MY DAD WITH US KIDS ON AN OUTING IN IOWA AROUND 1960
Health consequences I wish I had known about when I was younger…
Gratitude
Mother’s Day with special thanks to the women who have taken care of me my whole life!
In offering gratitude for the gift of our lives, we celebrate Mother’s Day as it honors all forms of caring and nurturing ourselves and others. Mother’s Day reminds us to express our love and thanks to all of the women who have cared for us, our birth or adoptive mother, our grandmother or teacher or therapist or elder friend who helped us grow up. It also serves to remind us that caring for others is a uniquely valuable skill, one which is not particularly honored or valued in our culture.
When we look at those who devote their lives to caring for others, we see a subculture of healthcare workers, daycare workers, teachers and counselors who are not paid well for their services. And no matter how amazing mothers may be, they are not paid anything for raising the future citizens of our country.
Let us also appreciate that Mother’s Day has its roots in the peace movement.
For more than a century since its inception, Mother’s Day continues to be a day of protest. Historically, women have taken to the streets to call attention to the injustices of war, poverty, inadequate healthcare, child labor, gun violence, and more. These are the fierce, socially engaged underpinnings of Mother’s Day.
So this Mother’s Day, I invite you to honor the mother-figures in your life and also to marvel at the intricate web of caring that holds our world together. Let us honor the work of taking care of each other in recognition of our profound interconnectedness with one another, appreciating and celebrating the deep bonds we all share.
In gratitude for the nurturing and radical power of love, I wish you all a loving and peaceful Mother’s Day.
Making friends in small towns
A new friend has been through hell lately adjusting to the many strange things that go on when you move to a small town. That is not to say that you don’t also meet plenty of strange ones in cities too, but I have come to think there is something unique about moving to a town under population 1,000 where many people also come and go with the seasons.
My friend got stuck in the middle of lots of confusion and negativity which resulted in bad feelings. In talking with her about all of that, I began to recall how many beginner friendships I had in my first two years here, most of which ended quickly. So I decided to make a list and ended up with well over twenty individuals or couples where some sort of friendship began and then either went nowhere or worse.
I basically met no one worth being friends with for about two years here. Either they weren’t friendly at first, our politics were too far apart, we had nothing in common, or they started out friendly enough, but then went unfriendly fast. What I have found is that La Veta is not so much a close knit community as one with a few main cliches, where few are truly friendly when you’re new here.
A few said they were just waiting for us to leave after a year or two. Four years later that is not happening! Luckily there are enough decent people to go around, so who cares about the rest?
When my friend started lamenting her recent bad experiences with new friends, I told her that I always approach this topic with the certainty that I am a great person to have as a friend, but here I have learned to be pretty selective. A friend is someone who improves the life of someone they care about. Mike and I live by that code. Once we are friends with someone we will help them improve their lives in any way we can. I make an extra effort through this blog and my book about this area, to reach out to those just moving here for the first time. I call that being neighborly.
Good friendships take time. There will always be a period of adjustment and testing in the beginning. I have found I do best with those with a similar education and background. Jealousy kills friendships. Most people here are quite nice, but I must keep in mind that some moved here to avoid relationships altogether.
What path am I creating that others might follow?
When everything began to change for me in the early 2000s, I was scared. It seemed like all of my previous coping skills weren’t working anymore. Staying in the same career and trying to make a moribund marriage work finally reached a dead end for me. My career no longer interested me, and my marriage was irrevocably broken.
Now I know. If you find your life headed toward dead ends, find the time to focus on who you are now, before you decide what’s next.
After I got myself out of that very bad place, and began to feel like things had truly turned around for me, my greatest desire was to create a better path that others might follow out of midlife misery. Being a psychologist and a scholar, I started studying the history of midlife psychology. There I learned that what I had just experienced was a natural, normal, healthy transformation available to every person who is willing to take advantage of this new rite of passage for the human race! If you have the desire and the courage to take risks, you can change just about everything in your life.
That is what I have been doing ever since, and life just keeps getting better. I became a writer to educate others about the unique opportunities midlife presents to us at just the right time to get it right this time! Yes, there is still plenty of time to find a much better life, but first you must decide your highest priorities and then do everything in your power to reach those goals.
But this is also about attitude. Do you believe you can create a much better life for yourself? Why not error on the side of the positive this time?
Abundance is how we live in each moment – the choice to be open, the choice to entertain the possibility that we can have, create, and attract what we truly want.
Open to your own vast spontaneous creativity. Give yourself the freedom to try new things. Let go of your innate fear of failure, and finally feel free to experiment, perhaps for the first time in decades!
90% Cure Rate for C. diff available in the USA!
UNBELIEVABLE! I saw a NOVA Wonders on PBS last night called “What’s living in you? There they spoke at length about the horrible and sometimes deadly bacterial infection called C. diff. They said that if I had found a decent specialist, I would have had access to a fecal transplant by taking 30 capsules at once with no C. diff the next day!
Go check out “OpenBiome, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding safe access to fecal microbiota transplants (FMT), and to catalyzing research into the human microbiome.”
Here’s why OpenBiome got started:
“In 2011, a close friend of ours contracted a C. difficile infection after a routine surgery, and antibiotic treatment wasn’t working. For 18 months, we watched him suffer with this debilitating illness and several rounds of failed treatment. Knowing the evidence supporting the use of fecal transplantation to treat recurrent C. difficile infection, he sought but couldn’t find a clinician who could perform the treatment for him. When he finally received a life-changing fecal transplant, the effect was remarkable. Within a couple of days he had his life back.”
The patient on this NOVA program felt much better within 24 hours!
This makes me so angry! Instead of 6 months of hell, I could have been cured in weeks…
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD to all who can benefit! There is even a “Find a Doctor” option on the OpenBiome website.
How lonely are you?
According to recent research, Americans are a pretty lonely group, and the younger you are, the lonelier you feel.
A nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that fact. Their survey of over 20,000 American adults age 18 or older, finds that loneliness is widespread in our country, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel left out always or sometimes.
The Cigna results offer some alarming findings:
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Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent).
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One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.
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Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).
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One in five people report they rarely or never feel close to people or feel like there are people they can talk to.
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Americans who live with others are less likely to be lonely (average loneliness score of 43.5) compared to those who live alone (46.4). However, this does not apply to single parents/guardians (average loneliness score of 48.2) – even though they live with children, they are more likely to be lonely.
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Only around half of Americans (53 percent) have regular meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family.
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Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations.
Is social media part of the problem?
Social media use alone is not a predictor of loneliness; respondents defined as very heavy users of social media have a loneliness score (43.5) not markedly different from the score of those who never use social media (41.7).
More time online and social media may be causing a rise in depression and suicide among American adolescents. People who spend less time looking at screens and more time having face-to-face social interactions are less likely to be depressive or suicidal.
It appears that how people use social media determines its influence on one’s sense of isolation.
Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.
I have been what I consider to be a loner for most of my life, and enjoyed most of that time alone. Even though I moved here with Mike, I feared moving to rural Colorado because I didn’t know if I would find friends here. As it turns out, I do have a few friends who understand the value of a great education, deep friendship and healthy solitude.
I also find I enjoy spending more time alone when feeling so connected to nature as I do here.
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 