BlogHer - My Life Feels Like Deja Vu All Over Again - Comments

Thank you, Christine

Maria Niles — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:14:47 -0500

What a kind and generous comment! Thank you :)

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Love this post

Christine.Kraft — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:31:38 -0500

Hi Maria - Thank you for just being so sane.

Loving a pet, or a child, or another human being is huge. I don't know why you'd have to go through a similar early decline with two dogs in a row ... That's difficult. Maybe it's because you have so much to give that the ones that need a little extra somehow find their way to you.

Coco Kraft
http://www.cocovillage.blogspot.com

Resiliency

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:54:31 -0500

It sounds like you are demonstrating the strength of resiliency WomenBloom wrote of above by moving from a place of terror to one of survival. Thank you for commenting and I will hold the certainty for you that fabulous is indeed just around the next bend.

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And your..

nelle2nelle — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:52:07 -0500

As with Laurie's comment, it is amazing how often song lyrics connect with us and reveal insights. Writers, poets, songwriters... artists of all stripes - so often they have the ability to help us see and feel what we struggle with.

quote pretty much captures what has worked for me in life. I can't sing. Can't play a musical instrument. Can't read music... but there are times music speaks to me, lyrics, instruments, right across the board. I"ve had some very memorable experences through this, very emotional experiences.

nelle

llhaesa

Profound lessons

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:51:44 -0500

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. Painful as they must have been it sounds like you've learned some valuable lessons from those experiences. I hope that life in England is now creating new roots, memories and beautiful experiences for you.

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Absolutely they deserve

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:48:49 -0500

the same merit. Puppies are a very important topic!

You raise an important point - we must not let our fuel and reserves run so low that stress overwhelms us. Sounds like you've come up with a nice approach to coping. Thank you for sharing these thoughts.

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We are writing the curriculum

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:45:39 -0500

What a great expression, Laura. And it was my pleasure to include your post. It really made me think and I thank you for that.

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Personal, yet

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:43:59 -0500

I'd be way more revealing, angsty and dramatic if I was talking to you in person ;) Thank you for commenting and sharing such important and beautiful thoughts, Nelle. As with Laurie's comment, it is amazing how often song lyrics connect with us and reveal insights. Writers, poets, songwriters... artists of all stripes - so often they have the ability to help us see and feel what we struggle with.

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Experience does teach us

Maria Niles — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:39:45 -0500

Thank you, Laurie, for your wonderfully thoughtful comment. You have so many good reminders, like about surrendering. And, yes, experience is a good teacher. Kvetch as I did, it is easier to deal with answering life's questions and making way through life's challenges the 2nd, 3rd, ... time around.

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Deja Vuing With Ya

Elana Centor — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:38:13 -0500

Like you, I'm in a life cycle that I have visited before and didn't much like the first time around.

What I am noticing is that instead of being in my terror zone 24/7, I am more in my survival zone -- as much as I wish I wasn't dealing with the issues that I have to deal with right now, I have more confidence that I will get through it.

It won't be elegant. It won't be pretty.And, it won't be without tears and anxiety but having been there and done that I have the confidence that I'll get through it and maybe a fabulous cycle is around the corner.

elana
Blogher Contributing Editor,Business&CareersFunnyBusiness

Life's Lessons

Dori7 — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:40:32 -0500

I can relate to this, because I have felt like life keeps repeating the same things over and over for me. Something must be changing within me a little bit though, because I am finally seeing that the good and the bad are part of the circle of life, and are here to teach me.

When my mother passed away two and a half years ago, I went through such turmoil. Everything in my life was changing. I was getting ready to get married, I was moving to another country, and it seemed that all of my roots were gone. I was so raw. And I got here to England and it seemed that a lot of the pain and hurt that came up for me during that time in my life, were reflections of pains and hurts that I had carried my whole life. So when all of these things were happening to me, they amplified wounds that were already there.

So I have come to realize that life brings us the same lessons over and over until we get the lesson and we don't get a break from it even in the midst of extreme turmoil.

http://fromayellowhouse.blogspot.com

Thank you for the thoughtful

kylabea — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:40:42 -0500

Thank you for the thoughtful mention, though I don't know if my dwellings on puppies deserve the same merit as the other mentions!

I'm feeling much the same as you but about different things. Between new house, new puppies, work, freelancing, and wedding planning it seems hard to have my feet underneath me and keep doing the normal daily things that need doing.

My tactic is to take a deep breath, make time for whatever quiet I can so I can gather myself and then dig in and start powering through what I'm faced with. I find that if I'm exhaused emotionally or physically because I've accomplished something, or I've been able to get myself to a new place by working on myself that I can deal with that exhaustion - it's when I have a constant stress level that seeps into every crevice of my life that I can't manage.

That attitude + black tea + croissants. That's mostly how I cope.

Spiral-of-Life

rebellious thinker — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:08:56 -0500

Thanks for including my thoughts in your wonderfully thoughtful piece.

Maybe a lesson is that there is no lesson, it is a continuum. And the cycle or circle of life is, in fact, a spiral. Unbeknownst to us we are absorbing and learning and acting on those refined perceptions without realizing that we are not in the Life 1.0 class any more, and neither are we in Life 2.0, we are, in fact, writing the curriculum.

Laura, www.RebelliousThoughtsofaWoman.com

Wow...

nelle2nelle — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:59:58 -0500

My regular blog exists to write on things personal - what goes on in my life or in my brain. Reading your posting struck me as being profoundly personal, exactly why I write...

and so there is so much to say, yet my commute begins in a few minutes, sigh.

We are born into a complicated place, a complicated universe, with the ability to take in what our senses pick up on, store that information, shape it by our experiences, needs, and circumstance, and fashion a life out of where it all takes us.

As such, we get a daily barrage of lessons as a child. The lessons continue throughout life, and sometimes they recur until we grasp whatever the lesson might be. I doubt there are bad lessons - it is what we take in and what we come out with that probably most matters in the long run.

There are countless methodologies out there for how to make our way through, but at the heart of it all is how we react to and interpret things. The song Breathe by Anna Nalick has a line in it "these mistakes you made you'll just make again if you only try turning around."

I'll close with that... for me it is at once a simple yet layered statement one could ponder for a long long time.

nelle

llhaesa

I have so much to say to this.

lauriewrites — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:02:32 -0500

And I'm not sure I can say it adequately at the moment, except to note that i am right there with you. Big Head Todd has a song that I love called "Circle"...the chorus is "All life is is really just a circle" and that's proven to be pretty true for me lately. It's like, who are all of these strange people I haven't seen in five years and why am I out at a pirate-themed bar with them? (True recent story. Weird, but not entirely bad.)

This is so true:

The past versions might inform my decisions but life 2.0 is its own
release not just a rehashed, recycled, rewarmed version of Life 1.0.

And therein lies the good and the challenge of it. It's its own release, which means it's aggravating to walk the same roads, but at the same time hopefully some of the stuff we've learned in 1.0 makes it a little bit easier to manage.(i.e., I might be oddly attracted to the inappropriate man, but I will only spar with him verbally, not let him move into my house gradually over a period of two months until I realize he's just....never....leaving. I might enjoy the view from the apartment on the fourth floor, no elevator, better, but damned if I'm taking 47 steps every day. The second floor's cool. And so on. ;))

For instance, I like to think that you'll know better this time around when it's time to take the job if it comes or when to surrender and say "I need help" so you can become the employer (Always a challenge, the surrendering.) The dog thing I can't help with, as you know. That stings every time. All we can do as you know is love 'em while they're here and walk the tough road as far as we can until they let us know what's up (as they always do...).

All of this said, I still think that challenging and sad things hit us how they're going to hit us no matter how many times we've been through them. Repeat performances just make us better at identifying the patterns, and hopefully more astute at handling them. (That whole thing about experience and it being the best teacher and all.)

Laurie

My Life Feels Like Deja Vu All Over Again

Maria Niles — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:59:36 -0500

I keep checking the calendar. Is it really 2008? So much of my life right now is a loop of decisions and difficulties I've faced before. I get that the universe is sending me a message but I really wish such lessons came with a decoder ring.

I'm the kind of gal who often needs to be hit over the head with a 2x4 to see the important meaning of life in the trials and tribulations we all deal with. I also resist just chalking it up the the vagaries of life. I am determined to sort it all out, to make it all make sense somehow. Perhaps if I blogged more regularly I could get some insight from outside observers. I find outside observers are often able to see the trees more clearly from the forest.

My dog Gracie has heart disease and it is progressing in ways very similar as it did in my dog Zoe who died last year. I am once again up at all hours of the night and consumed with worry, sadness and anger at the fact that my dogs aren't living as long as some other dogs their size. On the other hand I am acutely aware and reminded that loves in your life are more important that anything else.

The realities of life, however, don't fall away. I still have to bring home the ground turkey for that little dog. I run my own business and as such work life runs in cycles. I am once again at a tipping point where things have ramped up enough that I need to consider hiring others to help me grow the business. Unless, of course, I'm tempted by a juicy job offer, possibly too perfect to say no to - a conundrum I've face previously.

I was told once that I should always look up as if I were climbing a ladder towards my golden future and that turning to look back down would only turn my world dark and gloomy. But how to keep climbing and not looking back when my life pulls me tightly towards memories of the past by having me re-live some moments?

Am I to keep repeating until I do things differently and "righter" somehow? I don't know. I do know that I have to once again get into the habit of cutting up pills, putting meds in the dog's food and tune into waking every few hours through the night to help a dog whose haywire body is no longer sending her the right signals. I have to plow ahead and do the work in front of me and around me based on the now. The past versions might inform my decisions but life 2.0 is its own release not just a rehashed, recycled, rewarmed version of Life 1.0.

What are your strategies for dealing with life issues you thought you'd already worked out? Do you do the same or run in the opposite direction? Please share any strategies in the comments - I'd love to get an outside perspective and learn something.

Here are some life posts from bloggers who have stories to share and lessons to teach...

Lynnster is new to the BlogHer blogrolls and I so feel her when she shares News from the Nursing Home:

Living with an elderly cat in decline has certainly become a challenge lately. Of course, there’s also the fact that I have two more elderly cats who are doing okay for now, but Schuyler, my black cat, is presenting all kinds of new challenges lately.

Kyla Bea, another BlogHer newcomer I can relate to, extols the kindness of internet strangers and describes the problem with puppies (you can never have just one).

BlogHer member, rebellious thinker, makes me think when she argues that we should Sweat the Small Stuff:

It took me time to realize that if I don’t sweat the small stuff, I will never get to the big stuff. If there are any writers out there I can illustrate this easily: the dishes or laundry must be done before any writing can get done. For those who don’t work from home, than this can be illustrated as follows: you will not get any real work done until have straighten up your desk, added more paper clips to your paper clip container, made coffee or organized a coffee run. Okay, maybe this is really about procrastinating and realizing that it has its place in our lives.

And BlogHer member, WomenBloom, has some wisdom worth pondering when she shares Resiliency: A Handy Habit Of Mind:

I think as we get older resiliency is an incredibly important quality to have. I’ve noticed that older people who don’t have it seem to get brittle, and bitter. It seems to me that all the things we do not accept and resolve—the things we don’t say, the resentments that build up, the unhealthy relationships we don’t address, the boundaries we don’t set– gradually build over the years until they simply collapse on themselves, often spectacularly, in a painful way that seems to drag out forever.