Coping with difficult times

Many of us are going through difficult times and also times which may get even more difficult. My difficult time is really about my mobility and my physical health but this also applies to many others as well. As many of my readers know I am now 81 and have mobility problems which vary from day to day. After doing very little during the hot weather I decided that I needed to walk more either using my elbow crutch or using my walker/rollator. I made a decision to walk every day even if only half a mile. The first few days were fine but then I chose a different route which went up a hill. Where I live, if you go off the main road you go uphill. This uphill was hard and I was out of puff when I go to the top but I found a different way back down. However the feeling of space at the top made up for the hard work getting there. The following day I went the other way and came down the steep hill. That was the straw that broke the camels back and my knees and ankles did not like this at all. So a decision is made now that I do not go up or down the steep hill but go the other way which is less steep. You could call this adjusting or adapting what I do.

I feel that adapting different ways of doing things or making little adjustments to how you do things can make a lot of difference. You can apply this to many other things, shopping, cooking and other what you could call household tasks. I look out for offers when shopping and have found that I can still buy good food but save money with offers.

There are other things that can prove difficult for many. Those on waiting lists to see consultants or have operations or treatment. This can mean a difference between life and death in some cases and some with savings are using those to get treatment. In the UK this should not have to be the way but lack of proper funding for our NHS has brought us to this position. How do you cope with the waiting? Some look for alternative treatment and this can work well for some illnesses, others sink into depression which only makes things worse. I really understand that staying hopeful is hard, very hard, and when I look at the state of the world I often feel that there is no hope for change but we have to have hope and we have to imagine our world as a better place however hard our lives are currently. Without hope there is nothing.

As a Reiki practitioner I know that working together is better than working singly. Thoughts are energy and if we all send out love to every person in the world at the same time on the same day I am sure things will change. If you believe in this then join me at 9pm UK time on Wednesday evenings when together with others we send out healing and positive energy to our world.

Learning from experience

We all go through different experiences during our lives but do we learn from them? As a child we probably do, after all if you are told not to touch something because it’s hot and then you touch it, you most likely will not do that again. There are emotional and physical experiences as well as mental ones, that come to us all during our lives. Do we deal with them in appropriate ways and then learn from the experience or do we hide it all away and try to forget them often making ourselves ill in the process.

There are the deep emotional experiences such as grief, death, divorce and accidents where our lives may be forced to change so we have no choice about learning from that experience.

This last few months most of us in the world have been going through a different experience of lockdown or isolation. It is likely that we have all dealt with this in different ways. Some will have coped well while others will have gone into a depression or have found it mentally hard while others with physical problems who need to exercise in some form or other may have found that their physical health has deteriorated.

Most of us learn to adapt to a new situation and we are going to have to adapt even more as our world changes. This pandemic gave us an opportunity to learn what is most important to us and the world around us. Many have chosen to ignore those lessons so I believe that something else will happen to make people think hard about their lives as well as the continuing of the pandemic. On a soul level we are ready for this new world but it will consist of a lot more change and upheaval as we adjust. Stay strong and go with the flow knowing that all is as it should be and will be.

Random connecting thoughts

Following on from the events of last week I have spent much time pondering how we react to such events. First of all we start to adapt what we do and how we do things. This is essential for survival of course. Often we find we have to compromise by doing different things that we had put on one side for a later time and then of course there is the finding of other ways of doing things.

But these thoughts also bring me to the way we lead our lives. I don’t personally know any one whose life has gone smoothly. We all seem to have times when there are hitches or delays or when we have to change our plans. This is life of course and how we deal with all the hitches and changes is what makes us unique because we don’t all work in the same way. What works for one person does not necessarily work for another.

Looking back at my life I can see many times when I have had to change course as it were. Unexpected events, unexpected results of exams and unexpected changes of jobs are just a few of these. In most cases I either adapted to the changes or found ways of dealing with them that took me in another direction. This of course explains my varied academic achievements from music to science! I have found my life to be a very long learning curve.

What has your life been like? How do you adapt to unforeseen changes or events? Do you compromise in difficult situations? Do you continue to learn each day?

My restrictions on walking this week took me to a tiny garden planted by the residents of that street and called the Jubilee Garden. It won awards over several years and was hard for me to find until the shrubs were pruned and I realised what it was, a little gem in the midst of houses. I might not have found this had my walking not been restricted.