Taking A New Road

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." ~E.B. White

Today, like many days when I have nothing really pressing to do I drive down quiet, unfamiliar country roads just to see where they go. I am never disappointed because I don't drive with any expectations. I just go to see what I can see and where I'll end up. Sometimes I drive for thirty minutes to an hour and get totally lost only to eventually come upon something that tells me where I really am.

Now that I have survived a heart attack I don't really know where I am because I'm heading down another kind of road--one that I have never been down before. I don't know where I'm going but I have a clearer idea of who will be my traveling companions than I ever did in my youth. Back then it seemed I was always picking up temporary relationship hitch-hikers that very often wanted out sooner than I or I would rue the day I picked them up.

Brenda, the friend I spoke to today after not talking for 30 years ago is still riding along with me. My beautiful wife is by my side co-piloting and switching off occasionally as pilot when I become road weary. My aging, but relatively healthy mom, dad, mother-in-law, father-in-law and my sweet friends Bill Stott and Robert Bly, about a dozen long time friends not to mention my brother, sister are all sitting comfortably in my mortality motor vehicle.

This road winds, curves, and delights and I can't even see around the next bend. I can't hardly wait to see where it takes me.

Question: Are you taking roads never before traveled or just taking the same old ones?

Finding the Balance Again

“Teach us to care and not to care and to be still.” —T.S. Eliot

In my youth I did all kinds of things in the name of survival or to be thought of as a "nice guy": taking care of everybody else, knocking myself out to prove I was “worthy” of love. I lost a lot of myself in the process.

Or I’d try the opposite side for a while and I’d pretend I didn’t need anybody, the lone wolf who would only look out for old Number One, when secretly I feared that no one else cared about me. Both tactics failed.

In the end I’ve had to begin learning the difference between “care-taking”—giving up my own needs in favor of others’ needs—and caring for people—loving them while respecting their right to live in their own way.

Especially since my heart attack I’ve learned, too, that sometimes “no” is the most loving word that I can say. I've said no quite a bit lately--"no" to exhaustion, "no" to too much traveling and "no" to trying to do this thing called "life" by myself. More yeses are coming--"yes" to more conversations with friends, "yes" to family, "yes" to quietly reading good books and long walks in the park.

Questions: What do you need to say "no" to and what do you need to say "yes" to?