From this week's
thefridayfive
1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?
Honestly, I don't know how to begin to answer a question like this - how do you determine a "favorite" of anything? Life changes and ebbs and flows. I'd probably have to put relatively small experiences - like standing at the ocean on the island of Maui, or even just at the edge of the Atlantic in Kure Beach.... or how I feel when I'm hiking and make it the top of the mountains. So I guess the answer is...the experiences of witnessing parts of this world that fill me with awe and a reminder of how small we are in this great expanse of a planet and a universe.
2. What motivates you to keep going every day?
Also tough to answer, because I think the occasional darkness that comes and goes in my life has been more present this year. But I do get up in the mornings and do not lay in bed all day. I guess the possibility of each day, and the animals - they always need to go outside or to be fed, and I feel an obligation to keep them well. For all of my missteps and mistakes, I do believe that I am trying to move through the world as best I can, and that each day has that opportunity to do more.
3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?
*dark laughter* I once thought that I wanted to change things, for the better, for the environment, for people, for animals. I think now I am going through a crisis of feeling powerless at actually being able to do any of that, through either work or activism. I'm on a lifelong quest to learn, though. And maybe I'll also be brave someday.
4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?
Scads and scads of regrets, things that, if I could turn back the clock with the understanding I have now, I would have saved myself and others a lot of pain. I also understand that those things helped make me who I am (for better or for worse). I do still try to change my ways of moving through the world to do the least harm, and the most good - that is why I am still in therapy, to try to tease out the parts of me that are fearful or anxious or stuck, and how to move onwards.
5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?
About a year before she passed, my mother crocheted me my own afghan, in my favorite greens. It is the dearest thing I own now. Unfortunately one night after she passed it slipped off the bed and next to the rats' housing, and they happily nested off a corner of it. My now MIL helped me to find someone who could fix it, and they ended up removing about 3-4 inches and then re-stitching what was left (I wish that they had been able to truly repair it with the pattern, but I guess they couldn't find the same yarns). So I am also always a little happy and a little sad when I use it, but on days when I feel like I can't go on, it is the closest thing I have to my mother's arms around me.