A New Day

The last few months have been challenging for me personally. The first quarter is always my hardest because of a project at work but this quarter has been marked by a number of other difficulties.

In my personal life, I have been battling a issue with my health. The symptoms didn’t just start this year but it was only recently diagnosed as hypothyroidism. This isn’t life threatening but is life altering and it explains a lot of seemingly isolated problems that have been going on for a long time.

Everyone complains about weight gain and exhaustion. These are certainly the headlines when it comes to my complaints but there’s a lot more to it. My muscles and joints hurt, my voice gets raspy and my skin itches for no reason at all. Nighttime is often defined by violent cold chills while morning is defined by grogginess and the sensation I spent my night running a marathon.

I tell you all this, not for your sympathy, but because I wish more people would talk about this stuff. Had I known more about the symptoms I might have been a better advocate for myself. Maybe you or someone you know is struggling and you don’t know why. This problem often comes with a litany of other things I haven’t mentioned here. Sometimes my hands and arms go numb for no reason. It’s ridiculous, the weird stuff that has been going on.

The cause can be genetic but it can also involve nutritional deficiencies like Vitamin D, Iron and Magnesium. We caught mine because my cholesterol was creeping up there and your thyroid controls cholesterol. Who knew?

I’m now on the path to finding the right dosage of a little white pill I take every day. This can be a real chore and it can be ever changing.

The more meaningful journey for me is using food as medicine. In the interest of boosting my magnesium, I now eat banana a day whether I want it or not. I never want the banana but see value in it as those bad muscle aches and pains are starting to subside. I’m reducing gluten at home. While this isn’t a fix for everyone, it does seem to be helping with my brain fog.

I have a list of things to try adding or removing from my diet. As I feel better, I can be more active. It would be nice to take off the extra pounds and to feel healthy and strong again but I have read and heard horror stories about the thyroid and why it’s often a lifelong battle.

I put that big work project to bed yesterday. It’s in the hands of my printer now and some other things at work should improve soon as well. I am hopeful that life will get easier. You can have stress at home or stress at work but it’s crippling to experience stress everywhere you go.

I celebrated in my own way yesterday. At lunch, I treated myself to some really nice books at an Ollie’s. This included one about the artist Monet and will help me prepare for an upcoming adventure. Near the cash register, a display of bare root roses presented one called “New Day.” It is yellow and happy and you can bet it will soon grace the flower bed outside my home office window.

It is a new day.

After work, I strolled the bike path, logging two miles and stopping once to admire a nice patch of wildflowers. There’s one area where you’ll find several varieties. While there are a couple that are large and obvious, they’re mostly small and delicate. You have to look for them, and the more you see, the more you see. It’s a quiet reminder that great gifts often come in small packages and that you sometimes have to slow down and go looking to find the beauty.

It’s there. You just have to try to find it.

This blog is written as an exercise in daily creativity. That means, instead of keeping a queue of future posts ready to go, I usually have just a list of ideas and start fresh every day. The exception is when I’m planning vacation or know that there will be no time for writing one day.

That has worked great until recently as exhaustion has started to win. That’s why I took a break.

I woke up this morning still tired but not as tired as a week ago and certainly far better than a month ago. I trust that I’m headed in the right direction and that I can get back to storytelling here. This is something that I enjoy immensely. The writing is close to my heart but I also enjoy hearing from all of you virtually and in real life.

If you’re interested in an overview of hypothyroidism, the Mayo Clinic provides a basic overview here. Talk to your doctor if some of the symptoms sound familiar. Advocate for yourself.

Happy Saturday, friends. It’s a new day.

Real People, Real Stories

Rosie the Riveter courtesy of theAtlantic.com.

A trip to the doctor for a sinus infection this week left me sitting in a waiting room filled with strangers. Nearly all of them were like me or like people I know – white, middle aged or elderly. The one person in the room who was different was an elderly Amish woman.

If I had been asked to start a conversation with someone in that room, she’s the one I was most curious about. And it occurs to me that I am naturally drawn to people who are different than me.

I’m interested in where they’re from and how our paths crossed. What’s their world view? What do they enjoy? What do they wish people knew about them? I often am surprised at what I learn from talking to those who have a worldview different than my own.

Maybe that’s why it’s such a shock to me when people dismiss those who are different or, worse yet, bully and discriminate against them.

I like human stories and sometimes share them on Facebook – the Louisiana brothers who survived D-Day and who lived to be old men; the elderly woman who smuggled hundreds of Jewish children out of Germany; and the many strong women who we call Rosie the Riveter have all appeared on my Facebook page. I often give attention to those who can no longer speak for themselves or who don’t make it into the history books. Sometimes I share stories of people who do have a voice but who often are ignored.

More recently, I’ve been sharing the stories of people of color. Maybe no one is reading or watching the videos but I like to at least give them a platform. It’s healthy to hear the human side of the story as opposed to the headline version of what’s happening in the world.

I’m convinced of two things:

1. It’s easy to hate people you don’t know.

2. People who think they hate history believe that it’s all about memorizing dates, places and names of people long dead. And that’s not what matters most when studying history.

If you think about it, we are living history right now. That Amish woman has a story to tell that will be a valuable thread in the fabric of our history someday just as the female biracial pilot who told her story on YouTube does. Just as you and I do.

Someday, historians and kids in schools across the nation will study 2020 American history. Wouldn’t you like them to know how you lived and contributed? What you think of our world today?

Go look for the people and the stories that don’t make the history books. You never know what you might find.

Why This Blog Exists

Peonies on a spring day in Ohio – just because they’re pretty. 

It was a shock to realize the one year anniversary of this blog is just a few weeks away. After all, most new blogs don’t make it past the first year. I started writing here for a couple of reasons. The first is that pictures and stories posted on Facebook prompted friends to request a blog with more in-depth stories.

The other reason Make the Journey Fun was born is that I needed a project at the time. It’s not a secret that 2018 was a transformative year and a period of self exploration. Having this outlet was a healthy part of that process.

Since then, I’ve written about things that interest me and that I hope interest you as well. If you’ve been around for a while you probably know how random the subject matter can be. That’s because I write the kind of stories that I like to read – the bloggers who invite their reader into their home and life and thoughts.

Photographer Jim Grey comes to mind as he mingles stories of his personal life with camera reviews and pictures from his travels on Down the Road. I look forward to his posts every day and have learned a lot about photography as well as the National Road which frequently appears in his storytelling.

The Frugal Girl is another great example of personal storytelling as she shares about her family and their efforts to live responsibly.

Neither of them present themselves as experts in any topic but simply share their thoughts in a pleasant way. In a world of self proclaimed experts and glorified internet trolls, these blogs are like a breath of fresh air.

So I tell the stories that friends sometimes request and stories that I would want to read. And it has been a wonderful experience to do so. Near strangers sometimes strike up a conversation in the grocery store and friends often message with their thoughts. Not to mention the people I’ve met online who have provided insight and even a kind of friendship that wouldn’t have existed had it not been for this space of written word and photos.

It’s been a fun ride and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it.

In the world of bloggers, the experts measure your success by statistics. I’m honored each time someone subscribes or says they like reading here. However, I measure my success by the great conversations that occur online and in-person rather than by my statistics.

But as the year is winding down, I can’t help but assess the future and whether writing here is the right thing to do. I’m better now than I was a year ago and no longer need this outlet.  Yet, it’s still fun to share here so I’m planning to keep going until it’s not fun anymore or until folks aren’t reading anymore.

Please accept my thanks for bringing me into your world each day and for coming into mine. It’s lovely hearing from so many of you – both in the cyber world and the real world. I appreciate you all! I’m also happy to share observations from my corner of the universe and hope that you sometimes find yourself enlightened, inspired or even encouraged.

Enjoy your day, my friends. Spend it doing something that makes you happy.