November 5, 2006

• Relative Difficulty

  Sometimes life feels like an uphill road.  It’s a matter of
  perspective.  Attitude has a lot to do with it, too.  If I
  allow myself to think in those terms, I start finding myself saying
  things (to myself) like, “It is so hard to…” or “I’m too tired to…”
  or (horror of horrors) “I can’t….”

  I still  haven’t got the knack of keeping my attitude sunny and
  upbeat all the time, and from where I sit now such a denial of the ups
  and downs of reality seems insane.  In the attitude department,
  I’m a whole lot better off than I used to be.  There was a time in
  my life, about forty or fifty years ago, when those defeatist attitudes
  were all I had, besides fantasies.  That’s pathetic, living
  between daydreams of happiness that I believed to be impossible and a
  perceived reality that was uniformly tough and challenging when it
  wasn’t actually more than I felt I could bear.

  Little things sometimes get to me.  A while ago, I missed a call
  from Greyfox because I was in the bathroom, the computer was connected
  to the internet, and CallWave took the message.  Living apart from
  my spouse, I rely on such phone calls for whatever day-to-day
  interaction there is in our relationship.

  Because his cell plan gives him more off-peak minutes than the
  “anytime” ones, we do most of our talking at night and on
  weekends.  Yesterday, Doug had an online D&D session all day,
  and by the time he got offline so that I could get a phone call
  through, I was yawning and so was Greyfox.  It was a brief
  conversation and I don’t recall anything but the yawns.

  We had another conversation this morning when Greyfox called to tell me
  that his cell battery was almost dead.  He was going to put it in
  the charger last night, but it was inaccessible and he didn’t have the
  energy to rearrange his clutter to get to it.  He called to say
  that he was going to find that charger and would be incommunicado until
  this evening.

  Then I walked in and saw the CallWave box showing the number of one of
  the pay phones he often uses when he’s in town.  His message was
  35 seconds long and the sound of his voice made me kick myself because
  there wasn’t really any good reason for the computer to have been left
  online while I went to the bathroom.

  There wasn’t any good reason to disconnect it, either, really, and
  there’s a good chance that the phone’s answering machine would have
  taken that same message if I had disconnected.  I’m a fool for
  beating myself up for missing out on a little common everyday
  pleasure.  Life is full of them, now that I stop and think about
  it.  But stupid, self-defeating habits are hard to break.

  Even before I missed that call today, I had been thinking about degrees
  of difficulty and how the hard times are easier to bear when I don’t
  keep telling myself how hard it is.  Enough already!  I have
  heard it all before.  I know just how difficult it is sometimes,
  to breathe, to move this body from point A to point B, to accomplish a
  simple, complex, or strenuous task.  I know, already.

  Another thing I know:  it’s all a lot easier when I remember the
  attitude secret.  Back when I kept getting in my own way with all
  the pathos and pessimism, in some ways I had it a lot easier than I
  appreciated.  Now that physical tasks are harder, I can use all
  the help I can get, and an optimistic, can-do attitude helps a lot.

  

  • 3:44 pm
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