Tag: Changing Thoughts

The Saga of Chunky Cheap Necklaces

S R Janssen
Graphic
The new jewelry

For decades, the stuff in my jewelry box was demure and understated. Except for a three huge “dinner rings” sporting gaudy glass stones: gifts from a dear friend kept for sentimental value.  They lived in the basement of my jewelry box.

They have come out of hiding; they sit front and center in my jewelry box. With them are some “newbies” on the block: chunky, gaudy and cheap necklaces. Every morning, I don a necklace and a ring. Even when I dress in garden grunge, the jewelry is there.

These “gauds” support my efforts to “mind-shift” into a different version of me. Yeah! yeah! My mother, my aunts, my teachers, my sister all told me “be yourself.” I am fed up with that business. I tried it for 75 years and I am tired of “being myself.” Would you believe I think the same thoughts in exact same sequence every single morning while brushing my teeth? What am I thinking about? Living a year in Spain? Pony trekking in Iceland? Hell no, I think about an insignicant event with a coworker. It was an incident free of trauma and fleeting interest.

Time to teach this old dog new tricks. Now every morning, I fasten a gaudy necklace around my neck and slide on a gaudy glass ring. Then I sit down with the morning cup of very strong coffee and my journal, and I practice thinking new thoughts. This morning, I listened to a scientist speculating that the “world we know” is limited to the nature of our senses. If we had a different set of senses, our experience of the world around would be different beyond our comprehension. Imagine seeing your world in a five-hundred shades of red!

How would my teenage years felt if I had spent time thinking new thoughts, ones that had nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict between my parents?

Some say that imagination is the most powerful force in the universe.  Did you know that Einstein is quoted as saying “If you want to have intelligent children, read them fairy tales; if you want to have more intelligent children read them more fairy tales.”

Going to go read a fairy tale now and get smarter.

Kicking the Tires of December 8, 2022

S R Janssen

Today, I am making two old sayings work for me.

  1. “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
  2. “Grow water lilies out of the muck.”

I know I am not the only one over 70 finding myself walking away from a task then failing to come back to finish it. Or, finding myself standing in a room and wondering why I am there. But I have stopped deprecating myself by calling it a senior moment and laughing it off behind a false face.

Make Lemonade and Grow Lilies

Now, I use those moments to make lemonade and grow lilies. I am reframing them: considering them as my messages from my brain telling me to stop horsing around with the irrelevant start focusing on the moment. Yesterday I was in the middle of paring potatoes when a feckless thought flitted across my mind. Like an idiot, I chased after it. Dropped my paring knife and went to my desk to look for the address of an old friend. And found myself wondering what the hell I was doing there.

What I wanted was potatoes for salad within the next half-an-hour, not an address. What a waste of time and energy. But you know, I fell into that habit in my teens. It would take me an hour to accomplish a ten-minute task.Now I don’t have the luxury of time and energy to waste, so my brain teaches me to focus then condense vapid thought into solid accomplishment.

Such experiences are common among the tribe of elders. I have decided to consider these moments to be gifts provide by “the unknown wisdom of life.” For me, it’s an opportunity to dismiss the “monkey mind” of earlier days and concentrate.

We can leverage those moments that are not relevant to what we are doing now. Enjoy the freedom from the unpleasant memories of the past and practice a new skill: engaging in the moment. The western horizon is in sight. Time to stop thinking “over the hill,” and embark on the upward curve. Let’s see how far I can go, how much I can accomplish with the time remaining.