Author: athling2001

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JSW Prompt 4-23-2018

Feel free to join in and respond to the prompt. Please try to keep your response under 300 word (recommended, not law). I will re-blog your post to my site.

 20180418_175743.jpgpix by csk
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Question of the Day 4-22-2018

Please feel free to answer these questions on your blog or in the responses. If you leave me a link to your post, I will re-post it on my blog. You can also feel free to forward these questions to anybody who might be interested. Thank you to those who have already shared their thoughts.

What habits would you like to cultivate in your life?

Habits are mysterious things, hard to start, harder still to stop when they are bad. Once you get past that golden hour and have the habit entrenched, things are usually great. Getting there is the hard part. Exercise used to be a habit for me. An hour of deep muscles exercises, thirty minutes of ski machine.  Twenty minutes of weights. Every day. Seven days a week. Plus twenty minutes of meditation and affirmations.

So what happened? Kids did. Divorce did. Just plain being tired.

Back to the habits I would like to cultivate. Start the list  – Eating better. Exercising more. Being kinder. Gentler. Freer with myself and my heart. More financially aware. Write more. Be more productive.

The more you do, the more you can do. I believe that. The more habits I weave back into my life, the more habits I can weave in. The more freedom and kindness I can weave into my life, the more joy I can hold. The more joy I can hold, the more joy I can give….

Habits are pretty amazing, don’t you think?

 

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Taken for Granted 4-22-2018

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It’s hard to remember the things which come easily and abundantly into our lives might not be abundant in other people’s lives. For example, I take for granted I will have someplace to go, to live, to be safe and secure between walls and roof and floor. But how many other people, both in America and beyond, don’t have the safety and security of a place to live?

Probably more than I could ever imagine, since I can’t even image what it would it be like to be homeless. I’m sure it won’t be like Sam in My Side of the Mountain or Claudia From the Mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. If homelessness was running away to live in the woods for a year or running away to live in a museum, I’d be all over that. I’ve always wanted to run away to live in the woods, with a nice cozy tree to live in and a pet falcon. And I’ve always wanted to live in a museum. Or a tree-house.

See, those are my fantasies from childhood. Maybe another child fantasized about living in a house with four walls, heat, AC and a working kitchen and bathroom. Maybe another child fantasized about hot dogs and beans.

I take for granted I will always have food to eat, if I can just figure out what – in all the choices available – I’d like to eat. There are people in the world who don’t have that choice. Often they have to choose between eating or some other necessarily of life.

So many things we take for granted. Without even thinking about it, I can walk into a store and buy a drink and some chips. Not everyone can.

I can stay warm inside my house. I can stay cool. I can stay dry. Not everyone can.

I can go to school. I can choose to continue education. I can choose to move anywhere I want. I know that if I walk from my house to my car, I am normally fairly safe. I can work in my backyard without being afraid. I can go out to eat, see a movie, decided to take a trip, make some popcorn, take a flight, go to a ballgame or anywhere else I might wish to go or anything I might wish to do.

But not everybody is so lucky. I’m sure that, even in my neighborhood, there are people who do not have the same freedoms and luxuries I enjoy.

How do we fix this problem? I don’t know, but I do know that every single step we take forward, each time one of us ripples the universe with a gesture of love and acceptance and togetherness, the entire world takes a step forward. I can’t feed the children in Africa, but I can help feed the children in my own town.

I can remember those things which come easily for me, don’t come so easily for all. I can open my hand and my heart to let little bits of my ‘things’ free for others.

If each of us, the hundreds and thousands and millions of us, opened our hands and our hearts to let little bits of love and hope and caring free, we might not recognize the world when we wake up tomorrow.

What an answer to all our prayers!

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Question of the Day 4-21-2018

Please feel free to answer these questions on your blog or in the responses. If you leave me a link to your post, I will re-post it on my blog. You can also feel free to forward these questions to anybody who might be interested. Thank you to those who have already shared their thoughts.

What are you eating these days?

What am I eating? Not the best choices, but not horrible either. I have yogurt – either raspberry, blackberry or mixed berry – with mini chocolate chips and walnuts for breakfast. Some sort of granola bar or breakfast bars for snack. Lunch varies. Soup in the winter, maybe a sandwich. I tend to go on tangents over food. I might have PB &J for lunch for three months and then switch to something else. Right now, I am eating what are called Ready Meals because they are easy to carry and eat at work. Everything in one pouch, heat 1:30 and lunch is done!

For dinner I have been eating cereal, PB&J (last night PB&Banana!) or a variety of frozen meals.

The things I don’t eat enough of are vegetables and fruit. Normally at this time of the year, I would be buying strawberries, raspberry, blackberries, blueberries and all other sorts of fruit to eat. This year, money being as it is, I don’t feel I can spend so much on the more expensive items like berries.

At some point, I will have a harvest of blueberries off my bushes, but it’s not time yet.

I get very obsessive over eating. The yogurt breakfast has been going on for quite a few years now. For a while, I was eating yogurt for breakfast, lunch and dinner and not much else. Not good, I assure you.

Most of the time, I can resist sweets, with the exception of chocolate chip cookies, Butterfingers candy, cheesecake and ice cream. Put two of them together such as a butterfinger blizzard…. heaven.

Oh, and Sprite to drink. I don’t drink any other sodas and I try to stay away from anything with artificial sweeteners. Yeah, I know. Try that in these days of artificial everything. I also drink Chocolate Almond milk, Oj and a great little drink called Berry Burst. Green tea if I can find a kind which is not too sweet. And water with a touch of fruit. Just enough to taste, but not too sweet. The brand I get is called Hint and I love it.

The problem is, if somebody gives me something else food-wise, I feel obligated to eat it so as not to hurt their feelings. I know, but I do. Anything but meat. I’m gotten good at turning meat away.

I’m working on it. I’d like to lose some more weight though I can be happy as I am if this is where I am going to stay. What I really need is more exercise and I am working on that also.

Evie helps with the exercise. Short walks with her turn into adventures. We took a short walk the other day which ended up being two hours. The walk ending up with her deciding to run down a muddy bank to the creek. And, thus, me sliding down said muddy bank into the creek. It took me some time to get back up the muddy bank with Evie running back and forth and all around.

But, you know, it was fun. I hadn’t slid down a muddy bank in years.

This post has wandered far astray of what I eat, but that is okay, too. In the end, what I eat comes down to what makes me happy and what tastes good to me at the time.

I am, however, working on the vegetables.

Wish me luck.