Two Plans and Many Details

Almost my first thought this morning was to set a daily plan. That was the easiest part as it turned out. The thought. In the past many years I’ve worked a morning routine developed for epilepsy management. If that routine were to have a title it would be Prepare for Self Care and it always includes a morning cup of tea. Then journaling where today I thought I would quickly sketch out a plan for today. Several years ago, I took a pencil sketching class. We were to copy a picture of a simple flower. I spend a lot of time sketching in every single detail. I didn’t get it finished by the end of the classes, but I did get it finished. So a Plan for Today. Easy. But it is always about the details! And so I questioned the quotation from Jasper Fforde I used for last night’s blog: “The best plans are always the simplest.” Simple? My Plan started with preparation for my weekend trip. Pack - put things in - take things out - and don’t forget your meds. Bus 7:15am. Scratch a morning blog post. Not enough time for that. Empty compost and garbage. I know - it’s only a weekend but there were good reasons. Bus at 7:15 and the walk to the station takes 10 minutes. Good it’s not raining but I have an umbrella with me and I’ll wear my raincoat. Those thoughts and more raced through my head before I was even finished my smoothie prepared yesterday just for this morning. So what I have learned is that I need some broad guidelines for creating a Daily Plan. Filling in all the details makes the plan quite overwhelming.

Daily Planning - A Work in Progress

1. Preparation 
2. Flexibility
3. Watch the busy work
4. Time lines

“Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything.”

~ W.G.Sebald, Vertigo

*******

Yesterday's Plan

This story from yesterday’s planned Writer’s group.  Topic - write about an Irish fantasy. The very interesting part of yesterday was that five of six writers chose a different piece of Irish mythology: selkies (seals can lose their skin and walk on land as men), kelpies (water spirits in the shape of a horse), leprechauns (little men full of mischief and known as shoe makers), banshees (a wailing woman whose cry predicts the death of a family member) and ‘thin places’ (a divider between the physical tangible world and otherworld dimensions).

Just a Bit of Mischief

*Carlingford’s Sliabh Foy Loop trail is officially protected land for the 236 Leprechauns that apparently live in Ireland. Thomas didn’t know that this lovely trail was his to roam. ‘Oh, don’t you know that it’s a beautiful day with the sun a-shinin’ and the birds just a-twitterin’, all their music ridin’ on the breezes that rustle the leaves on the trees. And just look at those little clouds. Little white fluffs like heads of ripe dandelion, edging close to the sun for a bit of it’s lovely, warm gold.’ Thomas was not talking to anyone in particular but the rabbits and deer along side the trail. Thomas had been summoned to the town of Happy, nestled in the foothills of Grim Mountain to bring a bit of magic to change the sadness to happiness again. It was that or change the name of the town. Granny Marsh had sent for him. Against the wishes of most of the townspeople, she had decided it was the only solution. The problem was the Mayor. When he was elected, the town of Happy was, well, happy. He smiled and told them all how things would be so much happier. But Granny knew better. She knew of the Leprechauns and believed in their magic, but also knew that no one would come to help unless they were called. They didn’t need to be called to create mischief, but to help? Now that was a more serious matter. When Thomas arrived, all decked out in his *fine red outfit and tri-cornered hat, he went first to Granny Marsh’s front porch where she was knitting and rocking. Anyone watching would only see Granny talking to herself, leaning back in her rocker and laughing, getting serious and leaning forward and talking some more. Pointing her knitting needles to the town hall, the townspeople heard her say - ‘Himself is in his office and makin’ money means more to him than this little town.’ No one in the town could see anything except a big beautiful rainbow that reached from beyond the town of Happy all the way over top and behind Grim Mountain. The Mayor had been looking out the window of his office, a smug and smarmy grin on his face. When the rainbow appeared he thought that he saw a big pot of gold go flying all the way up the the rainbow and down again, all the way behind Grim Mountain. “I resign!” were the last words anyone heard the Mayor say. He did not even stop to get his coat or his hat. He jumped out of the window to the roof below and then to the street. The last anyone saw of Mr. Mayor was the dust he churned from running towards the end of the rainbow behind Grim Mountain. Thomas returned to Granny’s porch, where she was still rocking and knitting. ‘There you go then Granny. If that’s all you needed me to do, I’ll be off then. I’ll just take a spin around your fair town and see if there just might be some mischief that needs takin’ care of.’ The town of Happy was so happy that they didn’t even notice fence posts painted purple or a goat untied from it’s post.

*celtic-weddingrings.com

*Irish folk lore describes Leprechauns as men who wore red outfits and tai-cornered hats. Irish novelist Samuel Lover describes Leprechauns as such in his 1831 work Legends and Stories of Ireland.

A Puzzle a Day

Plans have frequently eluded me and I’m not sure why that is. From the book Coaching the Artist Within by Eric Maisel one sentence made me sit up and take notice:“When it got harder I stopped planning.” I saw my various projects with a different perspective. It has always been easy to have a goal, often more like a very dreamy dream. It has usually been easy to gather the materials I need for any project.  However if the goal set is too far away, or when it gets harder, the project is left to stagnate, often forgotten. All I need do, is look at the clutter on my table, glance over at the card table with my paints ready to go, my crochet basket with an unfinished sweater………and with each one of them as soon as it got harder I stopped. Granted I have looked up solutions to get me past any particular block, but resist going further, and ultimately lose interest. Of greater importance is my will to move further into retirement. A simple task - fill out government forms, put them in the mail box and all done. I’ve filled out government forms before, and forms for work, for donations and on and on. But this retirement thing is hard, really hard.

Sorting through my mind about retirement is also hard. It is not as simple as putting cutlery in it’s proper places in the drawer. Not as easy as culling out and donating books to a library. It is confronting that age-old issue of identity and purpose. I have long said to myself that my epilepsy is not my name, is not me it is merely a part of me. A pretty important part of me that shouldn’t be neglected. But nursing? If I retire from a decades long work in nursing, where do my beliefs in nursing go? Were they ever important? Are they still important or just outdated and now meaningless.

Bumping along through all of these questions, the government form waving at me like a ghost even though buried beneath other paperwork, I return to plans and goals. Also from Coaching the Artist Within, one of Eric Maisel’s clients, reminded him of a conversation they shared. ‘Do you remember that? We decided that goal was sexier and more exciting and that plan was dowdy and boring. But there was much more muscle in a sentence like ‘I plan to………every day. It was like the difference between getting up and going to work or staying in bed wishing that the work would get done. I’d been spending a lot of time in bed entirely depressed and couldn’t deal with ‘goals’. But I could deal with a daily plan.’

So what plan have I had on a daily basis, or have I? Actually a fair amount, minus the forms and the actual stepping away from nursing employ. In about 2004, when I was living in Kelowna, I did start with hesitation on a plan to write as a retirement activity. I just started with little ideas, and stories, but no plan to write daily. I took a bit of a sabbatical on that plan until I was settled here in Victoria. I began to write daily. I have planned to be in contact more frequently with family, which has improved but still needs work. I have been participating in book club, writing groups, and spending time with friends. All of these activities outside of the sphere of nursing in order to learn more about the world outside of health care. Writing for over a decade has become part of my life, and still there are spaces of time. Spaces of time that I can use at my discretion. My future seems to hold lots of quite scary open space, so I am encouraged to expand my horizons. Maybe only in the writing world, or could there be more?  I don’t wish to ‘spend a lot of time in bed and entirely depressed’…wishing my life to be filled without my energy behind it. Puzzling out a plan, in the morning, on a daily basis is intriguing suggesting each day can be shaped and made to measure and giving me that future. 

“The best plans are always the simplest.”

~ Jasper Fforde

**Please remember! March is Epilepsy month. Purple Day for Epilepsy is March 26 around the world and in your neighbourhood.

Positioned

Well, I’m excited! Food is costly, household supplies are costly, and pharmacy costs for aches, pains and such like another bill to pay. For February, I did my usual writing but with an eye to the depth of the writing. I am not wholly satisfied, but am still curious about what it means to go deeper not wider. For a couple of years now, I have been tracking my food expenditures. Not my going out to lunch or supper expenditures, but just the food I bring into my house. Slowly, I have been able to see a pattern emerge allowing me to create a spending plan for food. I am willing to set a spending plan, but a strict budget makes me want to run away and hide. My immediate plan was to learn about my spending. Impulse spending? Oops!  

David Cain on his blog, raptitude.com, started me thinking about the food inside my cupboards and refrigerator. I have prided myself on my ability to use my food well, making my own meals for work days and having easy access to soups and snacks. In general, cooking and enjoying all aspects of food has been a big plus. Growing it, preparing it and definitely eating it. Missing from the big picture was what the actual costs were to me - aside from the power bill. An organic result has been a plan that has emerged, a plan that deepens my habits of a lifetime. The plan? Using up the leftovers in more creative ways. Coming from a family and generation that were just meat and potatoes, I have learned to use spices to spice up my dishes, research what mixes and matches, listen to the gurus of food shows and use just a soupçon of courage in the kitchen.

How many times did I throw out a blackened and watery head of lettuce? How many times had I let my garlic sprout in the darkness of my own cupboard? How many spices have I had for years…..and for some let’s make that decades. Each one of those food items cost me financially. Tearing up the dollars would have been an anathema to me. I would have been horrified! But if I exchanged them for a head of lettuce, well, it was just logical to let it rot in my fridge and then throw it out. A kind of putting off of tearing up the dollars given to a grocery store. Granted I have been contributing to someone’s monthly pay cheque, benefits their employer provides and of course the store’s profit margin. In the meantime, my tiny profit margin slowly gets whittled away.

February has passed and I am pleased with my spending results. I am taking this ‘go deeper, not wider’ into as many areas of my life as possible. Closer than ever to retiring from my nursing career brings me closer to the beginning of a life completely foreign to me. Courage and bravery is called for more than ever. So for the month of March, I hope to see what I may already have designed for this new chapter. For this month’s blog, I have no specific theme but to explore in greater depth that frightening place a whole lot of folks have gone before, but one that I have never wished to explore.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. 

It cannot be chased without changing our thinking.”

~ Albert Einstein

**Please remember! March is Epilepsy month. Purple Day for Epilepsy is March 26 around the world and in your neighbourhood.

Into the Depths

It was a party. Haven’t had one quite like it for a very long time! No one was invited so it was only me standing alone in my living room looking out at the dark. My mood was as dark as the night sky. The only lights - and there were a lot of them - were street lights, a curving moon, car lights swishing back and forth, and the warm glow of living room lights in apartments across the street. 

Now you may think I shouldn’t be talking about these dark moods, but I think that it’s important that dark moods be given a hearing now and then. Have you ever tried to keep a smile on your face continuously for even an hour? How about keeping that smile in your heart when your head is running non-stop with every conceivable negative thing past, present and definitely future? I can usually get my black belt anti-gremlin stance on and just knock all the mud balls up, down and sideways. But when I have a cold (which I do), or when I’m over tired (because a cold makes me overtired) those gremlins get the upper hand. I tried to ignore the little darlings and, with a good box of tissues, reminded them that this Pity Party is my Pity Party and they had not been invited. Those silly gremlins kept scritch-scratching at my minds door. I kept trying to ignore them while I wallowed around in the warm mud of Poor Me Lake. It sometimes does take going down into the very depths of Poor Me Lake, bruising myself on the rocks at the bottom and pushing myself back to the top where I can breathe. 

Once all that whining and caterwauling was over I went back to bed, had a sound sleep and when I awoke, the fears and awfulizing of the previous night seemed but a nasty nightmare. There were some real concerns, but valid issues, not wisps of panic.

“You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, 

but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.”

~ Johnny Depp

February Afternoon

Sunshine on raindrops

glistens winter greenery

stray drip-drops from the eaves

out of sync with unruly rain

bare branches, warmed by the sun, wave lazily in cold breezes

rusty grass skeletons bob fitfully

traffic rolls by 

in a hurry to get somewhere

bright pinks, oranges and reds  ~

a schoolyard troop 

saunters by with their guardians.

Sunshine brightens colours,

leans shadows all around

finds depth in this ordinary afternoon. 

“February is the uncertain month, neither black nor white 

but all shades between by turns. Nothing is sure.”

~ Gladys Hasty Carroll

Look!

Where does it come from?

Curiosity.

Slipping past society’s filters

Climbing in an open window

Nudging at a crack in a door 

Scaling a tree to see in the distance

Watching a seed burst it’s skin in spring ~

Coming unbidden from the depths of the soul with questions tucked below the surface.

A beckoning finger to pull us forward.

“I set out to discover the why of it, and 

to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”

~ Charles Baudelaire

Movie Review: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool directed by Paul McGuigan

Taken from the pages of Peter Turner’s journal, this is a simple story with a complex back story showing a wonderful depth to the love between Gloria Grahame and Peter Turner. Gloria Grahame, a film star from the Golden Age of movies and Peter Turner, more that 30 years her junior met casually in the rooming house they each lived in. From that meeting, a smoky friendship blossomed into a love affair that would be Gloria Grahame’s final love affair. Annette Bening played this role with sincerity and with real gentleness. Set in 1978, Peter Turner was a young actor borne to a working class Liverpool family. Jamie Bell captured the role of Peter Turner and the relationship with Gloria Grahame with heart and with sincerity. Their's was a transatlantic affair but concluded in Liverpool where Gloria Grahame had left film and was back on the stage. I don’t often cry in movies any more, but at the end, a single tear escaped from my eye. This was a beautiful, haunting movie that I would see again any day.

“It’s quite a simple story. It is just two people in a room, 

really, at the end of the day. And so I wanted to 

make sure that it had its own cinematic language to it.”

~ Paul McGuigan, director

Director: Paul McGuigan

Partial Cast

Annette Being as Gloria Grahame

Jamie Bell as Peter Turner

Vanessa Redgrave as Jeanne McDougall, Gloria’s sister

Julie Walters as Bella Turner, Peter’s mother

Kenneth Cranham as Joe Turner, Peter’s father

Stephen Graham as Joe Turner Jr., Peter’s brother