There are things I’ve learned over the past few years that are counterintuitive.  And because they’re counterintuitive, I tend to forget them and need to re-learn them.  One of the things I learned was that when you’re super busy, you should take more time to pause.  That it will make you more productive in the end.  The lesson had to do with meditation (meditate for longer the busier you are), but I took it into the physical world this Sunday. 

​I stopped the world and just floated down the river. It was easy going with easy going people.  And for those hours you are floating down the river, there’s absolutely nothing you could do about anything elsewhere, so you just let it all go and live in the moment.  In that way, it’s a lot like meditation.
And do you know what?  I was super productive today!  It was like magic; things just seemed to cross themselves off lists. 

​I’ve decided that lists are introverts.  If you bug them every day trying to cross things off (or add things), you will drain them and they will move reluctantly and slowly and just seem to get longer.  Give them an introvert recharge day, and they will be much more cooperative the next day.  They might even just cross some things off themselves. Turn off, rest, turn back on.  Age old wisdom there.

​I’ve learned in my later years to “feel all the feels”.  While I understand the human tendency to avoid painful emotions, and the midwestern tendency to push down these emotions or pretend they don’t exist, they are a part of the fullness of the human experience.  So now, I embrace them, sit with them, feel them, and then they don’t usually stick around quite as long.
With this new philosophy, I found myself grieving the loss of our beloved dog, Tully.  I let the grief wash over me. I cried the ugly tears.  I played all my sad music.  But there aren’t too many songs about the loss of the family pet, so I turned to the music I listened to at my last moment of grief and found, interestingly, that grief is just grief.  It lives in the same place in my body and feels the same, no matter the source.
So I listened to all the music about the loss of love, about the dissolution of relationships, and found the emotion not so different than the grief of losing our dog friend.  Which is, of course, amusing enough to elicit laughter that helps grief to not be all that unpleasant after all.