In a Stew

Didn't sleep very well last night, or the night before that either.  Images from the days headlines kept flashing through my mind.  "Paris Strikes Lead to Significant Flight Cancellations."  "Strikes Cut Fuel to Paris Airports."  "Train Service in Paris Cut by 50 Percent."  "Paris Air Traffic Controllers Walk Off the Job." My normal reaction to headlines like these would be little more than a "tsk tsk."  However, we're supposed to fly to Paris on Saturday night, a trip that's been in the making for more than six months.  Hours of careful preparation and planning, including arranging for my son and daughter in law to house sit watch out for my mom while we're gone, could very easily go up in the smoke from firebombs thrown by some angry protesters on the Paris streets. I admit, I'm not an intrepid traveler.  Especially when it comes to foreign travel, I like to prepare for every eventuality and do everything I can to make sure things will go smoothly and without incident.  The older I get, the harder it is for me to take the necessary risks associated with traveling.  There is a part of me that really prefers to stay home in my slippers, comfy and cozy in my own little house.  I'm perfectly happy here, so why should I risk discomfort, inconvenience, perhaps even downright danger, just to go somewhere and see a bunch of monuments and paintings, or pay exorbitant prices to eat fancy food and drink fancy wine?

So I could quite easily talk myself out of this trip.  You see, I come from a long line of non-travelers, people who are almost pathologically obsessed with being home.  My mother was always a reluctant, if not  a completely rebellious traveler. We rarely ventured far enough away from home to require an overnight stay in a strange bed.  When I was younger, not only did I not understand it, I had no patience with it.  Why wouldn't anyone want to go new places and see new things?

Confession time -  within the last year or two I've begun feeling my own reluctance about leaving home.  Each time I prepare for a trip, even one to my "second home" in Florida, I have to fight back a certain amount of anxiety.   I look around my home where everything is familiar and safe, and feel the cold hand of fear grip my heart when I think about leaving it.

What am I afraid of?

Mostly of the unknown and different.  Of the possibility that something "bad" might happen while I was gone and I wouldn't be here to take care of it.  Of being apart from all the convenient and comfortable routines of my life, the ones that make me feel I'm in control of some small bit of this crazy world we live in.

While I read about the turmoil in this city where I'm about to travel, a tiny, cowardly part of me is almost grateful for a good reason to stay home, is almost hoping the flight will be cancelled and the whole decision will be taken out of my hands.

So, I'm in a stew.  Don't know what will happen - here, or in Paris.

I'll keep you posted.

Scatterbrained

I don't know where my brain is lately. Oh, I know it's still lodged firmly in the bony recesses of my skull.  But the part of it that's supposed to be working - keeping track of all the to-do lists, coming up with things to write about, managing all the little details demanded by the insurance companies I work with, helping me remember where I'm supposed to be at any given time - that part of it seems to have gone missing.

Or at least out to a very long lunch.

I've been feeling REALLY scatterbrained lately, and this is a quite new and unwelcome phenomenon for me.  I've always prided myself on my ability to store details in my head, everything from calendar appointments to log-ins and passwords - even the birthdays of otherwise long forgotten acquaintances were once stored safely in the recesses of my mind.

Recently I feel as if it's all coming unglued in there, as if all the bits and bytes of information stored in my cerebral hard drive have come loose and are floating around in a huge disorganized conglomerate.

At least I'm not alone.  The effects of aging on the middle aged brain have been the subject of a spate of recent magazine articles.  Women are particularly prone to memory lapses and mental confusion.  It seems that as we age, our brains are no longer as adept at blocking out unneeded information, so that the multitude of stimuli we're bombarded with each day clutters the space in our brain...sort of like the way my kitchen table looks by the end of the week when I've dumped everything from mail to work to leftovers on it.  Hormonal changes associated with menopause also affect brain function, causing age related physical changes which make the brain work less efficiently.

It all adds up to  feeling frazzled and addled.  And I feel like I'm losing control.

For a while I've been blaming the state of my life for these changes in mentation - that whole long year filled with loss and disruption seemed to jumpstart this process, and it hasn't improved much in recent months, despite their relative stability.

I also attribute my scattered mental status to the ever present bombardment of stimuli.   I admit I'm often powerless to control my addiction to the internet with its eternal distractions of information overload and constant array of social media.   Unlike the members of my son's generation, I wasn't raised on the mother's milk of the world wide web and all its irresistible fascinations.  My roots harken back to the olden days of four basic TV channels, the FM radio, and the local library.  These old  processors weren't wired for 21st century media, and are working harder and harder just to keep up.

But I can't ignore the fact that I am getting older, and have to accept that my brain will change along with the rest of my body.  Sigh.

Those same magazine articles also assure me I'm not powerless to combat these disruptions in my cognitive ability.  What helps?  Exercise, apparently.   (Good thing I've been spending more and more time pedaling my old bicycle and using my Walk at Home DVD's.)   I'm sure diet and nutrition come into play.  I've also heard that learning new activities helps build stronger brain function.

But somehow I think the solution is as easy as this old acronym -KISS.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Yep, sometimes life is general is just too complicated for this old brain to handle.

How about you?  Where's your brain these days?  How scattered is it?  And what are you doing about it?

Fermentation

I've been away from this space for awhile.  No particular reason for that, just one of those times when there was little to say. Or perhaps much to say, but not quite ready to say it, not quite able to put into words the thoughts and feelings of my heart.

I'm not really sure I'm ready to do that yet today.  In this journey we call writing, especially when we're writing to make sense of life in general, there are resting times when the words are busy fermenting in the mind, processing in some strange sort of alchemical way, until they're ready to bubble over onto the page.

I'll be back when they come to the boil.

What Kind Of Artist Do You Call Yourself?

Every so often, I get into conversation with someone at my office about the world of music.  Recently, some of these conversations have to do with the contract dispute our symphony musicians are engaged in.  Not everyone in the Motor City understands or believes that professional musicians should be paid and paid well for what they do.  Playing music is exhilarating and joyful and personally rewarding.  It's also very hard work, and requires years and years of effort, time, and expensive training, to achieve the professional quality of a world class symphony player.

The other day I heard myself prefacing my explanation about the contract talks by saying, "I am a musician."

For a moment, I took myself aback.  You see, I rarely refer to myself in that way, although I've been studying and playing and performing music for the past 48 years.  Sometimes I get paid for doing it, sometimes I don't.  Sometimes it's a blast, and sometimes it's just drudgery.  But lately, I've begun to think that all those years of playing music entitle me to claim that title.

Here's another moniker I rarely adhere to aloud:

Of course I am - if I'm not, what in heavens name am I doing sitting here, when I could be at the movies, or riding my bike, or out to dinner with friends?  More and more often, the only way I can make any sense of life in general and my own in particular it to write about it.  Whether anyone reads it or not is almost immaterial.

We all like to be recognized by our peers.  But sometimes before that can happen, we need to recognize ourselves first.  We need to call ourselves by name, and affirm what kind of artist we are.

I am a musician.

I am a writer.

What kind of artist are you?

Visit Jamie Ridler's blog and accept her invitation to name yourself.

Borrowed Time

Lately, nary a day goes by that I don't hear news of another illness, and tragic illness at that, people my own age with terminal cancer, MS, ALS, Parkinson's disease.  I'll be honest with you - I feel as if I'm in a war zone of sickness, dodging bullets filled with disease.  Every night I'm able to go to bed unscathed is another battle won. Where is this all death and darkness coming from?  I'm not buying the fact that its purely demographics, that all my acquaintances are "of a certain age" and therefore prone to illness.  There's simply too much of it.

I'm more likely to give credence to the theory that our combination of additive filled foods and polluted environment are slowly but surely contaminating us.  The cumulative effect of years of poor nutrition and exposure to environmental hazards is finally catching up with us, setting off all sorts of adverse chemical processes in our bodies and causing them to turn on us.

I'm also becoming more and more convinced that the 21st century lifestyle is lethal.  You know what I'm talking about - the constant stresses about money and jobs, the worries about terrorism and war, the persistent gloomy predictions about everything from the economy to the survival of planet earth.  Add to that the frantic pace of daily life, the constant bombardment of phones and e-mail and social media demanding our attention, the feeling that there's never enough time in the day to accomplish all the tasks clamoring for our attention.

Frankly, I'm completely exhausted.

Last week as we attempted to jump through all the necessary hoops to satisfy our insurance company's requirement for reimbursement, I collapsed on the sofa in frustration.

"F*@# it," I said.  "I give up.  Let's take all our money and go live in a hut in some third world country where they've never heard of insurance.  We'll just live there until we get sick and then we'll die in peace in our own bed."

"Fine," my husband said, tossing his pencil and calculator aside.  "When do we leave?"

I was only half kidding then, and the more I think about, the more serious I become.  The thought of living this kind of lifestyle for the remainder of my days is becoming almost too daunting to contemplate.  Not to mention trying to cope with the myriad of ways life will change over the next 25 or 30 years - there's me, quaking in my proverbial boots.

Here's what I'm really looking for, the image that comes to mind as the ideal lifestyle - Mayberry.  The little town in North Carolina that was home to Sheriff Andy Taylor, Aunt Bee, little Opie, and daffy detective Barney Fife.  Life was slow and easy, and the biggest problems were whether Otis would need to dry out overnight in his comfy jail cell or Barney would lose his single daily bullet allotment.  Supper was shared every night at the same time, followed by a spell of settin' on the porch.  Maybe Andy would get out his guitar and sing a few songs before everyone headed off to bed.

I dream of going back to a time and place like that, and I know it's an impossibility.  But I feel as if I'm living on borrowed time here - if the economy and the crime and the stress don't get me, then one of those horrible diseases everyone seems prey to surely will.

I also feel like a sitting duck, waiting here powerlessly for it all to happen.

I don't like that feeling one bit.

How about you? Where would you go to escape the stress and dangers of modern life?