The question is “If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over, which one would you choose?” I have to admit that it would be a pair of jeans and my shirt of a cat drinking coffee. Something relaxed but still a little dressy. Casual but a little upscale. It’s a definite mood.
I ask my students in internships what they do for self-care. It’s a very important practice for people in helping professions, because of the stress levels they experience. Self-care can stave off burnout as well as help people reclaim their free time.
When I assessed my own self-care activities, I found that I was somewhat lacking in them. Writing is a flow activity for me, and flow fits into self-care, but I have not been doing as much of that lately. I’ve started walking again, but right now I can only walk for short periods of time, which makes it not as much of a self-care activity. I don’t meditate as often as I could. I am definitely lacking self-care activities.
What can I do about this? Obviously put some of these practices back into place. Walking will come back a little at a time because of my current fitness level. Meditating can start today. Writing is a struggle given my current motivation level. But it’s important to have my self-care routines together, especially for when the school year starts and I’m back to more pressure in my life.
My biggest time waster is getting sucked into the Internet. I could be writing and need to look something up on the Internet, and then presto — twenty minutes have passed and I find myself in the middle of reading Facebook. I take a detour into Quora and find I’ve been reading it for a half-hour.
I don’t know what makes the Internet so addictive. I suspect it’s the amount of information in it. I crave learning, and the Internet gives me a treasure trove of information. The only trouble with the information is that much of it is trivial. Should I care what Clint Eastwood’s first movie was? (I’ve already forgotten). What was John Wayne’s real name? (Marion Morrison).
In other words, the same reason I love the Internet (information at my fingertips) is the reason I hate it. And so often, I go traveling down the information highway with no destination in mind, just driving.
I have had a number of crushes, a large number of crushes. Some of these were really intense and lasted years, others were fleeting. My first crush was one of the fleeting ones, seeing that it was in kindergarten.
His name was Randy. He lived around the block from me, by the railroad tracks in an asphalt-shingled house. He had a round face and shaggy blond hair and blue eyes. I don’t understand why I got a crush on him; it was part of that inexplicable kindergarten thinking. But I talked about him constantly.
My mom and I went over to his house to visit, and afterward my mother told me she ‘wasn’t comfortable’ with me going over to Randy’s house. I knew it was because of the house and that he didn’t have a father at home. I don’t know how I knew this unless my mother told me, and it didn’t make sense because my mother told me to be nice to everyone. The crush disappeared as soon as it was formed, because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Thus I internalized my first lesson on social class and bias.
I went on to have many crushes, some intense and some fleeting. I learned the most from my crush on Randy, things I look back on and wish I hadn’t learned.
I feel like you could ask me on different days my favorite thing about myself, and I would have different answers. Some days it’s my sense of humor; other days my intelligence. Occasionally it’s my courage. Today, my favorite thing about myself is my sense of joy. I am, overall, a joyous person.
Joyous is not quite the same thing as happy. Happiness is a state, fleeting, full of excitement or pleasure. For example, when you visit someone. Joy, on the other hand, is a longer-lasting state of being, full of contentment and well-being. (Embark Behavioral Health, 2025).
Joy, to me, is the flow of a stream through my life, one which occasionally bubbles up. I feel the bubbles in my soul, and they sometimes come out in laughter. Laughing for no reason startles people sometimes. I can’t help it; it’s the bubbles.
I feel joy even when I’m depressed, which doesn’t make sense to most people. But joy is my love for the universe, which I feel even when I don’t feel any love back. That’s what depression feels like, like something has put a transparent wall between me and love. But joy is still there, beneath the despair.
Joy is a subversive quality. It does not depend on external factors. It is not a response to good things happening externally. It cannot be taken away, only pushed aside temporarily by things like disaster and depression. It is the thing I like most about myself, at least today.
I am passionate about many things; that’s just what kind of person I am.
I am passionate about hope. I think hope is one of the most powerful forces of the universe. It is my natural way of meeting with the world.
I proselytize about flow. This is Csikszentmihalyi’s concept, that there are activities that take us out of ordinary space and time, completely captivate our minds, and give us a sense of well-being. I tell my students that they need to find a flow activity eventually to help them deal with stress.
Then there’s coffee. It’s a small thing to be passionate about, but we roast and grind our own coffee in this household, and make it in a very good coffeepot. I am passionate about good coffee, and occasionally share the home-roasted stuff with others.
I have passion for my goals. I keep Big Audacious Goals on my list of things to do because they motivate me not just to act, but to be better. My BAGs for the moment are to lose weight and to get back into writing. (Although those are not SMART enough for goals, I am working on making them so.)
That’s enough to feel passionate about for now. If I were passionate about everything, would it really be passion?
It is 5:57 AM on June 5, 2025, and I am pretty sure nothing of note will happen to me today. And I’m glad of that.
One of the things about being over 60 is that the big good things are likely not to fall into one’s lap. They’re not likely to happen under 60, either, but younger people don’t know that. My younger years were brimming with possibility. Now that I’m older, I’m doing pretty good at work but not to the point of winning any awards, I know I’m not going to win the lottery, and I’m not getting a new kitten because I already have three.
Bad things, on the other hand, seem part and parcel of one’s 60s. Am I going to develop another health problem? Is social security going to be dismantled? Is my roof going to fall on my head? Those things would also be worthy of note, but I don’t want them to happen.
I don’t know when I became a pessimist, but I think it was when I started getting arthritis. So nothing of note will happen today, and I will be grateful.
In the midwestern United States, winter brings cold and snow and dirty slush, summers are too hot, and spring nearly nonexistent. This leaves Autumn, a glorious time which starts in late September and goes on until November.
Autumn is a glorious season, with days in which trees in flaming red and orange stand against cloudless blue skies and soppy evenings with tumbled leaves tugging at people’s feet. Autumn sun brings with it the sense that the moment will last forever, while the thunderstorms bring memories of past loves.
Autumn is deep. It doesn’t flirt like Spring, or stupefy like Summer. Nor does it oppress like Winter. It delivers crisp afternoons for delight and cool evenings for shelter. It stays with us.
This is a hard question to answer, because the one thing I “can’t live without” is my iPhone, and I don’t know whether that is a luxury or necessity these days. I use it for work, I use it for entertainment, I use it to record my carbs every day. I read and compose email, I keep up with people I know — it’s a tool that’s no longer a luxury to me.
At the same time, it’s a luxury. I pay a decent amount of money for my iPhone, although I only replace it after several years. I have lived without a smartphone, but I used to have a Palm Pilot back in the days before the iPhone. (I remember the Palm Pilot for its tendency to regurgitate all its data and become useless until synched on the computer.)
I suppose I could live without my iPhone, but it would have to be a different world, one in which I didn’t get daily emails from my students or have to fill out paperwork for them. One where I don’t need a handy reference for counting carbs. One where my life was a lot slower than it is now.
My tagline would be ‘a simple woman’, which is meant with a bit of irony. For example, I think I’m very simple. I’m a Quaker, which is almost the definition of simple. I live an ordinary life. Simple, right?
My friend Les (rest in peace) thought I was anything but simple. I suppose, what with my active spiritual life, my bipolar disorder, and my musings about the world, I am anything but simple. One might even say I’m complicated. I don’t think so.
I wish I had a better tag than that. But “mostly harmless” has already been taken.
Words Like Me 