Just Keep Swimming

If you happened to ever see the animated movie "Finding Nemo," then you might remember the character of Dory who was voiced by Ellen Degeneres. Dory was the ditzy, skinny, blue fish with the sunny personaliy and no practical sense of direction who somehow always ended up in the right place anyway. Her advice to Nemo's father when things got tough was to "keep on swimming, swimming, swimming -- it's what we do."

I'm thinking that Dory is the model for what I'm doing these days: just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. Everytime I think that things might slow down just a bit; settle enough to get a breather; come to a place where I could think about what would work to make things feel calmer and better; give us a chance to talk and really reach some resolution -- another hurdle comes at us at full speed. That seems to be the way of it; life never sends just one challenge. There is the escalating issue of elders with significant cognitive decline and the need for that to be addressed soon, more of our own health issues loom and dictate even more lifestyle changes, work life changes have changed our routines just enough to have us unsettled and "off" kilter...

Around it all is the sense that the world spins too fast and with a tinge of meanness that grows steadily more ominous. We recently got word of some input to a planning process that is going on with Master's agency. The word came to us in such a fashion that it felt as if there might be something insidious in the information -- we were immediately thrown into worrying about whether it was "about us." It turned out that it wasn't that at all, but it put us once again into the space where we were made aware of the edge we walk -- how vulnerable we are to gossip and vindictiveness should someone choose to use our lifestyle against us.

And, through it all, we keep swimming. It is what we do.

swan