This year my family and I would like to attend the Life Is Good Unschooling Conference in late May, 2012. The cost for the conference is $175. The cost for the hotel is $90/night, and we would like to stay the full week. This would officially be the longest “vacation” our foursome has ever had. If we do take it.
~$900 (not including meals away from home) is a very high pricetag indeed for us Hogabooms.
At this point it is kind of a pipe dream that we may even be able to go.
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So, I’ve been elbows-deep in Recovery work the last couple days and I’ve just about fried my brain. Running from doctors’ appointments to feeding and picking up kids, cleaning up around home, meetings and one-on-one help, answering phone calls from people who, if they don’t get help, well, they could die a horrid death. Plain and simple. I know it’s not my sole job to keep other people alive nor sober, as my own sobriety is enough in my hands, but it’s just the truth, people die, so calls I get are pretty important.
Today at the Treatment Center the topic is Anger. This is a good one. Hands-down the most honest conversations I’ve been exposed to have been in the rooms of Recovery. Never have I seen personal responsibility taken to the utmost level; never, concomitantly, have I seen the ugliness of the human condition, the kinds of depraved creatures we work ourselves into. Later in the day I’m laughing in a new cafe with two friends; my mom brings the children along to join us. During lunch I drink an espresso doppio. I’m pleased there’s a new place to get a great sandwich. It’s rainy and shitty and blowy outside.
More phone calls; more work. At the end of the day I’m so spent that if I could literally have any wish for myself I wouldn’t know what to wish for. This is not a good sign. I am completely tapped out.
I move through a small subsistence of activity. I show the children how to make an incense offering. Daily I teach my children a little more about housekeeping life (Phoenix recently learned how to clean the bathroom sink with Borax), and they apprentice with a willing spirit. A friend of Nels’ comes over and the two boys rough and tumble. Phoenix puts her arms around me and kisses me and whisper-snuggles, “I love you.” I wash, dry, fold and put away clothes. I take the lemon tree in for a long drink in the shower, and I clean the table. I pick up Ralph’s guitar and figure out a song. I haven’t played in something like twelve years.
Tomorrow I wake up a bit early to get my work done and head out to donate blood. At all places, the winery in Westport. I haven’t been there yet, although I remember biking past it on our camping trip a few summers ago. I hope the roads are good, and I hope my energy returns. I haven’t sewn in a few days and I feel a bit sad.
There is one Key component to this post that I’ve noticed and can appreciate, “Giving to others” whether your giving your experience, strength & hope or giving life through a self-less donation of Blood, Even thinking of your family before yourself, simply doing what needs to be done so that your world can keep spinning round. A running theme, “Balance” you see this is something I strive for and have a hard time with, most of the time I feel like life is to heavy and I can’t handle everything that’s on my plate yet in retrospect it seems trivial and honestly like an excuse to do less. I feel that if I clear my plate and arrange my life in a new way I can do much more, more officially. Oddly enough that’s what I got out of this post.
@Andrew
I see a lot of people who seem to lack a feeling of purpose and an experience of lightness in their day. It’s true that by “giving” you receive, plain and simple. But I think part of balance is receiving help and love from others. If we can’t do that, we’re just workaholics!
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