How Does Your (Spiritual) Garden Grow?

Writing has always been therapeutic for me. So why, at this time when I seem to be in need of therapy, does writing feel like such a difficult task?

What’s going on, you ask? Or perhaps you don’t ask. Regardless, I am forging ahead.

For weeks now, I have been facing each day with a sense of anxiety and restlessness of spirit that just isn’t normal for me. And as human nature dictates, I keep trying to explain it to myself as a means of dispelling it, and that seems to just perpetuate it. I’ve tried praying it away, and that does help…but I think I need to write about it and see if that will help me get real with it.s

You see, there is absolutely nothing in my life that I really need to be nervous or anxious about. All of the things that come to mind when I think about this anxiety are things that are not real or valid. So while the feelings and sensations are very real indeed, they have no basis. And that by itself tells me that something needs to be fixed.

This weekend, the Thanksgiving holiday, marks three years since my husband’s illness returned with its awful vengeance. From that time until he died on July 1, 2012, most of my life was wrapped up in what was happening with him. It was a time of immense and dramatic change. He became ill on Thanksgiving Day; we learned a couple of days after Christmas that his illness was due to spread of his cancer and that his condition was terminal; he had at most 8 months left. At the end of January, I retired from my job — a decision I had made before we knew that Tom was dying. This retirement was supposed to be a time for us to do things together; instead, I would begin it as a caregiver, and six months in would say a last goodbye to the love of my life, with whom I was supposed to spend the coming years.

I coped very well with all of this change. I coped by DOING THINGS. I cleaned out closets, got rid of clothing, played rounds of golf, traveled, volunteered, spent time with family and friends, and knitted. Sometimes I cried, and I did grieve and I examined my grief very closely and wrote about it. About a year after Tom died, I bought TLHITWBTL back from his sons, and being there felt like coming home, so I sold my house in Mason and made TLHITWBTL my full-time home. There were tons of projects to keep me busy, and there were new frontiers to explore and new adventures to be had.

But my family was three hours away, and once the major projects were out of the way, I realized that I missed them more than I expected. Three hours is a major haul for people who work full time and have budgets and time commitments and children. Three hours is an easy trip for me — after all, I drive to Wyoming and back, to Georgia and back, and I don’t work, and … oh, I’ve taken on some time commitments like weekly bowling leagues and some things at church, and I find that I am wishing I hadn’t committed.

Anyway, about the time my younger daughter got married in October, I decided it was time to re-establish a dwelling in the capital city. I found a lovely little apartment, furnished it with some extra things I had up north as well as some good bargains I found, spent some money stocking the pantry and laying in necessities, and I really love the place.

And I really love the place up north.

So why am I constantly feeling worried and nervous about which place needs to be primary and where I should have mail sent and how much time I can spend where? I should be thrilled! I’m looking back at my Change Junkie musings and wondering if there is something else going on here…if I am really just covering up some deeper issues by constantly seeking the adrenaline rush that comes with something new.

I just want to feel like my normal, positive, not-anxious self. I want to fully enjoy the fact that I have options and choices, two lovely homes that I can spend time in and share with those I love, and the time and resources to do what I want to do and enjoy doing. I want to practice what I have always taught: that we can choose the attitude we carry, that we can own and manage the change in our lives, and that we are in charge of how we feel. I need to make the conscious decisions that will put me there. Can I do this on my own, or am I going to need help? Part of me says that I know what to do and have the tools to do it; that it is self-centered and self-indulgent to make my “problems” so serious that I need professional help to solve them. But another part of me knows that the way I am feeling is not normal or right for me and that it has been slowly but surely getting worse over time.

Yes, I grieved my loss; yes, I have rebuilt my life and it is a good life. It is very difficult for me to acknowledge that my moods and feelings just don’t jive, right now, with what I think should be happening nearly three years after that loss and in the midst of what anyone would call a very good life. Am I just picking at myself because I am bored? What is it that makes me schedule things where I will be with people, only to go and then crave my solitude; and then, in my solitude, begin feeling lonely and disconnected? I think this might be called “depression,” and I think I might be wise to do something about it. The realization is beginning to dawn that when one has feelings and moods that are very different from what one’s life suggests, that merits attention.

Here I am at The Little House In The Woods By The Lake (TLHITWBTL), listening to classic rock on SiriusXM and watching big lazy fat solid white raindrops fall from the sky. If it were December, I would call it snow.

It occurs to me that it’s a slow news day when you have to quote yourself to have something to say. But last night, I had a talk with myself about what’s going on in my life. It went something like this:

Me: You are a change junkie. You know that.

Myself: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Me: Well, when are you going to settle down and stick with one thing? What will people think when you keep on changing everything?

Myself: OK, here it is. Yes, I am a change junkie. I am probably never going to settle down and stick with one thing. And I finally find myself able to say truthfully that I don’t care what people will think about it.

I first wrote about being a change junkie last January, when I concluded a post as follows:

Choices, choices, choices. I am probably a change junkie, because with the sense of power that conscious choice gives me, I really actively seek change and feel restless when there is no change on the horizon. What I love about my life changes, so my focus is constantly changing too.

So bring it on, life: bring on my fix. Bring on the changes.

Eighteen months earlier, I’d experienced enormous change in the death of my husband, Tom. In that experience, I had found the reality of what I had taught in my workshops — that to manage change constructively, we must identify what part of the situation we can control, and focus our energy there. That process involves making conscious choices about what to do with that energy.

Most of 2014 has been devoted to working through changes, most of them of my own choosing. In February, I sold my house near Lansing and made TLHITWBTL my full-time home. I invested a great deal of energy over the following months on getting the house up here near Tawas City the way I wanted it. I hired a builder to add on a garage; I insulated and drywalled the garage myself, painted the exterior of the main part of the house myself, and spread and leveled two truckloads of stone myself. I hiked in the woods. I made new friends, played golf and played cards, got on a couple of bowling leagues, became more involved in the parish life at my church, and volunteered for a local hospice service.

I continued my knitting projects, completing and delivering no less than 4 Grannie Love Blankets in the first 10 months of the year.

I traveled, visiting my brother in Georgia twice and making a trip to Wyoming and back.

A few visitors came to TLHITWBTL, and I made a couple of trips back to Lansing — most notably in October, when my younger daughter married her guy.

And I constantly battled an odd combination of restlessness, anxiety, and a sort of fear. I finally pinned it down: There was no change on the horizon. On top of that, I really missed having family time, and that 2.5-hour drive was a lot easier for me to make than it was for the rest of them.

The idea came out of nowhere, quite unexpectedly, and once it had formed it was unstoppable. Why not re-establish a second home in Lansing? TLHITWBTL would still be my main home, but I could find a studio or small apartment in Lansing and spend as much time there as I wanted, near the people I love most.

Once I verbalized the idea, it took on a life of its own. A week after the wedding, I traveled back to Lansing for the sole purpose of looking at apartments. The first one on the list was a nice one-bedroom in a very well-kept older complex. The current tenant wanted to move to a two-bedroom unit but could not do so until the one-bedroom unit had a new tenant. What a sweet deal I got! Pet deposit waived, heat included in the very reasonable rent, free laundry facilities right next to the apartment, great location and neighborhood, lots of green space… Never let it be said that I take long to make a decision. I concluded that it would be a waste of time to look at other places, and signed a lease on the spot. This coming week, I will move in. JD, the little brown spotted puppy dog, will once again be convinced that I can’t make up my mind where we live, but it will soon be (a second) home to him. And I will have something new to put my energy into over the winter months.

Already, I can hear you asking : So what will you do when you have that new place all fixed up, and you get restless again? What will you do when the novelty wears off?

I have the answer, even though I categorically reject the negative implications of those questions. When it comes time for something new, when my psyche and my soul begin to crave the fix of a new change again, then I will find the right change and I will put my energy into it. And if life throws me a change I am not expecting or that I do not like or want, I will form up my choices and my energy around it and work through it.

You see, most of my life — growing up, working, raising children, being married — I accepted as normal and desirable something that I now recognize as a trap. I accepted that the desirable state is for things to stay the same, that we are better off when we know what to expect day after day — and get what we are expecting. I accepted that happiness could be found in avoiding change. Even when I came to a point of understanding that I like change, even seek it out, I explained it by labeling myself a “change junkie” — as though that were a bad thing.

The “Aha!” moment: The incredible realization that Change. Is. Good. Not in the semi-humorous way people say it when they are faced with a change they didn’t seek but still have to adjust to…but in a wholehearted acceptance that change is as necessary to me as oxygen — and it is OK to go looking for it.

Childhood memories … I heard a report on the radio recently that suggested that our brain constantly reforms our memories, so that years later what we think we remember so clearly is quite different from the actual event. Today, I saw it in action. When I was quite young, we used to come up to my Aunt Pearl’s cabin near a wide spot called Eckerman on M-123. As I drove along M-123 today, I saw a sign that said “Eckerman – 2 Miles,” and I started looking for the cabin. I never saw it, although a couple of spots looked familiar. I spent a lot of happy times in that cabin with family and friends, and I now have no clear idea of where it was located. Also, in my childhood memory, Tahquamenon Falls, Whitefish Point, and Grand Marais are all right next to each other. Not so much. It turns out that Whitefish Point is about a 2-hour drive north and slightly west from Mighty Mac; Tahquamenon Falls is some 20 miles from it; and Grand Marais is a good hour and 45 minutes from Whitefish Point by the main roads. We used to visit all of these places when we came up here — oh, and there was the little town of Strongs, home town to the first boy who asked me to marry him. He was 22 and I was 14. I met him the last summer I came up here before going away to the convent. He was in the Army and home on leave; he wrote me passionate letters after I went home, begging me to come and join him on base in Kentucky and get married. I still remember my mother telling me I had to decide whether I wanted that or wanted to go to the convent. I was incredulous and said, “I can’t believe you would really let me go and marry him!” She just shook her head and repeated that I had to decide what I wanted. In the end I thought about what life would be like with him — I had a friend just a few years older than me who had married very young and who already had several children by the time she was 20, and I didn’t think she seemed very happy — and chose the convent. Right choice for the time, I am very sure; but seeing the sign for Strongs today sure brought back some memories.

On the drive up M-123 and Whitefish Point Road, Lake Superior sneaked up on me — I came around a curve and there it was! The majesty and beauty and power are still remarkable. I walked on the beach at Whitefish Point, and listened to the waves and looked out across the water. And I walked over the dune and out to the water here at Grand Marais and gazed out over Lake Superior again. I have great memories of being here with my mother 30 and 40 and 50+ years ago, but I realized today that these places don’t hold such a strong pull for me, on my own and for themselves. It was nice to visit, and to mull over the memories of my mother; that said and done, I may not need to come back this way again.

That realization leaves me feeling vaguely disappointed. I have a sense of loss for a place that was so important to me when I was young but which seems to have lost its charm for me now. Ah well, The Little House In The Woods By The Lake has its own charms, and I am on my way to create new memories with the rest of this trip as well as to revisit new favorites in Wyoming. And I can’t wait to see my Brother Odd and the lovely Maria!

Much of tomorrow and the following two days will find me in what is, for me, uncharted territory — following a route that I haven’t taken before across the northern UP and on to Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, then into Wyoming. The mild disappointment of today’s revelations will be shed as I leave the driveway of the North Shore Lodge, and my spirit will once more be ready for adventure. As for JD — he just loves to ride, and he is not fond of water.

I will still walk down to the beach again early tomorrow morning, and find the pieces of driftwood my daughters have asked for…and perhaps, then, just a little of the magic will be back.

At first, I was going to call this year’s travels “The New Ultimate Road Trip.” Then I realized that (a) there really can be only one “ultimate” road trip, and I took that one in 2012, in memory and honor of Tom Hunt; and (b) the initials would spell “NURT” and that acronym really does not have a ring to it. So this morning, it came to me that it should simply be called “Journey 14.” Today is Day 0, because it is dedicated to packing and preparation.

 I started the day out with unexpected blessings. I have volunteered to serve as a lector for Masses at my parish, Holy Family in East Tawas. Today was my first turn at reading, and despite my years of public speaking and teaching, I was nervous. Our sacristan reminded me that the Holy Spirit would guide me, and that was a reminder I needed. And He did. And the added blessing was that Mass was being said this morning by a guest, Bishop Oliver from Maiduguri Diocese in Nigeria.  Did you know that people are shot and killed weekly in Nigeria simply for the fact that they are Christians or Muslims; that the Boko Haram insurgents kill the men of these faiths with the intent of marrying (thus controlling) their widows and thereby stamping out these faiths? And yet Bishop Oliver’s message was that these trials and troubles will not last forever, that God will protect His people and faith will prevail. I spoke with Bishop Oliver briefly before and after Mass, and came away from those moments and from his homily with a sense that I had been in the presence of a holy man and one of strong unshakable faith.

Then I was on to more mundane matters: A final trip to the laundromat before hitting the road tomorrow. While I was there, a trio of women came in — obviously wrapping up a vacation and having the time of their lives. As I listened, I realized there were three generations, and I was reminded of the time (some 55 years ago) that my mother, her sisters, my grandmother, and I took a trip along the shore of Lake Superior. We camped in a tent, and all rode in a single car. We had some wonderful times, and some arguments; and we created some wonderful memories. The women in the laundromat turned out to be a grandmother who lives here, and her daughter and granddaughter from New York, who had been similarly traveling about Michigan together for a couple of weeks. I shared with them what a pleasant memory their banter had brought to me, and we had a nice chat.

And so tomorrow I start out on Journey 14. This trip is similar to the trips of the past two years in many ways, and profoundly different in others. That first trip in 2012 was undertaken in the throes of grief just a few weeks after Tom had died. I went because it was a trip we had planned to take and then, because of his worsening condition, were unable to complete. My travels took me from Michigan to Wyoming with a brief foray into Montana; through Denver to Kansas City, then south to Arkansas and New Orleans before heading home by way of Georgia and Ohio; the trip took me into the homes of siblings I had not seen in years, as well as into the homes of siblings I had met only briefly on one or two prior occasions; I saw sights I had never seen before, and I had many wonderful conversations with family who universally welcomed me with open arms. I healed as I drove and experienced the open road.

 In 2013, my brother Paul joined me on the trip, and we varied the route a bit — traveling north and west from Atlanta to Kansas City and on to Wyoming, then back to Georgia for a bit and then home. We had some wonderful adventures and saw some new things, and thoroughly enjoyed spending the time with each other.

 This year, for Journey 14, I travel alone again. The route is a new one for me — north through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, then west across the UP, Minnesota, and North Dakota into Montana and then south into Wyoming. I have intentions, if not definite plans, for things to see and do; and I am not yet sure what direction my travels will take me when I leave Wyoming. I am keeping my options open and will do some planning as I go; the possibilities are endless and limited only by my imagination and daring! My first stop, tomorrow night, will be Grand Marais, Michigan, where I will stay at the same lodge my mother used to love, and where I will walk the agate beaches and visit Whitefish Point and sit and look out over Lake Superior and let her spirit settle on me. Mom always loved a good road trip, even if she was the “mother” of all backseat drivers! ❤ 😉

 JD, the little brown spotted puppy dog, will be with me — and I dare say that Tom will once again ride shotgun, for although he is physically absent these past 25 months, I feel his spirit nearby so very often. And I will probably take pictures out the car window and eat too much fast food, but I will keep safe and try to be reasonably healthy in my habits.

 So here’s to Journey 14 and all the adventures it is sure to bring!

In my house, paper and pen always are nearby. I’m given to jotting down thoughts that I might use in my fiction work or in a blog post, and when those thoughts come, they go on the paper in whatever direction the paper is facing. The result, by the time I am ready to do something with the items, looks like a mind map, and sometimes the results are just as mysterious.

This morning, I spied one of these sheets of paper as I was eating my breakfast, and the following notation caught my eye:

People care, greet — far less stress and tension. How do you translate that?

I looked at the note, and pondered. What on earth induced me to jot that thought down? What did I mean by it, and what did I mean to make out of it?

After a minute or two of reading and re-reading the note, it came back to me. In my new home town, and I think “up north” in general, people are different, on the whole, than downstate. People are friendly. Every cashier has a minute to chat while you are checking out at a store. People you see out and about in the course of doing errands are about 80-90% likely to speak to you — either to initiate a greeting, or respond warmly if you are the first to greet. When they say, “How are you?” it usually comes with eye contact and you get this sense that they actually care. Now, in the past, unless I went into a place where I knew a lot of people, I could go through an entire week’s grocery shopping and errands without exchanging a warm word with a single soul. Sure, a cashier at Meijer might ask “How are you today?” but eye contact? Nope. Warmth? Ha. No, the greeting would be mechanical. And if I spoke first and smiled and asked “How are you today?” I’d likely get back “Good-n-you?” It’s all one word, hyphenated, with no inflection.

Up here in my new part of the world, the stress and tension seem to drop away. People are nicer, and the niceness is genuine. In my old part of the world, people rush and avoid eye contact and make mechanical greetings as a matter of form, and when you are out and about you can feel the stress and tension building all around.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. All of the people I know and love in the world are wonderful people, and I am not talking about those people. But I know that most of them, and I as well, would tend to behave that same tense, mechanical way when out in public, because we often tend to respond in like manner to what we encounter.

In my new up-north world, days go by in a warm cocoon of peaceful contentment, especially now that I’ve gotten through some of the adjustment to change and that frisson of anxiety I kept feeling has fallen away. I find myself looking forward to each thing I plan and do, because each thing is full of possibilities.

And so to the last part of the note: How do you translate that? Because frankly, downstate, in my own experience, people speak a language of stress and tension, and when I envision myself back in that milieu, I wonder how I might translate the language of peace and contentment in a way that might help others speak it.

What do you think? I would really love comments and discussion!

Promised, but not yet true. This afternoon, I logged five miles. Let’s call this a “shoulder hike,” since I elected my Keen hikers and Yak Trax and walked on the roads, rather than hitting the trails in snowshoes. And I saw something! There, on the side of the road…shining, reflective, like ice — yet when the little breeze slipped by, I saw the surface move!

Water! It was water! and nearby, something brown, with greenish-brown wisps coming out of it. Wait! Could it be? Oh, sweet Lord, yes it is — it is a patch of bare ground!

Things are melting!!!

It’s only March 8, and we still have some really cold nights and days in the forecast. But Spring is a promise, and I saw the promise today.

Near one of the roads I hiked, I saw this — open water, part of the channel system that connects our chain of lakes:

And then, on the way home, I snapped this shot of Big Island Lake, which is where my little house in the woods by the lake calls home:

This is the lake on March 8, 2014. I plan to take a picture every day until it’s open water again.

A bonus for today’s hike: I found my iPod! Music greatly enhances the hiking experience. Today, my random shuffle was hitting the classical playlists. Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches; some wonderful Chopin piano pieces; and a few Bach organ pieces — my soul is always stirred by music, and today was no exception. Anyone watching me would have been quite entertained. I’m sure none of the artists have been conducted in precisely this fashion before! Some music just won’t let your hands and feet be still.

A day that started off cloudy has turned into blue skies and bright sun. I counted up the months, and realized that even in a year with a really tough winter like this one, the bad weather takes up only a third of our time. My next project is to figure out why the other two thirds goes by so quickly!

Spring is a promise, and I intend to walk with the promise each day.

Yesterday, I went on my second-ever snowshoe trek and discovered that an hour on snowshoes in a few inches of loose snow is a very good workout. The outdoor temperature was about 20F, and the sun was shining. I worked up such a sweat that by the time I got home, all but the outermost layer of clothing was soaked. (Or “were soaked?”) I am so glad I bought the snowshoes! I found my way around a nice loop of trail that gave me a nice variety of scenery. When I first got to the trailhead, I saw a couple of snowmobilers, but after that, I was mainly on trails that are currently closed to snowmobiles and other motorized vehicles.

To be in a place where I can neither see nor hear road traffic and where the most current signs of life are deer tracks and rabbit tracks intersecting my trail, feels like a small piece of heaven. I’m sure that some of the feelings of well-being come from endorphins, but some of those feelings also come from the pure bliss of being out in God’s creation with only the trails themselves to suggest human involvement.

I am not antisocial, but I am solitary — and I am shy. For so much of my adult life, I could indulge my solitary nature only rarely, and I found it necessary to hide and overcome my shyness. I suppose I got to be fairly good at both, although at times the lack of solitude made me grouchy (Tom would vouch for that!), and the fact that most people I encountered refused to believe I was shy was actually a bit painful. In order to succeed by the world’s lights, I was for years very deeply involved in not being my true self.

In the 20 months since Tom’s passing, I have begun learning to indulge my solitary nature again, which is a good thing, and I’ve also found myself retreating into shyness again, which I am not so sure is a good thing. For all the years of my busy career, I found myself in a very front-and-center position where shyness just didn’t work. So I quite literally set it aside and developed techniques for stepping outside myself. I think the best preparation I had was my 6-month stint as a retail store cashier, just before I stepped into the middle-management position I retired from. I found it easy to simply assume a role for the 5 or 6 hours of my retail shift, a role where I was this outgoing, assertive, friendly person whose line customers liked to enter. I gave up that second job when I accepted the corporate management position, but I never gave up the lesson that carried me for the next 25 years: I could be whoever/whatever I needed to be to accomplish what I needed to do. I simply assumed and played the role.

And I did it with great success. I loved what I did for a living, until a day when all the signs told me that it was time to move on. And once I retired, I found out it was harder than I expected to find the real me amidst all the roles I had played.

For six months, I filled the most important position of my entire life — that of caregiver for Tom during his final illness. And then one day he was gone. My final job was to commend and commit his soul to God, and watch while the angels bore him away. And then, along with the grief and sorrow and the relief over his release from suffering, I found myself on this journey to rediscovering myself.

This was a risky business at first. There was a real danger of simply falling in line with the expectations — both real and perceived — of others around me. It isn’t that there was anything malicious or pernicious in those expectations, but they were not always true to my nature, and sometimes it took a little while to recognize that.

And then slowly but surely, I began to be able to recognize and accept my pure enjoyment of time spent alone. And knowing this made it so much easier to enjoy human interaction when I did seek it out.

I am still shy. It is still hard work for me to step out and put myself in groups of people, and I no longer feel it is necessary for me to wear a role in order to do it. The other night, I gathered up all of my courage to attend a Mardi Gras potluck supper at my new parish home. Right up until I packed up my veggie casserole and set it in the car, I was telling myself I did not have to go, but in the end I went. I put my dish-to-pass on the appropriate table and just stood and looked around. Finally, I spotted our parish priest, and figured it couldn’t be too hard to introduce myself to him. So I did it. And the next thing I knew, I was meeting other women of the parish and beginning to get acquainted.

One of the nice things about being shy, I realized, was that it allows you to sit quietly and listen. And if you get comfortable enough to reach out, it allows you to do so by asking questions rather than talking about yourself.

I enjoyed the evening, and came away with the beginnings of new friendships and the promise of new activities and interests I may choose to pursue. And I also earned a new perspective on being me. It’s a good thing.

Yes, I am ready for the “time change” this coming weekend. I really wish we could eliminate the switch and just live in real time, but that seems unlikely to happen. And isn’t it ironic that a person who would prefer to stay with “real time” — the time that now prevails only from late October to early March — has a perfectly awful time adjusting to the switch from DST to EST in the fall, and thrives on the spring-time switch.

Wait, let me get this straight: The autumn time change, where we “fall back” and thus gain an hour’s sleep, messes with me, but the spring time change, where we “spring forward” and lose an hour’s sleep, is good for me? Yep, that’s right. I don’t understand it either, but like clockwork, I begin to have trouble staying awake in the evenings when we fall back, and I wake up insanely early in the mornings throughout the winter. Insanely early, like 4:00, 4:30 — sleeping until any time after 5:00 a.m. feels like sleeping in.

I don’t know if it’s some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder or if the “fall back” time change just messes with my circadian rhythms. I know that this year, the maladjustment (which used to readjust itself by Christmas or New Year’s) has persisted throughout the winter, and I am really looking forward to “springing forward” next weekend. I would love to just get up in the morning, stay awake all day and through the evening, and go to bed between 11 and midnight and sleep through until 6:00 a.m. or so.

Fortunately, I am a morning person, and for many years I have required only about 6 hours of sleep a night (yes, including the doze-offs that prevail in the winter evenings).

So, the sleep thing may solve itself in a few days. I hope so. Although I think sleep is somewhat overrated, when I am doing it, I like to do it well.

Now, this morning, I noticed something interesting. I love opening my drapes early, early in the morning and watching daylight find its way into my little wooded hollow. It does not bother me in the slightest that I start out looking into darkness, because I know dawn is coming. But at the end of the day, I find myself closing all of the curtains well before it actually starts to get dark. I don’t want to watch it get dark.

And that got me thinking — again — about change, and how people deal with it. I like the early morning change from dark to light, and I push away and block out the change from light to dark. And it’s because I like morning. I get up feeling excited for what I have planned for the day and feeling energized to get at it. Getting to the end of the day and letting go of its possibilities? Not so much.

Like most people, I deal quite well with change that I choose and, therefore, like. Also like most people, I resist change that I do not choose. And each event of the day involves some kind of change, some movement from what I was just comfortable with to something different. All change brings stress with it, but the stress of coping with a change that one did not choose is a sharper stress, and it requires a more conscious effort to manage it.

It’s the conscious effort, which involves a series of conscious decisions, that gave birth to the second part of this post’s title. Don’t we love reading those wonderful, pithy, positive, affirming quotes our friends and our “liked” pages share on Facebook? Maybe it’s reading a page from a favorite motivational book in the morning. It generates good feeling, and that carries us, some days, for quite a distance.

Then there are other days when that boost falls short and the good feeling does not persist very far into the day at all. Those are the days when we have to Work At It. What a strange idea — to work at feeling good!

Which of these things is true? Is it that “feeling good” leads us to do good things in our day — that acts of kindness, good interactions with other people, going to the gym or out for that walk, doing our best work, accomplishing goals, all are made possible if we start out “feeling good.” Or is it the opposite? What if the way we live our day is what generates our feelings about it and about ourselves?

If the second thing is true, then a person can make a conscious choice to act in a positive way — to take on the unchosen change and find something good in it, to do whatever is the right thing in each situation that presents, to smile, to be pleasant, to be aware and mindful. Those motivational posts then become a springboard; their effect does not have to last so long, because each conscious decision to embrace the next moment creates its own energy.

Now, some people would like us to think that relying on feelings to manage our day is at best a shaky way to manage life. Maybe so. But the fact is, we really spend a lot of time with our feelings, and what matters, I think, is whether we let ourselves be led by them, or whether we choose how they are going to affect us. Grab the good ones and use them to create energy! Make a decision to overcome the not-so-good ones and turn them into something that creates energy!

You can call me Pollyanna if you want, and I’ll still go through life thinking that positive thinking is a good way to live.

Not only that, I just love starting the day with a good ramble!

It has been several weeks since I posted here. Once I got things rolling for the Move Up North, the thing took on a life of its own, and writing (except for some Facebook posts) took a back seat. I did a lot of thinking while I was packing up my old house, and I’ve already written a little about that. Today, I’m going to indulge myself in a ramble. I hope, for all our sakes, that something useful comes out of it.

During the last push before the movers came, I made some decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. I thought I had done a good job of downsizing, but after the movers drove away from Sparky’s Place (my name for my little house in the woods by the lake), I quickly realized that I still had too much stuff. It took me about four days to unpack and organize the house, and I have made at least five trips to St. Vincent’s Charities in Tawas City, with the Equinox loaded to the roof rails every time. On Monday, I made the trip to town with a 5-gallon gas can riding shotgun; on the way home, the can was full and rode in the cargo area. It was a good thing — by Tuesday morning, we had almost a foot of new snow, and having gas for the snow blower is a very good plan in such circumstances.

I came out of the unpacking process with several thoughts.

• First, my default mode from this point forward has to be one of NOT acquiring things. Not only is there nothing I need, other than the usual consumables like food and gasoline; but also, I need less getting and more doing; I need to contribute less to the landfills and more to the health of the earth. So the one thing I did acquire since my move was a composter.
• Second, I need to focus on using up some of the stuff I didn’t get rid of. After I got done with all of the donating, I have quantities of yarn and craft materials, a lot of writing paper, and more dog treats than JD could possibly consume before they go bad. Some of it comes from combining two well-stocked households; some of it comes from years of compulsive consumerism.
• And third, when I build my garage, while I will benefit from the additional storage space, I must be very careful that I don’t fill it!

This week yielded some discoveries that will shape my life going forward. Remember all that yarn I mentioned? Well, it turns out that my new parish, Holy Family, has a very active “knitting ministry” which produces prayer shawls and blankets for a variety of recipients in need of them, including children in developing countries. I will be pursuing an involvement in that ministry! Also, the county’s Humane Society is just about five miles away, and when I stopped there yesterday to drop off several boxes of dog treats, I learned that there is a need for morning volunteers to help with cleaning and working with the animals. I’ll be heading there this coming week. As tempting as it could be to just hole up in my little house and — literally — tend to my knitting, that is not my most healthy lifestyle. I need to get involved in the community!

This week also brought a discovery about that “change junkie” aspect of me that I’ve touched on before. Once I got the house pretty much settled, and worked through some plumbing problems that included a frozen drainfield and plugged sewage pipe, I started to experience some anxiety, accompanied by some sadness. It took a couple of days and some hard thinking to figure out where it was coming from, but I finally nailed it down. I think I was actually experiencing a sort of adrenaline withdrawal. My system had become accustomed, over the past several months, to the adrenaline rush that comes with stress and big changes, and was trying, with the anxiety, to retrigger the flow of adrenaline. I’ve chosen to treat this little syndrome with lot of physical exercise. It is going to be important to push myself in new directions and to seek out adventures without creating the kind of total life upheaval that the past months — indeed, the past two years — have involved.

Finally, a bit about facing up to the reality of the second-biggest change in my recent life (the first having been Tom’s death on July 1, 2012): I made the decision for this change after considering the factors carefully over a period of months. Voluntary change is still change, and it still brings with it some reality checks. My daily life and activities are not enormously different from what they were before I moved, except that the variety of choices actually expands now over what was available before. I still have frequent contact with my family and friends via the same social media that we have always used. The difference — the reality check — is that I am doing all of it at a 160-mile distance. What does that mean? It has some practical implications, sure — but the heart of the matter is that it’s only a longer drive when I want to have lunch!

This page showed up in one of my calendars last week. Since we already have established that I am something of a “change junkie,” Dr. Einstein’s words seemed particularly on point.

Talk about change! I am getting ready to sell and move out of the house that Tom and I built. Since the house I am moving into is a bit smaller, and since I (we) accumulated a LOT of stuff over the years, the time has come to mercilessly downsize and sensibly simplify, especially when it comes to possessions.

We purchased this house — a manufactured home — the day after 9/11. By that time, we had been married almost 8 years, and this house was the first thing we had put together literally from the ground up. We picked out everything together, right down (or up?) to the roof shingles, which we both loved for the flecks of blue color against the brown background. When we moved in, we were absolutely on the same page: everything we moved in a day had to be unpacked and put away that day. Once we had a bed and a coffeepot, we couldn’t wait — we started sleeping there. And we downsized and simplified, but as I have learned in recent weeks, there was a lot that neither of us could quite bear to throw out at the time.

We did a lot of living in this house, and we did a lot of loving here, too. We faced life-changing events, both wonderful and catastrophic, together in this house. And he died in this house, with me holding him. It was the first place and the only place that we truly made for ourselves together. And now it will become someone else’s home.

I’ll be moving to the “cottage” that Tom bought back in 1993, just before we got married. I bought the place back from his sons this past June, and when I walked back in the door I knew I was home — the same feeling I had the first time Tom and I walked into the place to look at it in July of 1993. It’s been christened “Sparky’s Place,” also known as “my little house in the woods,” and the feeling of peace and contentment I have when I am there is indescribable.

And it is about 2/3 the size of “the house Tom and I built.” So downsizing and simplifying are in order. I practiced at this process 18 months ago. Shortly after Tom died, part of my grieving process that I still don’t fully understand involved a burst of almost insane energy and restlessness. I cleaned out closets and dressers and cabinets, reorganized, and (I thought) downsized significantly. All of Tom’s clothes and shoes went to the Lansing City Rescue Mission; I shredded obsolete records to the tune of 7 large trash bags full of shredded paper; and still, when I embarked on my current project to move up north, I found that I still had Way. Too. Much. Stuff.

I’ve been taking on one area at a time, and I thought I was sailing through it. Today’s project: clear out my closet and dressers, get rid of all the clothing and other things that I never wear or use. I thought, “Show no mercy!” I thought it would be a relief to relieve myself of these excess things.

Then I found the first stash of birthday, Sweetest Day, and Valentine’s day cards. I set those aside, not at all sure I could get rid of them. Then I found the second stash — sympathy cards and cards from my retirement. So I sat down and took both stacks, and started looking through them. It was a nice warm fuzzy to revisit those retirement wishes and expressions of sympathy — and then into the trash bag they went! I realized that I don’t need the cards to remember that people cared about me and what was going on in my life at that time. And frankly, I will probably never see or hear from a vast majority of those people again. That’s how life happens. We connect with people for a time and for a reason; sometimes, great friendships develop, and those are the select few that we continue to make a part of our lives. I don’t need the cards to make that happen, either.

It was the birthday and Sweetest Day and Valentine’s Day cards that got me. As I looked through those, two memories came very powerfully to me. The first was that for all of our 21 years together, Tom and I could never get it straight whether we observed Sweetest Day. Our first year together, he got me a card and gift, and since I thought Sweetest Day was the ultimate Hallmark holiday, I had nothing for him. The next year, having learned my lesson, I got him a card and a little gift, and he had nothing for me. You can imagine the discussion — but it went on that way for the rest of our lives together.

Tom was amazingly good at picking out cards, and I always knew that he had spent some time and had carefully selected the card and verse. That’s why the Valentine’s Day cards really got to me. As I read through them, I could finally hear his voice again — something that has escaped me for the whole 18 months he has been gone — and through my tears, I had to laugh as I heard him say, in my mind, “Get rid of it!” I found one card that summed up beautifully the way he loved me, and kept it. That card brought the second powerful memory: The way he would say, sometimes just out of the blue, “I love you, Abb — I love you more than you know.” And he did.

All the rest of the cards, I got rid of. Into the trash bag they went, and out to the curb it went ,since today is trash day.

Painful? Yes. Yes, it was. But if I expected this process of downsizing and simplifying to be without pain, I should have known better. Life happens, and pain and tears are part of it. Fortunately, they are only a part. You see, I went right on to have a good hearty laugh as I got rid of dozens and dozens of pairs of old socks and even older unmentionables. My closet and armoire are next. I expect I will find some memories there, too.

The lesson? Very simple, for me: It’s that the essence of what I’ve grieved for lives deep in my heart. It isn’t tied to the things, and it isn’t tied to the cards. It’s tied to my soul, and it will always be there to bring a tear, a laugh, a moment of joy — not necessarily in that order. Thank you, Mr. Einstein — I will keep moving and thus maintain my balance!