Dreaming Paris

The title of my post is a book I just finished by Pema Chödrön. She's a Buddhist nun, and of course it's full of being nothing gives you everything kind of talk that has me being mindful of what I'm thinking from one moment to the next, though I have no idea what to do with any of it, not that it's even necessary to DO anything with it when you're a Buddhist, just be in the moment and observe what's true for you. Yeah.

Some of you know the bigger picture of what's going on with me, some of you only know the recent slice, but regardless, right here, right now, in this moment, my neck and head hurts and all I want to do is cry and nothing else matters but that I DON'T THINK AT ALL for just a little while. Because that's all I've been doing for weeks since before the crash, and ten times more so since. I'm living in some kind of slow-motion existential nightmare with cherry blossoms blooming all around me. Last night I lay in bed and thought loving thoughts toward my husband and the others in my life that I love, hoping that they may in some small way pave the road ahead of us with just a little less pain because no matter what happens, we're in for a bumpy trip. We're already on it, and just like my body is literally battered at the moment from the shaking I took and my neck is stiff and aching, so are our emotions.

My husband and I rode his motorcycle to the theater today. A matinee we decided to treat ourselves to. The theater is only a 3 minute drive down the road, but as I was on the motorcycle I was thinking what nuts we were to be riding such a deathtrap just for a bit of entertainment. We could go down in the blink of an eye, and be all battered and scraped and in pain, maybe die, and for what? And yet, I did it, and didn't care. Well, I cared enough to think about it. We watched How to Train Your Dragon. A lovely movie with the predictable youngster doesn't fit in but is vindicated and accepted kind of story, and yet it triggers all my thoughts of not feeling like I fit in, doing the unexpected, disappointing those I love, etc., etc. A silly kids movie and I'm personalizing every little moment of it, even the brushes with death because no matter how I try to accept and live with it, I could have died 6 days ago and I have to work through that in my head in whatever way works for me, sometimes by joking, sometimes by crying, sometimes just living the next moment, but it's always there now, and I have to settle what that means for me somehow.

When I came out of the movie I felt lightheaded again. Sensory overload, I think. When we got outside I asked my husband if we could sit down on one of the benches for a little bit. The sun felt nice and warm, but I was all shaky inside and didn't feel I could sit on the back of the motorcycle yet. And then I just started crying for no discernible reason. I couldn't stop it. I haven't really cried much since the accident happened. A couple of times because my daughter cried first, and a few momentary tears here and there, but I couldn't stop this. It didn't last long, but I still feel it almost 2 hours later.

My life is very strange right now. Very, very strange.

I got a letter stating the 3 workers in the ambulance who hit me were injured in some way and the city insurance is subrogating against my insurance. Okay. They told me at the time no one else was injured, but I imagine they got a bit of a shaking, too. A friend said the ambulance didn't look damaged, but the police report gives it about $4000 worth. Sigh. One wrong turn. One moment of missing the road signs. It's all so weird. I want to go out there and look at where it happened. I haven't been able to yet. I want to see where it says the road is one way. I want to know why I didn't notice it. Where was my head?

Caught up in my thoughts, as it is so often, probably. Oblivious to the world around me. I haven't been oblivious this week, though. Mindful. Slow-moving. Watching. Waiting.

No answers.

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Maybe no one. Maybe I will get there. But it ain't lookin' so good. Paris, I mean. It might just remain a dream. I don't even have a passport. I meant to get one last year when I still had some money to do it, but money just seems to slip through my fingers like water. I could be happy right now if my finances weren't in such a mess. I like teaching. The hours and the work suit me. But I need more of it. As an adjunct at only one college I can only teach 3 classes, no more. And the subject I teach isn't one to which they assign a full-time position. I haven't been able to get on teaching the same thing (college success to college newbies) at the other colleges around here. I need a doctorate to teach education classes in the universities in this area. I need a doctorate like I need a hole in the head. That's one of my financial worries, my student loans. But they're deferred for now. Why have I made it my life's work to educate myself in areas that are useless? That provide very few opportunities for finding work? First an art teacher. Now adult education and eLearning design. Oh, there are eLearning jobs out there, but without 5+ years experience in the field no one wants to look at me. There are a couple of other issues that I can't write about because they involve others in my family, but suffice it to say, we're all stressed right now. Really stressed. And Christmas is coming. I know money isn't the basis of Christmas, but it sure helps to make it merry, doesn't it? :-( At least I'll see my parents and brother at Christmas. But my kids won't be there. One son is in Afghanistan, another one will have to stay here working, and my daughter has the opportunity to spend it with her boyfriend, which, if you knew my daughter and what her life is like you would realize is a major deal and a good one at that, though it's a little anxiety ridden for all of us. My foray into tutoring entrepreneurship was a bust and it left us deep in debt. Now I can't find a decent paying job and my husband's job, though pretty secure, doesn't support even our small family of 3. Especially not with the debt I incurred. Not only that, I would like to see a doctor. I need to see a doctor. But I have no health insurance. Add to the mix my ongoing experience of "the change" which leaves me with memory gaps, unpredictable mood swings, and crying jags that come and go without warning. I'm generally in good spirits when I'm distracted from thinking too deeply about all of this...when I'm not experiencing the depression part of the change, that is. But I'm so very, very tired all the time. Heavy sigh.

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I'm terrible at it. I seem to make the wrong ones. I think they're good at the time because they're practical, they make sense, and for anyone else, they WOULD be good decisions. Problem is, I am not, at heart, a practical person. Well, no, I guess that's not true. How should I describe what I'm like? I like to be practical in the sense that I'm good at coming up with solutions when things are broken around the house, or I'm trying to make physical things work. I have a great deal of common sense in anything that has to do with my hands, making things, that sort of thing. But when it comes to making decisions about living, I follow my heart, even after I've taken all the steps to be a practical person and do things that ought to make me a success in my chosen career-education. But I'm just not happy with those decisions over the long haul. I always find a new challenge exciting and exhilarating, and I'll love whatever my job is when it's new, because I'm having to test myself and come up with ways to make what I'm doing better. I love doing that. But eventually I reach a point of saturation, a point where I feel, "Okay, I know how to do this, and I know I can do it well, what's next?" This is a HORRIBLE way to feel when you have to pay for a daughter who needs health care (not to mention myself now that I'm getting older and more creaky) and a lifetime of student loans because you end up very unhappy. I just don't have what it takes to stick it out after a certain point. My job as tutoring center supervisor lasted two months shy of 8 years, the longest I've held any job, and the only reason it did is because my crew kept changing, so I was meeting these wonderful people from all over the world, and I kept developing creative challenges for myself in order to build my skills in multimedia, but eventually I was simply bored out of my mind silly with tutoring. I am now on the Board of Directors for the National Tutoring Association. It's an organization that I believe in, and I feel honored to have been chosen. It also looks good on my resume. But I'm tired of tutoring, folks. I accepted being on the board because it was the practical thing to do to continue to advance in the field of education, and I was flattered. I like the sound of it, "I'm on the Board of Directors, blah, blah, blah." As long as I'm on it, I'll do what's necessary, and I'll continue to create things and be a presenter at the conventions, etc., but frankly I resent any of the time it takes away from other things that are in my heart to do. I say I want to revise the book I wrote, and I know how to make it better, but I keep putting it off and putting it off because...I ALREADY DID IT! I've written TWO tutoring books (and I actually like the first one I wrote for my center better) and to do it again is a waste of my time (or so my heart says). I've proven I can do it. I've learned what goes into it. I have no desire to be a tutoring expert and write book after book on the subject, I just had fun testing myself. Capice? I know now that the reason I entered education is because it was safe. I'm a shy person at heart, someone who has to exert herself and push through barriers to connect with the world. You know why I do it? Because I love people and hate being afraid. But I'm afraid. I was never afraid in school. I excelled in school. It was my comfort zone. It continues to be my comfort zone. But I'm not happy staying there! Yes, right now I love teaching. Every 2-4 months I experience a completely new class, and right now, I'm still in the tweaking phase, I'm still creating new ways to do what I do. But going into my fourth class of teaching the same subject, I'm feeling those pangs of boredom again. I've proven to myself I can do it, and I can do it well. I will always love getting up in front of people in order to help them learn something new. Teaching is in me. That's weird when you consider my shyness, but I guess it's because I've been given permission to lead. It's an agreement between me and the audience, and as long as I'm in that role, it's okay. It was the same when I was in plays in school. As long as the role was defined, I was okay. But please don't make me push myself forward on behalf of myself. I suck at it. I really do. It was a real effort to develop my online tutoring business, but because I put myself into a role that others accepted, I was able to do  it, though I'm sure I could have done it better had I been someone other than me. Money was a factor in closing down, but it was also that part of me that was tired of tutoring and relieved that I had an excuse to close it down. Anyway, I was saying that teaching is in me, but just as everything else I do, I can't do these things over the long haul. I need breaks, I need times of doing something totally new and different, and then, if I come back to teaching, if it's a new topic, I'll love it again. Do you know what I never tire of? Planning things out and working with my hands. But even there, I always need a new project to do. I've done all kinds of artsy, craftsy things over my lifetime, but once I learned how to do it well enough to understand what went into it, I moved on to something else. I can crochet, knit, sew, decorate cakes, cane chairs, build/repair small pieces of furniture, paint walls decoratively, throw pots on a wheel, do ceramics, fill a home with decorative touches, and so on, but always, I've moved on to something else. Sewing is a chore for me now unless I were to come across a beatiful piece of fabric that moved my imagination to find the perfect pattern to create a new dress for myself, but I'm so fat I wouldn't enjoy it. I look at my walls and think I want some brighter, happier colors in the house, but the thought of painting them makes me tired. I don't have small children to make fun birthday cakes for any more. I do love the thought of getting out and working in my yard except that it's just too, too hot. I wilt after ten minutes when I try and get horrible, blinding headaches. None of this is here nor there, what I'm leading up to is the fact that something I never get tired of doing, maybe because the subject matter always changes, is drawing and painting, yet those two things are always left to last to do because my practical side tells me I should be doing all those other practical things that ought to be bringing a decent living wage into our coffers, even though they're not and never have because I just don't have the drive and follow through to climb the ladder of an educational career. I'll think about moving forward and maybe eventually becoming a dean or even a campus president because that's the way my mind works. I do like challenges, I do like testing myself. But I know that once I got there and could say, "I did it!" I'd be ready to quit. I'd actually hate the day to day of those kinds of jobs because it doesn't feed my soul the way art does. See, we're back to the way I'm led by my heart, even when I try so hard to be practical. It's my heart that doesn't allow me to remain content in any job I've had. It's my heart that pulls at me with such force that even when I determine to keep on keeping on for the sake of the people I love in my life, I end up falling on my face. I wish that I could be someone who could find peace and contentment in the knowledge that I'm taking care of my loved ones, making life good for them, but I'm not. I'm selfish. I need what I need, and when I don't get it, I'm a mess. A wreck of a human being. And here I am, 50 years old and $50.000 in debt with student loans, not to mention a whole lot of other debt, and I'm contemplating spending the rest of my life in the field of education with horror (now that I've once again come against that wall of boredom when I thought that perhaps this time, finally, I'd found something I could continue to love), wondering what on earth I've done to myself, and by extension my family, by deciding to do something that sounded practical at the time. Lifehacker had an article about websites that help you to make decisions, and I decided to try one of them just for fun. Heh. Like I didn't already know the result of the query before I asked it, namely, which career path should I choose, art or education? Anyway, the site is Let Simon Decide, and here are the final screenshots.

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Technically it isn't. It's been raining all day, and not a warm rain, either, which is unusual for this part of the world at this time of the year. And the burning, pulled muscle sensation that I sometimes get between my shoulder blades just to the left of my spine is doing it's darndest to make me cry when I move wrong. Be that as it may, my frame of mind is one of contentment and hope for the future. I could list all the reasons why someone else in my shoes might see things differently. I have a variety of challenges facing me, three of which are money, concern for my daughter, and concern for my second son who leaves for Afghanistan sometime this summer. And yet, none of those things are weighing on my mind. I have a very strong sense that all will be well, even if things should conspire to look like they aren't. I don't know why that is, it just is, and since my experience has been that when I am at peace like that, I can rest in it because it's real, that's exactly what I'm doing. Resting. Taking one thing at a time and not worrying about tomorrow. Living in the moment. It's not easy for me to do that usually. My natural state up until now has been to look forward, always seeking the next thing to do. That isn't the case right now. I know what my next thing to do will be, but it doesn't consume me, it doesn't stop me from just stopping and enjoying this moment right now. I love the rain. The amazing thing is that I haven't gotten a headache from it the way I often do. For the last 3 years or so the change in pressure causes me to get headachy. Not today. So I've kept the back porch door open and enjoyed looking out and listening to the rain. The cats like that, too. At least, the kittens do. The big cat is afraid of thunderstorms and rain and has been hiding in my room mostly. But the other cats like to go in and out, enjoying the coolness on the porch, coming in when it gets too windy and wet. The rain let up just enough for me to run out to my studio and grab my class materials before going on to school. The whole day has been like that, everything looking badly, yet flowing smoothly. It's one of those object lesson kind of days I guess that illustrates the point that you can choose to look at your circumstances and believe that life sucks, or you can find something within you that makes it not suck so much. Of course, that all depends upon what you have within you to draw upon when the circumstances are rotten, and that changes on any given day. Perhaps tomorrow my brain chemistry will turn on me, and the sky could be blue, yet inside my head it'll be all thunder, lightning, and rain. I was "discussing" how I believe that there is some kind of energy or force to our thoughts that can attract circumstances to us, good and bad. I put discussing in quotes because basically it was me saying, this is what I believe, and the other person saying, you're full of shit. :-) That may be. I can only go by what seems to happen in my life. It's not as though I've made a religion out of the belief, and all in all, by trying to be aware of what I'm thinking, I have some control over how I choose to respond to life's circumstances. And sometimes I choose to respond poorly because I just feel like having a tantrum over its injustices. I'm an upbeat person at heart, though, and I guess I really can't take any credit for that. It's the way I was made. I have a melancholy streak, yes, which can influence me, but it doesn't control me. So I can say that looking on the bright side of things is a healthier, happier way to live and good things just come your way if you can believe that the flow of life responds to what you make of it, but if you're not me, you may not find that an easy thing to do. You may be made differently. It could simply be that my outlook is what makes life look better to me than someone else experiencing the exact same things yet thinking this life sucks. Am I making any sense at all? Nobody mentioned blogging about dreaming things into existence. While life can be spontaneous and surprising, I do think that if there is something that you really want, it takes thinking it, imagining it, first before it can become real. I see myself in Paris again. I visit Paris through Google maps, orienting myself and becoming familiar with where the major landmarks are in relation to the rest of the city. Soon I will begin to do deeper research on places, prices, transportation, where to stay, etc. It will happen, even though today it looks like an impossibility. That money challenge, you know? But like I said, I'm not worried. Everyone around me is talking about a financial crisis. I've been living in a financial crisis ever since I first started working. This isn't new to me. And yet, I'm surrounded by the things I've wanted, and loving people I always believed would be in my life. It took me a long time to come to terms with how to spend my time while living this life, and to accept some things about myself that I spent years fighting, but now that that's all square, I'm cool with how things are. I feel like I'm in the flow, mostly. It feels good.

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and my favorite story to read out loud to all of my kids - Where the Wild Things Are - coming to theaters in October.

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