I wasn’t able to post this until today because of some technical issues. What a total joy to participate in this concert! I did indeed try to be mindful throughout. Don’t know that there’s much more to say. If you live anywhere near Greenwood Village, CO, come to our next concert! I’ll start posting about our new music in January. In the meantime, take a look at what you missed.
milestones
Thoughts on Thankfulness
Here I sit the 
day after Thanksgiving, at a kitchen table that still has dirty dishes on it, facing counters still piled with debris. Jim and I will launch a commando raid and get everything cleaned up later on. It would have been nice to get up to a clean kitchen this morning, but our guests stayed and stayed. Isn’t that great? The surest sign of a successful party is that people don’t want to leave. So I’m reminding myself as I sit here of the wonderful time we had last night sitting around this very table (and the one in the dining room, too, which is also still cluttered). How fast special events go by! Which is only another way of saying, how fast life goes by! Everyone left and I looked at Smoggy, our cantankerous cat and said, “Smoggy, Thanksgiving is all over for another year!”
It Ain’t About the Money, Honey!
A number of years ago I read an article in the Washington Post Magazine (attempts to track it down online have been unsuccessful) about expensive weddings. The highlight of the story was the description of a couple who spent $100,000 on their special day—and this happened at least a decade ago, when a $100,000 wedding was really a $100,000 wedding.
True Desire Leads to Action
You know what got me started on this whole blogging thing? My son’s cancer experience. I knew there were lots of people who wanted to keep up with developments, and I found it very therapeutic to write it all down. So I went ahead and did it. This website had been up for months, but I hadn’t felt compelled to do much with it because I had no true focus, no true desire, just a vague idea that I needed to publicize my book. Suddenly, though, I had a real story to tell. Once I got started I realized how desirable it was to write these entries. And I kept going. To this very day.
Happiness in Transient Things
I love tulips! And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage. If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food. You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.
A Very Happy Occasion!
Recognize the woman in the picture with me? It’s Gretchen Rubin, the writer who has done so much to shape my thinking on happiness, and now on habits. She was on the cover of Parade magazine this past Sunday, so she may look familiar to you even if you haven’t heard of her. (Sigh. As with a number of other images, this one did not survive our site migration. So this is just Gretchen’s author pic from Amazon.)
Gretchen’s on tour right now promoting her latest book Better than Before, and last night she was at the downtown Denver Tattered Cover Bookstore. I was determined to go and see her in person, especially since I missed out on the last time she was in Denver two years ago.
There is no elevator to success . . .
. . . you have to take the stairs!This anonymous proverb embodies the rather timeworn idea that there are no shortcuts to achieving a goal; you have to get there step by step. We all know that isn’t true 100% of the time; once in a great while there’s a so-called “overnight” success. (Including, I guess, viral videos.)
I’ve been thinking for some time that there seems to be a paradox about what produces achievement. The boring, repetitive actions, followed consistently day after day, tend to produce great results, while the dramatic actions often produce . . . nothing much.
There’s no great pleasure . . .
. . . without some small pain!
Below you’ll see a slideshow of some of the wonderful pictures Jim took this past week on our traditional visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens “Blossoms of Light” tour which they have during December. (This post was originally written in December 2014. Please note that because this site was moved to a new platform some images were lost, among them, sadly, the pictures for this post.)
Last year we missed it, for some reason. This year they had absolutely outdone themselves. There’s one small drawback to this outing: It’s usually pretty COLD. I’ve gone before wearing a totally inadequate jacket and shivered my way through it. More of an endurance test than a pleasurable outing. This year I made sure to wear my heavy-duty parka and did much better, but 23 degrees is still 23 degrees. I found myself alternately being distracted from the cold by the lovely displays and distracted from the lovely displays by the cold. I’m so glad we made the effort, though. What a great memory, and how little the discomfort really mattered. Don’t we often switch those priorities, though, and concentrate on the small inconveniences and difficulties? I think back to my father’s funeral, for example, which was on the whole a wonderful service. What stands out in my mind the most? The fact that their sound system picks up police scanner transmissions in the area, so periodically the testimonies and the Gospel-filled sermon were interrupted. Later my brother said to me, “Why were you sitting there making faces at me while I was giving my testimony?” I was so irritated and distracted by the sound system’s defects that I irritated and distracted him. I do try any more not to let myself dwell on the imperfections inherent in any human event, but it’s a struggle for me. I’m sure there will be more posts on this topic.