Author: ferylfiles

Today’s prompt is a bit of a gut-puncher, not gonna lie. Bryan was diagnosed with prostate cancer just a few months after his 50th birthday. We built a really beautiful life with a Damocles sword hanging over us. We did our best to bring levity and humor to the most painful things. Our favorite toast was “to your adequate health.”

Just like time, health is an increasingly fraught game with each day that passes. The pandemic and Bryan’s brain cancer put a bold black line under that notion. So in that same spirit, I cherish health, even when it’s just adequate. Sure, we have a responsibility to do what we can, when we can, with nutrition, exercise, rest, and eliminating unnecessary stressers. But taking care of our families, work responsibilities, paying bills, world calamities, climate change, and access to quick and processed foods mean that we are often in an uphill battle.

Let’s not forget the role of genetics and trauma. These affect our health through no fault of our own, so the uphill battles gets weighted down with baggage we were given and had no say in. This post may sound a little darker than I intend, but I watched my Mom die at 66. My Dad was only in his 70s. My oldest brother and my husband were only in their 50s. Old age and health are absolute privileges not everyone gets, so I’m grateful for the days of adequate health.

And of course, I can’t leave it on a dark note, so here’s a fun, little story. Todd, my oldest brother, and I enjoyed exchanging pop culture references and threading them through our conversations and texts. If I would complain about a cold or he would mention having the flu or something, we’d always reference Count Rugen, the six-fingered-man, from The Princess Bride. On that note, please enjoy:

And here’s to your adequate health…

[If you get a little extra out of these blog posts, you’re welcome to leave a tip in my Venmo “tip jar”: https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Lubbers-1 and a big thank you to those who have already done so. I really appreciate it.]

It’s funny, I thought today’s prompt would be easy. I find myself struggling a bit. This is my heart and passion and what compels me. I don’t think of creativity only in terms of artists, writers, musicians, actors. I think of the folks at NASA who had to come up with a solution that would bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home safely. It’s the scientists who ask questions, hey, what if? finding solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. It’s the kid who goes to Goodwill and repurposes clothing and makes something brand new and completely unique.

It’s the outcasts and oddballs who look at the world cockeyed and get people to tilt their heads just a bit to see the bigger picture, the clearer picture. It’s the tech guy who can see someone’s eyes glaze over and use a novel analogy in a pinch to teach a complicated process.

Creativity is an engine whose fuel is creativity and whose exhaust is creativity and whose destination is creativity. Bryan described creativity as “the well that never runs dry” because creativity begets more creativity. I’m thankful for that abundance. I’m thankful for creativity.

Every day I get more stingy with my time. That’s the one commodity I have that becomes more scarce and precious with each passing day and I guard it carefully. Covid, cancer, conflict all underscore how precious time is. I think about the time I got to have with Bryan and how damned lucky I am to have had it. I think about the time spent with friends, family, beloved furry critters that claw up my furniture. Every beautiful moment is underscored by loss–a reminder of the fleeting nature of time and how absolutely sacred it is.

I don’t think I’ve arrived on some new territory here. People close to me have determined that they do not want to go back to work in an office, wasting time commuting, wasting time in irrelevant meetings, wasting time that could be more efficiently intertwined with the richness of life. Folks I admire don’t waste time on grudges. They don’t spend a single moment on petty garbage. They know time is short and dust that misery off their shoes. For some that means peace and reconciliation and for others that means healthy boundaries not spending time on things that continue to hurt.

Time is a commodity with a giant question mark. We have no idea how much each one of us gets. I ask myself a lot: what am I willing to sell my time for? What is a worthy exchange? I want to spend my time building and creating. I want to focus on things that bring joy to others and to me. I want to show up for my friends and family. Those are the things I will sell my time for. And yes, I will sell my time to make sure I have food, shelter, and clothing, because without those, time slips away a lot faster. But I also don’t want to waste my time in a life that makes me miserable and that I’m longing to escape for two weeks every year.

I am thankful for time so much so that I value it highly. I also consider it a gift when folks share their time with me because I know they have options, too. 🙂

Look, I didn’t make this list, so you can’t be mad at me for the poor grammar. Yes I know this is a verb. Yes I know quotations is the noun (unless we’re referring to how much the car repairs are), but we’re doing a gratitude listical and we’re not going to be pedantic about it, okay? Okay. [This is what it looks like when I lecture myself.]

I am so grateful that Bryan had some fantastic phrases that I find myself repeating all the time. It keeps his spirit alive and close to me and to those who love him most. “Be here now.” “Do the next right thing.” “Never argue with success.” And while he never claimed this one, he used it a lot and I LOVE IT–“If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a happy Christmas.” So many were situationally specific that I can’t think of them all off hand.

Fun little story, when Bryan and I first started dating he had a big cat-track ski trip scheduled with a few of his best guy buds up to Canada. I wrote notes that had little quotations on each one–one for each day he was gone. I bet you didn’t know just how much of a romantic Mr. Lubbers was. He kept those in his boot bag ever since. I am very grateful for quotations. 🙂

Of course a gratitude list would do something sneaky and add the word “work” to the mix. Fine. I like a challenge. Sometimes. If the mood strikes correctly. I have a complicated relationship with work, not because I’m lazy. Because I’m not. Anyone who saw how much river rock, black plastic, and dirt were around this house and are now gone knows. I grew up in a home, at least early on, where both parents worked outside the home. Mom was an RN and dad was a surgeon. They were busy folks. And when I was a teenager, Dad worked a lot–clinic hours, surgery days, being on call. When he wasn’t doing those things, he was resting or fishing.

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did know that I wanted my life at home to be more important than my life at a job. While I took measures to become a school teacher and eventually began the path to be a college professor, it became really clear to me that those career paths and having a life at home and an identity separate from those paths would be almost impossible for me to achieve. Some can do it and I SALUTE them. As a graduate student and as an adjunct, I remember grading papers in bed late at night, on the weekends, whenever I could to get the job done. This was definitely moving the needle in the wrong direction.

During one summer break, when I had to find temp work because adjuncts don’t eat in the summer unless they’re working somewhere else, I got a job at a water company in the West Valley of Yakima. My days ended by 4:30pm. I had every minute of the rest of the day to myself. What a revelation. Was it a lot of money? No. But this was the first time I had a taste of that work/life balance I had dreamed of. After that, I didn’t do adjunct teaching any more.

After my mom passed, I moved out of Yakima to Walla Walla and a job as an administrative assistant at Whitman College. I had office work experience, so that was no problem. I understand the culture of higher ed. No sweat. And while I took a significant pay cut from what I’d been making at the water company, I had an even sweeter work/life balance. My apartment building’s front door to the front door of the Memorial building was a five minute walk. I could sleep in until 7am. I was home before 5:15pm. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to Pioneer Park. I could (after a couple of months 😛 ) walk to my boyfriend’s house. All of this was within just a matter of minutes from my place.

Maybe that’s where I get into trouble. I conflate jobs with work. I mean, it’s easy to do right? But I think for the purpose of this little exercise, I’d like to differentiate. Jobs are the things I did/do to allow/pay for/make possible (I’m having a hard time articulating it) my work. Now please don’t misunderstand me, jobs are where I meet some of the most fabulous human beings. A person spends more waking hours with their co-workers than their families and it’s truly wonderful when those people are good, funny, wickedly smart, playful people. They make going to a job more than tolerable but a delight.

Work and a job only overlapped for me once and that was as the business owner of Shop Eleven. I have never worked so hard and loved any work quite so much, but the work/life balance was not quite right. I had the shop opened on Saturdays and missed out on that weekend time with Bryan. When I closed the shop, I very deliberately chose to do few if any markets or jobs that would encroach on our weekends together again. That time was sacrosanct.

Work that fills me with gratitude is the work that I know makes a difference to others, to me, in an intensely meaningful way, and I’m deliciously exhausted at the end of the day. Usually, that takes its form in my backyard garden, baking for others, cooking a meal for a lot of guests, creating (jewelry, paintings, pottery, writing). Preparing for and executing the May fundraiser for our Mom’s scholarship is exhausting every time and I LOVE IT. This is the work I appreciate. Maybe I’m trepidatious to find a job that is the work I love because I fear it will affect the work/life balance I cherish.

Tip jar: https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Lubbers-1