Coping

A Small Change of Perspective

/ James Browning

Last year here in Oklahoma many record high temperature records were set. This year is shaping up to be another record summer with heat frequently above 100. All across the country people are bearing unusually hot temps.  The overly warm days is just about everyone’s favorite thing to grumble about. My gratitude for my air conditioning is at an all time high!

Sometimes a small change of perspective can alter one’s thinking and mood. I found the following images to attempt that for me before I head out into the heat this morning. 

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.
J. B. Priestley

The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow.
Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show.
Anonymous

There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest
clothed to its very hollows in snow.
It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray,
every blade of grass, every spire of reed,
every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance.”
William Sharp

There is nothing in the world more beautiful
than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow.
It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray,
every blade of grass, every spire of reed,
every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance.”
William Sharp

 Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
John Ruskin

Just a few simple photographs of snow, winter, cold and fun are enough to shift my perspective this morning.  I am grateful!  Before I know it, winter will be here and my wishes will be for a hot day like today. 

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending.
J.R.R. Tolkien

A Day to Dream

/ James Browning

It’s easy to forget how much I enjoy a day off from work during the week. What for many was a one day holiday on July 4th, I chose to use vacation time and craft a five-day, stay at home weekend. Although not yet contained in MSWord’s spellchecker, it was a surprise to find the word ‘staycation’ has made its way into American dictionaries: a vacation spent at one’s home enjoying all that home and one’s home environs have to offer.

Staycation days are especially good when I don’t fill them up with projects and stuff to do. Being one who is somewhat hooked on activity, it’s healthy to slow down from my usual busy-ness addiction. The only plans I have is to drive with a friend to a nearby city one day to visit a mutual comrade, be true to my intentions to catch up on sleep (eleven hours last night!) and to spent some time outside.

Let us put awhile away
All the cares of work-a-day,
For a golden time forget,
Task and worry, toil and fret,
Let us take a day to dream
In the meadow by the stream.

We may linger as we will
In the sunset valleys still,
Till the gypsy shadows creep
From the starlit land of sleep,
And the mist of evening gray
Girdles round our pilgrim way.

We may bring to work again
Courage from the tasselled glen,
Bring a strength unfailing won
From the paths of cloud and sun,
And the wholesome zest that springs
From all happy, growing things.

From “A Day Off” by Lucy Maud Montgomery,
a Canadian author best known for a series of novels
that began with Anne of Green Gables published in 1908.

Richly decadent is one shade of my feeling within at this moment. Unshaven for two days, I sit here writing at a time I would normally be piloting a desk and driving a computer at work. All in all, I am more grateful than usual simply because I am taking time to relish being alive.

The best cure for an off day is a day off.
Frank Tyge

I’m Living Proof!

/ James Browning

It’s a shame modern society trains to hold our emotions in and not express them fully, including gratitude. Most of us robotically say “thank you” and “I appreciate it” a good bit of the time, but words alone are not an expression of feeling. We’re frequently taught that emotion plus words equals expressed feeling and its our feelings that make us vulnerable. I suppose that’s true, but hiding our feelings always insulates us from enjoying the full richness and fullness of life. Being happy takes risks!

All relationships to be functional must contain a level of mutual duty and loyalty. Gratitude is a step past being such moral obligations and gratefulness generally falls under the heading of “altruism”. Altruism is a motivation to provide something of value to a party who must be anyone but the self with no expectation of any compensation or benefits, either direct, or indirect. In other words, expressing true gratitude is giving purely for the sake of giving.

A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, stated when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees—from person to person to person to person. “As a result,” they write, “each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met. In other words, the ‘giving’ of gratefulness breeds gratefulness.

Giving (such as expressing gratefulness) has been linked to the release of a hormone released during sex and breast-feeding that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, found that a dose of the hormone (oxytocin) will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others, with “symptoms” lasting up to two hours. And those people on an “oxytocin high” can potentially jumpstart a “virtuous circle, where one person’s generous behavior triggers another’s”.

That’s boomerang effect of giving gratitude. Plainly and simply, what you give comes back to you. Maybe not in the quantity or frequency you give it, but more gratefulness expressed will cause you to get back more. Further, telling others of your gratitude for them is it’s a gift you give yourself. Expressed regularly, thankfulness can change the world and your perception of it. Author Mary Angela wrote, If you were to stop and feel the thank you each time you gave it, you would be living in gratitude. True gratitude is spiritual and fills the heart with warmth and joy!

Genuine gratitude, given or received, accumulates over time and softens a hard heart and opens a closed one. I am living proof!

Live with intention.
Walk to the edge.
Listen hard.
Practice wellness.
Play with abandon.
Laugh.
Choose with no regret.
Appreciate your friends.
Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is.
Mary Anne Radmacher

I Wear the Black

/ James Browning

Three quotes from Johnny Cash:

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space”.

“There’s unconditional love there. You hear that phrase a lot but it’s real with me and her [June Carter]. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

“I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times”.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity:
it must be produced and discharged
and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner

I am Right Here

/ James Browning

Taken from “Finding Your Real Self” by Kathleen D. Cone

Hi,
It is me,
I am here,
Right inside of you,
and, although
You don’t know me
Very well,
Quite yet,
Time is on our side
and the days will grow longer,
The times together stronger.

We are friends,
and I’m here
Where I’ve always been.

You are light,
You are joy,
You are kindness beyond measure.

I am the child in you.

The purest part of me is you, the little boy who lives within. You are filled with an innocent joy for being alive and have never lost your sense wonder and adventure. For as long as my memories go back you have been with me and we have witnessed together a broad scope of the experiences of life. I know you have been scared at times and upset at others. We have shared wonderful moments of happiness. We’ve gone through a lot of sadness and heartbreak too. Even though I misplace my spark for life sometimes, you never lose your abundant joy for being alive.

I am deeply grateful for the little boy inside, the child within, who reminds me what true and honest feelings are, how beneficial hope and simple joy can be and how much fun playing is!

You will find more happiness
growing down than up.
Author Unknown

Lost and Found

/ James Browning

At the back of the class room was the “cloak room” is where we hug our coats. In one corner was a round cardboard “can” with metal edges that had originally been made to hold about three gallons of ice cream in the lunch room. Taped on the container was a piece of construction paper with “Lost and Found” written on it in Miss Pittman’s near perfect handwriting. She was a soon to retire, old maid school teacher who lived in the rundown school teacher dorms behind the high school. Years late I would come to feel sorry for her as I realized how lonely and sad her life must have been. She had evaporated into obscurity before I was twenty-one.

If we found anything in the class room and did not know who it belonged to, we were supposed to put it in the lost and found. If we lost something that was the first place to look for it. Sometimes things ended up there because some 5th graders would put other people’s things there as a joke, although I never thought it was funny.

No matter how strict Ms. Pittman was or how much in turmoil was in my life then, those were simpler times in that wrong and right seemed clearer to me then. My Mother had decided to marry a man sixteen years older that my Brother and I did not like. As we would come to know, that was for good reason. He was a mean and abusive stepfather and we always thought he had a few screws loose. In those days I knew bad was bad. That was clear. Then I imagined good was simply the absence of the bad.

Through my childhood and into early adult life there were parts of me that ended up lost and stayed unfound for many years. Unlike the classroom of my youth, there was no ice cream bin to check out for what was missing. I did not develop the ability to love a girl/woman properly and it was replaced with neediness and want. With very little family influence of love expressed and shown, there were no teachers to emulate. So I read books, watched TV and saw movies. When I was sixteen that’s about all I knew about love.

My education continued, but painful and slow, learning the most difficult way from repeated mistakes and bad choices. The girls, then women, I was attracted to were often attached and several times I became the ‘secret guy” on the side. Too, I had a penchant for choosing ‘female roller coasters’ who were emotionally unstable. I sure could pick ’em, but they were not the problem. It was my ‘picker’ that was. I look back now and can see I thought the intensity, the anguish, the heartache and the longing totaled together was love.

Today awareness of who I am, where I come from and what I have been through has brought a willingness to pull the lost part of me out of “lost and found”. Like a broken vase that has been glued back together, the fractures and scars will always visible. But it is from those very wounds that knowledge and wisdom benefits me today. My sensitivity, ability to relate and identifying my feelings are all keen sense now. From what once hurt and confused me came great teaching from strict and difficult teachers too, just like Miss Pittman. But I got A’s and B’s in her class and give my self pretty good grades for living life and knowing how to love today. I am grateful for the difficulties I endured that eventually made me more able than most to know and express my feelings.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.
But the self is not something one finds,
it is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz

Stripped by a Storm

/ James Browning

Within the last six years, I have lived the equivalent life experience of several decades.  My very being, mentally and emotionally, was thrashed to its barest existence.  Within that kneading and pounding  the majority of the greatest insights of my life have come.  So today I am grateful for my teachers called pain, grief and heartache.  They beat me into submission where I needed to go so like a tree stripped by a storm I could grow more fully and stronger than before.

Taken from “Moving On” by ‘Cue Ball’
As of now, I am moving on.
Through and out, this hard time.
The clouds will clear, and the storm will pass.
Things are looking up, as I raise the mast.
Sailing on, and moving out.
From these dark days, I muster all my clout.
I am ready, to start again.
Just to see, where life begins.
Tough it is, and tough it will be.
Life moves on, and this I see.
So move on I will to start all over.
Just to see, the fields of clover.
I am still hurt, from my loss.
Nothing can change, what was lost.
Strength is coming, for me to move on.

I have learned not to damn the trials and difficulties of my life.  As hard as any might be to face, it is still “my life” they are happening in.  To damn them, is to damn my own existence.  Much gratefulness is within to have learned that simple wisdom.

Serenity is not freedom from the storm,
but peace amid the storm.
Anonymous

Refuse to Entertain Your Old Pain

/ James Browning

Reading is a favorite pastime and over the last fifteen years I have lost the majority of my interest in fiction; largely abandoned for non-fiction.  My preference has become reading about what actually happened, what others make of things or else simply reading to learn.

With this focus on fact, not fiction, occasionally I stumble across just the right words at a moment when they’re particularly meaningful to me. Such was the case with the following by Mary Manin Morrissey that grabbed my attention last night:

Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?

One foot on the brakes… Refuse to entertain your old pain… Those phrases rang loudly with insight for me the first, second, third and more times I read that paragraph over and over. My reaction is a good example of how a guilty man knows what’s true much more so than an innocent one. I do hold on to the past too tightly and dance with the pain back there far too often.

Today I make a renewed commitment to slacken the pressure of my foot on the ‘brake pedal’. Anew I promise to loosen my hold on the past. To the best of my ability I will “refuse to entertain” my old hurts and endeavor to increase my proficiency in doing that. I am grateful for the breath of fresh air just thinking these thoughts brings at the start of this new day.

You will find that it is necessary to let things go;
simply for the reason that they are heavy.
So let them go, let go of them.
I tie no weights to my ankles.
C. JoyBell C.

Rain Upon the Blinding Dust

/ James Browning

Human beings are the only animals that cry ’emotional tears’. Other animals have their own distress-signals, but crying from stress, pain, sorrow or joy is unique to man. Why we cry and even the actual function of it is not clearly understood even today. The general belief is that adult human crying does two things: relieves tension or stress and is a social signal that communicates distress to others indicating the need for comfort and emotional support.

Western society expects women to cry and in some circles one who does not do so openly with some regularity is often thought of as being hard, jaded and to even have reduced femininity. Only today is it becoming OK for men to cry.

In a national survey done in Great Britain by The Social Issues Research Center it was found that 90% of women and 77% of men think it has become socially acceptable, over the past 20 years, for men to be seen crying. In one-on-one interviews with respondents the message was the same: the majority of both men and women felt that attitudes have changed – that the taboo on male tears is now generally regarded as outdated and ‘unhealthy’ and that men are allowed to be more emotionally open.

They survey found the majority of men (74%) were touched emotionally to cry most often by the death of someone close to them. However when questioned about this in detail it was found men most often shed those tears of grief in private, rather than at funerals. The other primary tear-triggers for men are sad moments in films or on TV (44%) and the breakup of a romance or relationship (39%). Music to a lesser degree was also found to be capable of moving a man to tears.

There is no evidence to suggest that men are somehow created to be “less emotional” than women and are more cold and unfeeling. Research indicates men experience just as much emotional feeling as women. Experiments measuring physical responses to emotion have shown men respond at least as much as women in most cases. Men are simply less emotionally expressive than women.

I am here to tell you as a man:  crying can be cleansing and renewing. Having held back such intense feeling for much of my life, it was a surprise to learn in the last ten years the therapeutic value of tears. There has not been some emotional basket case syndrome come over me, nor is crying something I do every day or even every week. However, when I feel tears coming I don’t hold them back as I once did. Although I will admit sometimes where I am or who I am with still causes me to stifle them. The old conditioning of “big boys don’t cry” kicks in then knowing there are still many people who attach a stigma to a man who cries.

As silly as it may sound to some, I am very grateful to finally be able to let tears vent what I am feeling on the inside. This ‘big boy does cry’ and it has proven to be a healthful thing for me.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears,
for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth,
overlying our hard hearts.
Charles Dickens