Letting Go, Moving On.

I've let go of a few ongoing commitments and involvements lately. I found so much of my time was sucked into reading the multiple different group chats, the organization of duties, the learning curve of new skills (in one case, hello sound engineering!) that there was no longer any enjoyment in any of it. I felt pressure and stress and my attention was scattered and completely unfocussed.

I also suffered from an ongoing resentment against myself for in my desire to keep stimulated and involved neither was happening.

Sometimes the need for evaluation of time spent needs to be thoroughly examined. Which I did.

As I age I am discovering that decisions need to be made quickly. How the hell do I know what time I have left?

So I dropped three outside involvements in my life. Without any regrets. And no agonizing. Clean, clear.

I'm now dedicating time to things that motivate me further, like my book launch tomorrow which is thrilling me no end as I put together a playlist for the background music, a draw for a free book, intros of the presenters and readers, my wee talk beforehand, the greeting of old friends, the chat, the gratitude, my own reading.

Orders are exceeding all expectations and we're going into a second printing and scheduling more signings around the city.

Life is good.

What's been your experiences with letting go and moving on?

Adjustments

The Table - looking into the kitchen. More photos to follow.

They can be positive or negative.

The biggest adjustment to both my new life and my health challenges is the lack of energy. I've always been a high energy person, whether internally or externally. Reading voraciously, loving live theatre, concert halls, performances. Hiking, travelling, racing,spontaneous walks, etc.

Now the lack of energy has me parceling out activities or performing trade-offs. If I shop today I can't run around later to visit so-and-so. If I write today I'll be wiped in the afternoon. Or working out a new design means I can't start the new book.

I was completely frustrated and hopeless for a while until I took the time to redesign my new space and go against the grain of popular opinion and have the old long dining room table moved from the house to the apartment. This simple task has opened up my new life in ways I couldn't have predicted. I find this new multi-use space invites flowers. And a candle and lamps for close work. I've never been much of a couch person. I like a table, the bigger the better. I sit here a lot, read, have my meals looking out at the view, everything is close at hand. Instead of making the space smaller it has opened it up.

Thinking outside the box when re configuring a downsized life is very helpful. I've observed a few apartments here and see that they are crammed with relics of the past. Huge china cabinets, tea trolleys, overstuffed furniture, massive bedroom suites. If that is what gives one comfort then go for it. But I like the reinvention of who I am now. Yes, I have to safeguard my energy and calculate the expenditure of it during the day.

In the common hall outside I hung some of my artwork and a little sculpture I made with knitting wool and needles and a few owls, one is a small vase filled with fresh flowers that I hope to replenish every few weeks. A bunch of flowers purchased late on a Saturday night costs under $5.00 (full price $10.99) who knew?

Some of you thought I was upset about leaving the salt box house in its wee paradise of land and ocean and woods. I tried to summon up some feelings when the fellahs were taking apart the dining room table prior to moving it. I stood in that dining room, summoning up all the dinner parties and brunches and convos held around it.

And you know what? There wasn't one shred of sentiment in me.

I was done.

Chapters

I divide my life into chapters. This is the ending of another one.

I hosted my last PGs* last night. Three from BC plus two very well behaved dogs. their paws on the wood floors of my house and on my stairs had me unexpectedly and apologetically leak a few sniffles in spite of myself. I remembered with a kind of savage pain, the Wonder Dog. So I talked of her for a little while.

The three, a mother, her daughter and son-in-law were ascetic types. I would always fall in love with ascetics. You know the ones who have a spoonful of oatmeal, a radish and half an apple and call it a meal. Thin, tall lean hikers who say jolly good and gung-ho to anything that involves burning off 5,00o calories in an afternoon. Me? I count my life in meals eaten, where, when, and rate and oomph the OMG slobber factor for each and every one. Opposites attracting and all that.

They frowned on my breakfast offerings, the full Monte Newfoundland breakfast which would cement your stomach in place for two days, and had dabs of porridge, yogurt and teeny tiny spoonies of my selection of jams. That was it. No toast, or ham or eggs or scones and just the one cup of coffee they allowed themselves a day, and they were on their skinny greyhoundy way. I wish we all could be mixes of this type, the lusty gustoes and the leany beanies.

More potential buyers have turned around at the site of the Cathedral. It is getting wearisome, I admit.

Grandgirl recommended a really lovely book which her mother has subsequently read and passed on to me. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I will review it when finished. It takes me out of myself.

I know I have to move but the inertia has gripped me with icy cold fingers and I'm stagnant and paralyzed and don't know how to begin. I curled up around a cheery fire today and did absolutely zero apart from nap and read. A friend had provided me with a large pot of stew so there was nothing to do apart from simply set a date and helpers but it all seemed far more than I could possibly manage.

I took the pretty picture above this morning, in my bathroom, of the last of the community garden flowers that have kept the rooms in my house blooming over the summer. The picture below is of my first knitted flowers which I created on another story shawl for a dear friend.

*Paying Guests

Downsizing Part XV or Dither and You're Done.

The more I work on this, the more I love it.

Catch up Day.

Well, the dump is open all day, limited hours in my wee town out on the Edge of the Atlantic.

So I look around me and my eyes fasten on my enormous collection of VCR tapes. Enormous, you say? You have no idea. I have maybe 2,000 movies scattered on these bulky (often 4 movies on a tape)suckers, all labelled and indexed carefully.

And now I shamefully report these have all been unwatched for something like 14 years now. I think I taped every episode of Saturday Night at the Movies when Elwy Yost was doing his gentle, professional interviews of all these old timers (performers, directors, technicians) before they died off. The only one who was doing so. I had planned to have a periodic movie night with a feast of these old classics. Alas, that never happened. When you're an aficionado, it's hard to find your equal nutbar twin. Most have no time for the old black and whites. And "restored" to colour? Oh please.

So I tackled the deep green shelves today. These held a triple layer of these tapes. Times 4 shelves.

I knew the only way to do it was to take out a row of garbage bags and start pitching without looking. If I lingered, it would be game over. Ah, you're definitely going to want to see this again, oh look, another Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, James Stewart. See? So seven full garbage bags later I think, I could donate these, oh someone would love these, I should Kijiji these as a freebie.

You catch my drift. Stall tactics. I slapped myself. Hard.

I loaded all 7 bags in my car and drove to the dump. I told Brian, the dump-man, what was in the bags (You have to do this, they don't want household waste) and he said, hang on a minute, there's a real old fellow I know living in the back hills, he's a right old movie buff, do you mind if I take all these for him? With the winter coming on he'll be thrilled!

I mentioned I may have 7 or 8 or 10 more bags to follow and Pete says, even better for the old fellah, he'll love them all. Bring 'em over when you can!

And oh, yes, as I drove my empty car home I realized the "old fellow in the backwoods" was a year younger than me.

Letting go is not easy but it can be done if you don't stare.

Car

Dateline: Monday May 8th, 2017, St, John's

It's like this. Everything happens at once. My car lease is up next month, my tourist season has started, word got out my forte is filing delinquent tax returns and some are dribbling in, and I'm busy minimalising and bagging and donating excess, and oh yeah, my domain went down and new owners of same could not be traced through multiple sales of the domain holding company so I lost my address book and my domain name and the website I've had for 20+ years. And it's like the Irish pension I tried to get, I just don't have the energy anymore to keep chasing down my rights. Whatever they are - do we still have any? Do exhausted elders?

Daughter came for dinner yesterday. Her main purpose, apart from dinner, was to get me up to the Tigeen to survey what I was taking from there and to tidy up after the winter. I was terrified of the climb up. But I took one of my sticks and paused many times, the pain can be mind-numbing, but I made it. It was very emotional as I love it so much up there and Ansa and I spent so much time in this wee paradise as did some very interesting artist guests. Ansa'd go off up back and explore the woods. I'd write or just soak in the entire bay and the birds down below. But I am always mindful of attachment and hope the next person to inhabit this space will take as much pleasure in it as I did.

Speaking of, I was approached by a local who is interested in purchasing my little estate and batted not an eye at the price I'm asking. He needs to convince his wife, as he's in love with the place.

Purge

I never tire of the sunsets here

I've started the purge. Not that there's much enough. Sentimental stuff hauled all the way here from Toronto. Letters, photos, cards. And the journals I need to burn. Tripe as my father would have called such "rubbish". He burned and dumped all his own stuff about 6 months before he died. "The Evidence" as I like to mentally call it. Cartons of papers and gawd knows what else.

I found lovely photos of my Helen. Cards from Missing Daughter loving me forever. Forever is always negotiable, isn't it. At the time we mean it. Can never imagine forever being over and done with. I philosophize as I work my way through stuff. A lot of thank you cards extolling my kindness, etc. Many from people whose names do not stir any remembrance at all. Weird that. Many items from people long dead. I am being ruthless. I don't need these memento mori anymore in my life. We change. We evolve. We devolve. We move on.

I had to make two hard decisions in the week. One was not to attend Grandgirl's Convocation in Ontario. She was limited to inviting three people only. Her father, her mother and I were her choices. The health thing. I am bockety, unsteady on the pins. I thought about this. Being a constant worry to my loved ones. Because worry they would. And distract. There is endless walking and grounds and halls and parking lots. I'm good for about three minutes and then kazoom. And a fresh worry, legitimate, deep vein thrombosis on the flight. I shouldn't say worry as I sound a mite obsessed. I'm not. At all. This was a carefully thought through decision with no regrets. I'll see the pictures and the fact she included me in her three beloveds meant the world to me.

I'm putting a small stayover bag for my apartment together. I'm quite excited about this. And then I walk across to my iceberg in this sparkling shine of a day and I feel the tears. Leaving here, leaving this magical place where I finally found myself. I still have a busy final tourist season happening ahead of me.

That's all good. I'm going out with a bang.

I keep reminding myself: This is all so good. So very good.

In the Beginning....Part 1.

When I bought this place over 13 years ago, I knew my relationship with my darling house and land would all end some day. I'm very conscious of the ticking of my own clock. I stay in moments and cherish them and reflect on my privilege and gratitude to have this house overlooking the ocean, surrounded by trees and hills, with views right out of some exotic magazine. With its own off the grid artist's cabin tucked up on the hill overlooking the bay.

We are so finite in this world and sometimes a tap on the shoulder comes, intuition if you will, and we must pay attention.

My friend Helen's death was a huge tap for me. Then a whole series of friends fell to the wayside shortly thereafter way before their time. I say way before their time when, really, what is human time? Three score plus ten? I've been losing friends since I was six when Geraldine died of meningitis and at eight Eithne was burned in a house fire and at fifteen Rosario had brain cancer. So death walks along beside me even though many of us behave as if we have two hundred years to live. And to live with full mental and physical functions intact. Not so. Take a look around at your Zimmer frames, oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and bewilderments in the supermarkets. I do. Not morbidly but noddingly, know what I mean? Constantly aware too that most health impacted seniors don't shop for themselves so we don't see the Alzheimer's, the dementia, the legless and blind and stroke victims.

I thought to take charge then, back in 2015. I live alone. Have a fierce streak of independence, turned down potential partnerships here, 3 or 4 at last count to offer an example, and wish to be proactive rather than reactive to any future challenges I might face.

I remember a dear blog friend, I was her role model of aging well for some reason, saying at one point: "Well it's a good job I have ten more years to catch up to you and loads of time to live creatively" but sadly she didn't. She died Christmas 2013 rather quickly, from cancer.

So the power of now became a mantra for me long before it was fashionable.

To be continued.....

Change

Once the initial excitement is over, change, even planned change, exhausts me. My brain doesn't function properly, you should see me struggling with a knitting pattern I'm designing, or trying to make a municipal decision today.

I filled out the application for my new life, pretty please. It helps, the instructions said, if I can lay claim to a veteran in the family. I decided against hauling out my grandfather's (old)IRA fight for Irish freedom. Instead I focussed on his estranged son's (still alive - 90++) long international career in the RAF and my occasional participation and partying at local Canadian legions.

My resident friend called and said it was the best time to apply as residents were dropping like flies in the last few days, old age, transfers to extended care homes and one marriage.

Much as I hate jumping on another's misfortune, I had to laugh at the droll way she said it.

So I got my act together and signed and mailed off. Thank you for your service to the enemy, Uncle Michael.