life

One Fades Out, One (sometimes) Fades In

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments

Sisyphus Photo by Gerard Van der Leun

I have a lot of things that I find of interest….some more, some less. Still, I feel that this is the norm for most of us. There’s a handful of things that you’ve held dear for your whole life, or at least for such a long time that it can FEEL like it’s been your whole life.

Then there’s the entire ocean of all the other stuff in this world that can latch onto your attention and time. The massive bulk of this you just “let be”, if only because there’s not enough time in your day or life to pay attention.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a cognitive pattern for me that lines up, more or less, with the the attentive emotions for the duration of a deeper interest and engagement with something. An example in my life was my passion for painting. Right at the beginning of the COVID shut-down, I decided that I would try my hand at painting. I have a friend who had been doing this for awhile at that point (this friend has since excelled WAY beyond what I felt I could do….her work is, well, “jaw-droppingly wowser”….), and I felt it would be a new and different outing for my creative side. I have been a musician most of my life, but my active engagement with that side of my creative self (other than CONSTANTLY listening to music….) had drawn down, and I felt that going a new direction that I’d never even considered before would be fun and an adventure.

And indeed it was. For about two and a half years. Before I get further into that experience, I’d like to give a shout-out to all the fellow travelers who created (and continue to create) an enormous number of helpful online videos with tips and how-tos, as well as all the members of various online groups and forums of others willing to not only give a guy a hand, but commiserate about tough nuts to crack for a newbie.

So why only two plus years, you might ask? Good question. Age and growing personal awareness has led me to learn a couple of things about myself (“FINALLY!”….my inner voice exclaims). One big one one has been that, in those areas of interest and engagement, when it stops being fun, so to speak, it’s time to either take a break or give it up.

Now, I know about perseverance and cracking a tough nut. Those were and are the areas where that virtual “cloud of witnesses” encourage and support me. I’m writing about when it stops feeling like fun and starts feeling like work. I HAVE to make myself do something that I liked and might present me with a challenge for the period of time, or confront me with a hill that I need to get over. I don’t know about you, but I spent a LOT of life having to go ahead and just DO something (or take up the tug-of-war-rope ONE-MORE-TIME just to get to the next Sisphusian point) regardless of what I felt.

Well, I’m in a time in my life where I don’t really need to do that any more. Are there regular chores? Sure. But I’m not writing about those. I’m writing about stuff over which I have the agency to say, “Nope. Don’t want to do that any more. Buh-bye…”

I’ve discovered that there are more of those in my life than I thought. Over time, I examine the things I spend precious time and attention on and evaluate whether I can, or want to, scale down, ramp up, or drop them. I now know that this has NOTHING to do with being a “quitter”. What others may or may not think about my actions in that regard has had less and less an impact on my awareness and acceptance of myself than it might have had in earlier days.

I’m going to limit my banging on about this for now, but I wanted to get this out there as a testimony, and maybe as an encouragement to any one else who might stumble across this post and is confronting the ongoing changeableness of everything in this life. It’s OK. It’s normal. If it really isn’t fun any more, think about whether you want to keep going, or move on in some way.

Don’t worry about making “the wrong decision”. In most cases, there really isn’t such a thing.

Forward Into The Past

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Cartoon rendered by CoPilot AI

It can sometimes take a long time for the technologies that I’ve gotten used to and the other threads of my life to get entangled in a more meaningful way.

OK, so some background story should be filled in here.

It has been a LONG time since I left home to join the U.S. Navy Music program back in 1973. While not a strict introvert, my close friends at home were small in number. We all pretty much went our own ways when time sprung us from home. That’s the apparent effect that many of us experience once we’re past the high school graduation experience. Being young, and having been around each other so much, “staying in touch” wasn’t so much in our DNA as much as going out to get hip-deep into life, whatever that was going to be for each of us.

Still over the years, there have been a couple of friends that I have stayed in very infrequent touch with. Over the decades we stayed vaguely aware of where each other was geographically and the status of our families (I was always WAY behind in keeping track of their children and what they were doing, but I was having a hard time keeping up with them personally and getting through everyday life, as I’m sure they were to.) Every once in awhile (like every few years…) we might have an impromptu phone call or a “drive-by ” visit, but generally life rolled on.

The rise of the kind of video calling that tech has brought into mainstream awareness and usage in the past several years, as well as personal advancing years, made me even more aware of what kind of regular get-together might be put together. At the beginning of this year, one of my friends lost his loving wife to heart disease (and the host of maladies that brings with it….). My other friend that I had kept in closer touch with had experienced a messy divorce a number of years earlier. All three of us seemed pretty comfortable with the online video tech, so I orchestrated a 3-way chat to catch up. I didn’t really understand the importance of this at the time…

We all like to talk and tell stories, which meant that I needed to block an entire afternoon for the chat, but that was fine. Being retired, my time (and theirs) was flexible, and it would be really good to be able to reacquaint each of us to the other in this context. The time spent was richer and more meaningful than I thought possible. We each came away from the chat hungry for more time together.

Since then we have gathered a least once a month. Other one-on-one chats spawned from the group chats, as we check up on each other. Rekindling these friendships has been one of the truly bright spots of this year for me, and one that I feel we have found to be valuable past valuing. I have rediscovered two extremely unique men that I valued highly long ago, and value even more now, if that’s possible. Lifetimes of experience, along with insights of life from the different parts of the country we live (I live in the Pacific Northwest, another lives in the Midwest, and the other on the Southern East Coast), along with finding out how well, or badly, we remember events from our past…..all these things, along with the joy that comes from experiencing afresh why we all became friends to begin with so may years ago….I can’t recommend it high enough.

If you have a friend that lives afar, either in time or space (or both…), and you haven’t caught up in awhile, do that. As humans, we are made for relationships, and building or rebuilding them is a good thing.

Can I Hear You Now?

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Photo – James Musallam, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This condition has been going on and degrading for quite awhile. Much like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, it’s easy to miss (unless caused by something catastrophic, of course….).

In this case, I mean hearing loss.

As of today, I’m just less than a month away from turning 70. I’m sure this has been going on for quite awhile (an earlier life spent as a musician, which has the possibility of hurting your hearing, or not….still…). Over time, you adapt to include slight behaviors:

  • turning your “good ear” (if this is the case..) toward the person or sounds you want to focus on
  • saying “WHAT?!” a lot more frequently at home than you used to
  • sneakily cupping your ear toward the person or sounds you’re trying to hear, and
  • a really dangerous precedent, in a noisy environment, just internally giving up on trying to hear clearly and hope for enough snatches of conversation, music, whatever that will allow you to piece together some idea of what is going on, with an appropriate facial expression (hope you pick the right one…..).

With this wind-up, the next node in the story for me was realizing that I needed to do something on behalf of the hearing on my left side. The right side wasn’t a real picnic, either, but the hearing on my left side (when I cover up my “good” right ear) sounded like I was trying to discern the world through a really thick pillow. Added to that is the positional problem in my home. The way our family area is set up, my spouse always sits to my left. When we chatted, my tally of “WHAT!?” was WAY more than the usual….

So, although many audiologists offer a free hearing test as part of their community outreach efforts, I decided to go through my healthcare and insurance providers. This would make sure that test results and further medical decisions would be notated in my medical record, allowing for check-ups and amelioration, as might be needed.

So, at the beginning of this year I got a “full meal deal” hearing exam via the healthcare network. The last official one that I’d had was over nine years ago (and for which I was able to obtain the results). The comparison was pretty drastic. Hearing on both sides had degraded, but the left side much more so, validating my internal assessment.

So, an appointment was made with an audiologist to talk over options. The technology for hearing aids today is pretty awesome, I found. I also was wildly fortunate in that the audiologist I met was very well acquainted with working with the U.S. Military veterans’ community and the VA. She had previously spent ten years working at the VA and knew the system really well. In helping me submit the appropriate paperwork, along with the test results and medical recommendations, we received approval from the VA to pay for the hearing aids and a few follow-up check-ups.

It’s now been about two months since I was “fitted” with the single hearing aid for my left side. I thought it would be hard to adjust only having one, but that has been non-issue. My biggest road bump so far has been behavioral…..inserting this new activity, “putting in my hearing aid in the morning” into my nearly calcified daily routine.

I’m getting better at it though. One way I hang a carrot for myself is by introducing my brain afresh to the sounds I have been missing. I listen to music constantly, so in the morning when I’m getting ready, I pause, put on my hearing aid, and all of the sudden I can hear the music much more clearly, which makes me happy…Oh Yeah…

One last bit, kind of a PSA: do not neglect your hearing. I don’t care what age you are, but especially if you over fifty, get a baseline test. Getting some of that sound back allows you to take back a bit of the world around you.