Last week I went on about how most of us just want to have a life we can live, so we want to live more of it, so we might want to pay a modicum of attention to exercise and diet and…Oh! By the way: Medicare covers obesity prevention work and it’s worth doing even if we won’t ever become that lithe, hard-body you always see sprinting across the supermarket parking lot, indiscernibly encumbered by 150 pounds of greens and yogurt and…
Then I ran across a “New York Times” article about studies revealing that more and more of us in “later life,” or the “older generation,” are falling prey to eating disorders! Yes! Folks (well, women outnumber men on this one, 10:1) in their 50’s, 60’s and beyond going WAY beyond: restricted eating, excessive exercise, laxative abuse…Killing themselves.
So I thought, “Oh, great! Last week you go on about losing weight so you have a life and don’t kill yourself and this week you can go on about not losing too much weight so you have a life and don’t kill yourself. Talk about a ‘mixed message’…!” And figured I’d back off of that bad idea.
Mixed message. It is and it isn’t. It’s good and it’s bad. Some is good, too much is bad, unless it’s not enough…We think it’s good this week, but we might not think that next week, so stay tuned for the new study of the old studies that studied the studies previously done on folks who did too much of that…Or too little…
Enough! I’ll show you: I’m just going to do the best I can with my own common sense and to…HECK with all of your mixed messages!!!!!
Sound familiar? Me, too. And when you stop and think about it, that’s what we’ve been doing all of our lives: Trying to make our way through a morass of mixed messages and conflicting information and values and philosophies and recommendations and…All of our lives, even before we can remember, we were being told what to do and what not to do; true enough, in those very early years, most of what we don’t remember hearing was being said to us for one very good reason: Survival.
Survival IS a good reason: Do this so you don’t die, don’t do that so you don’t kill yourself, if you keep doing that it’ll get you someday and don’t ever do THAT, because it’ll be the beginning of the end! And, in some cases, they were right.
In some cases, they weren’t – We know, because we tried it.
But for almost all of us, there’s never been a shortage of people, institutions, agencies or philosophies who were more than willing to tell us how to live – To teach us how to live. To show us what is right-and-true, and valuable and important and insightful and accurate and wholesome and tidy and the “…way your mother would have wanted it.”
Or whomever.
And do you know what almost all of us have done? Some of it. Some of this, some of that. Experimented. Learned the “hard way.” Made horrible mistakes that we dutifully teach those we love to never make, and succeeded where we were dutifully taught we could never succeed. Maybe we didn’t die, but we wish we hadn’t done it, or maybe we didn’t die and we wish we done a lot more of it a lot sooner!
And then there are the things that we don’t want to remember or admit, even to ourselves – Yup, they were right about those.
But sometimes we were “right:” We took the chance! We sucked-up the courage and did it, anyway, and soared into places that we could never have imagined! Places and people we could never have known! - If we’d listened, if we’d “learned,” if we’d obeyed.
Even the “good” among us have been “bad,” sometimes, and even the bad among us have been good, at times.
Mixed messages.
So we’ve made our ways the best we could: Trying to learn, trying to do better, trying not to make things worse or be part of the problem, trying to follow the rules – Mostly, depending, of course, upon which rules those might be…Or, whose rules.
We’ve made choices, up-and-down, good-and-bad, smart-and-SCARY stupid! We’ve made our ways the best we could, and the story of how we got to “here” from “there” rivals “Gone with the Wind!”
You know what? Maybe it does; so when I got an e-mail from a gentleman politely and graciously pointing out that, in my various “guides” of how to do or survive this-or-that, perhaps I’d neglected to mention the value of leaving your legacy, the story of your life - I had to let that sink-in.
I certainly experience my admittedly labyrinthine and…eventful life in epic panoramas, but who else would? It’d just be boring to anyone else…Wouldn’t it? And on what basis did I decide that? On behalf of the people who purport to love me? Because I know what’s “right?” True?
Because somebody told me so?
Oh, dear. So, if we’ve made our ways the best we could, then maybe we ought to leave the ways we came: Tell the stories, label the pictures, explain the mementoes…The way we came. So someone else could understand.
So someone else could learn.
So someone else could know when to go straight ahead on the path we left, or veer off into the unknown.
Or maybe just as a way of saying, “I was here, so you don’t have to be.”
And if you’re a caregiver (you know, someone who’s taking care of someone who needs to be taken care of, whether they like it or not), could it be time that you “veered off into the unknown” to take a little care of you? Yeah? OK, try this:
If you’re an unpaid caregiver who happens to live on the West End (actually, you can live anywhere you want) you could get in on a new series of “Powerful Tools for Caregivers” classes, starting July 11. You’ve heard me talk these before – They change lives, literally.
Starting July 11, 1:00 to 3:30 pm at the Calvary Chapel, 451 5th Avenue, in Forks, and going every Wednesday for six weeks. Worth learning more about? Call Susie at Family Caregiver Support, 374-9496.
And this is NOT a “mixed message.”
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