Trippin'

Here I am, in the Delta Sky Club, sipping a cup of (free) coffee, nibbling a (free) toasted bagel and some trail mix), using the (free) internet, and waiting for my flight to board. The past week has been kind of an emotional roller coaster ride for me, and has brought me face to face with some things about myself that I have to decide whether to work on overcoming, or simply accept for what they are and go from there.   In practical terms,  these things have a lot to do with the issue of being home, of traveling.  In more general terms, it's all about staying within a comfort zone, and how much willingness/courage/opportunity I have to step outside of it.

I have enough self awareness to know where my comfort zone lies, and I also know that over the past several months-maybe years- it's been shrinking instead of expanding.  Several incidents during the recent past have demonstrated this in spades, most notably the Paris trip we had planned for this week.  I had so much anxiety surrounding this trip - irrational anxiety which had little to do with the unexpected social unrest in that country - but which stemmed from a real, and obsessive fear of leaving home.  I remember having that kind of fear about a trip one other time in my life.  It was the first trip I was going to take as accompanist for the high school choir, a long weekend in New York City which turned out to be one of the most exciting and memorable trips I can remember.  And yet, for days even weeks before hand, I was sick to my stomach at the thought of going on it.

I've traveled a lot since then, on musical trips, and vacation trips, solo and with groups.  And I always experience a certain amount of anxiety, but it's always been manageable.  This time was different - the anxiety nearly crippled me, and in the end played a significant role in our decision to cancel the trip.  The strikes and gas shortages and terror alerts - those didn't help, for sure.  But I'll admit, in a small corner of my psyche, I was almost relieved to have this excuse.

So knowing and recognizing this reluctance to travel, what do I do?  Because I think this fear is only one symptom of a larger and more pressing disorder - the aforementioned shrinking of the comfort zone.  How do I find ways to expand my boundaries?   Or do I simply accept that this is my personality and live within whatever comfort zone I eke out for myself? I can envision my life diminishing into the kind of small, safe box my mother and aunt and grandmother chose to live in.  Occasionally, fed up with the hassles of modern life, I'm tempted to shout "open the lid and let me climb in!"  But then, I think about the brevity of life in general, and wonder if I this is really the way I want to live out the remainder of mine in particular.

Perhaps, as in alcoholism, recognizing the disorder is a sign of half the battle won.  As I did 15 years ago when I went back to work after being a stay-at-home mom,  I need to be alert for opportunities to step outside the confines of my comfortable box.  But knowing who and how I am, I also need a core group of "encouragers" - cheerleaders, if you will -  faithful supporters who nurture and cajole me into taking those first steps.

Then  I might find the sides of the box expanding ever so gently, taking my comfort zone along for the ride.

Oh - in case you're wondering what I'm doing in the Delta Sky Club - we actually did travel this week.  To Newport Beach, California, where we spent a very happy five days driving a Corvette convertible up and down the Pacific Coast Highway.

And so the expansion begins <smile>

Ways and Whys of Writing

This was exactly what I needed tonight - an invitation to write about something so completely opposite from everything else that's been on my mind of late - strikes in Paris, home invasions, frail elderly parents - an opportunity to just think about something I do for me and wallow in a few minutes of geekiness about it. I was enjoying Melissa's blog post earlier today about the "ways and whys" of her writing life.  Her post led to me here, to the post that inspired her and a to a blog I think I could quickly come to love.  I shouldn't be surprised, because its author is the editor of one my favorite e-zines, All Things Girl.  While wandering through her archives, I realize she and I think a lot alike on a number of topics.

But back to her invitation..."Because people fascinate me," she writes,  I am curious about other writers. How do they maintain the discipline?  Where is their best place to write?  When are they most creative?"

Oh yes, the writing life.  It's been getting short shrift around here, mostly because of those afore-mentioned preoccupations.  I recall a time when I came to the page each morning with the same regularity that I set the coffee brewing and opened the back door to let the dogs out.  Life has been fragmented lately, and writing always finds its way to the back burner when that happens.

I'm a morning writer.  My morning ritual starts with strong coffee and reading...immersing myself in the words of good writers helps jumpstart my creative process.  A few years ago, I was deeply committed to morning pages, three pages of handwritten, stream of consciousness style writing, which I found extremely helpful in keeping my own muse satisfied.  Alas, I've fallen out of that habit - or rather, it's been supplanted by morning exercise, which is good for me in an entirely different, but no less important way.  I have a drawer in my desk filled with spiral notebooks from the Dollar Store (34 in all, about one a month), which contain almost three years worth of  morning ramblings from a middle aged woman.

Most of my writing is digital - I work on a MacBook Pro at home and on an old Gateway desktop (circa 2000!) at my office (where I write medical reports for insurance companies and attorneys).   I love paper and pen writing  - but my handwriting has become atrocious over the past few years, especially when I'm trying to write fast enough to keep up with my thought process.  More than once I've scribbled so frantically in hopes of capturing every idea that I've been unable to read it later.  When I write manually, I usually work best with a cheap Paper Mate pen, and a one-subject, wide ruled, spiral bound notebook.

Sometimes (like tonight) I'll get a second wind, and find myself writing late in the evening before bed.  A late night check of e-mail and social media occasionally inspires me, and I'll find myself tearing off a blog post or starting a new story or essay.

I'm fortunate to have a "room of my own" for writing.  It was once my son's bedroom, but when he grew up and moved away, it became my place to retreat for quiet reading, writing, and resting.  I have a desk, and a big easy chair with matching ottoman, where one or two dogs are usually curled up sleeping when I write.  Right now, I'm using a gorgeous wooden lap desk that my husband bought me a while back (one of those "just because" presents that are SO meaningful).

So there you have the "ways" of writing.  As for the "whys" - writing has always been the way I made sense of Life in General and My Own in Particular.  It's a way to tell my side of the story.  Because I think every one has a story worth telling, and that we each learn and are enriched when we share those stories with one another.

How about you?  What are the ways and whys of your writing life?

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.