Hi y'all
Hope you're having a good week. Pleased to be back to regular blogging, if not frequent!
Still thinking about 'peripheral' - see blog 6/2/07.
I am wondering how far being on the periphery is a personal decision for an adult? For me? Is feeling peripheral a glass-half-empty-response on my part? One that fails to be proactive, take initiative, and find a place of acceptance, even if that is only with myself?
Maybe that has come about without my realising it. Perhaps the view from the boundary is all I've known and I therefore don't step onto the pitch. But, I'm getting bored watching the game. Want to be fully involved.
Anyway, I have choice, right? Choice to change. Affect change. Set the course of direction. Determine the pace. Select my outfit for the journey even!
Talking of which, I am going to the North East this evening, (via Oxford to drop Ned at his mum's!) for a conference Friday / Saturday in a large church , related to my Psychotherapy training. Looking forward to what God is going to do for the church, for me, and the benefit to my training.
Staying with good friends in Yarm for the weekend so will have a lot of fun, bar the driving, though will have some grooves and soulful melodies to accompany me! Long run in my new car too.
So, feeling like I'm a glass-half-full guy today. This week. Taking control. Making positive choices. Taking risks. Speaking up. Stepping out of my comfort zone. Feels good...if not a tad scary!
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Stories: You don't know you are born
My colleague was telling me today about the above ITV show today shown recently. Celebrities uncover their family's heritage and reveal the social history of the time as they explore the road they might have travelled themselves if their lives hadn't taken them into the world of show business.
Ray, who is nearing retirement after years of dedicated service to the YMCA, related the episode with Ken Stott (I think?) who pushed a plough around a field as his grandfather would have done day after day to earn a crust.
We related stories of our own grandparents and how the young people we serve in hostels have such different expectations of work today. I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch - "I got up this morning, before I went to bed... licked road clean...etc !!!
I do feel humbled that we do not really appreciate how generations before us have had to strive and struggle to exist, probably dying younger too.
My maternal grandparents, who have been dead 11 or more years, were entrepreneurs and grew from a corner shop to become the national mail order seed merchant Marshall's, eventually sold to a much larger firm. My auntie was pictured pushing a wheel barrow on the front cover of the seed packages.
Nan was a single parent for a few years when her husband, Moat, died suddenly. Their daughter was 12 or 13, but it didn't stop her adopting a baby girl as they had planned to do together. During the war she drove trains in Norfolk, to move essential goods around. She had plenty of tales of toil to meet deadlines and all the other problems of trying to run a small business. I used to listen to her for hours. She remembered the announcement of the first world war on the radio. I recall laughing how in Bungay, Suffolk, where she grew up, she would have to run errands to take messages for her mother because there weren't telephones (let alone mobiles!). So different to today.
Ethel was a great woman. Strong in heart and mind until the end, though her body lost to cancer, and her daughter had cut herself off from her for the remaining six years of her life, together with her other grandson. During that period she also nursed her husband with Alzeihmer's. Alone.
I miss my Nan and know she would have loved to see me now and to know her great-grandson.
I was the last to see her alive in hospital and it was a privilege to talk to her in her coma, say how I felt, pray over her, read her (trashy romantic) library book to her and share a joke about why on earth she was in to that stuff?!
I look forward to an answer when we next meet....
Ray, who is nearing retirement after years of dedicated service to the YMCA, related the episode with Ken Stott (I think?) who pushed a plough around a field as his grandfather would have done day after day to earn a crust.
We related stories of our own grandparents and how the young people we serve in hostels have such different expectations of work today. I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch - "I got up this morning, before I went to bed... licked road clean...etc !!!
I do feel humbled that we do not really appreciate how generations before us have had to strive and struggle to exist, probably dying younger too.
My maternal grandparents, who have been dead 11 or more years, were entrepreneurs and grew from a corner shop to become the national mail order seed merchant Marshall's, eventually sold to a much larger firm. My auntie was pictured pushing a wheel barrow on the front cover of the seed packages.
Nan was a single parent for a few years when her husband, Moat, died suddenly. Their daughter was 12 or 13, but it didn't stop her adopting a baby girl as they had planned to do together. During the war she drove trains in Norfolk, to move essential goods around. She had plenty of tales of toil to meet deadlines and all the other problems of trying to run a small business. I used to listen to her for hours. She remembered the announcement of the first world war on the radio. I recall laughing how in Bungay, Suffolk, where she grew up, she would have to run errands to take messages for her mother because there weren't telephones (let alone mobiles!). So different to today.
Ethel was a great woman. Strong in heart and mind until the end, though her body lost to cancer, and her daughter had cut herself off from her for the remaining six years of her life, together with her other grandson. During that period she also nursed her husband with Alzeihmer's. Alone.
I miss my Nan and know she would have loved to see me now and to know her great-grandson.
I was the last to see her alive in hospital and it was a privilege to talk to her in her coma, say how I felt, pray over her, read her (trashy romantic) library book to her and share a joke about why on earth she was in to that stuff?!
I look forward to an answer when we next meet....
Stories of who we are
Have snatched this from Pip (pipwilsonbhp.blogspot.com) as I love it in the light of my blog below.
"Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity . . . that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.”
Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets, 1991)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Disappointments
Been having some deep, deep feelings lately about disappointments in my life. Some of them recent, some from years ago, some (I think) from before I can actually remember. Unlocking them is painful.
Counselling is often (for me) about taking me to where I least want to go, because it can be so painful to take the lid off the can. But... no pain, no gain - so true.
I am trying not to stay on the periphery of my feelings but stay with them and understand them. I am grateful for those who help me in the process, and on the journey, although it can feel like, at best, I am squirming on the end of a hook or, at worst, being machine gunned!
I have been introduced to the thought that we should grieve for that which has disappointed us in life. Some of this is obvious, like the hurt and unfulfilled expectations of a broken relationship / marriage. Other areas are less obvious....
I don't think this means moping around feeling sorry for ourselves, or inventing disappointments when, as we well know, shit happens, but it is, I believe, helpful to acknowledge and understand feelings rather than let them fester and become 'cancerous' and eat away at us. To coin another phrase: better out than in!
I hope you have good friends. People you can really be honest with and share your deepest stuff. Friends that will listen and not try to answer lifes riddles for you, but just be with you and love you.
I have some and I feel so blessed not to be on the journey alone x
Counselling is often (for me) about taking me to where I least want to go, because it can be so painful to take the lid off the can. But... no pain, no gain - so true.
I am trying not to stay on the periphery of my feelings but stay with them and understand them. I am grateful for those who help me in the process, and on the journey, although it can feel like, at best, I am squirming on the end of a hook or, at worst, being machine gunned!
I have been introduced to the thought that we should grieve for that which has disappointed us in life. Some of this is obvious, like the hurt and unfulfilled expectations of a broken relationship / marriage. Other areas are less obvious....
I don't think this means moping around feeling sorry for ourselves, or inventing disappointments when, as we well know, shit happens, but it is, I believe, helpful to acknowledge and understand feelings rather than let them fester and become 'cancerous' and eat away at us. To coin another phrase: better out than in!
I hope you have good friends. People you can really be honest with and share your deepest stuff. Friends that will listen and not try to answer lifes riddles for you, but just be with you and love you.
I have some and I feel so blessed not to be on the journey alone x
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Peripheral
Do you ever feel, like me, peripheral?
Meaning:
[1] relating to or situated on the periphery, i.e. the edge or boundary. [2] of secondary importance; marginal, of minor relevance. Concerned with the relatively minor, irrelevant, or superficial aspects of the subject in question.
The subject in question might be family, or relationships generally? May be common to those adopted? Or perhaps you feel peripheral in other ways?
Even if I feel that.... is it true? Am I of secondary importance? Of minor relevance or even irrelevant?
No. It's a lie.
It may be the way I have grown up thinking like this, even if in tiny, subtle ways.
Do like me - make a list and note down when it sometimes feels like it's true, and the other times when clearly it is not. Does the list balance? What can you discern? I found that sometimes I may feel like that, but it doesn't mean I am.
Sounds like the bleeding obvious eh? Not for everyone!!!
Meaning:
[1] relating to or situated on the periphery, i.e. the edge or boundary. [2] of secondary importance; marginal, of minor relevance. Concerned with the relatively minor, irrelevant, or superficial aspects of the subject in question.
The subject in question might be family, or relationships generally? May be common to those adopted? Or perhaps you feel peripheral in other ways?
Even if I feel that.... is it true? Am I of secondary importance? Of minor relevance or even irrelevant?
No. It's a lie.
It may be the way I have grown up thinking like this, even if in tiny, subtle ways.
Do like me - make a list and note down when it sometimes feels like it's true, and the other times when clearly it is not. Does the list balance? What can you discern? I found that sometimes I may feel like that, but it doesn't mean I am.
Sounds like the bleeding obvious eh? Not for everyone!!!
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