The past few months have been what I call a Steel Magnolias kind. If you haven't seen the movie starring Julie Roberts and Sally Field, you may not understand the reference so let me try to briefly explain. There's a scene where Sally Field is overcome with grief after her daughter's funeral and she screams in angry agony, "I just wanna hit something. I wanna it it hard!" You feel her depths of despair even if you've never lost a child before, and your heart wants to break at the thought of it. I always cry during this scene, and I'm not much of a weeper with most movies. Just when you think it will be too overwhelming, her friend replies, "Here! Hit this!" as she pushes Shirley MacLaine's character towards Sally. Tears turn into laughter instantly, and the all encompassing pain lightens.
The last two years have thrown many of us some moments to rant at and maybe even scream, "I just wanna hit something." Between Hobbes dying, pandemic issues, and the daily negative reports from the news, my normal, "I'm not much of a weeper" turned into a daily cry-fest last month. Then I adopted three mischievous and super loving cats and my tears turned into laughter. I had tears sometimes while I had a new fur baby making me laugh when wrestling with me at the same time. I know missing Hobbes doesn't go away over night. At times it does seem there is a little light at the end of the tunnel, but then something new pops up on the world stage of tragedies. "Laughing through tears is my favorite emotion." ~Steel Magnolias I don't have any sage wisdom on how to deal with grief, stress, sorrow, or anger, but if you're like me, a purring fur baby can alleviate the ugly stuff so you don't implode. My three new fur babies have given me a little reprieve from it all. They didn't need me to rescue them; they actually rescued me. I know if you believe in God as I do, turning to Him can also be your salve. No matter what, don't give up. Find what gives you a respite from it all, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. I heard this quote by CS Lewis on a podcast that encouraged me. Lewis wrote many books beyond The Chronicles of Narnia and had great insight on life. Though the world falls apart around us, we must keep living life. Fear and despair won't fix all that is wrong in the world and we can't let evil and negativity win. Written by CS Lewis in 1948. Very applicable to today: “In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’ In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
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December 2023
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