I’ve been trying to take some lessons from Mari at my new favorite blog, SaimaaLife. She is doing a 365 ways to well-being challenge this year – each day she posts something she is doing that day to improve her well-being. While I’m not sure I will do something different each day, I am trying to be more mindful of this. I know that especially with the grieving process, I need to pay even more attention to my sense of well-being. Grieving takes such a huge toll on a person, and suicide is a lot different from other deaths. I am also trying to put forth the things I want to do into the universe, and be open to whatever comes back to me. I’m telling it what I want, and waiting to see what happens. I’m being more mindful of what I’m actually putting out there.
So today started out as any other regular day. I had to go shopping for my daughter’s birthday. I’d tried to find a few things yesterday with no luck so today I drove to a bigger nearby city to shop at a different store. I did find quite a few of the things she wanted and at the check out I saw that my budget had definitely been met! :O Because I was essentially finished in one trip to one store, there were a couple of other places I wanted to go, so I went. One of them was my favorite Middle Eastern grocery. I was the only one in there that early so the person working there started chatting with me. I go there often so they all know me. He started to tell me that less than a week ago, he had a heart attack, just dropped dead in the snow while cleaning off his vehicle. Someone saw and ran to him, started CPR right away and called 911. He woke up in the hospital, a cardiac cath having removed the clot. So I told him how happy I was that he was here, he looked really good, for this having happened just 5 days prior! He said he quit smoking, quit drinking, and he said, and I’ll never forget this, “I am learning to not get so stressed out.” He went on to explain that he was worried about so many small things, things that made life more stressful but that he really shouldn’t worry about at all. The majority of stress is small stress. I gave him a hug, told him I was happy he was alive, and he said he’s telling everyone he can. He said this can happen to anybody without warning, and it was important to never take things for granted, and to stop worrying about the little things. I walked out of that store feeling like I’d just touched a miracle.
From there I needed do bring a check to a friend of some friends of mine. She and I hadn’t ever had much of a chance to visit before, but today we did, and we stood there and talked about our kids, families, parenting, babies, loss, grieving… it was just such a good conversation and before I realized it I’d been there talking with her for probably an hour. It was just wonderful to be open and have such a wonderful visit with her, I felt so instantly comfortable. I feel really blessed today to have really had connecting conversations with two people I met a while back but didn’t really connect with them before. It was so good and we are all connected and we need to nurture those connections with people. The world would be a much happier place if we did.
What have you done to connect with others today? Have any of you ever had an experience like this where you just were somehow unhurriedly drawn into conversations that resulted in connections like this?
This Finngarian Mama 