Parting

Saying good-bye makes me nervous. Maybe it's because it's the last chance to have everything said, at least for a while.

Today was the last of my 5-day workshop at Meredith on writing fiction. I've spent 35 hours with this group of writers in the last week, and, inevitably, we talk about some fairly intimate stuff. Writing brings that sort of thing out.

So it feels strange to finish the last lunch and maybe not see some of them again at all. My impulse is to dodge good-bye, grab up my picnic-basket-briefcase and run.

Maybe somewhere there are workshops in saying goodbye. Perfectly reasonable that such a thing would exist. If we can take lessons in leadership and assertiveness and stopping smoking, surely it's possible.

Probably lesson number one is: pause and at least say something before running out the door. I'm happy to say I did boldly manage to do that much.

It's so hard to know what to do with emotion, at least for chatty introverts like me.

---

Add to del.icio.us - Stumble It! - Subscribe to this feed - Digg it

---

Secret of Happiness (Bold Title, Yes?)

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” --Charles Kingsley, nineteenth century English minister who wrote The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, as well as being chaplain to Queen Victoria.

Quoted on The Happiness Project

(The very thought of water babies makes me both happy and enthusiastic. And I'm not even a huge fan of "cute," but I do find delightful the idea of chubby young things paddling about in exotic mysterious realms.)





If you like this post, please bookmark it on del.icio.us, share it on StumbleUpon, vote for it on Digg. Thanks so much.

Throw Off Minor Depression

I was in a truly shitty mood this morning: bitter, sad, angry, depressed simultaneously. (In short, visit with adult stepson did not go well.) The mood threatened to last for the rest of my life.

It lifted when I did one useful small thing that made me feel effective. All I did was drive to a Verizon store and say that two phone accessories weren't working right. One they replaced for free; the other for $16 (it hadn't come from Verizon.)

I left with working equipment and rising spirits. Not simply because I had a headset and a recharger that worked. Instead, because I'd demonstrated to myself that I could be effective, even at running a small errand that had no connection with the original problem.

That kind of remedy is always available. Maybe I'll remember it quicker, should I ever fall into such a state again.

Oh, it's good to have a blog to be able to share such wisdom!





If you like this post, please bookmark it on del.icio.us, share it on StumbleUpon, vote for it on Digg. Thanks so much.