Scaffolding, Resilience, Relinquishment and Boundaries

Springtime recital joy

 

It's already feeing better

Don't let him fool you. . . he loves Oliver

One of my happy places

The Grand Canyon in March ~ Bill and Mary went

The best prayer. . . 

Please don't slip

It's Sunday afternoon at our cabin, the Little Pines Lodge. If I were a napper I would be napping. Instead, I'm writing. 

I've always, thought, if a person were to read my journals that he or she might think me a troubled person. How often we write our sorrows and how seldom we take the time to write down the joy. I'm writing to say that I'm feeling better. Joy is seeping back. My light is shining again. 

I sprained my ankle on Friday. Not badly. Just enough to set me back. I was tamping down dirt around a new shrub and my foot went down into the hole and twisted. Still, by Saturday night I was having trouble walking. 

Late Saturday afternoon we drove to the cabin after a lovely morning graduation recital and an afternoon of Zoom teacher training. We arrived late and Bill and I settled ourselves in chairs around the new furnace with a little glass of wine. I studied my swollen ankle. We went to bed and with no cats to wake me up, I slept over nine hours. When I woke up the ankle was fine. Healed. In the night the little guys in my body put up the scaffolding and went to work on fixing it. Nine hours with no weight and it was ready to go. 

Ours minds are the same way. Resilient. This weekend the mental health repairmen in my brain went to work and started fixing things too. 

What is the scaffolding? What are the tools of resilience? How do we move from disequilibrium to equilibrium? I'm not talking about clinical depression, but times when events of life reach the tipping point where it's hard to be the light. 

What's in the mental health toolbox? 

• sleep -- hands down the number one tool
• friends, sisters, husbands and mothers who listen and respond with compassion and honesty
• writing in public -- just writing the blog on Friday, admitting I was having a really tough time, went a long way towards relieving the pressure to act like everything is okay
• writing in private -- making a list of everything around me and in the news that is wrong, and realizing that 99% are things I can do absolutely nothing about
• making a gratitude list-- I NEVER take for granted my God, my spouse, my kids, my friends, my family, my home, my studio, my garden, and our cabin, but writing it all down distracts the brain from it's negative pattern -- this is proven 
• relinquishment -- turning it all -- the whole list --over to God, knowing that he loves this world and all the people in it even more than I do -- He does in deed have the whole world in His hands, I can rest knowing that it turns out it not all up to me to fix it all (see humor below) 
• nature -- God's gift of creation -- the ultimate show of resilience 
• humor -- Zooming out and trying to laugh a little at yourself, with compassion
• setting boundaries -- being compassionate ultimately means setting boundaries in myriad ways -- personal and professional, boundaries from the news and social media -- boundaries from overworking -- recommitting to boundaries is an important tool for maintaining the joy of life and relationships 

I'm not some highly read author, I just have a few tried and true friends and family who read this. I certainly don't want to write things that bring people down. I thought about taking Friday's blog post down, but, my mom always told me, if you are feeling a certain way, chances are that someone else is feeling that way too. Maybe it will be of some use to somebody. 

So, if you are like me, a mostly happy cheerful person, who is blessed beyond belief, but who occasionally get pulled down with the events of life, you are not alone. 

Thank you for all the uplifting comments and prayers this weekend. My heart is lighter and I'm ready to shine my light again. 

Lord,

Thank you for my small but beautiful circle of my friends and family who lift each other up and who helped me reignite my candles. Thank you physical and emotional healing and scaffolding. That you for reminding me that I don't have to fix it all. And thank you for reminding me to set healthy boundaries in my life. May these words lift up someone else along the way. 

Amen.