I just realized as I was putting up the last post that a huge chunk of my online journal is missing in action. It appears to not have made the move from previous my previous online journal and website. Hmmmmmm... I am not sure what the best way is to move the rest of the stuff over as I don't to loose those entries.
And... I am not sure what to do with my Butler's Book, which appears to be more paper than online entries.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Transformative Experiences
I have to give a speech next Sunday to a group of victim service advocates and police mucky mucks. In re-working the text of this speech it made me realize that the topic transcends being a victim of crime... it speaks to all the tough times we have in our lives and how we deal with them. I have been reading about the difficulties some slaves are experiencing on a few of the lifestyle forums I participate on and thought this speech applies... so I am sharing it. I will probably point a few of them in this direction rather than answer their posts and rehash this for them.
So... here it is... Transformative Experiences
Good afternoon everyone.
Well...
I certainly did not expect to be standing before you today giving a short “inspirational” speech. Yet, here I am. I guess we can thank Tina (Divisional Coordinator for Southwest Division) for this honour as it was at her request that I speak to you today. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting her office with our Sergeant to take “The Grand Tour.” For those of you who have visited the Southwest office you know that takes all of two minutes. Near the end of our visit we were having a conversation about traumatic events in our lives and in the lives of the victims we serve and how we (and our victims) turn these negative experiences into something positive. As part of this conversation, I mentioned a traumatic event that happened to me 30 years ago. Following my brief description of that event, Tina asked me how I got through it. I couldn't really answer her at the time, other than to say “I guess that is just me” or something to that effect.
I could not stop thinking about our conversation, that event and how I was able to move past it. It kind of nagged at me. I really wanted to answer Tina's question in a more meaningful way. I remembered something I had written in 2009. I shared this with Tina thinking it would answer her question. It did, but it also made her cry. As a result, she was insistent that I share this with you today. So here I am.
I wrote this as part of a service our church held about “Meaningful Things.” Each church member was asked to share something meaningful – a picture, a book or story that had particular significance in their life. I had a very difficult time trying to decide what “meaningful thing” I wanted to share. Life at the RCMP station had been exceptionally difficult, if not horrendous, that week. As a result, I had been thinking about some of the difficult moments in my life, covertly comparing them to the difficulties my victim services clients were going through, and then trying to find some comforting words to help them deal with the emotional and sometime physical impacts of their being victims of crime. For me that week, it was not so much about meaningful things, but more about meaningful experiences - those experiences that transform us.
Each of the “meaningful things” we spoke about during that church service came as a result of our life’s experiences - meaningful experiences that sometimes left us with a tangible item to remember them by, but not always. Sometimes, all we had were the memories of the experience itself.
Each of us has meaningful experiences. We tend to share with each other our positive experiences rather than those negative experiences we have suffered through and have since consigned to our past as soon as they are over, never to be thought of or dwelt upon again - if we can help it. And, while we do not like to dwell upon those negative experiences, each of them has been meaningful in our lives one way or another. Like the positive experiences, they have served to act as moments of transformation. The thoughts I would like to share with you today are on those "transforming experiences" that make us who we are in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
What do I mean by a transforming experience? I mean an event or series of events that happen in our life that shift our way of making meaning in this world and our place in it. I think each of us has had one. In fact, I think we have had many, because transforming experiences do not have to be big major events.
Some are big ones, like a brush with death, but some are smaller ones, like turning thirty or forty or some birthday with a zero at the end. Some are all at once, like a parent dying suddenly, and some are actually a series of less noticeable events that happen over a longer period of time, like a child growing up and into independence. Some can even be non-events externally but still be transforming experiences like the feeling of oneness with the universe we get encountering the beauty of nature or through meditation. Some are seen as primarily joyful, like the birth of a child, and others bring more loss and grief, but no matter how they manifest themselves, transforming experiences are all important events that we have to come to terms with in one way or another.
They are the events and experiences that cause us to grow and change over the years, which we all do whether we want to or not and whether we are conscious of the changes or not. One cannot go through a transforming experience without being transformed, becoming, in sometimes very subtle ways, a new and different person.
The transformations that come from joyful events, although often dramatic, are ones we usually handle without too much difficulty. Events that cause loss, sometimes even unrecognized loss, are the events that can make us "moan more or less incessantly," as M. Scott Peck put it.
How can we constructively integrate into our concept of the “world-as-it-should-be,” events like war or the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one or a major medical event or, on a less dramatic but no less important scale, a child leaving home to start a life of their own or the retirement that we thought we were looking forward to but find ourselves at a loss to accommodate ourselves to? How can we deal with such events without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway, especially if we think something terribly unfair has happened to us? Do we have any control over how we are transformed by experiences in our lives? If so, how do we exercise that control? These are some of the questions I ask myself as I assist my victim services clients who are experiencing very difficult circumstances and can’t seem to see any light at the end of the tunnel. They know their lives are being transformed by the experience of being a victim, but they feel totally at a loss in terms of what this transformation will mean or how it will change their lives, forever.
People who belong to religions with a personal God may be able to answer that “God has control,” but then they have to deal with the question of "why bad things happen to good people" that Rabbi Kushner addressed in his book of the same name. However, some of us do not have a personal God to rant at or blame or attribute such seemingly inexplicable events "to the will of," so how can we come to terms with events that seem to make no sense. Most of us grew up with an image of a world that we believed was "generally easy" or at least a world that "should be" if not easy, at least “fair.” The issue of a world where events often happen randomly is one that we have to wrestle with. We need to find a way to make sense of a world that isn't always fair.
One of my most difficult experiences happened in the summer of 1982. That summer I was a victim of a violent crime.
My first serious boyfriend was when I turned 17. Our relationship was very intense from the beginning. He was jealous of everything, my family, my friends, and my life. It was not until we moved in together did things really change. My nightmare was just beginning. He would hit me, punch me all the usual things abusers do. There was always a constant barrage of set-downs and insults. Eventually you just internalized all the set-downs and believed them. I was ashamed, so I did nothing. Everyone in my family thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Eventually, with help, I moved out. I thought it was over, it was not. My nightmare was just getting worse. My EX stalked me relentlessly for 8 months. He showed up at my work, called my apartment, my friends, my family. He would park his car outside my window for days on end, sitting there watching me. He would follow me everywhere I went. When I called the police to report my concern they said I was over reacting and that he would get over it when he got a new girlfriend. He never did.
In the summer of 1982, my EX buzzed my outside apartment door and asked to speak to me. I said okay and let him in. Then I got scared and realized I made a mistake. So I called the police. I was on the phone with the police when he showed up at my apartment door. I tried to tell him to leave but he would not, he pushed his way through the apartment door and grabbed me. I was still on phone to police. Thank goodness for that, because that is what saved my life. Once I started screaming the police were dispatched. Within 15 minutes, my EX had taken a large kitchen knife and was telling me he was going to kill me - "If he could not have me, no one could." I don’t remember much after that. Only that it took 5 very large policemen to get him off me. I can still feel his breath on my cheek and the feel of the knife against my throat. And I can hear the yelling. I can't get rid of these images. They are with me forever.
In the spring of 1983, everything came to criminal court. It was a tough time. My friends and family all had very strong ideas about what should happen and I just wanted everything to be over. I was in counseling and I did not want to relive the whole nightmare in court. So, a deal was reached. He would plead guilty to assault with a weapon (rather than attempted murder) and he would get 2 years probation, and no jail time. He was not to contact me ever. And he has not - one of life’s small blessings.
People I trusted and who I believed knew about such things told me not to be surprised if I found myself with some tough questions as a result of this experience. A couple of months into my “recovery”, I was taking pride in myself for having dealt with the tough parts of that experience. I thought I had come to terms with the outcome of the court process. I was rebuilding my life. I was adjusting quite nicely to the idea that I could be safe in my home and in an intimate relationship, when, as one friend put it, I ran smack into my mortality. I realized that except for a twist of fate, luck, or whatever you want to call it, I really could have died. I would not exist anymore, right now, this moment. I began to question the meaning of my life up to that point. If I had died, what would be left behind? What effect or meaning would my life have had? I hadn't given birth to my son or saved the world or done anything magnificent like invented a vaccine for AIDS or solved the global warming problem. What difference would my life have made in twenty, a hundred, a thousand years? Even if I had an effect on this earth, what effect would it have on the universe? I realized I was less than a blip on the radar screen of the cosmos so what difference did it make what I did or didn't do? These were not happy thoughts. My old ways of making meaning of my life weren't working any more.
One of the ways I have found to deal with things that are troubling me is to find someone with whom I can talk them out. I took this problem to my friend, a worker in the mental health field. When I told her my realizations and feelings she said, "Yes, Kimberly, if you had died we would have missed you and felt sad, but the universe would have gone on." This was not the response I expected to hear. I'm not sure what I did expect, but that wasn't it. I continued by asking her how she helped people who came to her with similar concerns about their insignificance on a cosmic level hoping, I think, to get a different response. This time her answer was, "accept it." At first this seemed a bit harsh but, with time, I understood it to be the kindest answer she could give because, if we are to have meaning in our lives, there often is no other choice but to do just that. As I worked on giving up feeling sorry for myself and accepted that my one human life is transitory and insignificant on a cosmic level. I turned to the good things about being alive and I found myself seeing everyday life from a new perspective.
Part of this new perspective is a realization that worrying about the future is futile. Knowing that life is perfectly normal one minute and could easily have been in total chaos instead makes the future less rigid, less sure and therefore less important in some ways. There is a saying that I've heard, I don’t know the source or the exact quote, but it summarizes my feelings on this topic so I'll try to explain the gist of it.
"Accept it" is good advice for many difficult experiences. By this I do not mean have a "stiff upper lip" and push aside any grief you feel. Part of acceptance of the situation is recognizing and accepting the losses and sadness you are experiencing - accepting that life isn't easy. But one can "look for the silver lining" even if it takes a while for it to come into focus.
One of the ways to accept such difficult events is to delay judgment of what effect they will have on your future. We all think and act like psychics at times. We think we know what consequences an event will have for us, but often we haven't a clue. 20/20 hindsight is wonderful at showing us how wrong our judgment of an event's "goodness" or "badness" was at the time of the event. It is often difficult to be able to say to oneself at the time an "awful" thing happens "Maybe it's good. Maybe it's bad. I don't know yet."
A friend of mine shared a metaphor that he said gave him a way to think about events that happen in our lives and the choices we have in the way we incorporate them into our outlook of the world. Although music has not been as big a part of my life as it has been in his, the metaphor resonated with me and has helped me see that I have choices in how I treat events. Think of your life as a page of sheet music. The experiences you have, the "things that happen" to you are the notes on the page. You cannot change the notes themselves but you can interpret them in a variety of ways. For example if the music is in 4/4 time, you can play the notes as a funeral dirge or as a wedding march.
I would like to share one last story as an example of how my transforming experience has changed my ability to read the sheet music of my life. I have always hated winter or at least the rain and damp darkness that are an integral part of the season on the west coast. In the past, in early fall, I would start a "more or less incessant moaning" about how much I hated winter. It was going to be rainy and grey and dark for at least the next five months. I fear I was not always pleasant to be around as I griped and complained about the continually falling rain and how hard it was for me to get dry and stay dry for very long and how much I just hated winter! Over the years, somewhat to my surprise, I have changed my attitude. I still prefer to be too warm than too cold and I still don't like the decreasing daylight, but I am grateful that I am alive to feel the rain and experience the shortening of the days that I know will eventually lengthen when winter turns to spring. I don't hate winter so much anymore. Winter hasn't changed. I have. My attitude toward winter has changed. The notes are the same but I'm playing them differently. I do have a choice about how I perceive winter. Part of the transformation that happened to me as a result of my close call is a delight in every day, even winter ones.
I now return to some of the questions I posed earlier. How do we make sense out of random, "unfair" or even "evil" events? If we listen to M. Scott Peck, we accept that life isn't always easy. That is just the way our universe is. Can we do this without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? I think so if we realize we have a choice of how we let experiences shape our view of the world. We can take control over our interpretation of events, of whether an experience is good or bad or even postpone judgment realizing that maybe the best thing to do is say, "I don't know yet." What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway? There is nothing wrong with grieving losses. It is essential that we do so, but we can waste a lot of energy and miss many of the wonderful parts of just being alive if we become bitter or constantly wish things were different than they are.
I leave you with this thought today. When think about the meaningful things in your life, think about how the experience them has transformed your life. How do you want that experience to shape the phrases that appear on the sheet music of your life?
So... here it is... Transformative Experiences
Good afternoon everyone.
Well...
I certainly did not expect to be standing before you today giving a short “inspirational” speech. Yet, here I am. I guess we can thank Tina (Divisional Coordinator for Southwest Division) for this honour as it was at her request that I speak to you today. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting her office with our Sergeant to take “The Grand Tour.” For those of you who have visited the Southwest office you know that takes all of two minutes. Near the end of our visit we were having a conversation about traumatic events in our lives and in the lives of the victims we serve and how we (and our victims) turn these negative experiences into something positive. As part of this conversation, I mentioned a traumatic event that happened to me 30 years ago. Following my brief description of that event, Tina asked me how I got through it. I couldn't really answer her at the time, other than to say “I guess that is just me” or something to that effect.
I could not stop thinking about our conversation, that event and how I was able to move past it. It kind of nagged at me. I really wanted to answer Tina's question in a more meaningful way. I remembered something I had written in 2009. I shared this with Tina thinking it would answer her question. It did, but it also made her cry. As a result, she was insistent that I share this with you today. So here I am.
I wrote this as part of a service our church held about “Meaningful Things.” Each church member was asked to share something meaningful – a picture, a book or story that had particular significance in their life. I had a very difficult time trying to decide what “meaningful thing” I wanted to share. Life at the RCMP station had been exceptionally difficult, if not horrendous, that week. As a result, I had been thinking about some of the difficult moments in my life, covertly comparing them to the difficulties my victim services clients were going through, and then trying to find some comforting words to help them deal with the emotional and sometime physical impacts of their being victims of crime. For me that week, it was not so much about meaningful things, but more about meaningful experiences - those experiences that transform us.
Each of the “meaningful things” we spoke about during that church service came as a result of our life’s experiences - meaningful experiences that sometimes left us with a tangible item to remember them by, but not always. Sometimes, all we had were the memories of the experience itself.
Each of us has meaningful experiences. We tend to share with each other our positive experiences rather than those negative experiences we have suffered through and have since consigned to our past as soon as they are over, never to be thought of or dwelt upon again - if we can help it. And, while we do not like to dwell upon those negative experiences, each of them has been meaningful in our lives one way or another. Like the positive experiences, they have served to act as moments of transformation. The thoughts I would like to share with you today are on those "transforming experiences" that make us who we are in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
What do I mean by a transforming experience? I mean an event or series of events that happen in our life that shift our way of making meaning in this world and our place in it. I think each of us has had one. In fact, I think we have had many, because transforming experiences do not have to be big major events.
Some are big ones, like a brush with death, but some are smaller ones, like turning thirty or forty or some birthday with a zero at the end. Some are all at once, like a parent dying suddenly, and some are actually a series of less noticeable events that happen over a longer period of time, like a child growing up and into independence. Some can even be non-events externally but still be transforming experiences like the feeling of oneness with the universe we get encountering the beauty of nature or through meditation. Some are seen as primarily joyful, like the birth of a child, and others bring more loss and grief, but no matter how they manifest themselves, transforming experiences are all important events that we have to come to terms with in one way or another.
They are the events and experiences that cause us to grow and change over the years, which we all do whether we want to or not and whether we are conscious of the changes or not. One cannot go through a transforming experience without being transformed, becoming, in sometimes very subtle ways, a new and different person.
The transformations that come from joyful events, although often dramatic, are ones we usually handle without too much difficulty. Events that cause loss, sometimes even unrecognized loss, are the events that can make us "moan more or less incessantly," as M. Scott Peck put it.
How can we constructively integrate into our concept of the “world-as-it-should-be,” events like war or the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one or a major medical event or, on a less dramatic but no less important scale, a child leaving home to start a life of their own or the retirement that we thought we were looking forward to but find ourselves at a loss to accommodate ourselves to? How can we deal with such events without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway, especially if we think something terribly unfair has happened to us? Do we have any control over how we are transformed by experiences in our lives? If so, how do we exercise that control? These are some of the questions I ask myself as I assist my victim services clients who are experiencing very difficult circumstances and can’t seem to see any light at the end of the tunnel. They know their lives are being transformed by the experience of being a victim, but they feel totally at a loss in terms of what this transformation will mean or how it will change their lives, forever.
People who belong to religions with a personal God may be able to answer that “God has control,” but then they have to deal with the question of "why bad things happen to good people" that Rabbi Kushner addressed in his book of the same name. However, some of us do not have a personal God to rant at or blame or attribute such seemingly inexplicable events "to the will of," so how can we come to terms with events that seem to make no sense. Most of us grew up with an image of a world that we believed was "generally easy" or at least a world that "should be" if not easy, at least “fair.” The issue of a world where events often happen randomly is one that we have to wrestle with. We need to find a way to make sense of a world that isn't always fair.
One of my most difficult experiences happened in the summer of 1982. That summer I was a victim of a violent crime.
My first serious boyfriend was when I turned 17. Our relationship was very intense from the beginning. He was jealous of everything, my family, my friends, and my life. It was not until we moved in together did things really change. My nightmare was just beginning. He would hit me, punch me all the usual things abusers do. There was always a constant barrage of set-downs and insults. Eventually you just internalized all the set-downs and believed them. I was ashamed, so I did nothing. Everyone in my family thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Eventually, with help, I moved out. I thought it was over, it was not. My nightmare was just getting worse. My EX stalked me relentlessly for 8 months. He showed up at my work, called my apartment, my friends, my family. He would park his car outside my window for days on end, sitting there watching me. He would follow me everywhere I went. When I called the police to report my concern they said I was over reacting and that he would get over it when he got a new girlfriend. He never did.
In the summer of 1982, my EX buzzed my outside apartment door and asked to speak to me. I said okay and let him in. Then I got scared and realized I made a mistake. So I called the police. I was on the phone with the police when he showed up at my apartment door. I tried to tell him to leave but he would not, he pushed his way through the apartment door and grabbed me. I was still on phone to police. Thank goodness for that, because that is what saved my life. Once I started screaming the police were dispatched. Within 15 minutes, my EX had taken a large kitchen knife and was telling me he was going to kill me - "If he could not have me, no one could." I don’t remember much after that. Only that it took 5 very large policemen to get him off me. I can still feel his breath on my cheek and the feel of the knife against my throat. And I can hear the yelling. I can't get rid of these images. They are with me forever.
In the spring of 1983, everything came to criminal court. It was a tough time. My friends and family all had very strong ideas about what should happen and I just wanted everything to be over. I was in counseling and I did not want to relive the whole nightmare in court. So, a deal was reached. He would plead guilty to assault with a weapon (rather than attempted murder) and he would get 2 years probation, and no jail time. He was not to contact me ever. And he has not - one of life’s small blessings.
People I trusted and who I believed knew about such things told me not to be surprised if I found myself with some tough questions as a result of this experience. A couple of months into my “recovery”, I was taking pride in myself for having dealt with the tough parts of that experience. I thought I had come to terms with the outcome of the court process. I was rebuilding my life. I was adjusting quite nicely to the idea that I could be safe in my home and in an intimate relationship, when, as one friend put it, I ran smack into my mortality. I realized that except for a twist of fate, luck, or whatever you want to call it, I really could have died. I would not exist anymore, right now, this moment. I began to question the meaning of my life up to that point. If I had died, what would be left behind? What effect or meaning would my life have had? I hadn't given birth to my son or saved the world or done anything magnificent like invented a vaccine for AIDS or solved the global warming problem. What difference would my life have made in twenty, a hundred, a thousand years? Even if I had an effect on this earth, what effect would it have on the universe? I realized I was less than a blip on the radar screen of the cosmos so what difference did it make what I did or didn't do? These were not happy thoughts. My old ways of making meaning of my life weren't working any more.
One of the ways I have found to deal with things that are troubling me is to find someone with whom I can talk them out. I took this problem to my friend, a worker in the mental health field. When I told her my realizations and feelings she said, "Yes, Kimberly, if you had died we would have missed you and felt sad, but the universe would have gone on." This was not the response I expected to hear. I'm not sure what I did expect, but that wasn't it. I continued by asking her how she helped people who came to her with similar concerns about their insignificance on a cosmic level hoping, I think, to get a different response. This time her answer was, "accept it." At first this seemed a bit harsh but, with time, I understood it to be the kindest answer she could give because, if we are to have meaning in our lives, there often is no other choice but to do just that. As I worked on giving up feeling sorry for myself and accepted that my one human life is transitory and insignificant on a cosmic level. I turned to the good things about being alive and I found myself seeing everyday life from a new perspective.
Part of this new perspective is a realization that worrying about the future is futile. Knowing that life is perfectly normal one minute and could easily have been in total chaos instead makes the future less rigid, less sure and therefore less important in some ways. There is a saying that I've heard, I don’t know the source or the exact quote, but it summarizes my feelings on this topic so I'll try to explain the gist of it.
“The future is in the future and it will never be here. The past is past and it is over and done with. The present is all we really have. It is a gift and that is why we call it the present.”This is not to say that we don't need to plan for the future or learn from our past, both individually and as a culture, but it does mean, to me, that right now is what is most important and we can miss a lot of important moments in the present by spending mental time and energy in the past or the future.
"Accept it" is good advice for many difficult experiences. By this I do not mean have a "stiff upper lip" and push aside any grief you feel. Part of acceptance of the situation is recognizing and accepting the losses and sadness you are experiencing - accepting that life isn't easy. But one can "look for the silver lining" even if it takes a while for it to come into focus.
One of the ways to accept such difficult events is to delay judgment of what effect they will have on your future. We all think and act like psychics at times. We think we know what consequences an event will have for us, but often we haven't a clue. 20/20 hindsight is wonderful at showing us how wrong our judgment of an event's "goodness" or "badness" was at the time of the event. It is often difficult to be able to say to oneself at the time an "awful" thing happens "Maybe it's good. Maybe it's bad. I don't know yet."
A friend of mine shared a metaphor that he said gave him a way to think about events that happen in our lives and the choices we have in the way we incorporate them into our outlook of the world. Although music has not been as big a part of my life as it has been in his, the metaphor resonated with me and has helped me see that I have choices in how I treat events. Think of your life as a page of sheet music. The experiences you have, the "things that happen" to you are the notes on the page. You cannot change the notes themselves but you can interpret them in a variety of ways. For example if the music is in 4/4 time, you can play the notes as a funeral dirge or as a wedding march.
I would like to share one last story as an example of how my transforming experience has changed my ability to read the sheet music of my life. I have always hated winter or at least the rain and damp darkness that are an integral part of the season on the west coast. In the past, in early fall, I would start a "more or less incessant moaning" about how much I hated winter. It was going to be rainy and grey and dark for at least the next five months. I fear I was not always pleasant to be around as I griped and complained about the continually falling rain and how hard it was for me to get dry and stay dry for very long and how much I just hated winter! Over the years, somewhat to my surprise, I have changed my attitude. I still prefer to be too warm than too cold and I still don't like the decreasing daylight, but I am grateful that I am alive to feel the rain and experience the shortening of the days that I know will eventually lengthen when winter turns to spring. I don't hate winter so much anymore. Winter hasn't changed. I have. My attitude toward winter has changed. The notes are the same but I'm playing them differently. I do have a choice about how I perceive winter. Part of the transformation that happened to me as a result of my close call is a delight in every day, even winter ones.
I now return to some of the questions I posed earlier. How do we make sense out of random, "unfair" or even "evil" events? If we listen to M. Scott Peck, we accept that life isn't always easy. That is just the way our universe is. Can we do this without "moaning more or less incessantly" or becoming bitter? I think so if we realize we have a choice of how we let experiences shape our view of the world. We can take control over our interpretation of events, of whether an experience is good or bad or even postpone judgment realizing that maybe the best thing to do is say, "I don't know yet." What is wrong with moaning incessantly anyway? There is nothing wrong with grieving losses. It is essential that we do so, but we can waste a lot of energy and miss many of the wonderful parts of just being alive if we become bitter or constantly wish things were different than they are.
I leave you with this thought today. When think about the meaningful things in your life, think about how the experience them has transformed your life. How do you want that experience to shape the phrases that appear on the sheet music of your life?
Saturday, May 26, 2012
What if...
Every once in a while I come across an interesting question... this one was posted on FetLife of all places.
If I had a magic lamp... it would not fix ALL my problems. I just can't wish my problems away like that... not sure I would want to either. My problems are not so insurmountable that I can't, with a little effort on my part, solve them myself.
What if you had a magic lamp, and when you rubbed it whatever you needed would appear? Would it fix ALL your problems?I am not a fan of "what if..." scenarios like this. We don't have magic lamps that can fix ALL our problems. So, I am not sure what the point is for exploring answers to questions of this nature. Well maybe... other than... to wallow in wishful thinking rather than solving whatever problem you have or getting to work to get whatever it is you want.
If I had a magic lamp... it would not fix ALL my problems. I just can't wish my problems away like that... not sure I would want to either. My problems are not so insurmountable that I can't, with a little effort on my part, solve them myself.
Slow Baked Steak
Slow Baked Steaks
Sirloin Steaks, one per person
1 onion, sliced thinly (try not to break up the slices)
1 or 2 mushrooms (sliced) per person
1/4 tsp of Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp of Worcester sauce
Steak seasoning
Sprinkle each side of steak liberally with steak seasoning. In a frying pan brown the steaks for a minute each side on a high heat, then add some water (couple of tablespoons), mustard and the Worcester sauce. Remove the steaks from the frying pan and place each on a sheet of tin foil. Add the mushrooms to the liquid and leave to reduce, until thick. In the mean time top each steak with some sliced onion. Once the sauce has reduced top each steak with some of the liquid and mushrooms. Wrap each steak in the tin foil, using double folds at the edges to ensure the liquid can’t escape. Place on a baking tray and cook in the oven for at least 1 hour at 375f.
NOTE:
Now to make it perfectly clear, if you bake your steak it doesn’t taste the same as if you grill it on the BBQ for fry it. You won’t need a steak knife for these steaks, as they are cooked slower they are less tough and more melt-in-the-mouth. They taste more like roast beef.
Friday, May 25, 2012
30 Days of Submission - Day 29
Day 29 - Is pain or humiliation (spankings for example) a part of your submission? What is your relationship to it? Do you embrace it as a part of your submission, tolerate it as necessary or have some other type of relationship with it?
Why is it assumed that M/s or D/s dynamics must include pain and/or humiliation? Pain and humiliation are not part of our dynamic.
These questions are irrelevant (and annoying) as they relate to our M/s relationship.
Why is it assumed that M/s or D/s dynamics must include pain and/or humiliation? Pain and humiliation are not part of our dynamic.
These questions are irrelevant (and annoying) as they relate to our M/s relationship.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Moved
Master and I moved this past weekend. It was not as bad as I thought it would be... although I am still a bit sore and stiff from hauling boxes. I highly recommend getting movers to do the heavy lifting... neither of us could have managed without them.
I have to say, there were moments when I was a total cranky B-*-T-C-H. My Master is a saint for putting up with all my crankiness and understanding its source. He is a good man, and I am one lucky slave to have him.
We are slowly getting resettled... and the dog is over the worst of the change. I think he was a bit worried that we might take him with us.
Well... it is a busy week at work... so off to work I go.
I have to say, there were moments when I was a total cranky B-*-T-C-H. My Master is a saint for putting up with all my crankiness and understanding its source. He is a good man, and I am one lucky slave to have him.
We are slowly getting resettled... and the dog is over the worst of the change. I think he was a bit worried that we might take him with us.
Well... it is a busy week at work... so off to work I go.
30 Days of Submission - Day 28
Day 28 - Has your submission ever let you down? Have you ever been criticized for your submission? Have you ever regretted being or feeling submissive in a moment or in a relationship? Have you ever looked back and realized you made a mistake and how did you handle your submission going forward from that.
Hmmmmm... this is a hard question to answer because I am not submissive. I am me, who happens to live in a power exchange relationship. The only time I have ever been criticized in this lifestyle is when I have failed to meet the standards, labels, definitions set by others. I have had regrets about entering this lifestyle... especially when I was so caught up in the all the "true" this or that crap. Once I was able to let go of that, I have not looked back. I find that for this power exchange thing to work for me, I have to stay away from words like slave and submissive, then and only then, am I able to move forward.
Hmmmmm... this is a hard question to answer because I am not submissive. I am me, who happens to live in a power exchange relationship. The only time I have ever been criticized in this lifestyle is when I have failed to meet the standards, labels, definitions set by others. I have had regrets about entering this lifestyle... especially when I was so caught up in the all the "true" this or that crap. Once I was able to let go of that, I have not looked back. I find that for this power exchange thing to work for me, I have to stay away from words like slave and submissive, then and only then, am I able to move forward.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)