Quarantine Series: Learn something new

Learn how to Read….Again

If everyone will just give me an honest five minutes I’m sure we can get somewhere. If you can sound out these words going from left to right, forming sentences and then on to paragraphs without having to take Tylenol for a headache or Midol for cramps than I assume when you were 5, 6, 7 or 12 you learned to read. I’m also going to make a powerful assumption that there was something tangible in your hand when you first started this journey. You read words like cat and dog. You put sentences together like “Mat sat” and you got excited when you could finally sit down and read “Hop on Pop”. 

The world opened up to you.

You started recognizing that words are everywhere…on that STOP sign you just passed, on that restaurant sign, on those rocks (don’t read that honey). You started asking questions: What does that say Mom? What does that say mom? What does that say mom? What does that say mom? What a glorious time.

Then life happened. Not just life filled with growth and adult responsibilities but life filled with a changing world. A world of access to everything and a computer with access to everything in everyone’s back pocket. A life of speed (not the drug but actual velocity) and instant gratification. Life in 2020.

That being said, I ask you, honestly, if you have read a hold in your hands, flip the paper pages book complete with that “old book smell” within the last six months? If the answer is “no”, I invite you to learn something new:  learn to read again.

 “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

― Groucho Marx,

The friends I made in my childhood I still retain. Occasionally, especially now having children of my own, I visit them. I have met and adventured with countless decent, brave and remarkable people over the years. I have cried with them and shared their victories. And always in times of loneliness,  I have had a few really bosom friends that I can find companionship amongst. I can always feel home when I pick up Conan Doyle or Austen. There have been times when I read nothing else but the Bible and Charles Dickens. After a bit of that my husband and I can’t communicate anymore because my vocabulary becomes too dated. When I read “Old Yeller” to my kids, I laid down my head along with my seven year old and we had a solemn cry. My children and I have shared adventures of great magnitude in front of our fire through the winter months and have played Captain Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins until I was concerned that the neighbors would get to wondering if they heard “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum” anymore.

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I don’t doubt that reading on a device has immense conveniences but I do think that something, perhaps remote, is lost when you give up the paper book for a reasonable facsimile. This is nothing compared to the distressing reality that masses of people aren't reading anymore. At all! They aren't reading books at all! I have to object. We may all be different and have vastly varying strengths and opinions and tastes but we are all the same in many ways. There are things that may not be necessary but are valuable. They may not be missed when they are gone but they would enhance if present.

 “A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”

― Astrid Lindgren

I pose one question, if it was important when we were children, should it be unimportant now?

Picking out favorites from my favorites is just too hard and some might think me cliché in my picks (especially if they haven’t read them because then they just wouldn't understand) so I jot down a quick few to spark interest and “implore you to exert yourself” as the birds did to Peter Rabbit when he was hopelessly caught.

Persuasion By Jane Austen

Dracula By Bram Stoker

Princess Bride

All Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

Gaining Favor with God and Man

Switch on Your Brain By Caroline Leaf

Mere Christianity By C.S. Lewis (and frankly you could read his Chronicles of Narnia anytime in life. I just read them all last year....again)

Around the World in eighty Days By Jules Verne

Oh I have to stop!

If you have children please read “Honey for a Child’s Heart”. Just do it.

I refrain from harping anymore. You know how I feel and even if you have entirely giving up the childhood feeling that great fiction gives, I haven’t. I have a book waiting for me upstairs. A solid, Dickens that I’m 400 pages into so I am beginning to know the people within on a first name basis. Just thinking about spending a quarter of an hour in their company whilst my raucous household sleeps makes me a tad giddy. If you don’t get it that’s okay, I’m sure I wouldn’t get lots of things about you. But we can still get along. 

Learn something new

Here goes my first video. Used my child as a prop to help with my unnatural nervousness (although I really tried hard to get him to play outside. I am just super popular).

 But really, I’m not going to shy away from something because I’m afraid of looking foolish (which I did) or being inarticulate (which I was). Also, when my head is positioned just right it looks like I have a whirly bird thingy on the top of my noggin...Oh well. I’m not going to be a sissy pants because someone might not “like” me or might out n’ out hate me, or say mean things to me (apparently that happens to people). It is the time in our lives if ever there was a time, to live a life of strength and not of fear. To live out of an abundance of belief in a good good God and not out of worry or uncertainty. It is a time to add what light I have with what light you have and what light others have until our united brightness overpowers darkness. The Light of the World in us.

I invite you to learn something new with me.
 To refuse to be part of the negativity.
To make your moments matter.
 To laugh with your children.
To do something you usually don’t have time to do.
To do something of value. 

To live out of strength and not weakness.

Life in the Clink

It is, speaking along a common thread, an unprecedented time in many peoples existence. Even though our country and the world as a whole will probably not count this the worst of hardships in histories past and histories yet to come, there is nevertheless a realness that has seeped into every joint…I mean home. However hard we try to keep joy and peace prevalent in our family, to keep the TV off and the access to negative things minimal there is an overall weight that cannot be ignored. I am going to write seven posts of my own, for the sake of relevance and consequently interest but not necessarily genius, in the next ensuing days. “The incarcerated life”, as it were. Not seven consecutive days mind you. I need not promise where I cannot perform.

Does anyone else feel that although home all the time, one has less time than before? Maybe it’s just me. I’m definitely spending more time cleaning and never feeling that things are any more clean. More time doing school with my kids and not feeling like they are learning anything additional.  I’m not going to lie, that streak of very cold and very wet weather we had last week was just mean spirited. It made the slammer very nearly unbearable.

I refer to the difficulty of worldwide proportions as “that virus” since I refuse to call it by its semi technical name and adamantly refuse to refer to it by its pet nick name as if we are on speaking terms.  Stay tuned for “confinement confessions”.

Facing Reality

The nature of a human being is hopeful.

This is why the tragedy of losing hope is so significant. Even in bleak and challenging circumstances the heart of a person alive looks for the silver lining, for the lesson and for the light at the end of the tunnel. Which is why facing reality is a purely subjective practice. Everyone's reality is laced with their own perspective, their own past, their own humor and a hundred other altering factors.

 So I face my own reality with a grain of salt, as the saying goes. The short of it is this: I am a mom of six, undergoing the same quarantine that much of the country, nay the world, is experiencing at different levels. I am the same mom who blogged somewhat diligently for a while, practiced violin diligently for awhile and is constantly making goals and writing lists that often get started and rarely get finished. Oh, it's a harsh truth. but the hope within me of a better self, of using my time in wisdom and towards a specific and focused end still rustles and pulls me towards its bettering light. I hope you, my friends, are pushed and pulled and awakened by that same force. I began to blog years ago not because I desired to make a living at it or because I thought I had something so profound to say that the world of the internet just had to hear, but that I wanted to journal my journey and challenge myself to do something broadening.

 Well, that hasn't changed, so I pick up my proverbial pen to continue, not from whence I left off but from where I am. My hope is that I will reanimate the desire to share my little bits of journey by just starting again, less with a perfection that keeps me from posting at all but hopefully with my best foot forward, or my real self forward or maybe just with what I want my real self to be forward. I guess I'll see as I get going.

To the future, to the moments, to facing reality with hope and an ability to laugh...sincerely, heartily, well.