Category Archives: family

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C is for Credulous

C is for credulous. Have you ever felt credulous?

“willing to believe or trust too readily, especially without proper or adequate evidence; gullible.”

My young guest in the picture is not quite sure how to interact with the old lady: she is the old lady who swallowed the fly. The fly, the bird, the cat, the dog and even the horse have just been neatly delivered back out of her. My guest is not sure what she will do next. The world is a magical place.

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Adults get caught up too, but in a darker version of credulous. Something for nothing. A deal too good to be true. A young relative on the phone, caught in another country, asking for help. Email from people saying that we have money from a distant relative who has passed. Calls over and over to my clinic that say they are from my long distance company and that they want to “help” me lock in service before a change…. I asked for a number to call back and was given the number of a sex line. I called my long distance company and they said, “Yes, they just lie.”

I think that fraud is on the upswing in the United States, but perhaps I am just a credulous person who believes that most people would like to earn their living in honest work and doing good for other people and the world.

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B is for bored

B is for bored? All of the emotions that I could pick that start with B, and I pick bored?

But I am going to talk about bored in the context of chronic pain: and suddenly it is not boring at all.

Welcome to 7 Sins and friends, a spectrum, a kaleidoscope, an ABC of emotions.

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If you hear the same sound over and over, like a faucet dripping, can you tune it out? I can. I can tune out practically any noise and I have fallen asleep under bright light in a Casino room full of ringing and blinging and alarming machines.

You may not have quite that level of ignoring something, but you can certainly tune things out. I have been reading Jon Kabat Zinn’s books on Mindfulness Meditation and I have used his mindfulness CD. I was having trouble sleeping after my father died, and I would use the CD. However, I used it in the reverse of how it is meant.

I used the body scan. Dr. Zinn talks in a slow calm tone and has the listener move from body part to body part, just feeling what is there. Not tightening or releasing muscles, but just starting with the left toes. At the start he says, “This is to fall more awake, not to fall asleep.” And I fell asleep every time.

But what does this have to do with pain? If you have tried meditation and focusing on your breath, your mind wanders. It gets bored. It starts think about the grocery list, or that person who yelled at you or ….. anything but the breath. You keep returning your mind to the breath. One day I had a hurt knee and was trying to go to sleep and thought…. hmmm. So I focused all my attention on the knee pain. Really tried to get inside my knee. Felt the pain fully and entirely….. and soon I was thinking about my grocery list. I pulled my mind back to my knee. My mind was sulky: yes, it hurts some, so what? Can’t we do something else? I am bored!

We are taught that pain is bad and I see many people in clinic who are afraid because of back pain. They are afraid to move because pain means something is wrong. Only most of the time it means that they have injured back muscles. The back muscles cramp up to protect themselves. The muscles must be soothed and stretched and healed and to do that we have to both pay attention to the pain and move without hurting the muscles worse. Sounds a bit boring,Β  right? Bored is more important than we think….

I took the photograph at the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula Washington, in 2004. We were not bored.

 

 

 

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Costume

My sister loved to dress up in costume. She died four years ago next Tuesday and her birth day is tomorrow.

The photograph is me and her daughter, in costume, at Lake Matinenda in Ontario, Canada, in 2009. I brought a rather demented flower fairy costume. The gloves are my mother’s: crocheted, uncomfortable, romantic and impractical. The whole outfit was entirely silly and impractical for the woods. My sister would bring long ball gowns up to the woods. We played dress up at my grandmothers with our cousins, in my mother’s 1950s prom dresses, in the middle 1970s. We thought her dresses were ridiculous. So were ours, of course.

I am not sure exactly what my niece is dressed as: a boy, I think, and maybe she was being a rapper.

At any rate, it is fun to dress in costume…. miss you, sisty.