#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.

#365Gratitude Day 225:Let's Be Forward, Shall We?

Yesterday I was updating the apps on my phone, and ended up deleting a movie I had on it, to make room for all the downloads.  

I had two movies on there, and the one I kept is one of my favorites, an animated Disney film called Meet The Robinsons .

The movie is about a young orphan and brilliant inventor, Lewis, who becomes obsessed with finding his birth mother, and through wacky misadventures winds up visiting the future. 

The central theme of the movie is mindfulness, to weather misfortunes and mistakes, learn from them, and keep moving forward.  

Sometimes you just run right out of plans

 It's a lesson that the film's villain, the Bowler Hat Guy not only doesn't take to heart, he can't even perceive it.  At a few key points in the film he's so obsessed with the past that he literally cannot see what is happening around him. 

Eventually though, through pluck, determination, a smattering of good luck and some Disney magic, Lewis is triumphant and things work out. 

I love  this movie. I watched a good chunk of it yesterday, and finished it this morning lying in bed.  

It's got me so cheery just now. And as always, I find it so relevant to what I've got going on in my own life. I've got an ambitious side project going on, I'm just finishing up something at my day job, and have a lot on my plate.  Plus, my family life is exciting and challenging, with my new relationship with Squee having all sorts of amazing ripple effects on my other poly relationships, as well as all the surprises, benefits, and burdens of just having moved somewhere new. 

I'm so glad I stumbled across this favorite movie of mine again, and feel its message so strongly today.  

#365Gratitude Day 224: Sleep on it

I'm numbering these again. 

Why?

Because I've been sleeping on it.

It takes time to see when you need to make a change in your life.  I stopped   numbering because it felt like it was turning a mindful practice into an onerous obligation. I gave myself permission to miss days, to not be all OCD about it, whatever. 

I thought that ditching the numbers would be great. It was for a while. But it also let me get sloppy about the practice of my gratitude. 

So, right now, I'm changing that.  Yesterday I worked late, and for whatever reason had a not-so-great night's sleep. 

When I got up this morning, my girlcat Yin knew I had.  She normally sleeps with me anyhow, but after getting up for breakfast, she came back to cuddle up with me.  

"Let's take it easy, Mako."

I rested for a while, petting her, and letting her nuzzle up to me. Getting affection from your cat is one of life's great little pleasures. After about 45 minutes of it, I was ready to get up and get on with my day.  

One of the things that came out of our little impromptu cuddle session was my realization of another paradigm for marking my gratitude.  It's like cataloging something special each day.  It's a reverie, something that happens each day, labeled and numbered not from obligation, but fondness.  

I blog to hang on to my practice of being in the moment. 

Thanks, Yin.  

#365Gratitude:Free Chillbo

Sometimes you luck out. ​

A while ago I brought in our old Keurig coffee podthing (sure it's a word) to work. ​

​This was after Missy got us a new one because the old one stopped working. 

Then it mysteriously started working again. Nobody needs TWO Keurigs. That's like needing two belly buttons. Nobody needs two of those either. I easily can accomplish all the belly button related things I do each day with my one belly button. ​

​So I brought it into the office and left it in the kitchen, for anyone to use. (The Keurig, not my belly button. I figured people would bring their own belly buttons. Besides, hygiene!)

My coworkers are lovely people who drink a LOT of coffee. So, they broke it, for good this time.

​But that's okay. Because the management at my company are super nice folks, and they got me an Amazon gift card to make it up to me. 

The hammock, not the woman in the floppy hat

​I used it to get two of these:

That's a sort of inflatable hammock called a CHILLBO BAGGINS.  ​I think they're neat.  There are a lot of different brands of these, but I had to go with the Chillbo, because after my extensive research, I found that this particular brand has the funniest name. 

And I got two of them. For nothing.  

Actually, when I really look at it, it wasn't for nothing. I kind of paid in mindfulness.  

Instead of being grumpy when the second Keurig purchase turned out to be needless, I decided to bring it in, sure for my own convenience, but also to do a nice thing for other folks, because why not do a nice thing when it's easy to do so? 

That's the essence of how karma works. It's not a tally board sort of thing. The word karma is actually Sanskrit for "action".  It's the ripples you make in the pond by throwing a stone. Good action tends to make more good action. 

I'm planning to give one of the two Chillbos I got to a friend as a present. Because it'll be nice, and why not be nice? 

#365Gratitude:Lubble, Frubble, Squee and no Trouble

So this past weekend was a really, really big deal for me, and for Missy, too.

My girlfriend Squee came to visit us.

 I took off time Friday and Monday for her visit.  Missy and I did a fair amount of prep work to be ready.  We bought a bed for the guest room, put it together, realized we had it wrong, fixed it, realized we bought the wrong bed frame, returned it, put it together, and then collapsed in a sweaty, satisfied heap.

Missy agonized for days over finding good nightstands to put in there, and ended up rigging up some ersatz ones with plastic drawers, and a sheet or two.  (This was a total thoughtful surprise for me by the way - I love her so much.)  We just moved, and all the furniture money we had available really went towards the bed, so that was a lovely solution.

Squee told me that it was all amazing, but we didn't need to trouble ourselves, because the most important things she was coming to see weren't things at all, they were people - me, Missy, and my sister-in-law.  

There's this funny word that gets thrown around in polyamorous circles, frubble.  Frubble is (to quote Urban Dictionary [I know, but don't judge me, in this case it's great]) "Total joy over someone else's happiness."  In the case of polyamory, it's when you're happy that your partner is happy.

See? Cuddling!

We were positively dipped in frubble the whole visit.  Missy was thrilled for me.  Then Squee gave Missy and MB these amazing duct-tape wallets her daughter had made for them, and I was happy for them.  And we all spent time, and everyone was happy for everyone else and for themselves too.  There was a whole lot of cuddling on couches.

That's my wife, and my girlfriend, and if you look really closely, me sitting behind them (See my arm?)

We were family-building, forging all our individual feelings for one another into something greater than the sum of its parts.  I commented to Missy that frubble wasn't quite what I was feeling, because this joy I was feeling wasn't just someone else's happiness, it affected me, too.

She suggested a new word "lubble."  Maybe that's "total joy over the happiness of people you love, that makes you all love one another more"?  I don't know, it's a work in progress.

MORE CUDDLING?  Yep.

We spent amazing quality time together.  We hunted for Pikachu near our house.  We wandered around small charming towns near our house.  We ate Waffle House hash browns.  We felt love, connection, and closeness.

I am so blessed.