Miss My Waning Garden

Wish I could wind down like my garden. Yet at the same time have you ever seen the roses look so beautiful.  Each plant or person has special needs. When you are trying to figure out why you do what you do you think of needs. Basic yet not known. If you have knocked at a door for years and it did not open you go around it. You do not see the door anymore.

If you are unhappy, you don't see the door. Can a person find the door? I remember the phrase about knocking and it shall be answered. Who knows what you missed behind the door. You only know that now you are taking the long way around. Is it useful to look back? Maybe it is just better to see the roses bloom exuberantly in the moment. Waning gardens make one think too much. Guess the music box doesn't unwind completely. Where are the cat whiskers when you need a tickle to think on the roses? Cat whiskers do show the cat's mood.

When heat included with rent you get Life

Well. Apartment news. Six federal marshals with 2 local police and the rental agent arrested a Ten Most Wanted  profiled young man this past week in my apartment complex. Two well known local ladies of the night moved in upstairs. Opps. Almost forgot the explosive youth who loves to throw glass bottles outside and likes to kick in mail room walls moved into my building from the  complex's other building. Guess it will be company for the brain damaged lady who lives next door to him. She believes the light in the refrigerator controls how fast her milk spoils and that the police department has a remote control of her furnace thermostat. Let me not forget the registered child molester who lives next door to me. Or the new college student below me who believes you enter your apartment and get pizza deliveries through his garden apartment window below my balcony. I think he watched too many Dukes of Hazard County reruns.
 
Yes, when heat included in the rent you get life. Amazing what you can observe while you take out the trash, sit on your balcony, or watch the people from 17 cars enter the window of the apartment below you. Yes, When heat included in the rent you get life. Life as in prison sentence?

 Image from TMCnet Bloggers, 4-13-09  Click here for their link

Need a walk in the forest to cool your 'overthink' ?

Click here for the link to Forest Walk Art

 Enjoy your walk.    Be mindful of the images. 

Hold the simple breathing images in your memory  

when the mind races when it should walk.

Why am I awake when the rest of the world is sleeping?

If you can set a clock, can you reset a body clock? When you wind the spring too tight during the day, guess it takes a long time to unwind. So I'm awake when the world sleeps. But does it? The world that is. There are always cars on the road. I live near a major road that feeds the expressway and the city Main Street.

How can I find the 'switch' to change this red-eye habit? If behavior occurs because it meets some benefit, what benefit does this behavior give me. Clarity because environment offers less distractions. I can focus better. But this is only a perception acquired because I allow myself to believe that it is a better time to focus.

So again I am having conversations with myself that justify this behavior. Like in the book, Switch, my rational mind says it is OK to stay up late. But it also says the following day that I need more rest. But the strength I need to see to make a change in habits is that I am blogging about my struggle.  So the emotional brain is getting some benefit. Balancing this brain chatter, this overthink, isn't easy. It is like picking up a car and turning it around to drive in the opposite direction. I think I'll drive over to my cat whiskers and climb in the music box. I really don't do the best writing late at night. . . . Cat whiskers indicate mood. . .Guess I'm pulling them back in a defensive mood. They also let a cat feel around in the dark like I do.

Click here for why cats have whiskers.


Here's an image of a cat named whiskers from http://www.catoftheday.com/archive/2006/June/03.html

Awake and turn on 'Switch' to Change Habits

Since I have to make new habits I have found an unique book called Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.* It analyzes why change is so hard. Our rational mind wants to change but the emotional mind wants a safe known comfort zone. The book tells stories how people have changed by recognizing strengths not weaknesses. I think  their book presents a concise realistic plan for making transformative change .

An example is the story of a young man is given the task of reducing child mortality in a rural Vietnamese village. Given his placement is only for months he cannot realistically effect change by reducing poverty. Instead he observes and seeks out the few families whose children are thriving. He discovers some simple things they do different from the other families whose children are struggling due to malnourishment. These thriving families cook with cultural taboo foods and they make sure the children are not just present at the meals but they feed the children and make sure they eat.  Gradually by encouraging groups of villagers to cook together, to feed the children 4 times a day instead of two, and to introduce the previously excluded foods the young man was able to help 65% of  the village's children thrive.

So I don't have to create a new habit, I only have to 'switch' to see my strengths and expand that existing habit into the wider area where I desire change. It is provocatively simple. If my overthinking is immobilizing me then use this strength as a 'switch ' to turn on the area I want to develop or to form a new habit.

Could it be as simple as thinking about what I am thinking? I have to think about that. I am only just in the first few chapters of the book.  There must be more.  Ummm.  Am I overthinking again? Yes, this time it is a good overthink. Maybe my overthinking isn't such deficit after all...

Need to unwind into the music box now. The simple is complex. Did you know that cat whiskers have a smooth side and a very rough side when stroked in different directions. Got to uncoil this brain. The smooth side is what I feel when I slide out of the music box in the daytime. It is the rough side that I touch when I climb in at night. Nights are always rougher. Darkness is too vast an area for an overthinker to roam. Raw thoughts.

Click here for Heath brothers' website 

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Sugar can put you to sleep or anger you to stay awake.

If you want to stay awake, don't go for a 2 hour glucose tolerance test. You lose your ability to sit upright within 15 minutes. Give it 25 minutes more and you'll want  to sleep because it is too much work to breathe. You will drift off waiting for empty oxygen tanks to give you some chest expansion. But you'll not to get to sleep when very shaky paramedic hands try to put screwdrivers in your veins to start an IV drip. Wonder what med this paramedic is on. 

As this time elapses your body says OK enough of this sleeping break during the middle of the day and you wake up to wait for hours in ER to be told: No, you cannot have a sugar reading test. Anger builds up. You were supposed to have your glucose tested 2 hours after drinking this fruit punch with the wallop of a volcano. You may ask to have it tested so you don't have to go through this _____ again. But no the ER wants not to hear any requests. So you stew. Wait 2-1/2  hours more to be allowed to go to the bathroom and get a blood draw on their schedule. Then you wait another hour for blood work to come in. Sure, your reading is normal now. Sure, you want me to wait another three hours to perhaps see a doctor.

Sure I value your value of me, ER department. You take the blood results and decide to leave. The ER staff wants you to leave. Do they say any precautions? Nope. Sign here and leave. But the son says cross that off saying you were advised against leaving. Do they have the readings from the lab clinic that doesn't believe in oxygen belongs in oxygen tanks. No. Do they have the paramedic's report? No. All I have is some wonderful normal lab reading taken two and a half hours after it should have been taken.

Sugar can put you to sleep but it can wake you with anger. Now, do you wonder why I want to unwind in a music box and sleep among cat whiskers?

Blog has awakened in a different garden.