FOLLOWING THE HEART

Back in July of 2008 I wrote my first HOT COFFEE & COOL JAZZ blog entitled Following the Heart.  From that blog I said "I'll be looking forwards and backwards -- and sometimes sideways -- in my life, sharing with you some observations and reflections just for the fun of it."

And it has been fun.

More than five years have passed, and life moves on.  I have made many changes in my life during this time.   Just as I have worked hard to accept the necessity to downsize, I also focused on setting aside the things that cause pressure in my life.  Most pressure is self-inflicted anyway, and while it is easy enough to identify what things you OUGHT to be doing, it is hard to let them go if you truly enjoy them.  

I loved my genealogy society meetings, but the night drive to attend meetings became a burden that I had to set aside.  Jer and I joined a group at the library, and I found that I did not enjoy my time there, so that too went.  And to be very honest with you, things that we face in our daily lives get harder as our minds and bodies get less facile in physical and mental areas.  It's time to sort through those things and make changes.

Several months ago I tried to climb up on a chair to reach something in a cupboard.  As I hoisted myself up, my knee gave out and I plunged down onto the floor, luckily that same chair breaking my fall but nearly murderizing my rib cage.  It was hard for me to acknowledge that I could no longer count on my knees holding me up:  moral - don't climb up on chairs anymore, a feat I've done for probably 70 years.

I find a parallel to that in what is going on in the electronic age:  AOL upgrades create a monumental connection problem on my computer.  Google takes away things that I use every day.  The internet is not for old people, unless it is kept very simple.  I thought I was doing ok until I lost the capability to upload a photograph onto my blog, which I had been able to do for five years. That did it for me.  I don't want a photoless blog.

And so in considering this, I also came to believe my brain and my mouth and my thoughts have become overworked.  My life has changed and I don't have many interesting things going on, making the subject matter sometimes awfully difficult to work with and sometimes even to find.  Every day that I don't write a blog I'm inwardly fussing about it.  And I need to remove this burden from my life, too.

So this blog will be the last one.  It's been fun for me. I actually wrote them for myself, so in that I was successful.  I hope you enjoyed a few along the way.

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