(morning writing, health, quaker notes, journey with the gas can)

[elainegrey]

Things i need to process

• Last Thursday's unsatisfactory visit with the ENT where reflux is blamed for the ongoing cough. I've written a rambly review, asked Christine for thoughts, got back a gentle suggestion that there was too much distracting detail, and then wrote this.

I acknowledge the medical field has been under much strain, but I feel like Dr REDACTED listened much more the first time I saw her than the recent visit. This visit I felt a little railroaded into a determination of cause, and find Dr REDACTED did not bring any curiosity to addressing a chronic cough that has been with me since the mid 2000s. This cough has been mis-treated as asthma for about twenty years, significantly predating COVID. My spouse who joined me to help keep attention to details felt she was barely acknowledged and felt uncomfortably Ignored.

I am very frustrated, but so very happy i am not coughing Right Now. I'm not sure what i will do other than monitor my sinuses for the next few months so i can have more clear information for the nose surgeon i see him. I know i need to process this more

• all of the retreat, which is not necessarily done here but with other people. I think the org may be headed towards multiple practical schisms. The fact that a  similar but different event is being held this coming weekend with a clear association to one of the national organizations by a past clerk the org is interesting, but i think the schism is between those who see the need for a national virtual organization that offers the services of a monthly meeting and those who focus on the twice a year gathering.

• worship sharing where i realize it might be the case that i am a joyful person. Huh.

Comments

[cmcmck]

You come across as reasonably joyful! :o)

[elainegrey]

I like "reasonably joyful" 8)

[amaebi]

Oh, no, I'm so sorry. :( What a nasty experience. :(

[amaebi]

And I should have said that you strike me as always cultivating joy, including when things are going hrd.

I see it in your loving appreciation of the plants and interactions of your garden (though sometimes the stilt grass seems ll Too Much).

It reminds me of a child hockey player I knew, a colleague of Chun Woo's, J. He always seemed a very calmly alert child. But what I remember in particular is a time when I was minding the penalty box, and J. got two minutes. Often players were really mad when given a penalty, so I'd offer them water, ask them something, to get their mind into its speech centers. J. was fine, though. Clear-eyed and engaged, he told me that he'd been doing an experiment to see how often some minor infraction would get called. It just had, but it almost never was.

I remarked on that capacity for joy to his mother, who said, "Well, it's not as if he were always happy...." And of course not! But to my mind, that kind of interested attentiveness is as good a foundation for happiness and for joy as there is.

[elainegrey]

An experimentalist! Which, i guess, is much of my yard activities too. Will this work? WIll this grow? Will the deer eat that?

Totally off topic -- have you read anything by Robert D. Putnam? I was subscribed to ta tech newsletter that has been veering of late. This morning the author wrote about framing and the power of choice (shades of Viktor Frankl). But in his "equally true" examples of frames, he asserted "Since its founding, America has done more than any country to enable women and non-white people to thrive in business and politics. We know this is true because the numbers of non-white-male (or non dominant group) representation in business and politics vastly outnumbers any other country or region in the world. " At which assertion i was immediately indignant and wrote him back with a comment that i prefer frames with facts, and shared some. His response was, "Thank you for the note. Have you read Putman’s Bowling Alone?" Which appears to be a 2001 book about decline in civic life.

I'm slightly curious whether this was a non sequitur or... what? ANd you are one of the people i know who might have read the author.

[amaebi]

I have not read Bowling Alone, but I often heard it cited, when I was in seminary. Looking t Wikipedia's summary, I see tha Putnam mentioned associations that create solidarity within a demos, and those that bridge and connect demographics, which seems to me the only thing relevant to what you were talking about, and I still don't know how.

Offhand I suspect your interlocutor of engaging the "driving straight through fast and flinging references while sneering" form of discourse, but I could easily be wrong....