Stolen Moments

What a wonderful day today! My cell phone tells me it's 70 degrees outside while the announcer on the radio on my way to work this morning said it's supposed to average in the 40's this time of year. Now I know this is probably climate change but it's very difficult to be upset with it on an early, so welcome, spring-like day.

Its lunch time now and after running some errands, I stopped by a nearby green area. What I mean by that is, it's just a field of grass with a tiny parking lot and small playground that's devoid of any children today. I come here sometimes just to get some alone time in nature. It's just a small little place and I'm only here for a brief amount of time but it's so blissful to me. Especially on a day like this, when I can roll the windows down, recline the seat all the way back, and just lay there with my eyes closed and allow my thoughts to flit through my mind.

I think I'm an Ambivert these days, an extroverted introvert. I love to socialize, but downtime, alone time, is so very necessary. It's the time when I don't have any obligations or things that I am trying to accomplish. Instead I'm just still. Physically I become more still, and it allows a space where the thoughts flowing through my mind can be noticed. It's these thoughts that help me understand myself... my motives, my inclinations, my feelings, concerns and aspirations.

These moments are almost always stolen. I steal them from time as a parent, from time as an employee, from time as a friend, a daughter, all the roles I endeavor to fulfill. But in reality, there is no greater role for me to pay attention to then the role in which I am in service to my own self. If I don't take care of my own emotional, mental, physical states, then who will? And how will I have enough to give anyone else?

And as usual, it's time to get back to the day's work... for there are never enough stolen moments from my perspective. But, what I do get, always has to make do.

Me Time

I can remember when I used to do all my writing sitting in the other room, the family room, at the desktop computer.  I next to never sit at that computer anymore.  I'm in my room, in my sanctuary.  At least it feels like that again to me now.  I want the rest of the house to return to that vibratory level, too.  This place took a really hard few hits over the past few years... and when you are taking hard hits, it reverberates into so many directions and areas of life, even into adjacent dimensions, I imagine.  

Anyway, my house is in a state of distress, for the most part.  If each of us have our own "pain bodies" to haul around, then so do houses on some level, and right now I'm not the only person living here.  There are 4 of us: my 16 year old daughter, 19 year old son, and my 45 year old brother.  I am 41.  And I rule this house. lol  Maybe not well, but I do.  I'm responsible for its state both bad and good.  If I want improvement here, I need to do the work.  I started where it would affect me the most, in my bedroom.  And although I have not made too much more progress in other areas of the house (I stay busy), the living room is in my cross-hairs.  It was last Sunday (fail) and it is now this Saturday AND Sunday if need be.  

But I am sure I will "play" at least equally as much.  I spoil myself these days... I'm out running around town taking photos by car or on foot, usually a combination of the two with more than one stop along the way.  But not lately... brrrrrrr lately!!! :(  Plus, I'm just coming through to the other side of it being too dark too early to catch a sunset on my way home from work or later in the evening.  

So tonight [last night by the time this was posted] anyway, I am "in" for the evening, have been a while.  My son is at work (he works at a movie theater), and my daughter should be on her way home from her boyfriend's house (there is a 2-hr delay tomorrow or she should have been home sooner).  My brother? Probably watching the news or some entertainment news show, or... yes, football.  There's probably a much wider variety of shows he watches.  I try not to pay attention.  I don't like to watch TV where I'm force-fed from the powers at be.  But I do have my own vices (*ahem* GoT among several others, all of which I could do without except GoT).  I just can't stand to have a television playing every hour I'm conscious like he does.  I guess it's considered "white noise" to some.  If only!  

So tonight, I don a sweater, prop myself up against the headboard of my bed, pull the covers up to my waist, and let my fingers transcribe my thoughts.  This is what brings me joy in life, to be left to my own vices to listen to my thoughts and feel my way through my emotions.  To learn to heed the messages my body is telling me.  To hear what friends and family say to me and care about their outcomes and try to be of assistance when timing and synchronicities collide.  This is done relatively blindly of course... I go with my gut, like I do most other things.  Except when I don't.  And I learn, yet again, how and when, through retrospective thought, I fell out of the flow.  And I notice the pattern and commit it to memory... try to remember this lesson when next I am faced with it again.  

Lesson after lesson, blow after delight, glorious joy and bliss, breaking through a spiral of cycles.  Suddenly stepping up and having the rest of me just sort of, with varying lag, come into alignment with the transformed self.