Thoughts and a Request

In the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about my age. I am sad, sometimes tearful, at times for what I have lost. I used to love dancing and even, right after I retired, taught English country dances to the students at the school where I used to teach English. When I came to live in Vermont. I started taking a Scottish dance class but have to give that up because I developed a really bad case of tendonitis. {And, come to think of it, that was when the endometrial cancer was diagnosed!}

Before I chipped the bone in my wrist, I was in the warm pool exercising my leg and Nancy, the person who was working with me, had her fingertips on the outside of my thigh checking that I was actually using the abductor muscle. She said, "Have you noticed you have a hollow here?" I said I had and what was it? She said it was most probably muscle atrophy… Oh dear… NOT a good thing… So now, I am thinking that even if I work like mad, the muscle will never come back to what it was and I will never be able to dance or walk freely {with no support} again. This, as I have said, saddens me and I am heading downhill into depession thinking of what I possibly will never be able to do again.

So, I think it is time to think of what I CAN do and what I enjoy doing.

• Reading. And thanks to Fred who bought me the original Kindle, I am doing more reading than I have done since I was a teenager.
• Art. I need a push with this. These days I don’t seem to be able do draw/paint just for myself. I need the impetus of a class. Unfortunately. the teacher who instructed me in pastel painting isn’t listed in the college catalog this year. I really want to learn to use acrylics but the classes are taught at night…
• I am sort of tossing around the ideaa that I might write. I am like everyone else in the world who thinks she has a book in her…

Ok, more ideas on what I could I try? I am really asking this seriously… I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being sad over what I have lost. I want to be able to have things I enjoy to look forward to.

All notes private for this entry only.

"You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are

happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but

trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change

your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to

correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working."

Emmett Fox

"Enjoyment is not a goal; it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity."

Paul Goodman