Appointments & Hardships & Gum

3/20/2022

...

Thanks for asking. I still don’t know the results from my 48 hours wearing a stickum heart monitor. I assume that not hearing promptly indicates that nothing is too alarming. If I don’t hear soon, I’ll contact them. Again.

Last week I had an ophthalmologist appointment. Good news is that nothing has changed and in fact my vision is slightly better.

But here is what I realized that I’d never thought too much about before. If one is going to have a procedure that could easily take hours to “recover” from and if one can choose appointment times – make the appointment late in the day. That way, you recover while you sleep. I’m talking about the easy stuff we all do such as vaccinations, dental work, eye dilation, donating blood. etc.

I had a 9AM eye appointment and then proceeded to lose the day waiting for my blurry and very light sensitive owl eyes to go away.

If I had done the check-up late afternoon, it would have been gone by the time I woke the next day and I could have accomplished things besides wandering and napping.

That’s all.

…

Our daughter who is aunt to our 5-year-old granddaughter received this important phone call as she was driving to her sister’s home to visit a few hours. “Could you drive Miss Five to Walgreen’s and help her buy her first gum? She wants some and we think she’s old enough now.”

So that happened and sounded extremely cute. She helped Miss Five find the best gum – pink Bubblicious. Then she gave Miss Five her own money and held her up so she could hand it to the cashier and everyone had a pretty good time with that moment.

Back home, Miss Five and two of her tiny neighbor GFs were given gum and then they were told, very carefully and clearly, that one chews gum, one doesn’t swallow it. For the next 15 minutes the three little girls walked silently up and down the sidewalk practicing chewing gum while not swallowing it.

From this moment onwards I’m going to think about this every time someone says, “That person couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” Because yes, sometimes this is hard.

Mr. Two wanted gum, too. He was given a small piece and also told and to not swallow it.

He swallowed it.

…

We watched this last week and I’ve been thinking about it since. https://www.womenoutwardbound.com/  DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: MAXINE W. DAVIS We each had our reasons for signing on, but none of us knew how those weeks would change our lives. Fifty years ago, we boarded a bus that took us to the edge of a wilderness backcountry covering 2 million acres of lakes, rivers, granite outcroppings, bogs, rivers, and waterfalls.  We didn’t realize back then that we were changing history. 

 We soon learned that we’d get dirty and wet – but could also clean up and dry out. We paddled white water. We climbed rocks and ropes and plunged into very cold water. We gained the physical strength and mental tenacity to travel safely in "brigades" through the wilderness for the next 16 days. 

 We came to Outward Bound with such different backgrounds, abilities, and weaknesses. And when we left, many of us took something with us that we didn't realize we'd found – what I call “grit.” 

 It was 1965 and 24 teenage girls…including me…were having an experience that would change our lives forever.

 “Women Outward Bound,” is a documentary about those girls, what happened to them, and how 30 days in the wilderness taught us that we could do more than we ever thought possible.

I didn’t expect to be moved by an undramatic documentary about what some teenage girls did 57 summers ago, but there you go. This film moved me deeply.

Many of us are older women and men who have come through complicated lives. We had to go against what the “norms” were all those years ago. Sometimes we forget just how narrow our options really were. How did we get from that into the lives we lived? Not many of us were invited into structured self-esteem building programs, yet we more or less did it on our own.

Those kids helped each other. They weren’t “girlfriends” in the ordinary way of considering that. They didn’t choose each other; they didn’t know each other from previous experiences. They were thrown together and quickly learned to move beyond likes and dislikes into the work and adventure of supporting the person next to them. Sharing strengths. Helping each other. Figuring out who is best for what task.

They became adult women who often did hard things. They figured out who they wanted to be and what they wanted to do. They started programs and helped others and raised families and lived fun and worthy lives.

It’s powerful to watch what happens when kids learn how to work together.

It’s powerful to watch people sort themselves into effective teams.

It’s inspiring to watch how, sometimes, hardship empowers women into lives beyond what they could have imagine.