Mining Nuggets

Reviewing the situation (Update)

Update

In error, I posted this piece twice and people have commented on each one. I do not want to delete one of the posts, thereby deleting comments.

I think about this blog a lot. Daily. When I am out walking, or driving alone in my car. I wonder when I first started writing it, and reflect on how so many subjects of my life, thought processes, or the course of my emotional development have featured here in this public forum. Indeed, the sub-title of this blog is "my diagnosis of me," and I have certainly been on a self-exploration journey with it.

My blog has been my companion through some very painful emotional times these past four years. It has served as a connection to the outside world when I felt abandoned and alone. Indeed, here on this blog I was able to work through and confront some key psychological barriers that were really opened up for me with Bob-the-therapist back in my Buffalo days.

This ever-so-personal, while also extremely public, format helped me improve my writing skills, enabling me to complete a second book, and an edited collection of essays.

In short, this blog has supported my personal, social, and professional growth in ways that I could never have imagined. I am ever grateful for it. Now, however, I feel I have reached a cross roads of some kind. At the very least I think I have to find a different purpose for this blog - perhaps even a name or site change - if I am to continue at all. For, if I want social Internet connection, or to keep friends and family updated about my life, Facebook has become a perfectly satisfactory venue for that! Personal ruminations of one kind or another are suitable for my private journal writing, and in any case, I have been thinking about writing a memoir at some stage.

Turning sixty has had a major impact on me. I feel emotionally opened, grounded in a different reality, and at the same time, free to be all I can be. For example, one of the things I have been thinking about since I turned sixty is that I do not seem to need as much emotional support or acknowledgment as I did when I was younger. It is almost as if I am finally able to give up my old longing for parents. Indeed, I am able to parent myself! I have allowed myself to become an adult. So many of those ancient, unrealistic, and adolescent or childish expectations I had of significant people in my life have dissolved and gone away. I seem able to meet others in an emotionally mutual space, where I feel equal and more confident in who I am.

Perhaps I could name my new blog (if I decide to continue blogging) something to do with being in my sixties. 

Hm ... more to think about!

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Went away ... and - More hats ...

Reviewing the situation

I think about this blog a lot. Daily. When I am out walking, or driving alone in my car. I wonder when I first started writing it, and reflect on how so many subjects of my life, thought processes, or the course of my emotional development have featured here in this public forum. Indeed, the sub-title of this blog is "my diagnosis of me," and I have certainly been on a self-exploration journey with it.

My blog has been my companion through some very painful emotional times these past four years. It has served as a connection to the outside world when I felt abandoned and alone. Indeed, here on this blog I was able to work through and confront some key psychological barriers that were really opened up for me with Bob-the-therapist back in my Buffalo days.

This ever-so-personal, while also extremely public, format helped me improve my writing skills, enabling me to complete a second book, and an edited collection of essays.

In short, this blog has supported my personal, social, and professional growth in ways that I could never have imagined. I am ever grateful for it. Now, however, I feel I have reached a cross roads of some kind. At the very least I think I have to find a different purpose for this blog - perhaps even a name or site change - if I am to continue at all. For, if I want social Internet connection, or to keep friends and family updated about my life, Facebook has become a perfectly satisfactory venue for that! Personal ruminations of one kind or another are suitable for my private journal writing, and in any case, I have been thinking about writing a memoir at some stage.

Turning sixty has had a major impact on me. I feel emotionally opened, grounded in a different reality, and at the same time, free to be all I can be. For example, one of the things I have been thinking about since I turned sixty is that I do not seem to need as much emotional support or acknowledgment as I did when I was younger. It is almost as if I am finally able to give up my old longing for parents. Indeed, I am able to parent myself! I have allowed myself to become an adult. So many of those ancient, unrealistic, and adolescent or childish expectations I had of significant people in my life have dissolved and gone away. I seem able to meet others in an emotionally mutual space, where I feel equal and more confident in who I am.

Perhaps I could name my new blog (if I decide to continue blogging) something to do with being in my sixties. 

Hm ... more to think about!

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Went away ... and - More hats ...

Pieces, life takes out of you

Quote of the day:

Everything is miraculous. It is a miracle that one doesn't melt in one's bath. Pablo Picasso (From CCIE)

These past few days, while sitting on the beach, I have been reading Olive Kitteridge. Parts of it have moved me deeply. Especially the last page. In fact, after reading the ending, I plunged myself into the sea and wept. I could not help but identify with so many of the characters, even Olive herself:

What young people didn't know, she thought ... that lumpy, aged and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly ... No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it ... But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union ... (Page 270).

And, Elizabeth Strout about early morning ...

... he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret ... (Page 3)

Well, I surely have been having fun this past week. Lying in the sun, reading, walking, biking swimming, eating fish of all shapes and sizes, breakfasts out and about, cotton candy, and enjoying talks with friends, watching the ocean as the sun sets.

[Before ... (last year in Cape May) After ... (this year in OC, NJ)]

While walking on the beach in Ocean City, I remembered a photograph that Marion took of me while walking on the beach in Cape May last year, and us both making a pledge not to drag all our weight into our sixties. Looking at the photograph on the right, taken by a kind passer-by at Ocean City recently, I realize I have almost accomplished that goal. However, it is not just the weight on my body, I have lost - it is the heaviness in my soul. I have shed so much more than weight - it seems as if this past year, I have allowed much of my shame, guilt and anger to fall away with each pound of flesh!

Indeed, this year, I feel lighter, happier, and healthier in every way - full of energy and hope, and so much joy, and, dare I say it? - Inner peace. I think that going back to work next week is probably going to be all right!

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: A letter to my child (One of my personal, most favorite posts ... still enormously relevant today, perhaps even more so - one year later)