Shhh…
After weeks of guests everyone has gone home. Space. Quiet. Peace. I love having people here, the chance to talk. And its so nice to now be here alone. Time to think. I am blessed. Shhhhh…
Like Magic
We all need a little magic in our lives.
I was one of those children who would get selected by the on-stage magician looking for volunteers to help out – maybe I looked as though I would sweetly follow instructions, or perhaps I had a gullible face. No matter. I loved it. And I have been a sucker for magic ever since. I still marvel at how a plane can stay up in the sky (usually), the colours in a rainbow, and reflections on the water… the way a bud is suddenly a flower, a thing of beauty built from the ingredients of earth, water and sunshine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbMYzdjuBs&feature=fvw (1:33)
The real trick is to recognise magic when we see it and take note enough to hold on to it. And to see we can make it happen for ourselves and others. Especially I marvel at how a person living a limited life can blossom when the nutrients are added, nutrients of kind words, having someone believe in you, a champion. Even better when the kind words and belief is from the person themselves, and yet it often takes another person to kick-start the process. How fabulous it is when we see someone suddenly bloom, reach towards their potential.
My most favourite days are when I can say “Today I changed a life” knowing I have initiated the transformation process. It’s like magic.
Life not what you wanted?
Feeling down about the way things are going in your life? Not quite what you asked for?
Check out Nick Vujicic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MslbhDZoniY
If you think of cutting out of the clip, hang in there for 1:30 before you decide.
Redundancy Action
I am watching friends and family members go through the redundancy process, or possible redundancy which seems almost worse. This is where you know redundancy is coming for some people in the team but you don’t know who is staying and who is going; or you know redundancy is probable but you don’t know when – like waiting for the axe to drop; or where amalgamation of companies means everyone must reapply for a shrinking number of jobs.
Each of these scenarios brings its own types of stress. At least when you know you are being made redundant and you know when, you have the chance to plan. Assuming of course the redundancy is a little way off. I completely understand the anger of people who arrive at work on a Monday morning and find the gate locked and they are redundant and I see this as heartless in the extreme. But when you have certainty, when you have a date to work towards, then you can feel more in control of your life. At that point so much depends on how you deal with it. Some put their head in the sand and hope it goes away. Some convince themselves there is nothing they can do, that they won’t find other work, and drop into a state of helplessness.
Others take action. By taking action they not only feel more in control, they are more in control. They don’t wait for redundancy. They discuss things with their family and develop a plan depending on various scenarios. They research and apply for jobs. They may ask themselves “Where to next?” and set about exploring options for their life that are quite different to anything they have done before.
And for some of these people they will look back on this redundancy as the best thing that ever happened to them. Made redundant from an uninspiring job, A. got the job of her dreams. Highly intelligent and very well qualified, S. left a pretty average-paying job and got a job that truly valued his skills, at almost double his previous pay. And M. is in the process of starting his own business – before the final day of work (a date that keeps changing) – he is energised, excited and feeling impatient for the old job to finish but needs that redundancy cheque so he will hang in there.
A different perspective
With a history of self-harm, five attempts in less than a year, I can believe Tony Worrell never intended to kill anyone but himself when he deliberately drove into Katie Powles’ car. On the day of the crash he had been discharged from hospital after of one of these attempts. His defence is that he is a diabetic, was suffering from low blood sugar and was drunk, and that this caused him to drive on the wrong side of the road, but I wonder who would buy that? Obviously not the jury.
I had a conversation with a mother who had seriously thought of doing something similar. At the time she was dreadfully unhappy. She would look at oncoming cars and, more especially, trucks and would think it would be so easy to just drive onto the other side of the road and end it all. She looked at those vehicles as ‘objects,’ as if they were a kind of wall, never thinking that there was a person or people inside, let alone that they might get hurt or killed. She wasn’t even thinking of her young children and how they would fare in life left behind, that came later. It was only with the publicity around this case that she finally thought of the people who would have been in those vehicles. All these years later, she realised that she could have so easily been Tony Worrell.
I feel sad for Katie Powles’ family and friends and understand their anger. I also feel sad for Tony Worrell. Such misery! I don’t think I have ever seen such a desperately unhappy person. He has been convicted of murder with a non-parole period of 14 years, higher than the usual 10 years, because of the “callous way he tried to draw attention to his plight.” http://www.nzherald.co.nz/crime/news/article.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10626447 But people who are suicidal are so focussed on their pain they can’t see the bigger picture. They don’t empathise with others. They don’t consider the consequences of their actions.
I hope Tony Worrell gets the help he so obviously needs, and I hope his appeal leads to a lesser sentence. Without intervention Tony Worrell will die in prison. Unfortunately hardly anyone cares.
To understand, to forgive, and to reconcile
What leads a woman who has lost her much loved husband to a drunk driver to smile at and give a hug and kiss to the man who took his life, influencing the judge to deliver a lesser sentence? Twenty years ago Anne Krueger read a book that, translated into English, had the title ‘To understand, to forgive, and to reconcile.’ Those words stayed with her so that she forgave the man who ran down her cyclist husband then drove on, and also forgave for the process she went through afterwards, the people who didn’t understand her grief, and the situations that upset her. She didn’t want to hate, she forgave the man in the belief that “We all want to have peace in our souls and in our lives, and not always to carry a burden and [be] blaming ourselves and other people” (Weekend Herald 13/02/2010, p A7 ‘Widow offers drunk driver forgiveness’).
I wonder what Anne Krueger said to herself and what picture she had in her mind of the man who was responsible for the death of her husband that she was able to forgive. It seems she sought to understand him as part of forgiveness. I hope I would have what it takes to understand, then forgive and reconcile if ever I should have the misfortune to be in similar position. On her own survival, Anne Krueger says she has, “a corner of my brain that says ‘you will get there.’”
Phobia – spiders and other things
I was amazed to discover that more than a million New Zealanders are living with a phobia considered severe enough to limit their lives. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10624648 The phobia could be a fear of spiders, moths or heights, the kind of thing most of us think of as a phobia. Or it could be a social phobia in the form of extreme shyness, agoraphobia or an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) such as the need to wash hands over and over, or repeatedly checking that the oven is switched off.
There was a time when I too had a phobia – to spiders. I couldn’t touch a picture of one in a book and found it difficult to look at it. I couldn’t watch a spider on T.V. If a spider got on me I went crazy to get it off. Knowing this my (now ex) mother-in-law thought it tremendously funny to throw a big rubbery toy spider at my face. Unfortunately she chose to do this after a family dinner while I was drying a stack of a dozen of her dinner plates. I dropped the plates and ran.
Then one day I followed along as I watched an NLP practitioner take someone through a process to overcome a fear of spiders. Since then I have no fear of spiders, though I can’t say I like them and I choose not to see the film Arachnophobia or watch a tarantula on T.V. Today a small spider running over my arm brings no reaction and I can effectively dispose of a large black spider myself ….. a markedly different reaction.
What surprised me in the Herald article was the number of people affected and the prevalence of social phobia.
The Winner
Stuart Donnelly died last week.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10619064
Stuart Donnelly’s life was transformed by winning £1.9 million in a U.K. lottery at the age of 17, and now at 29 he is dead. We don’t seem to be informed as to how he died so we guess it may be his own choice. Donnelly won the lottery money in 1997. To avoid the people camping outside his house and the constant hassling from people for money, he and his ailing father moved to the Scottish countryside. When his father died two years later he lived alone for the next ten years. Stuart Donnelly’s social networking site on Bebo, listed his activities as: “Sleeping, watching TV, listening to music, surfing the net. Basically, anything that involves not leaving the house.” So Stuart became a person who avoided interactions with others.
It has been said that his self-imposed isolation and unhappiness was because he had so much money. I would say that his unhappiness was more a result of the media-generated notoriety that lead to the expectations of others that they could have some of it and the way they pursued him for a slice of the cake.
The Dentist’s Chair
I was sitting in the dentist’s chair yesterday for a total of 90 minutes. I realised I could think of it as an unusually ‘intimate’ sort of relationship. I was lying down with this person’s face only inches from mine and his fingers were in my mouth. From time to time he would mutter reassuring words.
I realised I could also look at it in another way, as a stressful event where I was vulnerable, exposed, at someone else’s mercy. I could wind it up a step further even and think of a visit to the dentist with horror, bordering on the traumatic. The dentist used to be called ‘the murder house’ or ‘the torture chamber’. These days of course we have injections to numb the pain and even gel to numb the area of the injection to numb the pain. Yet for many, a visit to the dentist is still something viewed with fear.
What makes the difference is how we represent it to ourselves, in other words what we say to ourselves and picture in our head. Mmmm … how can I use that more effectively for my next visit?
Sisterhood
I was thinking about what makes the relationship between my sister and me so strong. We certainly don’t live in each other’s pockets. With busy lives we may not even talk for a month. But I know that if I was in trouble she would be there for me and I am sure she knows that I would be there for her. We understand each other and we get on so well.
In a family of six – my parents, my two brothers and my sister, the boys shared one bedroom and for fourteen years, the girls shared another. My sister and I had our ups and downs as kids. There were times when we would have a line down the middle of the bedroom and she wasn’t allowed on my side and I wasn’t allowed on hers. Luckily I had the side with the door and I was able to deny her permission to cross my floor space to go in or out of the bedroom, then puff with indignation when she broke the agreement and put her foot down on my side of the room.
Yet it was this childhood time that formed the foundation of what we have today. As children, every night we talked. We talked about our day and everything that had gone right or wrong in it. We shared everything openly and freely. We kept each other’s secrets, even when we were having a scrap about whatever long forgotten issue that was important at the time. We trusted one another and we communicated. We were sisters in every sense of the word. This trust and communication continues today and is one of those things in my life of which I have certainty.
I have an excellent, loving, trusting relationship with my brothers and I also know that we would be there for each other. Somehow though, it’s not quite the same. They are guys. We didn’t share a bedroom. We didn’t share our deepest secrets night after night over all those years.