February was a blur of trying to keep up with our daily routines, and occasionally have fun, in between dealing with illness and injury. Well, we made it to March, which is speeding by in a series of weather mood swings. When I started writing this entry, it was a snow dump. Now, though still crisp, it is sunny with intense blue sky.
February-March redux, with the help of my iPhone calendar, my exo-brain:
- I went to yoga, twice;
- Dance group photo day (dress-up time!);
- Birthday parties to attend (2);
- Teachers’ convention, where my theme was the Slow Down movement;
- Met up for the second time with a friend from high school/university days, who has lived in Europe since 2003;
- Weekend extra dance rehearsals (attended 2, missed 1);
- Bingo volunteering;
- Cat sitting 2 cats;
- Informal music concert for AJ (she sang “Colours of the Wind” from Pocahontas)
- Hand-hemmed 12 scarves for my dance group (this was my self-regulation activity)
That’s in addition to our regular weekly activities, including school, work, dance classes X3, music lessons X2. And of course feeding ourselves, making various things dirty, cleaning them, and making them dirty all over again, in an infinite cycle. Oh yes, and we were sick a lot, which I’m not interested in remembering in great detail. But poor AJ missed two weeks of school and Mr Turtle one week of work.
Dani and me were a little bit sick but not as much. But then one of the cats, who was usually very patient, scratched Dani. The two of us ended the month on a course of antibiotics, her for the cat scratch and me for a nasty bacterial (I guess?) vaginal infection that dragged on for a month. A very gross first for me! After celebrating official menopause, there I was buying period underwear again to deal with the mess. I feel like I’ve been on antibiotics a lot the past year. Just call me a superbug breeding lab.
Anyway, I would rather remember February for my scarves:
I don’t understand everything I do. I could give you reasons, but they as likely to be made up as they are to be true. Not because I want to be untruthful, but because sometimes my own motivations are a mystery. I don’t own a sewing machine, but I could have found one and the hems would probably been ok hemmed on a machine.
I felt very strongly that I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to hand sew each one. The scarves were just raw pieces of satin that were quickly cut to match our skirts, which were made just in time for our first performance in January. I did my scarf first because it was fraying apart and I was sure nothing I did could make it worse. Then the ladies liked it and I said I would do everyone’s.
Maybe it is all the reading/listening/thinking I’ve been doing around making conscious choices about technology. Or learning about the Slow Movement, which is a similar idea. Or maybe it feels more like a gift to truly give your time and talents, rather than doing things to get them done. Or maybe I just really needed to spend February and the first week of March hand sewing. Well, that I know I did. Whatever, there was something satisfying about taking unloved and unlovely pieces of cloth and transforming them. They are not all perfect. But that’s kind of also the point. I shared something of myself, even when it was flawed.
The scarves looked great finished. They will no longer fray and the heavier hems hang much nicer, the ladies observe.
Observations, related and not related at the same time: Out there (I define it so deliberately) it seems there is an endless moil always about how to persuade people of this or that, of how to draw their attention, of how, perhaps, to change their minds. That would mean, in theory, that many of us are thinking seriously about how to change other people’s minds. I kind of doubt that is that case though; I think rather that “influencers” act as if their audience do not have minds, or do not want to use them; they do not offer the grace of even attempting to change a mind honestly.
Be that as it may. Sometimes I think about changing my mind (I don’t have the time for anyone else’s.) How does that even happen? My friend D wisely observed once that people do not change their minds easily, and that makes a lot of sense, because generally speaking, our beliefs serve us well in getting along in the world. It doesn’t make sense to constantly disrupt that.
There are times when you have to change, however. And I think for me, it is slow, subterranean, most of the time almost invisible. It involves a lot of observing myself. For example, I might say something to someone, or even write it here, and at the same time be observing it and deciding it is no longer entirely true, all at the same time. Sometimes I don’t know the untruth of something until I say it.
I write to discover; to experience my own slow burn.
I will end here and carry on with March in another entry, even though it is already the last week of March.
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