Traveling Together

When Nicki and I got married, more than a few of our friends voiced concerns about the fact that we would be working together, living together, basically together all of the time.  We were a little worried about that as well.  When you work in a high stress environment like the Emergency Department, as we do, there are bound to be days when you get irritated with even the closest of friends, not to mention your spouse. 

But, after over two years of marriage, and working together almost every night that we worked, we've become professionals at "leaving it at work".  We've become closer, and learned that we can relay on each other in a pinch.  I love working with my wife, because she is an amazing Nurse, and when the chips are down at work and I'm feeling stressed, she's the first one there to help.  I know I can trust her, and she knows I have her back as well.  It's working out, believe it or not.

We recently started travel Nursing.  IF you aren't familiar with that, it's basically taking a 13 week assignment at another hospital somewhere away from home.  You live and work away from home 13 weeks at a time.  Right now, we're in South Dakota working on an Indian Reservation.  Soon, we'll be packing it up here, and heading to southern Arizona for our next 13 weeks.  It's a nomadic, wandering kind of life, and we love it. 



Getting to experience new places, and to see this country one assignment at a time, is a great experience for someone who loves to travel.  Seeing it with someone you love is even better.  It's the best.  Turns out, that when I thought we would be searching for ways to do things separately, we've become the best of friends as well as a married couple.  There's nothing I love more than spending a day off exploring with her, and I have yet to feel the need to hide in order to get some solitude.  It helps that we're comfortable just sitting quietly together some times.  She reads her books, I dabble on the computer or play golf clash on my phone (not very well I might add).  We can be together, without feeling the need to entertain each other in those quiet times between shifts. 

We've learned how to be together.  Where once we thought it was going to be our biggest weakness, now it's one of our greatest strengths. 

Life truly is a journey, and we're making it about the trip now, not the destination.  So to all those doubters out there, the ones who said "I could never be with my husband all the time" or "I could never be with my wife all the time." , I say this.  You can, if you really love being with that person more than anything else, you most certainly can.  It takes a little patience, and you have to know when they need a little quiet space.  But if you are sensitive to them, and you celebrate your time together instead of seeing it as an obstacle, you might just find out that it makes your life even better. 

What a Wonderful Journey this Life Is

     Looking inward, sometimes you see things you don't really like.  Anger, jealousy, a lack of understanding or willingness to even try and understand.  That's pretty much what I was faced with recently when I took a good long look at myself.  I didn't like it very much.  It made me feel somehow smaller, less evolved really.  I mean, I was spending this amazing amount of time being angry at other people for my own predicament.  I was letting jealousy turn me into someone I hardly recognized.  I spent so much time demanding that my love understand me and my feelings, that I had no time left to try and understand hers.  I didn't really want to understand, I just wanted her to conform to my idea of what a marriage, of what love was.  In the midst of all of that, I almost lost the thing that meant the most to me in the world.  Her.

    You see, our relationship is complicated by the fact that neither of us is perfect.  My wife is smart, sexy, caring, and full of life.  But she's not perfect.  I'm a decent human being myself, but by no means am I perfect.  I had this ridiculous notion that we had to be perfect, and by making that demand on us both - a demand neither of us could live up to, I almost destroyed something amazing and beautiful.

     I think I understand now, finally, what it means to love someone.  To truly love someone.  It's to recognize that the person you fell in love with is a collage of thoughts, emotions, fears, notions, and a past you can never really fully understand, because it wasn't yours to walk through.  I look at my wife now, and realize that her smile, and her laugh, and her intelligence, and her fiery temper, and her mood swings, and her compassion for people and animals, and her deep thoughts and insane sense of humor are all things that drew me to her, made me fall in love with her, made me ask her to marry me, and have filled my life with meaning since that time.  I also realize that her anxiety, and insecurities, her needs and wants and weakness'....those were always there as well.  When I met her, when I fell in love, and when we married.  All a part of the whole. 

     If you truly love someone, you have to learn to not only love a persons strengths and qualities that you show off in the light.  You have to also accept and love their weakness' and imperfections, their darkness.  Because one without the other, is not the person you met, fell in love with, and wanted to build a life with.  It's not about settling, it's about celebrating the person you love as a whole.

     I'm learning to celebrate myself as a whole, and in doing so, I've found new beauty in my wife, and in my life.   We may not be perfect, as a matter of fact I can promise you we are not.  But that's just it, we don't have to be.  I just have to love her the best I can.  That's what I have control over.  My thoughts, my actions, how I treat her, and how I support and encourage her. 

     I give up control of those things that are not mine to control, and find peace and feel love in a whole new way.  What a wonderful journey this life is. 

 



Working on Me

I've spent most of my life looking at people who meditated, or did anything else I considered to be new age "crazy" like they were just that, a bit crazy.  It never really occurred to me that most of these practices had been going on for centuries, and that the people practicing them certainly seemed happier and less stressed than I was. I didn't have time, and actually considered myself kind of immune to enlightenment to some extent.  I am an ER Nurse.  Unfortunately, that means I am a bit skeptical of everything in existence and more than a little jaded when it comes to the human condition.  I've learned from 25 years of being an ER nurse that if you don't let something touch or soften your heart, you live to work another day.  Twenty five years, that's a lot of wasted time.

If you were to ask the people that are closest to me, the people I work with, none of them would tell you that I am a particularly nervous or stressed person.  I've always managed to stay pretty low key, let things roll off my back, and never get too worked up about anything.  But over the past few years, that's changed for me.  I don't know why, but life's stress' started getting to me.  I found myself suddenly inundated with feelings and emotions, and often I really had no idea what I was even reacting to.  I was just stressed, or angry, or sad, or even scared.  I had no idea what of or what about.  I just was.  It was affecting my personal relationships, and affecting my attitude at work.  I wanted to push people further away because it seemed like the more I insulated myself from other people, the less I had this emotional dance with myself. 

Then, quite accidentally, I ran across some reading on meditation and living in the "now".  Ah oh.  New age Crazy.  But the first few sentences caught my attention and so I kept reading.  After just two attempts at meditation, I realized that it somehow calmed me and made it easier to focus.  Maybe I'm not getting Alzheimer's after all?  (Fingers Crossed)   So, I'm doing more reading.   I'm going to continue learning to meditate and I'm opening myself up to a lot of other things I use to call crazy.  It's going to be a journey, but I can't wait to see what's over the next rise. 

It's kind of exciting to look in the mirror and realize that I had so limited myself in the past, that my future may not be at all what I expected.

Sometimes I Ask Myself

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I ask myself why

Why do I wait in silence for something that may never come?

Why do I believe in something that may not be true?

Why do I yearn for something when that longing leads to pain?

Why do I trust in something when it hasn't earned trust?

 

Then I remember that waiting helps your learn patience.

That believing in something sometimes takes faith.

That yearning for something makes obtaining it that much sweeter.

And I remember that demanding proof of what can't be proven, kills your soul.

 

S.G.M.