Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Below.
I am kicking life into a higher vibe.
Funny how that Tower Card from earlier this week helped to do that. My focus has never been clearer than it is right now, and I’m exactly sure of what I want in life and what I want out of life.
My dad’s in the hospital again, so I’m waiting to see how that goes, but I’m calm right now. It’s interesting to see how he’s manifested his current illness, which is terminal. Some of his medical issues weren’t in his history before and we’re not quite sure how he developed some of them, but over the years, he’s imagined certain things, he’s visualized them, he’s pretended them (long, angry story there), he’s patterned them…and now his doc says that he’s suddenly as bad as he was pretending years ago.
If ever there was an example of negativity manifesting! He’s expected to be out of the hospital in time for Thanksgiving Day, though I’ll be with the girls that morning and they’ll be with their dad that afternoon and evening, and then sometime over the weekend, we’ll make a quick trip to visit and spend a few hours with one or both of my brothers.
Historically, this is the time when various family and friends will ask personal questions about my love life, tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, and proceed to tell me how they would do the opposite of whatever it is I’m doing and how all my choices are wrong but then, just our luck, everything’s gonna be bad anyway. It usually hits on the emotional meter somewhere between mildly depressing and majorly distressing, depending on which wounds they choose to rip open.
Shannon, who is incredibly wise about this at such a young age, has a good guideline for living: Never take advice from unhappy people. Sheesh, does that not cover just about everything?
So this holiday season with family and friends, I’m anticipating a shift, with me stopping people in their tracks from saying any more. I’ve always heard teachers and religious people admonish children and teens, “If you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say anything at all.”
If understand that sentiment in an entirely different way now. I realized this today when I was thinking about a cousin of mine who died of leukemia at my age and a woman I met through a writer’s workshop.
Word spread fast about their illnesses and suddenly people from their pasts came out of the woodwork to express their pre-death sympathy to the corpse. They all focused on the terminal illness, on what kind of funeral the sick person would like, on what kind of arrangements they’d made for their family after they died.
I’ve seen the same happen with many family, friends, and colleagues who’ve been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. I’ve heard doctors tell their patients they had two weeks to live…and the patients died two weeks to the day. I’ve heard other doctors say “no more than two years,” and those people lived another ten and died of something other than their illness, but it was incredibly difficult for them. Even ones who’ve tried so hard to stay positive and believe they could beat their illness have found doubt around every corner, from their doctor’s receptionist to their pastors to their children. Everyone around them is focused on their dying and how soon they’ll go through the grieving process and hurry up and “accept” it. Damn, we send people to counseling so they can learn to accept their illness and subsequent deaths as smoothly as possible.
The other woman I’m thinking of today believed she would be healed. She stayed positive. She stayed away from naysayers and “supportive” friends preoccupied with her death. She focused on living and loving and enjoying her life. She showed me pictures of her skydiving adventures and talked about how her visualization techniques, meditation, stress reduction, and sense of peace assisted her doc—who share her optimism for life—in returning her to health. She was still under her physician’s care but her positive attitude never sent a message to her physical self to give up or that she’d run a “valiant race” but still lose. The mind is so important in healing! She was still active when last I saw her, in her late 70’s, still joyful and full of life.
I vaguely remember being 7 years old and my mother’s mother coming home from a chemo treatment only to be handed a catalog of tombstones to pick from so she could have “the best money can buy.” It was wellmeant by those around her, but wow, what an incentive that must have been for her.
For myself, I can remember plenty of times when I knew something was about to happen and was so excited, only to be stopped on my way out the door and told how bad things would probably be. I lost my positive frame of mind and lost the opportunity. If only those people had not said anything bad about something, I wouldn’t have lost my already shaky faith in my intuition.
But that’s all in the past. I’m alone more these days— not for long—but I’m in a much better frame of mind because I’m not constantly sandblasted by all the possibilities of how wrong things are going to go.
Some fascinating things are happening right now in
my life and I’d love to experiment with this new vibration with my family and friends, but for the most part, that would take a lot of energy to convince them to play along. So for now, I’m pulling in my two daughters and the three of us are working together to keep a high level of joy and love in our home and make some wonderful things happen for us.
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