Day Twenty-Two: My Journey to Zen
By: Joanne Reid
Tags: Mindfulness, Genealogy, Writing, Writing Tips, Habit Building

Day Twenty-Two: My Journey to Zen

Who gets to tell the story?

Photo by Peter Pryharski on Unsplash

As my creativity unleashes itself from all the knots and tangles in my brain, I am reveling in the stories that have been set free. I can write unimpeded by social demands and obligations. My work space is neat and tidy and my fingers are unfettered on the keyboard.

But….

I am now facing the dilemma of whose story can I tell. Where does my story end and the other person’s begin. I’m writing fiction and I do love to tell a story but there are dangers in someone thinking I am writing about them when I am just telling a story.

Whoa!

The brain is a devious thing. I have been carving out the time and space and creating the mindset I need for writing as I wish to write. There are no impediments.

So what does my brain do?

Throws up an invented roadblock that could appear logical or at least reasonable. It is using my habits and personality in its battle against change. The brain is like that.

It is one of the reasons that really small changes are more successful. Simply explained, the changes are so small they sneak past the change-resistant brain.

Family Stories

I have been intrigued since childhood with family stories. Not the whitewashed ones we were meant to accept but the human side of our grandparents and their grandparents. I wanted to understand what their lives might have been like.

The arrogant figure of my grandfather with his deep booming, and rather scary, voice is what I witnessed. When I was ten or eleven, my grandmother was in the hospital and apparently very ill. Grandpa and my parent and I went to the hospital. I had to stay in the car.

The pertinent part of the memory is that I was sitting alone in the back seat and cranky old Grandpa was in the driver’s seat, crying. What would he do without his beloved Bert? That was his plaintiff wail. I did what I had learned was best in those days and faded into the upholstery, barely breathing. I had to absorb the reality that the old guy had feelings.

He was strict and I knew that he disliked his step-father immensely. That was all I knew. Years later, I found the tombstone for his mother. She had been buried with her second husband, the much-despised stepfather. She had been born in 1864 and the second husband had been born in 1885.

Yes. A 21 year difference. Oddly enough, I looked for the tombstone on Billion Graves and found it but it notes that she was born in 1884. The transcriber must have edited the date thinking that 1864 was an error. Her first child was born in 1892 so an 1884 birthdate is highly unlikely.

She and her second husband died the year after I was born so I never knew her. At a family funeral, an elderly cousin remembered her and was great at telling me about her. She was a warm, funny person who liked to laugh and enjoy life.

There are wonderful records available for anyone who wants to explore their ancestry. I found her marriage certificate for her first marriage. And birth certificates for her four children. I was interested to learn that she married six weeks before her first child was born.

Her first husband was a man who lived next door to her family and who was five years younger than her. He died 10 years later in a farm accident. Within five months, she remarried. She was 39 and the new husband was 18.

Everyone Has a Story

We all have stories, all of us, our parents, our grandparents. The chances of writing a story straight from our brain and not hitting on someone’s story are slim.

I have to be more mindful than ever imagined to keep an eye on my self-sabotaging brain. Doing this for 30 days just sets a pattern. Maintaining it is another thing entirely. I have to be mindful of that too.