My brain has been feeling nostalgic lately. I keep having flash backs to life back in the “normal times”, before my head injury (Bertha). Of late I’ve been dwelling on a 5 year old physician’s consult note that reads, “Patient reports feeling exhausted and having low energy”. And I keep thinking, what the heck did I have to be low energy and exhausted about at that time? So, I went back and looked at my blog entries and calendar.
I looked at the summer of 2013 and what I saw blew me away. When I was not at work my calendar was overflowing with projects and commitments. Free time was crammed full of meeting/brunches with friends, full days of roaming the streets chatting up and photographing people, planning my next travel photography trip, meeting, dating and moving in with my boyfriend, now husband, taking a photography course at the local university, committing myself to photographing 4 weddings (each at 30 – 60 hours work each) in 2 months, hosting 2 sets of visiting family members….and on and on and on and on. No wonder I was exhausted!?! I look at that in awe now and wonder at that old me.
Nowadays if I can wake up, shower, walk the dogs, feed myself breakfast and dinner, and spend time on an art project I call the day a success. I try very hard not to dwell on what Bertha stops me from doing. There is no merit in focussing on the empty half of the glass…I’m really trying for the half full perspective. Maybe Bertha was sent by the universe to slow me down…to make me ask myself, why was I always running at full speed? What was I running away from…or running to? To make me appreciate the small rather than the big picture…to help me appreciate all the little tiny details in the every day. To make me notice the ribbons of fog on the mountains around me. To make me want to create art that mimics these details…….Or maybe I’m just delusional and Bertha is really and truly from the devil and is just a bitchy giant pain in the ass.
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style” – Maya Angelou