attend a presentation about working with trauma in group therapy, and
go food shopping with Michael,
I saw this:
I AM curious about that person’s hedgehog, but I haven’t got all day to hear about it. I actually haven’t got all day to do any one thing. Every day, I like to mix it up, leaving room for
listening,
talking,
walking,
animals,
people,
working,
playing,
thinking,
feeling,
breathing,
music,
eating, and
balancing my needs with other people’s needs (like talking about their hedgehogs or whatever else is important to them).
I also don’t have all day to write these posts and I assume you don’t have all day to read them. But I do have all day, every day, to notice what’s around me.
We have got only so many days in this lifetime, so how do we want to spend our days?
I choose to state my surprise that I have chosen to use the word “choose” so seldom during the past one thousand, one hundred and sixty-odd days of my daily blog, since we all need to choose so often, every day.
Why did I choose the title “Choose” today? Because yesterday, in therapy, somebody talked about how to choose when balancing personal needs with the needs of loved ones.
If you choose, please share what “Choose your battles” means to you.
I now choose to share all the other photos I took yesterday.
I choose to explain that last photo, as follows: Yesterday evening, I chose to drive my chosen friend and co-worker Megan home. As we made choices driving to Megan’s home, she spotted the car her mother had chosen, directly in front of us. When Megan chose to call her mother on her chosen cell phone to reveal this choice coincidence, her mother chose to suggest that Megan get out of my chosen car and get into hers, in order to make things easier for me. After Megan chose to get out of my car and get into her mother’s, I chose to snap the above photo and also chose to text this to Megan:
I miss you!
Megan chose to text me this back:
I miss you too!!!!
Luckily, since Megan chose to join me at work a few months ago, we can choose to see each other very often.
I now choose to share this song by Sting, about the multiverses created whenever people choose:
What would you choose to say about all I chose to share today?
Finally, I choose to thank Megan, Megan’s mother, my patients, Sting and you — of course! — for choosing to visit my blog, here and now.
Somebody at work, yesterday, talked about the agony of waiting to hear whether she’ll get a green card from the USA government, allowing her to remain here with her husband.
At my try-out for “The Voice” in Philadelphia next weekend, I’m hoping to receive a red card, which will get me into the call-back auditions.
My friend Eleanor sent me this card for my birthday:
Card-carrying meteorologists around here are predicting bitter cold for the next few days.
Here are some new photos I could store on a memory card:
The word “card” also means (according to those cards at Merriam-Webster):
a usually clownishly amusing person : wag <he’s such a card>
One thing I hope one writer of this blog has learned after one one one one days of blogging:
There is no other shoe, so spend not one moment worrying about one’s future. Worry is one especially useless way to spend one’s time.
Here’s more than one thought about ones, on this 1111st day of this one blog:
I have one son.
Last night I had one dream that my one son was gone.
I one-der if I had that one dream because my one son will be attending one college (TBD) in less than one year.
One needs to look out for number one, because what number of people will do that if you don’t?
One needs some al-one time, once in a while, to keep oneself together.
People need people, and yet one thing I witness as a psychotherapist — one day after another — is everyone’s difficulty asking for help and support from even one other person.
Mindfulness — one’s ability to be present from one precious moment to the next one — is one useful practice.
Yesterday, I spent some beeootiful time with my beeeooooootiful son Aaron and my beau-ootiful beau Michael in beautiful Brookline, Massachusetts, USA, which has a beeoootiful book store, many beeeooteeful restaurants, AND a beeoooteefulllll art deco movie theater.
At the beeooooteefull Booksmith, I spotted this beautifully signed poster:
The beeoootifulll author, George Saunders, has byootifully written
Thanks, Booksmith
You are more byootifull
Then this phlower
Luv.
George Saunders
… which I find beeoootiful, in many ways.
What do you find beeooootiful, in this moment, where you are?
Here are 57 varieties of additional beeeooootiful photos I snapped last night:
WordPress uploaded all of those quickly and smoothly. Beautiful !
Are there any of those images you find particularly beeoootiful? It would be so beautiful if you’d let us know why! And if you wish, I’ll let you know, as best I can, why I took that beeooootiful shot.
Which reminds me of an exchange I had with somebody who asked me a question, many beeootiful moons ago, while I was taking lots of photos in his neighborhood:
Unknown neighbor: I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to ask you this, but why do you take so many pictures around here?
Me: Of course! I’m glad you asked. I write a daily blog and I take pictures of things I find interesting and beautiful.
Neighbor: That’s okay, then.
Many beeeoootiful thanks to neighbors, Aaron, Michael, beau-ootiful Lewis Carroll, Alices in Wonderlands, Gene Wilder, turtles (mock and otherwise), Brookline Booksmith, George Saunders, the Regal Beagle restaurant (although none of us had the Beau-ootiful Soo-oop), the Coolidge Corner Theater, gangs of Harleys, The Wolfpack, and all the other beeeooootiful things I saw yesterday. And special thanks to beeeeeeeooooooooteeefullll you, for visiting today.
Lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of wonderment, amazement, surprise, and disbelief — from people in the Blog-o-Sphere and in the Non-Blog-o-Sphere — about the fact that I blog every day.
I, in response, have a lot of wonderment, amazement, surprise and disbelief that this seems so incredible to people.
Honestly, though, if I had not started blogging on January, 2013 and kept that going daily, I would also find such once-a-day, long-sustained blogging … wonderful, amazing, surprising, incredible, and — probably — beyond my capabilities.
We never know what we can accomplish until we do it, right?
While many people have told me they are impressed and surprised that I have maintained a streak of Six Hundred and Twenty-Seven posts in a row, nobody has asked me this specific question, so far:
Where do you get your ideas?
If they did ask that, I would probably answer — in my usually digressive way — by telling this at-first-seemingly-unrelated story:
When my son, Aaron, was born 16 years ago, on February 23, 1998, almost everybody I knew expressed wonderment, amazement, surprise, and disbelief that Aaron had red hair. Why? Because both I and Aaron’s father had dark brown hair.
As Aaron was growing up, he (and we) heard this question, over and over again:
Where did that red hair come from?
I taught Aaron to reply to that question a certain way, which I shall reveal momentarily, in my usual digressive way.
Before I do reveal that, I want to let people know that I stole this answer from a social worker who went to graduate school with me and who just happened to be working in the hospital where Aaron was born. This nice, red-headed social worker (whose name I cannot recall, in the moment) told me that her family taught her to answer the above question, as follows:
It came with my head.
Now, with just a little re-writing, I think I can use that same response — which Aaron said many times as he was growing up — to answer the title question of this post.
Hmmm. But what IS the best way to rewrite that, now, to:
be a good enough answer to the today’s title question: “Where do you get your ideas?” and also
Should the answer to the question “Where do you get your ideas?” be:
they came with my head?
they come with my head?
or something else?
Geesh! Rewriting, to make something fit perfectly, can take a lot of time and effort. It’s a good thing I’ve let go of any dream of perfection, here.
If I hadn’t, how could I possibly blog every day?
While I don’t include perfection here, I do include photos. Let’s see if I have any recent shots stored on my iPhone that might fit this topic — if not perfectly — well enough.
Aha! Here’s a photo I took at the Teacher/Parent Open House at my son’s high school, a few evenings back (when I was looking for C words for this post):
That suggests — to my brunette head — another possible answer to the title question of today’s post:
Randomly.
One final question, today, before I publish this post: How might you answer today’s post question, for yourself? In other words, where do you get your ideas?
Hmmmm. I’ve just looked at the time and realized I’m finishing this post earlier than I expected. Is it okay to publish this post on 7:17 on a Saturday morning? Or, would that confound, confuse, or otherwise craze my regular readers, who might expect me to publish this at a later time today?*
Just in case, I shall stall the publishing of this post, one more time, by searching for a piece of music that fits this post — if not perfectly — well enough.
I just went to YouTube and searched “where do you get your ideas song.” This is what I found:
That’s American singer-pianist-songwriter Billy Joel explaining to school students, in 1983, the answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”
While that video IS interesting, it’s not meeting MY needs, for a music-related video. (And, believe me, I write these posts, daily, to meet my own needs.)
Okay! It’s time to publish this Six Hundred and Twenty-Eighth (but who’s counting?) post!
Thanks to my son, to my son’s teachers, to nice social workers everywhere, to Billy Joel, to the Bee Gees, to ideas (and idea-generators), and to you — of course! — for doing your best to understand all these ideas, today.
* New readers might not recognize this, but I’m “mind reading” here. For more about mind reading and other CBT cognitive distortions, see here.
