Sometimes self-care is complicated. Confounding. How to get out of one’s own way can pose one conundrum after another. And now it’s construction and leaf blower season and I have to figure out how I will survive it — the windows not even open yet.
Fortunately, at other times, self-care is stupidly easy. Like cooking up one portabello and serving it with half an avocado and a tasty omelet … Himalayan pink salt elevating the meal to something nearly divine.
And hunger returns. Again and again. Giving us one opportunity after another to feed ourselves.
Week Ten of the Artist’s Way has one look at addictions. Bitching is a big one of mine (TV and sugar, the other two primaries). I will ponder, later, the skin-shivering response to four solid hours of leaf blowers to the pleasure of sitting down to a simple, home cooked meal, and see what I get.
Or, to frame it more precisely — I need to ask: what does naming the irritation (i.e. bitching) do to the business of tolerating the irritation? I’m guessing the answer here is obvious but even so, I think it will be worth a “go” on the page.
in 1994 we moved into a house on a 4 lane truck route, I couldn’t sleep for the noise all night for the first three weeks & was close to moving until one night when it rained the trucks sounded like sets of waves, the big ones were like the 7th wave, from then on I slept like a baby each night soothed by the sound.
These days we live in the heart of the inner city in an increasingly gentrified area where every second house is undergoing renovations, playing music helps a lot, it even dampens the sound of electric planing and the very loud doof music at 3am from the student parties across the back lane… I lived in enough share houses where we played loud music til dawn last century that I can never ever ask people to turn their music down!
I plan to use music, too. I have a big supply of AAA batteries for my noise cancelling headphones. That’ll help a lot. Traffic and sirens are tolerable. I get the water associations too with the four lane road not far from here. But leaf blowers are their own brand of obnoxious. Usually three at a time. There were at least seven crews in audible range today. It sure makes me appreciate when they are not blowing!
y’know Dee, the guys wielding the leafblowers are probably wearing earphones and enjoying themselves in the same way that jet skiers enjoy making lots of noise on the water, that’s the 21st C and we just have to learn to live with it!! If you really can’t stand it either sell and move to the country with a few acres to insulate you from the rest of the world or move into the inner city where lawn mowers and leaf blowers aren’t an issue or learn to divert the aggravation into something productivelike taking the new dog for a walk in the park!
Thanks Mo. I know I have to learn to live with it since it is not the time for us to move. Finn and I were out and about today and will do a lot more of that with the nice weather.
Leaf blowers. Ugh.