#365Gratitude Day 230:Voices from the past

This morning in the shower I was thinking about a code problem at work, like you do, and happened upon a solution.  

As soon as I had rinsed off the Himalayan Pink Salt body wash, I got out of the shower, dried my hands, and grabbed my phone. I popped open the voice memo app to quickly record my thoughts for later.  

This is something I do often.  I'll record notes about work, writing, code ideas, sounds around me I think are funny or memorable.  

Sometimes after I listen to them later I delete them. But often I hang on to them, knowing I'll savor them later. 

That happened today. After I recorded my work notes I went diving through old recordings. I found among other things: 

• A nice voice note my ex Kacie and I recorded for our friend Miss Jessica
• A recording of the elevator voice announcing Missy and I had arrived at the Lido Deck on the Carnival Valor  
• A fiction idea I had recorded about six years ago

I love  this sort of digital nostalgia. The files don't take up very much room on my phone, and they give me this instant hit, this sense of my personal history and longevity, each time I stumble across them. 

On my computer I have an old video of my cats when they were about six months old.  They are eleven years old now! Sometimes it boggles my mind that so much time has passed.  

Personal history is a big deal for me. Because my dad wasn't a very good person, certain traumatic events in my past really tainted a huge portion of my childhood. My past has been previously a touchy, painful area.  Things I thought to be true were not, and never had been.  At one point in my life I felt like I had no reliable past to look back on, and that was a bitter feeling indeed. 

But as I get older, each day I'm making more and more memories which I treasure. I'm not a very materialistic person, I don't set much stock in things. My aunt says that a good life is made of moments and memories. She's right.  Every time I dig up one of these old voices and hear it again, I feel happy. 

#365Gratitude Day 229:Monopolizing a friend's evening

My buddy Moliére is one of my closest friends.  We have a lot of things in common. He's an age player like me, and a techie too. We talk a lot about Very Serious Things™ about life, intimacy, relationships, technology, programming, business, and being entrepreneurs.  

But we're also like little kids who never grew up. So we also play video games together.  

He just got an Xbox and was asking me about games to get. So sure, I had him get Overwatch, my latest time-sucking addiction, and he had me get this golf game which he loves.  

But I also had him get Monopoly. And we played it over the Internet last night.  

It's funny. Another way we are alike is that we're both really gentle, kind people, who are generally soft-spoken and easy-going.  

Except when we play games.  

I thought it was just when I play Scrabble, but as it turns out, other games too bring out my competitive side.  

He is much the same. We spent a good hour or so playing and working hard to screw the other guy over.  

And laughed about it the whole time. It was fantastic.  

#365Gratitude Day 228:Your gratitude is my gratitude

These are the baby wipes we keep in my nightstand drawer.  

MY gratitude is my discovery that they are amazing at picking up cat-hairball-throw up.  

YOUR gratitude is that the picture I posted is the pack of baby wipes. 

#365Gratitude Day 227:The Wisdom of Solomon

I love, love TED Talks. You know, those 18 minute long videos given by some of the smartest people on earth, about significant issues of the day, incredible technological breakthroughs, medical advances, or issues of the human heart and mind?

This is not one of those. 

Oh, make no mistake. It is a TED talk all right. It's about spam, a man named Solomon, and most importantly A Giant Gummy Lizard. 

See for yourself.  

#365Gratitude Day 226:Pushing the envelope on gratitude

This has been quite the day for my practice of gratitude.  

So, first of all, there's this particular envelope I've been waiting for.  Moving is an expensive proposition, and in the course of my move, I bent, and then honestly broke my budget really hard.  It caught me off guard.  As I joked to some close friends, for the past two weeks or so I've been so broke I could barely pay attention.

That's a tough thing for me to admit, because I place a whole lot of self-worth in my ability to be self-sufficient.  I had this narrative playing in my head that went something like this: "I'm a 45 year old technical professional, who makes a very good salary.  This sort of financial hiccough is beneath me."

There's a word for what I was doing with that narrative.  I was shaming myself.  

So, cue today.  First, the envelope I was waiting for arrived.  It was the return of my security deposit from my old house.  Well, most of it, anyhow.  Just the budget broken bone band-aid bonanza I was waiting for!  Plus, payday is right around the corner, too.  Whew!

I actually called the tiny post-office in the rinky-dink town I now live in, to intercept the envelope in my meandering errand-doing today.  It was my Big Errand, really.  I showed up at the post office around the time they told me to, but they hadn't found the envelope yet.  So they had me leave my phone number, and gave me that lovely small-southern-town-service of calling me to come get it when it was ready.

About two hours later I got the call, just before they were closing.  I really needed to get it today. But the traffic was awful and I got there about 20 minutes after closing.  On a whim, I knocked and someone inside who had waited just for me, because she knew I was close by answered and said she'd be right there!  

Amazing.

Not five minutes later I was envelope-in-hand, heading to the bank.  

In all this hustle and bustle of running errands, I also was listening to an amazing audiobook, Brené Brown's The Power of Vulnerability, which my friend Andrea had given to me.

The book is powerful.  It's the sort of good, hard book that is as wonderful as it is unpleasant.  It's about the relationship between vulnerability and shame in your life.

It made me cry, I mean real, out loud sobbing, at least four times today.  I saw in it so many things about myself, my life, what motivates me, and my own demons.  I am incredibly hard on myself.  I can be a perfectionist, which has a very big relationship to shame.  There's this part of the book where Brené talks about how she was super sick, amazingly, extremely like death's door sick, during a pregnancy, but wanted to bring work with her to the hospital, because "she doesn't get sick."

That sounded SO DAMN MUCH like my inner narrative about not making financial mistakes.

Cue tears.

A bit later she was talking about how people experience a sort of foreboding joy.  You are always waiting for that other shoe to drop.  Sure, work is going well, but... you might get fired.  Sure, your partner is spanking and diapering you, and told you how much they want to tie you up and tickle you like you've always wanted... but something bad is going to happen to them, or you.  (By the way, I really don't like tickling, it's just an example.)

There is however, an antidote to this sort of automatic mode of waiting for that damn shoe.  It's the actual, conscious practice of gratitude.

Let me say that again.  

The way you lean into joy, the way you live without succumbing to shame and fear is to make a daily practice of gratitude.

The same practice I've been doing in my life for a long time.  Sometimes I've been spot on with it, totally rocking it each day.  Other times I've let it go, and even though I've observed my gratitude to myself, I haven't written it down.

I'm not going to ding myself for that.  That's not what this is.  (Besides, perfectionism is self-shaming, remember?)  I'm just SO GRATEFUL that I'm aware of how healthy, life-affirming and good my practice of gratitude is, and once more, I'm all in on it.

Oh, I'm also kind of wrong about ageplay and community - but I'll get into that in another post, soon.