Night Thoughts

• Grief eventually turns to love
• If love is everything, then love is pain
• Don't aim for happiness in the workplace aim for happier-ness
• Music often succeeds where everything else fails to relax and calm me and is able to permeate my soul
• If by 50 years old you haven't found the right lane yet, perhaps it is time to make your own lane.

These are the thoughts that I have compiled recently.  I am pushing myself to post here as it is late and I am tired. It is so important for my mental health to empty thoughts out of my head by posting them here.  I see it as a pattern now as Mom used to do this as well.  I find it such a calming way to destress and remove the pressure.  Almost like deflating a balloon a bit that was overfilled. 

Just writing whatever comes into my head without editing to keep the flow going.  I have been thinking a lot about the McArdle side of my family lately and how Nancy is my main link to that side of the family.  so much of the McArdle world is still shrouded in mystery to me.  I am looking forward to seeing Nancy in a couple of weeks when I go to Moncton to talk a bit about it.  We always glossed over our ancestry.  I wish I had asked more questions of Nanny.  There were rumours of us being distantly related to Ann Bolyn and another tale of a long forgotten castle from a distant relative.  This might have also been Nanny's side of the family, the Seymour's.  

It was always alluded to that the McArdle clan were stubborn which is evidenced by all of the siblings - Bev, Brenda, John, Rob, Steve, Nancy (Not sure if that is the correct order) and their feuds over the years.  Losing my grandfather Jack McArdle must have been hard on them all as he died in the late 70s (77  maybe?).  Nanny never re-maried nor dated anyone else as far as I knew even thought she lived until 2015 a full 38 years longer.  That seems strange to me, but maybe that was the norm in the 70s.  

I still often wonder how Mom and Dad ever got together as they seem to come from drastically different worlds.  I know they were in a bowling league, but the stories I hear of mom from that time are wilder and crazier like riding a motorcycle through Moncton and hanging with Dale Tait and friends.  While Dad's stories are different and focus on a couple of key friends that he doesn't talk much about.  His buddy Carl Fowler was a close friend that he reconnected with later in life, but I don't know much about his childhood.  I get the sense that Dad deliberately didn't talk about his childhood for a long time and still doesn't like talking about parts of it.  

Information Dump

Here are some random thoughts I have collected over the past couple of weeks:

• In the end, for me it not about following all of the rules, but more importantly learning who I am and being happy and aware of the choices I have made in my life.  Nobody is perfect and U need to treat myself with the same respect that I give everyone else.  Just continue to try to be a better person.
• I tend to overthink these days but in this age most men are taught to overthink to look over there lives to be sure that all of the decisions they made in the past adhered to the new enlightened rules of the present. Guys are very nervous that any of the previous actions, even thought they were decent guys, might come back to haunt them in an age where the rules now change so quickly.  As a result, I have been trained to think before I speak which then give the appearance that I am overthinking every detail.  I am hopeful for a time when we are able to move past this.
• One of the biggest problems in the world is that people think that they're the only one going through something and most of the time they're not but we are so reluctant to share our experiences because It embarrasses us so that we hold on to them
• Some of the best things that I've done in my life have been inadvertent
• "At 69 I was 17" - Jackson Browne
• "If love is everything, then love is pain" - East Pointers, Wintergreen
• Calling movies, TV, media, and news CONTENT  can have the effect of diminishing the value of information on its own.  It is now part of an endless streaming circuit as opposed to a specific show/movie/news with a particular message.  Starting to sound like Marshall MacLuhan here, but the medium is the message.  People don't just watch a show.  They turn on content.
• Try whenever talking to use "I' instead of "you" to really understand the message being conveyed.  It is not only less antagonistic, but it gives the speaker a truer sense of how the message is being received.
• Great title for a book/article - The art of the pivot. Changing your life to feed your soul.
• I might be a walking stereotype now but it is much better than many of the previous stereotypes i have been.
• As our society gets older and people start dying with corporate family knowledge those with a fulsome picture of the puzzle become an essential link to the past.  
• I am able to work nimbly as I understand how to move from thing to thing without getting caught in the rabbit holes 
• Song lyric - Its like you're turned off baby and I can't seem to turn you on.
• A life of leisure is considered a luxury, but I submit that most of us deep down strive for it.  It comes down to when you feel the need to step back and see it. 
• We have created a generation with all of the benefits that we did not have as kids and expect them to be as grateful as we would have been had someone done this for us.  The circle keeps going round in that they don't understand how hard we worked to get to this point.  And on the flip side, the next generation beyond this one, will probably be quite pragmatic as they will have been raised by a very entitled generation.  
• We have much more longer and deeper meaningful conversations with our kids than I ever did with my parents.   

ReplyForward

ReplyForward

That Kind of September

I am fascinated by charts, graphs, comparisons, statistics and numbers in general.  I always have been.  When I used to run, I would break down my times by km, splits, and PR.  As I look at the stats to the right of the page, I see the spike in posts over the last couple of years and I can feel my inspiration dwindling. on documenting things here. I hope that all of these posts will serve as some guide for myself down the road as to what is important to me.  

I knew this time would come.  My liminal point is ending and I am entering the next phase of my journey.  I am milking it and trying to write and be creative and figure out as much as I can about my journey and the journey of those around me before I sink back into my next patterns.  

This last chunk of my life has been both the most gut-wrenching but at the same time life-changing and beautiful. I have stretched myself in ways I never knew that I could, I have readjusted my lifestyle to better suit my personality and my needs going forward, I have connected with Cheryl in more deep and meaningful ways than I ever dreamed were possible, 

It took a long time, but I am settling into the man I want to be, in the relationship I want to have, living the life we built together.