Saturday, April 26, 2008

No Complaining

On Monday, my brother-in-law, a paraplegic pain managment physician, was admitted to the hospital with a high fever and high white blood count with a severe infection.

That same evening, a friend who is also my daughter's Girl Scout leader said she had just returned with her husband from the oncologist in planning chemotherapy for the next year for his rare cancer.

Wednesday, I received a text message from my sister in law, telling me that her daughter was back in the hospital after only two and a half weeks, suffering yet again from terrible pain of colitis, and not able to keep anything, food-wise, in her body.

Last week, my mother-in-law lost two friends to cancer and illness.

Our nephew, a US National Guard volunteer, last week heard that he would be sent back to Iraq in November, and his term with the Guard was to end in June.

My husband's business is at the cusp of greatness. Our older daughter is excited, yet hesitant about middle school next year. Our younger daughter is going camping at the zoo tonight. My days are filled with working at the school, for my husband and my mother, and at my home fulfilling the responsibilities of wife and mother.

Am I complaining about my personal life now? Not any more.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Sound. Listen.

Go outside and listen.

Okay, now that you’re back, what did you hear? Do you hear the TV inside, your phone ringing, traffic from a nearby thoroughfare or a car driving down the road in front of your home? Or was it just, Quiet. The buzz of a fluorescent street light or electricity poles, a faraway dog barking, crickets, or just the tiny cracks and creaks and droppings of the earth as a soft wind rustles through the debris on the ground. The Quiet sound is lovely.

The quantity of sound in cities has increased in the last two hundred years. Especially back in the early times after the death of Christ, there were no automobiles to cause engine and horn noise giving you the dull roar of a nearby busy road, only horses hooves clopping along the stone and dirt roadways. Electricity did not exist, eliminating the sounds of a television, stereo, blow dryers and washing machines. No telephones meant no ringing, blinging cells and home phones.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear the Quiet more often? An example of this quiet was during the above mentioned times. The Roman and Greek architecture of the outdoor amphitheaters built is amazing. One sitting on the top row of the theater can hear a person whispering to another on the stage, one hundred feet away, with no microphones or speakers. The architects must have had excellent knowledge of acoustics to be able to do that, we conjecture.

But wait, how did they figure it out, so long ago, without the many formulas and equations that have only been around for a few hundred years? No fancy Mega-billion byte computers to measure and test the effects of sound, to then be implemented in an outdoor site on the outskirts of town. What an awesome evening that would be, to watch a live outdoor performance with talented artists entertaining an audience of hundreds, and to hear every word.

Listen for the quiet, and see how quiet it really isn’t.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

The Heart is a Muscle

Have you seen the new New Balance running shoe television advertisement? It features a male runner, plodding through a techno-futuristic-high-rise landscape with a grim look on his face. It appears that he has gone quite a distance, for the sweat on his body glistens to display this. The ad addresses balance, and achieving it through running. A Love / Hate symbol appears at the upper left hand side of the screen, and as the commercial comes to a close, and the man fades away, a smile beginning to creep across his face, the Love side of the graphic enlarges, while the Hate reduces – Love / Hate. We love to grow, get stronger and faster, but we sometimes hate the process we must go through to reach that.

A friend made an analogy between this type of muscle growth – a race, to win, compared to the trials and tribulations of life, for our goal of a stronger, more peaceful life. When we work out our bodies lifting weights, running, biking, swimming, or participating in a team sport, we actually tear down healthy muscle to build new, stronger muscle in its place. It sounds a bit backwards when you think about it, that we actually break down, and feel the pain sometimes, to reach a goal. To win a race, to score points, to be more healthy.

This tearing down of our own bodies puts into perspective some of the trials we go through in life. By trials, I’m talking about love hurts, family issues, raising children, financial difficulties, illness and death. Everyone has trials. Life is not easy, whether you have lots or little of wealth, beauty, talent or intelligence.

I feel safe in saying that every person in the western world has been hurt physically and emotionally in some way in their lifetime. Of course, the degree of hurt or pain may vary according to the way it happened or was inflicted. We’ve all bumped, scratched or bruised at least some part of our body. Some of us have had illness and life-changing surgery. We all had a brother or sister or friend that said something mean to us and hurt our feelings, and many of us have been hurt much worse by the words or actions of a colleague, dear friend or family member. And many of us have dealt with financial strain, brought upon by emergency situations or by our own misdeeds. And death, it speaks for itself as a trial.

The beautiful thing is that we can regard these trials as the tearing down of our heart, as opposed to our muscles, but that the tearing will reap a stronger heart, revealing a faster recovery time the next time we endure a hurt. The process of healing, if we can recognize it, is when we can realize that we are not in control. The next time pain happens, we are better/faster at healing and dealing with it.

Pain is there for a reason, so rejoice in it! We will be stronger in the future.