Author Archives: ij

A Not To Do List

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I’m on my second-to-last day of holidays and the itch to write a to do list is driving me nuts.  I was going to wait until Monday, but instead I thought I’d throw out a “not to do” list (see below) just to satisfy my hankering.

My three week’s of vacation has been quiet, which is good.  I got back into meditation, I read a couple of fiction books, which I haven’t done for a very long time, we went for a few days to the mainland and saw family and friends.  We played a little golf, did some “tourist in your home town” kind of things, and we spent a lot of time just sitting in our little backyard haven.  We set up the backyard to be just that; we created a nice garden, built a little patio with some comfortable patio furniture, all to give ourselves a space when the weather is nice to sit and relax.  And it has come together quite beautifully.  So I would say, all in all, it has been a good and restful vacation.

It’s not to say that I’m going to be overwhelmed with students come Monday.  They will trickle back, actually, because many of them are still on vacation themselves, or are planning to start back in September which is a couple of weeks away.  Instead I will be working hard on scoring several television shows, which I very much enjoy doing, although it’s quite time consuming.  I have a website where you can listen to some of those compositions I’ve written over the years…it’s called Moonstone Productions.

But before I get back to work, here are two lists based on my holiday reflections:

7 Things NOT To Do When You’re On Holidays

1. Quit counting down!  Only two weeks left, only one week left…I mean, you’re on holidays, how dumb is that??

2. Email is a curse.

3. Stop reading weird things to keep you from being bored.  Like the obituary column in the paper.  You’re not in there yet.

4. Impatience is meant for when you are in a hurry, not on holidays.

5. Avoid mirrors and reflective store windows at all times.  Just in case you’re getting fat.

6. Don’t upload your photos to Facebook until AFTER your vacation.  Yeah, what are the chances of that??

7. Don’t answer the phone when you see it’s from THAT number.  That’ll ruin a holiday state-of-mind quicker than anything.  In fact, turn your phone off altogether.

7 Signs My Holidays Have Had An Effect

1. Driving to my golf game yesterday, I was singing along with my iPod playlist in the car at the top of my lungs.  With the top down.  People could see me.

2. It’s now exactly 11:18am and I’m still in my pajamas.

3. The house is a mess.

4. There was an embarrassing amount of empty wine bottles when we took everything into the recycling depot for a refund the other day.

5. I can almost recite the dialogue from every episode of Downton Abbey, I’ve been watching them so much.

6. I broke Rule #5 of things NOT to do.  Ugh.

7. I have no idea what day it is.  Oh yeah, it’s the second-to-last day of my holidays 🙁  Back to reality…

IJ

It’s All About Me

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Is it sad that the first thing I did on my recent birthday was to log in to my Facebook account to see how many birthday greetings had been posted on my wall?  As much of an adult as I think I am, there are still those moments (and occasionally days) when I get all caught up in myself.  Who’s thinking about or remembering me today?

I remember once seeing a titillating Facebook ad that asked “who’s been reading your profile?”, tempting me to click on it.  And of course, it lead to something else that I had to sign up for in order to see who was looking for me.  Which I didn’t.   But I’ll just bet you that they got a lot of hits, all because we’re so often obsessed with ourselves and we want to know who else might be!

Having said all of that, I do think that a certain amount of time and space is required to nurture and care for our “selves”.  When I first became a mother, I was overwhelmed at the amount of time and attention an infant took, and at some point I became aware of the feeling of having lost my “self” in the process.  As much as I wanted to go back to my old “me”, I couldn’t after that. Even as my children grew and my circumstances changed, it was like un-ringing a bell;  it couldn’t be done.

Over time, the same thought and attention was given over to my work, and also to my parents who became more and more dependant on my help.   My needs became less and less of a priority.  The problem is, of course, that we all need a little healthy time spent on ourselves in order to be able to do the best we can for others.  I have had guitar students who were new mothers, and I’ve encouraged them to get rid of any guilt they feel for spending a half-hour a week playing guitar to do nothing more than simply to please themselves.  A half-hour is nothing, but when you are totally detached from the “real world” for that thirty minutes, it can completely re-energize you.

Which brings me to the point of this post…

Last summer when I took time off from teaching, I had a To Do list as long as your arm.  And although I may have accomplished a couple of things on it, I didn’t come anywhere near completing it.  Ultimately, that had the opposite effect of “time off” because I felt bad at not having done what I set out to do!  And what good is that??

We have some plans for a quick getaway, but only for a few days, so the rest of the time is up to us.  And I’ve decided that the travesty of last summer’s To Do list should not be repeated, so my slate is utterly clean.  It sounds deliciously self-indulgent, doesn’t it?  Especially when you spend most of your week day time preparing for the next job, student, task, client, customer…whatever your job may be.  My time off this summer is all about me.

I’m used to teaching in the evenings, so last night, Monday, was my first weekly evening off.  And I had no idea what to do with myself.  I tried sitting out on the back deck and reading.  I spent time on my laptop, perusing this and that.  But I was restless.  My husband, who is used to spending alone time in the evenings since I’m always teaching, said that I would eventually figure it out, but I think this “me time” is going to take some getting used to.

Simply going from one moment to the next is a different way to live, even if just for a little while.  It makes me realize how much of my life is lived habitually.  You get up, you read the paper, you shower, you have breakfast, you get on with your day.  I’m still doing the first four;  it’s the “rest of the day” that I’m not used to having unplanned.  Is this what retirement is going to be like?

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now I’ve got to get on to whatever the next thing is…dum, dee dum…

IJ

Life Must Be Lived “Forwards”

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“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be
lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
I came upon this quote today as I was perusing my usual
website “hangouts”, and it helped me to put this past week in
perspective.  It was a difficult week for
me, mostly because of my father who is struggling with dementia.  Rather than going into what happened, let’s
just say that I came to realize that his disease has progressed and his health
has declined moreso lately.  When we first brought him to the care
facility several years ago, I was sad at the thought of him losing his independence.  But gradually over these years, he has also
been losing himself, which is saddest of all.
Last night I got into a conversation with two friends who
are also experiencing the difficulties of elderly parents and their various
physical and emotional struggles.  This
helped me to feel not so alone in my fears and my sorrows…you need to have your friends and family
around you sometimes to know that you are not the only one.  It was also a big
help when I came home to my two daughters who hugged me for a long time when
they saw how upset I was.  I kept
thinking that one day, they’ll have to go through this with me and with their father
and that even though they are sympathetic to my situation, they really don’t
know and won’t know what it’s like for a long time yet.  Hopefully.
That expression “youth is wasted on the young” came to mind as we hugged and I thought about the freedom they have from the worries I have.  But the truth is that youth is not wasted…thank goodness we have times in
our lives (hopefully!) where we are so utterly oblivious to the problems of
the world.  Thank goodness.  I am so grateful that I had days when I had no, or very few concerns.  I want my daughters to enjoy their young lives as much
as they can, because everything around them will continue to change and evolve
and sometimes you don’t even realize how much things have changed until you look back, just as
Kierkegaard said.  No, youth is not
“wasted”;  hopefully it is
simply well spent and enjoyed.

Then I thought of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow
Taxi line “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got
’til it’s gone?”  Because many times
you don’t realize what you had when you had it.  Ain’t that the truth?  There is a tendency, when we are going through difficult times, to want to look back to when days where happier and when life was easier, and why wouldn’t we? It’s just that the chances are that we have long forgotten there were also difficult times back then, they were simply different problems or struggles.  My daughters think they have bad days and rotten experiences from time to time, and they do.  It’s just that their bad days are different from mine. Youth is not necessarily as great as we remember it was!  And remember how when we were much younger, we longed so for the future and what it would bring us?  Well, here it is!

If I spend too much time looking back, then I am not fully engaged in the present.   So although I want to occasionally look back in order to understand my life and put things in context, I don’t want to spend too much time there.  And that’s why I’d like to add to Kierkegaard’s expression, with apologies to his much higher intelligence.  Life must be lived forwards, but it also must be lived “presently”.   I am increasingly aware of what I actually have to look forward to in my old age, for lack of a better phrase, and as I age my perspective changes considerably.   So today I’m thinking more about the line from Carly Simon’s song “Anticipation”…”these are the good ol’ days.”  Because they ARE!

Where are you Irene?
I am right here 🙂

IJ