Here's to raising the glass

My partner and I almost always have a date on any given Friday night and as the evening flows along to that inaugural refreshment, no matter what it may be, we sip not until we toast it between us with “Cheers” as we look intentionally into each other’s eyes and not upon the cup or glass—to meet just there in the now—in that moment—greeting each other’s most grateful company. Sappy? Perhaps.

But that eyeful ritual matters to both of us. It squares us up to purposeful acknowledgement in our presence of each of us, together.

I’m doing what my intuition tells me is right. I’m pretty sure this “G-force” in my life would agree that’s he doing the same.

I doubt either of us ever will go back to the old way of looking at the glass first.

Onward to other thoughts.

“When you don't know what to do, get still. Get very still until you do know what to do.” 

Oprah Winfrey offered this advice to graduates at Stanford University in California during her commencement address there in 2008.

She was right as rain.

If you are quiet long enough to listen to your intuition, and heed its advice, you will follow truth. I know it.  I know it for sure. 

Paying attention to intuition is not always easy—and often far more difficult than we imagine and takes much courage than we had planned—but I believe intuition always leads us home.

I see intuition as a magic of sorts; a realm of otherworldly wonders labeled as gut feelings, conscience.

Trust it, because some things are true whether you believe them or not.

Believe me, I still have much to learn about trusting my own gut and listening to it when it whispers to me in subtle and not so subtle ways in my life.

If I don’t follow intution’s lead, it just hangs around in the corners of my circus until the next best opportunity arises in which to flag me, challenge me again, and again, to heed that “feeling” of what I know is right.

I have a book that touts chocolate principles as metaphors for life.

Most mornings I have a piece of chocolate with my “Caldwell” coffee before breakfast. Chocolate rules.

“What if you could devour life with the same commitment and passion (as chocolate)?” queries the book.

Don’t go with herd. “Never assume that the herd knows where it is going; it usually doesn’t.”

Quite frankly I don’t often know what the answers are to any of the questions I’m being asked of my life—but I respect the accountability, and the older I get the more I listen to what my intuition is telling me.

Cheers, my companion. 

Let's talk tush and do the right thing

Poop test kit. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those three words, mostly because I’m over 50 years of age, in fact closer to 60 than 50 (how did THAT happen?!) and I’m four or more years overdue for colon cancer screening. Why? Because I’m a procrastinator and as the doctor would say, “a reluctant attendee” to some—okay just this one necessary duty of personal pro-health management.

Because let’s face it, who wants to mess with a number two—on purpose?

I did that enough when my kids were little when I was searching for the cherry pit and ten-cent piece they’d inadvertently swallowed, in order to make sure it actually came out the other end. All I really gleaned from such missions was how fast kernels of corn can pass through the human digestive tract and come out looking pretty much the way they did when they went in.

I’d probably win a contest for the most poop test kits brought home over the years from the doctor’s office and left to collect dust in the bathroom cupboard. My excuses are ninny-like and remarkably based on being afraid of the unknown. Yes, I would tell myself that if I didn’t check my own poop I’d be okay anyway. 

And for someone who often encourages others about the many benefits of “the more you know,” my own selfish reasoning around not dealing with my own poop hasn’t helped the cause at all.

But three people I know were recently diagnosed with colon cancer. Two of them face major surgery. The other one didn’t have time for any solutions and has died of the disease.

When that happened I basically stopped being stupid. I made the decision to request a new poop test kit and get to the job of filling up that little test card with my own personal collection.

I also decided to get educated. I went online to www.coloncancercanada.ca and did a lot of reading. I also went to the CBC website’s health page and watched Dr. Barry Lumb, a gastroenterologist at Hamilton Health Science Centre in Hamilton, ON, perform a colonoscopy on his patient, Dan Logan (whom I now think is one of the bravest, coolest guys ever) live on Facebook. Dr. Lumb used social media to get the word out about poop tests, colonoscopies, and cancer prevention and it worked.

To keep this column piece somewhat lighthearted and humorous and—no pun intended—to poke fun at myself for my misgivings  . . . I admit I am not enjoying being proactive with my own poop. In fact I rather suck at being professional at it, having gotten it on more than just the little window of the test card. Oh well, that’s what hand soap is for.

But just think, maybe somebody out there who’s reading this will decide to do what I did and have that colon conversation with his or her doctor, because it really is the right thing to do.

Open the closet door and talk

Technology, Entertainment, Design. In short, “TED.”

I’ve been a fan of TED for years. Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned have been from TED, a global platform of speakers who share their ideas—be they funny, courageous, ingenious, inspiring, or informative—in talks of 18 minutes or less. There are more than 1700 such talks, in 100 different languages available to us online at www.ted.com.

Ash Beckham, an equality advocate, and a tremendous spirit, is a respected TED speaker. She became a viral sensation when she did a TED talk for nine minutes and 22 seconds about empathy and openness and about how “everyone at some point in their life has experienced hardship.”

We all have had hardships and we all have closets where we keep those hardships that we don’t want to talk about.

She believes that all a closet is, is a hard conversation, and that being in and coming out of the closet is universal and scary and we hate it and yet we need to do it anyway.

“Your closet might be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you’re pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives,” says Beckham.

We all have a closet of hard talks we’d like to have with our bosses, our children, our partners, our friends, and a myriad of reasons why we think we cannot open the door—so we live looking through a keyhole and some of those hard conversations never get out and we never get free. 

I listened to that speech three or four times in a row and I was struck by how much it spoke to me about my own “hard conversation” closets, and how many times in my life I’ve hesitated to let them out and in the process been torn up inside for my keeping.

I’m a huge advocate of speaking one’s truth and yet I still struggle to follow through because of a host of self-imposed fears in my closet. You name the excuse; I’ve probably used it.

Beckham also reminded me about the importance of my listening to and respecting others who decide to share a hard conversation with me. And I have no right to judge what I think a hard conversation is not, nor to critique the one who just shared what they think was the hardest thing.

A father I know had to tell his young daughter that her dog was soon going to die of cancer. When my kids were little I had to tell them their dad and I were getting a divorce. An old man had to admit he could no longer operate a car and had to give up his driver’s license. My aunt, some 50 years after the birth of a son, finally told her family she had had him and given him up for adoption and that they had just reunited.

Beckham is right. There is no harder, there’s just hard.

Maya Angelou says we are more alike than we are unalike. I believe that too.

Open your closet door and have those hard conversations. To thine own self be true, and free.

It's all about to go south

Sometimes when I look in the mirror all I see is grey hair, crow’s feet deep enough around my eyes to plant seeds in, breasts racing against each other to see which will reach my belly button first, and the beginning of a double chin and turkey neck—and all of it makes me want to run screaming from the room.

To douse reality, I’ve thought about standing back from the mirror to the point where everything is blurry, but if I did that I wouldn’t know where I was, as my eyesight, too, is slithering downhill.

I’m going to Florida with my partner in 40 days, 39, 38, 37 . . . and something must be done to spruce up this 1960 relic before I step off the airplane and into a world of bathing suits and flip flops.

This I vow while picking potato chip crumbs out of my computer keyboard and grazing on another five of those delicious “Ferrero Rocher” chocolates from one of three large boxes of the little devils I bought from the discount rack after Valentine’s Day, as I draw in the physical evidence known as “Buddha.”

My fight with the “Buddha” has been dragged through the mud, stepped on, run over by a truck, and raked through the coals. I’ve sucked it in a million times over and tried to smothered it to death in body shapers.

My “Buddha” and I met head on just the other day as I bent over to pick something up off the floor from under my foot and became trapped by the fat of “Buddha,” which had fallen out the place where I usually tuck it in and thus prevented me from being able to touch my toes.

It’s like a really obnoxious neighbor who never leaves you alone—the one you envision burying in the back yard but can’t because that would be illegal, and so you put with it.

I haven’t given up trying to fix this burgeoning of my Roman goddess figure that I blame squarely on the childbearing years of my youth (and maybe chocolate).

It’s crazy I know, but this Florida thing has me focused. While sitting with my bag of Lays original wavy potato chips and dill pickle dip on the weekend, I pondered. What could I accomplish in T-minus 38 days to shed some of this indolence I’ve been carrying around like a sack of soft fluffy kittens?

For starters I dug out my treadmill from under a huge stack of chocolate recipe magazines (go figure) and climbed aboard.

I was five, maybe six minutes in to a fast paced walk up a mountain when I realized, sweating my face off, I had only burned 50 calories and still had more than 30 minutes of exercise left to go.

Oh brother.

It’s all about the stuffing

I managed to get through the past weekend without a sea of cat barf. However, about half way through my lazy Saturday morning sporting pajamas, raccoon-eyes of mascara, and a “Bride of Frankenstein” hairdo I would have traded the incoming moment for something squishy between my toes.

My cellphone went off and I answered it to find the “FaceTime” video app open up and reveal my disheveled appearance to the person on the other end, whose first words were “Oh, Good Heavens, is that you?”

I could see myself in the little video clip in upper right hand corner of the screen staring wide-eyed and dumbfounded at the friend I hadn’t seen or heard from in years. I flipped the phone over so she could stare instead at the worn off toe nail polish of my big toe, and replied, with a much simulated inflection of joy, “What a nice surprise!” while making improper hand gestures with my free hand in the air above my head where she couldn’t see.

And then she said the most dreaded sentence on the planet. “I’m in town and I’d love to come for a visit.”

There’s nothing like an unexpected guest to kick-start a cleaning frenzy. It matters not that I run a tidy ship on most days, but when that yellow flag started waving as I stood there mired in clumps of old mascara all I could think of was cleaning the toilet seat and bowl before she showed up at the door and had to use the bathroom.

I looked around the kitchen and realized I was a hoarder. I had three days of dishes piled in the sink and there was so much dirty laundry in the basket that clothes at the bottom were now trying to escape through the webbing for fear of being crushed to death.

I had less than 30 minutes to revive my good looks and hide everything.

Remember the “Bugs Bunny Show” episode where “Wile E. Coyote” orders a humungous magnet from “Acme” but instead of drawing in the “Road Runner,” it attracts every conceivable metal object in the Universe?

The space under my kitchen sink attracts like that the stuff I don’t have time to put away properly and instead cram in that endless cavern alongside pickle jars full of nails, and hideous bolts of “Mac Tac” from the ’70s.

Even plastic bags get stuffed under there—pushed in one at a time and it’s all good—until I open the door to find something and the change in air pressure sucks the fluid sea of bags out onto the kitchen floor.

This time, after everything was jammed under the sink, there I was digging further and further to the back of the chaotic mess for the toilet bowl cleaner and a rag, and instead found a mouse trap set with peanut butter. While it managed to go off without taking my fingers with it, the sudden jolted surprise made a clean sweep of the endless contents onto the floor.

Change of plans my friend. Meet me at the coffee shop.