on in my life is moot and praying for a period in time that can never be regained.
The truth is that time is an illusion and all we truly have is this present moment that we been blessed with. If we channel our energy into staying present by making the best of our moments, taking charge of our day by focusing on the things that concern us such as our health (spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, financial…) our finances, our relationships, our careers/jobs/business then we put in ourselves in better standing and will no longer keep looking back in regret or looking forward to an anticipated better future because we are dissatisfied with the present.
I hope your day is going well and as planned. Bless you.
This morning I woke up with a foggy feeling in my head and it was as if I hadn’t slept at all. I felt lazy, and just wanted to continue lying on my bed, but I knew that doing so would simply set the wrong tone for my day and literally muttering ‘mind over matter, mind over matter’ I basically cajoled myself to crawl out of bed and take my antidote – which is to go out for a brisk walk, to get some fresh air and hopefully feel more alive in the process.
My brisk walk can involve various things depending on my mood, either listening and humming to music that I enjoy with an occasional shake and a jig to accentuate the notes that hit home, listening to a podcast or any talk that piques my interest, venting in my head and going over an argument that I had with hubby and realizing that maybe I should have used a better punchline than I had; mentally deciding to save a punchline and use it to drive home my point, going over my to-do list in my head, making a shopping list, thinking of random stuff and just watching people go about their business…
I had almost come to end of my walk when an idea popped into my head out of the blues and I was so excited at the thought that I made a mental note not to forget to include it in my soon to be executed plans. Right as I turned into the bend leading to our apartment block, I ran into a young dad and a toddler – who by my assessment is barely more that 24 months – attempting to play football, and I slowed my pace to absorb the scene.
The man kept a few paces apart and kicked the ball towards his son. It’s either because the baby was wholly new to the game or wasn’t sure what to do; he missed it not once but four times. After each miss, his dad patiently walked towards him, picked the ball and kicked it again. I was silently rooting in my head for the little one and just as soon as I thought that he would miss it yet again, his little foot finally connected with the ball and he kicked it back with gusto. The ring of his delight and joy from his accomplishment had me applauding both of them and a huge smile made its way to my face.
A brisk walk of 40 minutes not only brought me such unexpected fullness, it drew home several pointers and set a positive tone for my day. During my grudgingly taken walk, I got inspired, I saw love and patience, I saw resilience and joy, I became energized, I gained more clarity and buzz that I wouldn’t have found in my cup of coffee. These little things we often overlook, they are the things that matter.
a cooking pot and twisted tales 