(1) Response to injustice
(2) What to do while you wait?
Tag Archives: Acceptance
In the forecast: Pain
(Originally posted 2016-01-16.)
A toothache can distract you completely.
For the past two months, I have now and then, with increasing frequency and duration, had mild toothaches in (I thought) one upper left tooth and one lower left tooth. They always went away; and that’s all I thought of it.
Then last Thursday night there was such severe pain for such a long time, that I lost several hours’ sleep and resolved to get those two teeth filled the next day. But that didn’t happen. The dentist said four teeth must be extracted; and the appointments the clinic scheduled for me are two weeks and four weeks away.
This means: for the coming month, I am going to be in pain of varying severity for varying lengths of time.
It may not be much, now and then; it may be a lot, now and then, and for quite a while now and then. But it’s unavoidable. It’s coming.
How will I choose to feel about it?
Will I accept it, or react continually against it?
Will I hate myself for being in pain? or possibly hate others? Hate God?
Will I be crying out, “Why me?”
Or may there be other options?
Related: A short route to agony
From my diary:
This program turned me away.
Adapted from a 12/03/15 e-mail to my brothers and some others.
Given instability at the shelter where I’ve been for almost five years, I decided to apply to a certain program affiliated with a major national charity and major local soup kitchen. This program is residential, has a nice facility, and (as I understood it) was geared toward taking men with histories of addiction or homelessness and rendering them self-supporting.
Since it is a residential program, I would no longer have to carry my bags everywhere I go, vastly increasing the radius within which I can look for work; and, I supposed, I would be able to work any shift. After all, unlike the shelter where I’ve been, they’ve got a big shove towards self-sufficiency.
They rejected me.
I wrote:
Baptismal grace means: when you get knocked down, you get back up.
Blog post (from October ’14, about getting back up): Life in the outer darkness
In the immediate future, I will be checking out options in transitional housing, and case management services at the clinic where I’m currently in treatment for everything I’m in treatment for.
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What happened?
The Real Reason Why You Haven’t Healed Your Trauma/Depression/Heartbreak
At first I expected this author to affirm the “blame-your-past” orientation of “the prevailing psychological wisdom of our time.” Instead, she sets forth an intriguing vision remarkably similar to my own, with, for me, remarkably intriguing ramifications that I want to consider further.
Her counsel is to accept What Is.
Continue reading The Real Reason Why You Haven’t Healed Your Trauma/Depression/Heartbreak
10. Strategies
THE WAY OF PEACE
| ← 8. Heart and soul | Home | 11. Tactics → |
Strategies pertain to long-range goals, or a basic posture one means to maintain over a long period of time. Tactics are plans of what to do from moment to moment. In this chapter and the next I set forth the strategies and tactics known to me, that I personally use. Continue reading 10. Strategies
Verna Moeller, saint in light
We can change history.
My daily prayer time begins with prayer for various chronic health conditions. The last one on the list is my right ear: for years, I’ve had significant hearing loss in that ear resulting from a patulous eustachian tube. I believe my youngest brother, my mother, and her mother all have or had the same thing in the same ear also.
One morning, I came to that point in my prayers, and stopped. I noted that I have prayed for that condition every day for many years, and there has never been any change. I said, maybe this is no more likely to be healed in this life, than Verna Moeller’s disfigurement was likely to be healed in this life. She is beyond the veil, now, but at that moment I devoted significant time and energy to her healing.
The banshee
Unusually many encounters this week
with people whose conduct is very abnormal.
Balto. police commissioner fired
This rose from the 2015 Freddie Gray riots.
Baltimore Mayor Rawlings-Blake fires Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts
I don’t like this. But I am best to “accept the things I cannot change.”
I have supported both Commissioner Batts and the mayor in everything they’ve done so far. An possible exception: in hindsight, it may have been unwise to shut down the subway Monday afternoon, April 26, as this rendered high school students at Mondawmin Mall unable to leave the area.
I have not studied the various calls for Batts’ resignation, but note that they come from many different directions. That doesn’t, in itself, give any of them merit.
The F.O.P. does not currently appear to me to be a friend of the people.
Originally posted 2015-07-09.
Poop
Science and the left wing and the right
“These key psychological differences can determine whether you’re liberal or conservative”
Some months back, I linked to this article and said I would need to devote more time to it at a later date. A later date has come. It lists fifteen physiological and psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Some interest me more than others. Let me begin with a fairly bare-bones presentation of the list. Continue reading Science and the left wing and the right
The Homeless Blogger 