Surgery

Day 223

It has been exactly a week since my last post on what was supposed to be a daily chronicled blog. But I read somewhere a while ago that the more willing you are to accept failure, the happier and more contented a person you'll be. So this is what I've learned in the past 7 days:

1. On Sunday I learned that there is nothing more soothing for nerves than remembering a time that was as or more stressful than what you're going through currently. It's extremely therapeutic, going through that memory in detail- what the problem was, the emotions attached, and how you got through it. It's such a triumphant feeling knowing that you survived another challenge.
2. On Monday I had a moment where I was no longer afraid. It was a short moment, but I actually experienced that ever elusive faith that Christ was always teaching us. Until then I was terrified of my upcoming surgery- terrified is an understatement. But something hit me, call it a spiritual spanking, when I realized I was about to enter into something I had absolutely zero control over. And that faith was the only appropriate verb on the matter. "Fear is the opposite of Faith." I just needed to trade up my "F" words! I've always stood as a religious woman, but I'm ashamed to say I've only practiced faith like this...unwavering, unfaltering faith, a few times in my life. So that's what I learned...to be a more faithful person. To be faithful means giving up some control, and that is very big deal to me.
3. Tuesday morning, the day of my surgery, I woke up with god given bravery. My anaesthesiologist and scrub nurse happened to be LDS and we all said a prayer before my procedure. I actually entered the OR smiling, and left singing. (Apparently anesthesia makes me sing...seriously.) I learned on Tuesday how much love I really do have surrounding me. I don't have to do everything on my own. The world doesn't end when I'm incapacitated. And I have some beautiful family and friends.
4. Wednesday I crossed number 90 off of my list of 101 things to do before I die. http://forgetthefinishline.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html I watched my sister Shannon give birth to my newest nephew- Ian Douglas. I learned that I'm a little green at the gills around all that pain and bodily fluid, but that there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be than in that hallowed room where his precious, new life was born.
5. On Thursday the pain of the surgery really set in and I learned that I'm a real mess when I can't just get up and do things for myself. I hate relying on other people when I'm in pain. I learned not to take my health for granted. In a very real way. I have so much more compassion for people who are hurting, in any way.
6. On Friday I learned how much better it feels when you stop feeling sorry for yourself and serve someone else who is hurting too.
7. Tonight I was reminded of how much I love Halloween. I am truly blissful as I'm busy living vicariously through my babies this season. Happy Halloween!

Janet

Day 222

I have learned a lot this weekend! So much that I want to share- but I'm busy having fun this weekend and will probably be too tired when I get home tonight. Tune in tomorrow!

Janet

Patience

Day 221

Patience. Patience, patience, patience, patience. I am certainly being taught patience. And how to be courageous.

I'm also learning how important itty bitty, tiny things are to building happy children. Trenton and I may not have the money to spoil them, or to do outrageously entertaining things- but I think they're pretty darn content. Let's hope we can keep them that way!



Janet

Spooky Treats

Day 220

Today I tried a couple new (to me) recipes for Halloween. I brought them to the cooking club and I think they were greatly received. Also- thanks to my friend Sarah, I will now be crusting my Cornflake Chicken with a combo of Cornflakes and Honey Bunches of Oats. Those tenderloins were incredibly yummy!

So these are "Witches Toes"-

1 pkg of Peanut shaped Peanut Butter cookies
1 pkg of green melting chocolates (they have them at the craft stores, but I found these spooky green chips in the Halloween decor section at Walmart).
Black licorice

After dipping the cookies I cut little pieces of licorice up the center and cut a nail-shaped curve at the top of the pieces to look like toe-nails.


These little cheesy eyeballs taste like gourmet Cheese Nibs-

1 cup flour
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1 stick very cold butter
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp salt

Cut the butter into tiny cubes and mix with cheese into the blender. Once that's well combined, add the sifted flour, paprika, and salt. Shape into little balls, push a dent in the center, and place a green olive. Bake at 400 for 15 minutes.



I'll have to get the specifics of this recipe to you once I get it from my friend. But it's a "bunch" of goodness!


Janet

Don't Complain, Just Work Harder

Day 220

If you haven't read The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausche, do it. It's based on a lecture that was given at Carnegie Mellon, by a man who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Although he has since passed, his words are as potent, if not more, than the day he first used them to advise his young students. One of my favorite chapters is Don't Complain, Just Work Harder-

"Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out.
I've known some terrific non-complainers in my life. One was Sandy Blatt, my landlord during graduate school. When he was a young man, a truck backed into him while he was unloading boxes into the cellar of a building. He toppled backwards down the steps and into the cellar. "How far was the fall?" I asked. His answer was simple: "Far enough." He spent the rest of his life as a quadriplegic.
Sandy had been a phenomenal athlete, and at the time of the accident, he was engaged to be married. He didn't want to be a burden to his fiancee so he told her, "You didn't sign on for this. I'll understand if you want to back out. You can go in peace." And she did.
I met Sandy when he was in his thirties, and he just wowed me with his attitude. He had worked hard and become a licensed marriage counselor. He got married and adopted children. And when he talked about his medical issues, he did so matter-of-factly. He once explained to me that temperature changes were hard on quadriplegics because they can't shiver. "Pass me that blanket, will you, Randy?" he's say. And that was it.
My favorite non-complainer of all time may be Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League Baseball. He endured racism that many young people today couldn't even fathom. He knew he had to play better than the white guys, and he knew he had to work harder. So that's what he did. He vowed not to complain, even if fans spit on him.
I used to have a photo of Jackie Robinson hanging in my office, and it saddened me that so many students couldn't identify him, or knew little about him. Many never even noticed the photo. Young people raised on color TV don't spend a lot of time looking at black-and-white images.
That's too bad. There are no better role models than people like Jackie Robinson and Sandy Blatt. The message in their stories is this: Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier."

Janet

Europe

Day 219

Trenton and I just got back from a date and as we pulled in our driveway we were reminiscing together about our trip to Europe- about all the things that were going through our minds back then, how everything was so fresh. And it brought back all those same emotions and wonderful feelings. More and more I am learning to view my husband the same way I did back then. He was a gift. He is a gift. How I love date night- with its powers to nourish a baby worn marriage! But I do have to admit that my favorite part of the evening was when we quietly carried our two babies to their beds. Nothing is sexier than a man singing the ABC's as he brushes his toddlers' teeth. That's better than anything Europe had to offer.

Janet

Getting You Out of the Way!

Day 218

There are many, but I think this might be my favorite quote from the book Eat, Pray, Love-

"All the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'- Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people."

- Elizabeth Gilbert

And isn't that the whole reason we're here? To serve and love one another?

Janet

Downshifting

Day 217


Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, "My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night."


Setting the world on fire comes with risks. Unfortunately we usually don't realize this until smoke gets in our eyes.
Burnout is a condition caused by unbalance: too much work or responsibility, too little time to do it, over too long a period. We've been cruising in the fast lane but we've been running on fumes rather than on fuel. Often we think that burnout is something that just happens to other women-to workaholics and perfectionists. But careaholics are also at risk-women who care deeply about their children, work, relationships, parents, siblings, friends, communities, issues. This sounds like every woman I know. Perhaps we would pay more attention to burnout if it were as dramatic as a heart attack. But a smoldering flame can be just as deadly as a flash fire.

Sometimes burnout manifests itself as a sense of complete exhaustion at the end of a project that has taken months of challenging and intense work. Taking a week off to rest, then resuming work at a slower pace is usually enough to bring about a speedy recovery. But first-degree burnout-the soul snuffer-comes from living unbalanced for years; when what was supposed to be a temporary situation becomes a lifestyle.
Burnout often begins with illness-anything from a bout of flu you can't shake to chronic fatigue syndrome-and is usually accompanied by depression. Sometimes burnout is hard to distinguish from a creative dry spell, especially if you're good at denial, which most women are.

It's burnout when you go to bed exhausted every night and wake up tired every morning-when no amount of sleep refreshes you, month after weary month. It's burnout when everything becomes too much effort; combing your hair, going out to dinner, visiting friends for the weekend, even going on vacation. It's burnout when you find yourself cranky all the time, bursting into tears or going into fits of rage at the slightest provocation. It's burnout when you dread the next phone call. It's burnout when you feel trapped and hopeless, unable to dream, experience pleasure, or find contentment. It's burnout when neither big thrills nor little moments have the power to move you- when nothing satisfies you because you haven't a clue what's wrong or how to fix it. Because everything's wrong. Because something is terribly out of whack; you. It's burnout when you feel there is not one other person on the face of the earth who can help you.
And you're right.

When you're suffering from burnout, you are the only person on earth who can help because you're the only one who can make the lifestyle changes that need to be made; to call a halt, to take a slower path, to make a detour. When you have no strength left, you have no choice but to rely on the strength of a saner power to restore you to wholeness. In the pursuit of our souls, spirit takes no prisoners.


Henry David Thoreau didn't set out to become the patron saint of simplicity. Actually, he sought a job as highway surveyor with the city of Concord, Massachusetts, in order to support his meager earnings as a writer. For years he had been the de facto keeper of passable paths around the town and the public had testified to the quality of his work. Nonetheless, the town officers declined to pay him a salary for his efforts. Packing his pens, bottles of ink, and paper, the would-be municipal employee borrowed an axe and headed for Walden Pond to conduct an experiment with life.
A century and a half later, Thoreau's experiment, reinterpreted for the 1990s, is called "downshifting," a word coined by business writer Amy Saltzman. It describes the emergence of a new breed of workplace trendsetters who are no longer willing to allow their work to ride roughshod over their lives. Like Thoreau, these career professionals are choosing not to keep pace with their fast-track peers. By setting career limits, they're slowing down in order to devote more time and creative energy to their families, communities, and personal needs. Saltzman documented the different ways in which these enlightened pathfinders have found authentic success in her thought provoking book Downshifting; Reinventing Success on a Slower Track.
Saltzman began tracking the downshifting trend in the late 1980s while working in New York as a senior editor at Success magazine. At the same time she was wrestling with maintaining some control over her own life while meeting the "intellectual and creative challenges of helping a young publication take hold in a competitive field." But she explains in her book; "I found myself feeling increasingly ill at ease with the message of a magazine that typically defined success in narrow, self-interested terms."
Then a chance encounter with a friend who was working as an editor for another magazine solidified Saltzman's misgivings about the fast track. As her friend assumed a "Gotta run, I'll call you, we'll do lunch" pose before dashing off down Madison Avenue, she inquired how Saltzman was doing. Saltzman told her friend that "things were fine, work was interesting, although I wasn't allowing it to take over my life; I was doing volunteer work a few evenings a week, reading a lot and working on a short story that I didn't think would ever get published but was enjoying it anyway."
This laissez-faire attitude baffled her friend, Saltzman recalls, because she was "unable to grasp the idea that I wasn't particularly busy at work and enjoying it." But Saltzman had made "a conscious decision to take life a little slower." In fact, she'd deliberately not gone after a promotion because she knew the job would eat up too many evenings and weekends. "Besides, while it might have looked impressive, I wasn't sure the position suited me at that point in my life. The decision, however, had not been made lightly and had continued to nag at me. When I saw my friend, I realized why. If we weren't always moving ahead and aiming for something higher and more impressive, if we didn't have that look of constantly being busy and in motion, we were somehow boring or even losers."
But no matter what her life might have looked like to an outsider, the reality of Saltzman's decision to take things more slowly was that her "life felt fuller, more interesting and more worthwhile than I could ever remember." By slowing down, Amy Saltzman discovered that "the fast track shackles us to a set of standards and rules that prohibit us from leading truly successful, happy lives."
I guess this is a very long, roundabout way of saying that I'm burnt out and have decided to downshift my own life. For the past couple years I've been given signs. Almost every day I've been given an indication that it's time to let something go but I've chased those indications away with Aspirin, or swigs of Pepto Bismul. I've chased them right into a bleeding ulcer. But this is it. I've been given the opportunity to live this life only once- and I really do feel like it's dissolving away right in front of me. I am sick. I don't have enough energy to experience the mother/child relationship I so craved when I started this chapter in my life. I'm beginning to feel buried. I'm losing the ability to laugh and keep from being offended. I am so busy that I don't know where to start. So after a lot of tears, anxiety, fear, guilt, sadness, and finally resolve- Trenton and I have decided that I'm going to stop teaching- for now. And with this decision, I feel such a warm, golden sense of peace.

Janet

Quotes from Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach

Caramel

Day 216

I was bummed today. I didn't really have any specific reason to be... I just wasn't my usual self. Anyway, I was sprawled out on my mom's couch, as if she were my therapist, listening patiently as I relayed my thoughts, and at the end of one of my particularly depressing rants she said, "I know what you need. I'll be right back." She went into the kitchen and returned with a caramel. One simple, chewy, buttery caramel. "These always make me feel a little better." she said.

And it did.

Janet

P.S. Werther's

Creative Thursdays

Day 215

I found this blog today, as advertised in this month's Better Homes and Gardens. Enjoy!

http://creativethursday.typepad.com/

Janet

J.K. Rowling

Day 214

Even if you think this post doesn't apply to you, or you don't have interest in it, for what ever reason...read it anyway. It is a quote, given by Harry Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, when she gave the commencement speech at a Harvard graduation. Her thoughts on failure and imagination are incredible- and I encourage you to google this speech and WATCH it. I say watch it because her accent and passion make each word even more powerful. I'll share with you some of the excerpt that was shown on Oprah this past week and the specific quotes that have motivated me so deeply to step beyond myself, my own fears of inadequacy, and LIVE.

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me."

"I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive."

"And so rock bottom became the foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all- in which case, you fail by default."

J.K. Rowling. http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination

So as Trenton and I were driving on a frighteningly steep mountain road this afternoon, and he was commenting on how steep the drop was just a few feet from our tires, I asked him to pull the car over instead of closing my eyes and panicking like I usually do when heights are involved. I asked him to stop the car so that I could get out and look over the edge. And so that's what we did. We stood at the edge of a 300 foot cliff for quite some time and I will tell you this...I didn't feel like life's failure in that tiny moment.

Janet