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.