Category: metaphors for life

Finding Beauty in Autumn: Life Lessons from Nature

It has been a while since I have written anything here and now Autumn is upon us. We had a very long and often hot summer. I was surrounded by luscious green lawns and beautiful gardens filled with rich colours that made my heart sing.

Now I am watching the life force in the plants slowly return to the Earth. Leaves are turning colour and gently falling to the ground. Orchards are filled with people picking fruits from the trees. Farmers are harvesting corn, squash and pumpkins from the fields. Those who love to can and preserve are making chili sauce and various jams and jellies. The farmer’s markets are loaded with fresh produce from their fields and gardens. Those of us who live in small apartments gain from the bounty of their harvest. There is nothing like a pan of fresh roasted vegetables to warm the heart and soul.

I spent a good deal of my time alone this summer and took the opportunity to do a life review. Looking not just to the past or out into the future but at the here and now. Where am I now? Where are we all at this moment in time. I am in the autumn of my life. What does that mean exactly? To me it means capturing the life force within me. Finding the fruits of my own labours. I am sharing what I have discovered over the years. I pay close attention to the lessons learned from poor choices made along the way. No one gets through life without a few hard knocks now and then. Still what I know for sure is my life is full of examples of Love leading the way.

I have always been a peace maker/keeper at heart. I lead with my heart and speak sincerely from what I know to be true for me. I have lived with a hearing impairment for over fifty years. I have also learned to listen with my whole self, not just my ears. I pay attention to body language, physical surroundings and follow my intuition when it gives a clear message. I also use my head to carefully analyze a situation when required before making any decisions or comments. The last piece of advice my mother gave me before she left this world was “Follow your heart.” But she also said, “Don’t lose your head!” She always thought I was too soft. She believed I was wishy washy and sat on the fence. She advised that I should state my opinion strongly like she always did. Her favourite saying was “I mean what I say and say what I mean!” Sometimes what she had to say was mean and still she stood by it. Mostly, though she was right more often than not.

Still for me, I see great value in seeing all sides of a story. Finding the common ground is important before expressing an opinion. My style of leadership is to listen twice as much as I speak. If I don’t have anything to say that will add to the conversation then I just listen until I do. This is particularly true now that I am living in the autumn of my life.

The beauty of autumn is that all the rich green of new life matures. It becomes vibrant colours of brown, orange, yellow and red. Eventually, it joins the Earth to break down and enrich the soil with its nutrients. This becomes fodder for micro organisms that work to break it down so that new life will emerge from it.

Our life experience becomes the nutrients that make up the wisdom of our elder years. We need to live long enough for it to build up. It must then be broken down into micro organisms of thoughts and knowledge. I am just now starting to glean the wisdom of my years of life experience. I see the beauty in living a long life. It allows me to understand what I have been through. I also see what I learned from it. Now is the time to nurture that and also to share it with others. That is why I write and tell stories. I offer what I can when I can. This happens when I am in conversation with family, friends, and others I meet along the way.

This is a wonderful time of year and time of life. It is not about losing life force energy. It is about the life force being transformed into a new form of life. This new form lives on in all its richness.

Posted on by Beth 3

Waiting: A Journey through Darkness to Light

There are days when the skies are filled with clouds and the sun is hidden behind them.  Some days are darker than others, still when the clouds disappear the sun shines forth and I am lifted up. I am sure many of us are.

What does that mean exactly, lifted up!  Well to me it means seeing something beyond the obvious.  It means allowing the darkness to be illuminated and the wisdom of my heart to be seen and felt within my very being.

Now this is not just a physical phenomenon it is a spiritual experience.  It can happen in the darkest hours of the night or on a cold and snowy day when the winds are blowing so hard you can barely see two feet in front of you.

How and why is this such an enlightened experience then?  Do we have to be experiencing the “dark night of the soul” in order to recognize the wisdom that shines through that darkness?  Or is it something we can access anytime anywhere we choose to?  This is question mystics have been asking and answering for centuries.  We are all Spiritual beings first and foremost and so when we can find our way to trusting in that knowing then we are on our way home. 

Shining a light into the darkest regions of our hearts can be difficult at best and darn right impossible at the very least.  Often we don’t even know where those dark corners are hiding until we come up against a memory or a physical sensation that tells us we have landed on something that needs to be addressed.   What I know from my own experience is when I shine a light in those regions of my being I am not doing it alone.  I have experienced more than once the hand of what I call God taking my hand and leading me as well as comforting me along the way.

It is not always easy to explain what this looks or feels like for me, still I know it to be true.  I can shift my thoughts away from sorrow and sadness to love and compassion on the turn of a dime if I am connecting in that moment.  It is not always that easy though.  Still at times it can be.  Learning the process of mindfulness is one of the best ways I know of to shift gears and learn how to be present with all that is presenting itself in any given moment.

Still there are many moments when my heart is aching and my mind is telling me that I have every reason to be sad, angry or disappointed.  It is in those moments that I need to take a step back and look at myself from the perspective of one who is witnessing myself in pain.  It is not a problem to be solved.  It is simply an observation of something that is happening in the moment.  Sometimes it only takes a few minutes for me to see myself in a different light.  Other times it takes days even months to move through that dark time and find the light on the other side.

This is the value and joy of having a human experience.  To be able to eventually shift our way of seeing what is before us and finding the diamonds sparkling in the sawdust of all that has been working away at us over time.  Psychologists may argue that the dark regions are there because of the negative experiences we have had up until that moment we see them differently.  They may be right.  I have had many experiences that I have reframed over my lifetime and others that I can not let go of.  They are painfully resting in my heart waiting for me to let go and let God take them over.  

Hanging on to such negativity is, in a way, a form of self protection.  As long as I remember what it feels like to be so hurt or angry or even fearful then I am somehow protecting myself from it happening again.  If only that were true.  The reality is that as long as I hang on to all the pain I am only reliving the original experience over and over again.  So I am learning more and more how to live in the now and live through the pain until it is no longer hurting me.  It becomes a story that I can tell and has no particular affect on how I am feeling now.  This is something that I truly believe comes with the aging process.  It is a way of looking at the world and my life in context of what is now rather than what was then.

I learned to be more consciously aware of my human shortcomings when I was caring for my aging mother and my young children.  My mother talked over and over again about all the ways she was hurt in the past by family members.  She could not let it go and so everyone around her was forced to listen to her ongoing rhetoric about all the times she was ignored or left with no support when she was going through difficult times. Finally she cut herself off from her family all together.  At the end of her life, my sister and I were the only ones left who she was talking to and our children of course.  

As I age I am determined not to be the same way with my family members.  I am not sure how successful I am in that regard still I am doing my best to be present to what is now and to take responsibility for whatever I am feeling at any given point in time.  

Being an aging parent I hold a certain expectation of my children which they may or may not be able to live up to.  They don’t know what those expectations are neither do I know what their expectations are of me.  Unless we have the conversation which for us is damn hard I may go to my grave wondering what I could have done differently or how I would liked to have been treated differently.  

Ultimately, it is for us to make peace within ourselves and leave no stone unturned until we are assured that we have done the very best we could at any given point in time.  By then the light will shine for us in all the corners of our hearts so that Love can prevail above all else.  That is how I want to leave this world some day.

Posted on by Beth 5

Managing Hearing Loss: A Personal Journey

I am in my seventies now and I encounter a lot of people who admit they are living with some degree of hearing impairment as I am. Many have chosen to get hearing aids to help them manage conversations better. Others get along without the use of any form of aid. They choose this option mostly because they are not ready, not because they could not benefit from them. Others have tried them and just don’t like them for various reasons. If you are one of the lucky ones who has exceptional hearing then I am happy for you. Your ears and brain are still functioning at the top of your game.

Hearing loss is most often gradual and for some of us that means the people around us usually notice before we do that we are not hearing as well as we used to. We gradually learn to adapt by lip reading or other methods of communication. So we think we are doing fine. The truth is most of us are not. We are just working harder than we need to and are exhausting our nervous systems in the process. Living alone we often don’t notice that the tv or radio is on louder than it used to be. Even when we live with someone we blame them for mumbling or talking at us from another room.

Early Diagnosis

I have been hard of hearing since I was eighteen years old. The doctor told me then I had the hearing of someone in their sixties. It has been gradually getting worse since then. I got my first pair of hearing aids when I was twenty-two. Thus began my life long journey of learning how to adapt and hear and communicate in a world that is not user friendly for the hard of hearing. Loud noises or even music playing in the background can interfere with how hard someone has to work to listen. I must say though that technology has really improved over the decades and I am doing better now than I did in my thirties even though I hear less.

I have had years to study how the loss of hearing can affect my ability to socialize. For years I did not go to the movies because I missed too much of the dialogue and the background sound effects are too loud. I only went to foreign films with sub-titles. Now there is a device some theatres offer called Rearview Captioning that you can borrow. It goes in the cup holder and shows the subtitles under the screen. It works great. Now I can go to movies again.

When watching television I always have the closed captioning on or I don’t watch it at all. I lived without a television for more than ten years. I also avoided large gatherings of people for a long time because it was too hard to hear when I engaged in conversation. Sometimes I would go but would then sit quietly by myself just observing what was happening around me and usually people didn’t seem to notice. So even though I was out and about and trying to socialize with my friends or engage in the world, I often felt isolated and alone in the crowd. Eventually I made sure I did more one on one activities because that was easier for me to manage.

Ways We Adapt

What I have observed recently is how well I have adapted by learning all sorts of responses to give when I don’t really understand what someone has said to me without cutting off the conversation. I might say something like “that’s interesting or right or that makes sense….” The other person carries on talking assuming I am understanding them and I just sit quietly and “listen” as hard as I can to what they are saying hoping I will understand enough and have something equally as engaging to share when it is my turn to speak.

This is a learned behaviour that has developed over a long period of time. Listening is really hard work for someone with a hearing impairment, and sometimes we just don’t have the energy or ability to focus that long. So we learn to fake it or isolate ourselves so we don’t have to and that can get lonely. Most of us take longer to process information so long periods of silence in between sharing information is so helpful. In todays world though I have noticed that silence makes people uncomfortable. So they try to fill it up by talking more.

My granddaughter asked me a few months ago “Nana why do you say ‘right’ so much when I am talking to you?” That was the first time I was aware I was doing it and at the time I didn’t know why I did. So after observing my behaviour I came to realize it was because I didn’t understand everything she was saying to me still I wanted to acknowledge her. I have learned over the years that most people do not like having to repeat themselves if you let them know you did not understand what they said. Often they will just say “never mind it’s not important” which cuts the conversation short and leaves the listener feeling left out.

Challenges Along the Way

Many people speak very quickly and often cover their mouths with their hands or turn their face so the listener can’t see them. Children have higher pitched voices and talk quickly going from one subject to another which often makes it hard to follow. I have tried my best to remind my grandchildren to face me when they talk with me and also to speak more slowly so I can understand everything they say because what they tell me is important to me. I did the same with my children when they were growing up. The truth is I am the one doing most of the adapting. Most of my friends and even my family have a hard time remembering I am hearing impaired. My own mother told me once I never think about it. You always do so well. Yes I do and it is very hard work sometimes.

Like most things in life change is gradual as we get older. Our bodies slow down and we learn to take things at a steady pace. Many of my friends who now have the experience of not understanding or hearing as well as they were used to are saying to me “how did you do it for all those years?”. I tell them that is a very good question. The answer is I learned to listen with my whole self – not just my ears. I developed a keen sense of observation and learned to put things in context so I could fill in the gaps. I also developed my intuition so that I could figure out what someone was talking about. I am a good listener and I listen a lot to other people. My heart is always open so what I don’t understand with my head I can feel in my heart and I respond as best I can.

The Gift of Silence and Solitude

Some of my closest companions over the years have been authors of books that I have read. When I find myself alone, not ready to venture out into the world I choose to be quiet at home with a good book. It is often one written by someone and about something I can relate to. It helps me feel connected and not so isolated and alone. I refer to my books as my friends because the words that they contain offer solace to my soul when I need it most.

I found myself wanting to pull back more and more these past few months and I wrote about it recently. What I was noticing was that my hearing was getting worse and I was more and more tired after I was in a group setting. I saw my audiologist today and she confirmed for me what I had suspected. I have lost more hearing. So she adjusted my hearing aids and hopefully that will help improved things for me when it comes to understanding and taking part in social activities. Still I am aware that the fatigue is a side affect of hearing impairment and I must take time out in silence to restore my energy and not over task my nervous system.

If you can relate to any of what I am sharing here then I encourage you to take time to regroup and if you haven’t already done so get your hearing checked. Taking care of our bodies so that we can live a rich and vibrant life is key to our well being.

Posted on by Beth 4

Nature’s Lessons: Encounters with ‘Squirrel TV’ from My Living Room

My living room window looks out onto two large trees. They are planted side by side along with some smaller trees. It is interesting to see how these trees reach out and touch each other. The branches interwoven make it easy for the squirrels to run up and down their trunks. They also jump from branch to branch and tree to tree. It is quite entertaining to watch. There is a large nest at the top of one tree. I imagine the squirrels rest there when they are not busy chasing each other.

Sitting in my chair, I look out the window. I take great pleasure in watching the activities of at least two squirrels. One of the trees is a chestnut tree so this time of year the squirrels are busy gathering the nuts. If anyone happens to be standing under the tree, they could be bombarded with a nut or two. The same may happen if anyone is walking on the sidewalk. I have seen it happen. Quite startling to the victim.

Some days I find myself wanting to sit back and relax in my recliner. I take time out to watch “squirrel tv”. One can learn a lot about how to play and exercise from these little creatures. The more I study them and their interactions with each other the more fun I see them having. Maybe it is not fun for squirrels to chase each other. Maybe it is not a game at all. I don’t know that much about the behaviour of squirrels. Right now I just enjoy watching them.

What I know is that outside my window, there is a wonderful example of the interdependence of nature. It is just steps from the building I live in. Birds, animals, trees, sun, rain, wind, and earth all depend on each other. Watching how everything lives together in one small part of the yard provides me with much to consider. Paying close attention to it gives me lots to contemplate.

I don’t have to watch a documentary on regular tv or travel miles outside the city to see it. It is right here in my own front yard visible from the comfort of my recliner chair.

So what am I learning from watching “squirrel tv”?

  1. It is good to live close together. The trees in the yard are growing close enough together so they branch out and touch one another. When it is really windy they bend and sway and support one another. As humans we need to be close enough to prop each other up when the winds of change blow hard.
  2. Find someone to play with. Watching squirrels chase each other up and down the trees. They leap across branches and repeat the process over and over again. This reminds me to get up and move and do it playfully.
  3. Take time to groom yourself. I often seen the squirrels sitting on a branch grooming themselves. They take great care in doing so. The ones who are mangy looking are not doing well. Isn’t that what it is like for all of us. When we feel good we take care of ourselves and when our energy is focused elsewhere we let things go. Still we feel better when we are well groomed.
  4. Have a nest to go home to. High in the tree is a large nest made of broken branches and leaves. It is built upon three branches that grow out from the trunk of the tall evergreen. Isn’t it great how the tree supports the nest? The squirrel has a place to gather food. It also has a place to sleep at night out of sight from predators. We all need a safe place to go to when our day is done.

So dear readers. Those are just a few lessons in life that I have been reminded of by the squirrels outside my window. As the seasons change, the trees will start to let go of their leaves. The view outside my window will evolve. I look ahead to seeing how the squirrels adapt. Stay tuned for more messages from “Squirrel TV”. Till next time……

Posted on by Beth 0

The Baseball Game of Life: A Metaphor for Personal Growth and Challenges

I have developed a love affair with baseball. About four years ago I began watching baseball with my then roommate.  She was and still is an avid Blue Jays fan.  Every night we would watch the games together in the summer and I learned about baseball from her.  I got to know the players and who was good and well liked by the fans.  I also got to know the other teams and how competitive this game really is.

After a while I began to form my own opinions and favourites based on personality and performance. I became a Blue Jays fan myself and am still, to this day, loyal to my team.  Growing up in Toronto it only made sense.

When I moved out on my own two years later I missed my baseball time and began watching it on my own.   There was something about the game that drew me in.  I like it because it is slow and strategic and there is no fighting among the teams, at least hardly ever.  

The more I watched the game the more I see how the strategies get played out and how players get to know how to respond to the pitches and work together to score runs or defend against them.  I now have so much respect for both the offensive side and the defensive side of the game though I am just a junior when it comes to my knowledge of either side.

Metaphor for Life

Baseball, in my mind, is a good metaphor for life.  When we come up to bat we are at home plate and sometimes we hit a home run and sometimes we strike out.  Either way where we start is called home.  When we hit the homer we make our way around the bases as fast as we can until we are back home again.  When we strike out we leave home and go back to the dugout to contemplate our last move and how we could have done better until it is time to go home again.   

Other times we hit the ball just hard enough to make it to first base or if we are lucky to second or third on the first hit.  Then we wait for someone else to come to bat and hit us home.  Isn’t that a lot like life?  We all start from some place called home and then we make our way back independently running as fast as we can or strolling around the bases with a little help from our family and friends.  Sometimes we are left on the base and don’t make it back right away so we have to start over.

I have had my fair share of home runs in my life starting new projects and then working as hard as I can to bring the project home.  Just like in baseball where the playing fields change, we move around and we have to get used to the new terrain.  Some people work the same job and for the same company their whole career.  I know people who retired after 40 years from the same company and lived in the same house which they bought and paid for with the wages they earned.  Retirement for them was going home and not coming back to work.

For me though, I did similar work for lots of different organizations.  I always started at home office or home plate and worked my way around the organization helping them set up systems and clear administrative structures that worked to keep the ball in play.  When the game was completed I moved on.  I never stayed with one team for long.   

I moved around a lot in my life.  I had several different homes that suited my needs at the time.  I learned to play different positions and how to be a good leader as well as team player.  I could pick up the slack at new positions and learned to see the field from different perspectives.

Sometimes, though, life throws you a curve ball and you either hit it and make it to the next base or you miss it and have to try again.  

Building Community and Team Spirit

I was once offered an incredible opportunity to work on a pilot project helping young adults make the transition from school life to community living.  These young people had various forms of intellectual challenges and needed special accommodations to be able to work or volunteer in the community.  What made this project so special was that it was based on individualized funding and specialized programming so that I could go out into the community and find places for them to be of service based on their individual interests and dreams.  I had ten clients who I worked with and at the end of the first year they were all working or volunteering in a community organization where they felt they belonged and where their gifts and talents were honoured and appreciated.  They were all happy.  

After having such success with the first group I looked forward to the next year and another group of young people coming through the program.  Sadly though, the provincial government did not see the need for such a program to continue and decided to incorporate the work we did into a more generic program which was cheaper and where everyone was lumped together into workshops and government funded group activities.  I was offered a new contract at $15,000 less than my original contract to work with the same people while I watched their dreams being squashed before my eyes.  I said no and went back to the dugout to find my way back to home plate. Before I left though the young adults and their families had a farewell party for me and told me how much they appreciate the work we did together.  They knew I respected them and they in turn respected me.  For me that was my own personal home run.  

Team Building and Commitment

Having worked for many different organizations in different capacities all to do with office administration, human resources and sometimes social networking or community development, I have learned the benefits of working independently as well as in a team environment.

Now that I am retired I spend my time in the stands observing and watching the games being played from a spectators perspective. My role in the game of life is to cheer on those who are still running the bases, managing the teams and keeping the games going.  

I watch and support my children raise their children and support their spouses.  I spend time with my friends and peers making our way through life supporting organizations that we believe in.  

When and where possible we are out on the front lines advocating for a better world for our grandchildren and all children to grow up in.  We volunteer in and support community organizations that we believe in.  We may be in the bleachers still we are participating in the game because without the spectators there is no game.  

So dear readers whether you see the metaphor the way I do or whether you even like or know anything about baseball may you know that what ever position you play or however your participate you are part of the team we call the human race and your role is important.  

Let’s Play Ball!

Posted on by Beth 3