A small special thing that happened to me today was I saw the feather in the title of an article “🗿 So, What Matters in Life Then?  🪶” (it’s at the end).

At the end of the movie “Forest Gump” a feather flies around and the question is discussed if life follows destiny or free will or both, that feather reminds me of that moment. Of questioning the wonder and complexity that is objective reality and subjective reality and the mesh-work of society that forms this world and the mesh-work of planets that lies outside of this world. My mind enjoys questioning everything all together, and though I don’t get many answers, the feather just floating along seems to say, “it’s okay for you to ask though, we all ask sometimes, it’s okay, life is okay.”

There is a lot of hope in that feather, which is a loose body part of an animal, a piece of trash actually, which just happens to be very aerodynamic. A piece of trash from a bird littering the world, but in such a pretty way. Birds are dinosaurs actually, theropod dinosaurs, proven by DNA tests, their feathers seemed to be made for insulation and identification before flight and then flight just developed as a possibility…

I wrote the article and looked for the right symbol/emoji to end with, when I found the feather I never knew for sure if it would work later on my system, it was a very, very small leap of faith to use it, but I did and today it brings me an irrationally large amount of joy to see it now.

I think it’s important to accept those moments of joy as they are, it’s easy to turn them down, thinking what makes you happy shouldn’t make you happy and something else should, but when you turn down the things that really make you happy (that are allowable by ethics) then there often isn’t something else coming that seems more PC or suitable to societal standards coming, in my experience it just leads to a self created famine of joy.

I didn’t write so much of the book, I started to get a daily habit going, then one day my daughter kept bothering me so frequently. Though I played with her already, I do a special time with her almost everyday for an hour, she wasn’t content to let me enjoy my hobby without bothering me over and over and over and over, and again.

She probably does want more time with me (we are always at home together… more attention I guess). But I don’t want more time with her at all. Not at ‘tal… so what can we do? I don’t know yet. I’m not playing kids games for more than an hour, I hate that so much it’s barely possible to justify to myself doing it for the one hour as it is. She wants more, I want less, what will we do?

I’m better thus far at being interrupted for articles and going back to them, it’s very difficult for me to go back to the novel writing for some reason.

I absolutely hate that I’ve had such a bad time with my daughter’s disobedience and interrupting that I’ve quit after three days, but that is what happened. I tired, it was going well, it was hard, but it was going well, then it got unfesable to continue. Perhaps if I just pretend to write for a week? Simply strike the keyboard… then I won’t be as annoyed when my daughter tries to stop me.

I changed my life for her, left work to take her to activities we couldn’t go to when we got off work at 6 PM, I try to arrange the experiments she wants to do, the activities she wants to do, try to involve her in her learning so she can choose what topic, book, or subject she wants to pursue, and when something is important to me and appropriate in how long it takes (I was only trying to write for 30 minutes) she absolutely does not care at all about me following my dreams or just being fair that I help her do the things she wants to and it would be reciprocity to help me have a moment as well. My daughter is 4, my son is 1. My son plays by himself or with me, he claps for me when I try to do something good, he says things like “thank you” even though he can barely talk at all. My daughter would crush every single dream I have if she could just so I wouldn’t offend her sense of ownership of me by ever being unavailable to get her “ice cold water” when it isn’t even hot. I don’t remember spoiling my daughter, but she is so spoiled. It was as if she didn’t need to be spoiled to become spoiled, but that her natural expectations from the world were that everyone in it would give her the best of everything with no work on her part ever. It annoys me to almost no end. Sometimes I feel guilty about not loving the entitlement that makes up a huge part of my daughter. But it’s only human to find some traits that are largely normal for some people are a yuck for others.

We just spent 30 minutes discussing what my daughter wants for her birthday coming up soon, if I felt at all guilty for calling her entitled before that conversation I don’t after it.

When I grew up our parents did get us gifts, but for some reason they almost always got us something we didn’t want that was more or less the same price as what we wanted. I’ll never forget the first time I got what I wanted, I wanted a soccer ball, not a team brand, just a normal soccer ball, a family friend got me one. I was so happy, my parents had never thought it was right to get me what I wanted, they wanted it to be a surprise, but without taking the time or expending the effort to come remotely close to what I liked. The strange thing in hindsight was that they could have spent the same or less to get me something I liked. As a child I thought it was about money, but it was more about not believing it was right to let us have what we asked for. There was a stigma that buying us what we asked for would spoil us, yet buying heaps of other things wouldn’t… I don’t think I’ll ever understand my parents, if I don’t understand them now as a parent myself, I don’t know what would happen to give me insight on their world so far removed from what seems like reason to me. Becoming a parent helped me forgive my parents, it didn’t help me understand them much at all though.

So, since my husband will get my daughter what she wants for her birthday anyways I leveraged the negotiation that she will not bother me when I write if she wants her birthday presents. Terrorism? I don’t know. Effective? I don’t know. But I’m often just grasping at straws in family life.

Another thing that happened as I was writing along is that I started not liking some of what I was writing a few days in, so I switched to trying the snowflake method as an outline.

Hopefully I’ll spend 25 minutes working on it later today. I’m trying to build a habit of having time for the book writing, it may be hard to get started, but if I can just get started I feel like it will feel easier a week from now.

Snowflake Method Introduction by Randy Ingermanson.

❄️

PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION

The mental journey is still the most important aspect of exercising (to me):

So, I’ve been making banana exercise videos for a week already, it’s been getting better as far as finding some kind of angle that will cover all the motion, lighting, those kinds of things, still not calling all the cues, not sure if I want to dub over vs try to do it during active exercise, either one would work better than indecision, but… indecision it is for now.

I don’t exactly know where this is going and I don’t exactly know why I’m doing it, but it’s healthy and it feels right and it doesn’t cost much time since I was doing the same exercise anyways.

WEEK 3 T25: Beta Mode, it’s strange to me that it’s only been a week since I started the banana exercise, because it feels like forever now. I drew that banana icon by the way, and added it with Autodesk SketchBook. I used to use Sketch.io, but it started crashing so much, then I used something new and found it to be much better for me. I guess that’s the opportunity in difficulty, without problems it’s so appealing to never change from something that is fine to something great.

FINANCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Doing fairly bad if by good you mean making money… but I’m learning about things and the overall market, especially in the tech sector took a loss of value, my husband said analyst adjusted the market to lower the value of stocks, I didn’t check that, I don’t care enough to check that.

It was nice making money at first, then it was painful loosing money, then it stopped being painful loosing money, at this point I am still loosing, but since it wasn’t important money I was investing (it was like spending money) it’s cool. I’ve learned a few things, one is that I don’t check more than twice a day the stock values because I refuse to push aside the kids for that and I have needy kids. So I can’t really be at good as buying low as someone who keeps watching throughout the day. Another thing is that my husband is a better investor than me… I was hoping to beat him easily, for no real reason, but I didn’t (at least I won push ups).

Another thing I learned was that when you don’t have a lot to invest and also are not a good investor, it’s much easier to make more money by just going to work. Passive income sounds really fun, but if it was very easy there may not be enough work getting done. It’s possible, many talented people start with little capital and many people with a lot are able to make something decent, yet without either the investment skill set, which isn’t universal, or a large initial investment, regular work still makes a lot more money.

FAMILY TRANSFORMATION

Each day I start out with an imaginary wheel barrel of love for both of my kids, and my daughter wants more than that, but I have only what I have… my son has so much left over, because he wants so much less.

As I made peace with the way my daughter is, needy, dramatic, unsatisfied, but also sweet, hard working, and ambitious, I made peace with my inability to meet all her needs. I do what I can and try to allow her a lot of other people, family and friends in her lives to try to add to her support and world view, yet I think she will only ever have enough love when she learns to bake her own love cookies.

She struggles to be less neurotic, we had to stop her from washing her hands 100s of times a day over the past two days, it was a bit ugly. She thought that if she washed her hands she wouldn’t get sick and actually she did get sick, with what seems like a normal runny nose. She was really afraid of getting sick due to the panic that the news has spread. No matter how much we explained that young people were doing really well with recovery, she was afraid to get sick and she is sick, so she is kind of terrified. We are trying to help her know real facts about microbiology, virus, bacteria, physiology ext, but it’s hard when conflicting information tells her that if she washes her hands she won’t get sick (which is unfortunately not true for airborne particles). I don’t know how many people this year have gotten sick and worried about it being worse than data indicated it should be, it must be truly scary for the elderly who are at real risk, but it’s interesting how easy it is to dismiss the mistake in panic legitimacy in children and honor the feeling in adults. It’s stupid in both or valid in both and I don’t even know for sure which one, but I do know if it’s valid for one it’s valid for both children and adults to be panicked. Children are seen as a nuisance when they freak out and adults are seen as completely in the right due to these “unusual circumstances”.

Each day I keep failing to be as patient with my kids as I’d like to be, but I’ve accepted that that will probably be the outcome of the day and as long as I do the best I can I keep hoping that someday my patience will exceed their ability to annoy me greatly.

SOUL TRANSFORMATION

I haven’t made as much progress here as I would have liked, but since I’ve leveled up in physical and family sectors, I can accept that pretty gracefully.

I recently read about a speech Winston Churchill gave where he said “never, ever, ever, ever, give up,” or something like that. That’s me in the kitchen, trying, hoping, doing something, but it’s not exactly a victory yet.

I have a meal plan, I deviated this week because I found out about Charlotte Mason’s school ideas last Friday, thus I adapted our life style to be outdoors for 6 hours a day this week. Which is great and crazy to me. I thought it would be harder, but since I, my daughter, and my son all love being outside, it’s not too hard at all. We have breakfast, I set up a fence, we go out, have lunch out there, and come back in at 3PM. It’s only been two days, but it feels like a glove that fits for us. The kids do not get board of 6 hours outside, I think we could probably just live outside all the time… my daughter gardens and plays, does more art, does some experiments, plays ball. It’s not the same life as indoors transferred outdoors, it’s a different life. My son crawled under a golf cart to get a ball today, he was figuring out so much of problems solving, cause and effect, spacial awareness. Us three are all better people outside. I’m more patient, because I enjoy the blue sky, the trees in the view. It would be wonderful if we had grass, we have concrete, but at least the kids enjoy drawing on the concrete. At one point in my life I realized I would never be happy if I didn’t learn how to McGuyver happiness with the (sometimes ghetto) stuff available in the current moment. So, although it doesn’t look very much like Waldorf, at least we are finally outside.

Last year my dad left to go to help care for his dad for about a week, he was the chef in the house. I had a bunch of ground beef, so I learned to grill hamburgers. Tomorrow I think I’ll grill our lunch or at least grill the meat I was “supposed to” make into a stew today. It will be easy to grill since the grill is right where I will be with the kids for 6 hours… perhaps I can roast tomatoes on the grill too? We have a grill pan kind of thing maybe I can try.

MENTAL TRANSFORMATION

The more I have going on in my life, the more easily I seem to be able to forgive. I guess I don’t want to be bogged down with the past when I have a present I enjoy?

For whatever reason forgiveness is coming easier. I think I’ve been laughing everyday since I started dressing up in the banana costume.

Laughing at the absurdity of life that is always there, but that is usually invisible. When I can laugh at myself, laugh at life, then I can laugh at the mistakes of myself and others and that paves a pretty good pathway for forgiveness to follow.

I’ve been doing things without fear that I used to be to afraid to do, draw, write, try to write a book, then I have fun, then I forgive others because I don’t want old conflicts cluttering up my mental space that I want to use for the projects I’m enjoying. I never felt fear held me back in major ways, but it’s almost impossible to deny that. It’s weird that I only feel the fear as it leaves, I’m only conscious of it in hindsight. It’s not something I lie to others about, but I’m finding it was something I deeply lied to myself about. I don’t really know why so much fear has left me and so suddenly, but it seems like it has.

I think in part, I was always afraid to ever seem silly, and to be a beginner, which I am in many ways (as an artist, as a writer, as a teacher, as a wife, as a parent) is to make silly mistakes often, such that I wasn’t comfortable being myself until I got comfortable with the silliness that I have. My shadow side was not violence or lust, but mere silliness that I wasn’t owning. I was very afraid to put myself in a position to be laughed at, but I think as humans we are almost constantly in a position to be laughed at… once I stopped trying to not be silly I had so much more energy for the rest of life.

ONE WEEK IN LIFE IN SUMMARY

Body – Can’t explain exactly why, but banana costume exercise is really deeply correct for me, it’s a good core to my preferred lifestyle.

Finances – The stock market isn’t great, but I didn’t depend on it for food or rent, so that’s fine, things are great right now, perhaps nothing is not a good retirement savings, but why dampen the abundance of the moment worrying about tomorrow? It’s not the same as actually saving to worry about savings.

Family – It could be better, but it’s so much better than before that it’s almost blissful. My daughter is volatile, but wants to work with us, that’s major, she still throws huge fits, but it’s 2% as often, which is amazing.

Soul – I’m starting to live outside of my comfort zone often and it’s weird how much more alive I feel, I’m only a tiny bit out of my comfort zone, but life feels amazingly different.

Mind – I’m starting to get a lot of confidence back in my ability to keep going. I may not have completed anything major like a book, but I’m trusting myself to at least consistently take steps towards my goals and I think I will finish those big dreams in a time that works with reality.

THANK YOU READERS!

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.‎

– Oscar Wilde

You are the best you the world will ever have. We are all depending on you to be you. Thank you, for being you. There is a lot of happiness in accepting who you are and owning it, it’s not that easy, but you have to carry who you are, either as debt or profit, you can’t get rid of you, no matter how hard you try. I thank you for being you, and remind you, you are the best you ever, really. No one can ever take that from you.

🐔🌈🌞

(Chicken Art – Life Balance – Things to Be Happy About)