Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today I went with my friend to a water exercise class and had a great time.  Everyone was friendly and told me their names and helped me with the exercises and gave me tips.  We were all about the same age and no one had the figure they once did and no one was embarrassed.  I was immediately comfortable, and the warm water was soothing, though I struggled with executing some of the exercises.  The "noodle" was impossible for me to control, and it kept popping up or I went under.  Half a dozen women reassured me it had taken them months to be able to control it.  Their kindness mitigated my embarrassment.  Friendliness should never be underestimated.  I'll go back Thursday, because of the warm atmosphere, not the warm water.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We went to friends' house to watch the Oscars, and had a great time, but my husband doesn't like people talking at all when he's watching something, and I could see he was irritated a few times and he said so today.  He cannot stand much distraction, and it's a handicap for him in social situations.  He tries, but I don't think it's going to change.  He is generally so anxious that little things throw him off.  I don't explain him to others, that would be insulting, and I myself no longer become irritated.  It's a challenge and a burden for him, but others are doing nothing wrong.  I'd love to be able to lift this stress from him, but it doesn't work that way.  So I am a witness to his struggle, a sympathetic one, but I've learned not to take responsibility for it.  I never push him to do social events, so that when he does it's his decision.  I do a lot of socializing without him, and he's okay with that, though for him it brings up his struggle.  His agreeing to go last night was an act of courage, and I told him so.  That is right speech:  that witnessing and acknowledging.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I've just said goodbye to my best friend who was here for three days.  We had a great time and talked a lot, but interestingly, not as intensely and compulsively as we used to when we were younger.  Part of that is our weekly phone conversation, so there is nothing really to "catch up" on, and also the comfortableness we feel in each other's presence.  And I noticed my husband has figured out how to weave in and out of the conversations and activities without going mad trying to get a word in edgewise.  He knows how to get in his two cents and get out when the subject bores him.  This is all good, because the three of us are taking a twelve day trip together in June, and it's a first.  Before, my friend and I have traveled alone, or once, with my childhood friend.  So we're trying something new and different, and it symbolizes a new level of connection for the three of us.  We each know how to take care of ourselves and each other pretty well, after forty years.  I love it!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend is coming today for a short visit, and it's been a while since we saw each other.  It was last May.  We used to visit each other, but now we usually plan a trip and do that instead.  However, she has been a champ about attending my kids' weddings and before that graduations and such.  I attended her son's wedding, but I've got three more kids than she does so she ends up doing the lion's share of traveling for events.  And in the fall we have the final kid's wedding here, so once again, she stands in as aunt and sister and best friend.  I appreciate it and her, and I'm going to remember to tell her today.  At least this time, her purpose is another's friend's birthday, so I benefit when she visits that friend as well, because she'll be here and then drive there for the event and visiting the town where she lived until she retired.  Gratitude.  I must remember to express it, and not just think it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We watched a movie last night, "The Debt" with Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds.  It's about three Israelis who in the sixties are sent to capture a Nazi doctor and things go wrong,
enough that he gets away and they lie to their superiors and say they killed and buried him.  For 30 years they are heroes, but that decision eats away at them all, but especially the woman and the one man that she loved, but because she impulsively slept with the other man and got pregnant, she can never be with.  Thirty years later, though she and the man she does not love are long divorced, their daughter writes a book lauding them.  Then they find out where the Nazi is, and that he is still alive and a reporter is about to interview him.  The one man has been ordered by the exhusband to find and exterminate him, but kills himself instead when the woman will not agree to finally go public about their deception.  She is sent by her ex to kill the Nazi before the reporter speaks to him.  Thus, the two people who were in love are eliminated, along with the Nazi, but before she dies she gives the reporter the real story.  Karma has punished each for the lie. 
You can see that the three, when young, were innocent, and never intended to kill themselves, just bring back the Nazi for trial.  But they kill their souls by taking credit for something and having to bolster and repeat lie after lie to conceal the truth.  We have great sympathy, as they have lost relatives in the war, but their lack of courage about admitting he escaped is the catalyst for disappointed, miserable lives, though the couple with the daughter become famous and powerful.  The third spends his life looking for the Nazi, unable to live with the lie.  So love is killed, and when the truth comes out, the daughter will be ashamed and humiliated, and her view of her parents forever tainted.  We cannot always know what consequences our actions will bring, but speaking falsehood is in this case like drinking poison.  It's a powerful lesson.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We're having another deluge, and when I returned from walking our dog, we were both soaked.  Another day for reading or a movie.  Fear arises in me during these storms, as we have huge trees that could fall on our house, both on our property and on either side of us.  Last week two enormous trees fell:  one crushed three cars, the other blocked the whole street for a day.  I stopped by our younger son's place this morning and his fiance asked me if we had felt the earthquake Saturday morning.  I was visiting our older son, so had not.  But this kind of weather reminds us Nature is powerful and we are not in control.  It makes us jumpy.  When I was on the phone yesterday with a friend in another state, she described how nervous she was feeling about earthquakes.  Part of this is natural, and part may be the result of the election and the turmoil right now in Washington, D.C.  The zeitgeist is anxious. 
We're never in control, but storms like this don't allow us to ignore this fact.  We face it or wonder why we're snapping at our children.  I'm attempting to sit with this fear, and while I probably won't befriend it, I can cut myself some slack.  After all, I am an ordinary human being, so I guess I'll just join the crowd.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I was just visiting my 16 month old grandson, and his speech is an explosion of new words, all expressed with utter joy:  bunny, car, train, book, soft, kittie, momma, daddy, cracker, etc.  His exuberance is contagious, and it gets so excited he exhausts himself, running bowlegged on his newly walking legs, carrying a book and ten a car and then a ball.  He found lots of his stuff under the sofa and I got a broom and we pushed it all out:  a truck book, a yellow ball, his hair brush, his train car.  Yellow is his favorite color and sunny is his disposition.  I could listen to him all day.  I follow after him like a puppy, attempting to keep him from electrocuting himself or hitting his head on the furniture or climb the footstool in the kitchen.  Life is just that miraculous, but we forget.  Our grandchildren make us remember just how extraordinary the ordinary world is.