A lot of thoughts

Dealing with a 14 year old young man and staring my 53rd birthday dead in the face . . . seems like a weird juxtaposition of events.

I don't have a teenager, I have a 7 year old who wants to be a teenager.

But enough about them, I find me more fascinating :)

Actually, there isn't probably any one thread I can use to tie all my recent thoughts together but I want to try.

Soul Hunger
Critical Thinking
Best Friend Forever Mother
Humility and Forgiveness
Making every day Count
Family Routine

It's a blessing to have a family. The bible says God puts the lonely in families. Family gives us our place, the belonging place. That is our foundation and it's much more than I ever knew when I first wanted a baby. Luckily, I learned more about how to make a family as I went along and was it a hard lesson. Still learning that lesson, too. That "loneliness" is a form of soul hunger and the instinct to make family is the human drive to fill the emptiness of life. That's not to say that all lives without families are empty but it takes a lot to fill the emptiness; family seems like a built in mechanism to make it happen a little easier.

Most of us learned how to nourish our bodies and their are enough fast food joints on most corners to give us the illusion of nutrition and to at least fill the belly. We don't necessarily learn to nourish our souls and reach satisfaction in the heart. I use the word contentment to describe that soul satisfaction.

What creates contentment, inner peace? How the hell am I supposed to know? I just posed the question! But really, religions and self-help industries have been formed to answer that question so I don't presume to even go there. But without some way of nourishing one's soul, one walks through life hungry, perhaps ravenous, on the soul level. Empty and aching and perhaps confused, a person can get horribly lost and twisted.

That brings me both to critical thinking and to best friend mother. Both are ways to unravel the twists and turns and ease the aches of soul starvation and straighten out the faulty thinking and twisted characters that can result from the lack of both. I think we need both a nurturing and accepting mother self and an analytical and methodical critical-thinking self. Those two being war in me and most of the time the critic wins.

So that's where humility and forgiveness comes in and makes it possible for me to live with myself, despite all the mistakes I am prone to make. Knowing I am a fallen and flawed human being, I can yet freely admit that and ask forgiveness of the person/people I do or might offend. I can say "I was wrong" or "I was foolish" or "Man, that was silly of me." Saying that, I don't take pride in it or get there easily but I can eventually get there. It's not easy to admit one's errors or even to see them, but seeing them and seeing oneself as fallible makes one easier to live with and to be a family with. Somehow this notion isn't a popular one and I think it's because of Darwin, and his survival of the fittest notion. We want to see ourselves as "the fittest" so that we can see ourselves as winners and at least as survivors. However, I think this evolutionary treadmill theory taints our thinking and puts us in a competitive mode all the time. Or I could be wrong and it actually is a natural law (like gravity) and we are truly going to get hunted down by the alpha dog and eliminated if we admit to a weakness. Hmmm . . . I'll stick with my humility and forgiveness story, at least for now.

Now I come to making every day count. I get there by virtue of pulling up hard on 53. Never give up, never surrender. Every day dawns and offers a new beginning. Renewal. Rejuvenation. Lots of forces rally against those truths. The cycle of life and the circle of life and the rut of living. No matter what we do, we are part of the circle of life yet we don't have to stay in the rut of living. At least not in America. At least not most of us. That's the theory of the American Dream anyway. So I say, make every day count, one new word at a time, one new thought at a time. Keep hope alive, basically. Thanks, Jesse.

And the family routine, as much of a rut as it can be, still serves us well. It gives us a foundation, a base to start each of those new dawns. We can get our faces washed, teeth brushed, clothes on, that cup of coffee, and get fueled in our bodies and in our souls to start this day off with the notion that every day counts, we can start over, we can be forgiven for being the wretch that we are, we can still count on mom and dad despite being a fickle 14 year old, we can still count on hubby / wife despite being an aging hausfrau/house husband. We can start this day knowing we can both think analytically and nurture others; and knowing that we can benefit from others nurture and clear thinking.

That's it; that's all.