Tag: Lorie Sheffer

Creating and Sharing, By Lorie Sheffer, Featured Guest Blogger @ Mid Life Celebration

Photo courtesy of Lorie Sheffer

If you love to cook, would it still give you pleasure if there was no one to eat the food you prepared? If you love to sing, would you still sing if no one ever listened? If you love to write, what if you were the only person who read your written word? Would an artist still paint even though his or her canvases could only hang in total darkness? What if there was a play that was performed every evening to a totally empty theater?

How much of what we love is done for the simple act of creating something, and how much of it is because we can share it with others? If we love doing something does it matter if anyone knows or cares or shares it with us? Or is the simple act enough for us to continue?

New and Improved, By Lorie Sheffer, Guest Blogger

Have you ever wondered what happened to your favorite summer hangouts or vacation spots? One day I decided to look for information on a campground where my family and I spent several summer vacations. I wondered if others remember it as fondly as I do. It was the place where my older cousin saw the ocean for the very first time. It is the one place from our childhood that has no equal.

Enter a combination of Google and Facebook. I am now one of a growing group (48 members at last count!) of baby boomers who gather Online to reminisce about the shared experience of this old campground. Best of all, they share PHOTOS!  My family wasn’t big on picture taking and my memories were becoming faded. Reading the posts by the other members made something very clear very early on: this place holds an almost transcendent nostalgia for all of us. There is almost a reverence in talking about it.

Some of us have made the mistake of trying to find out what happened to our old campground. I was tempted a few years back, when my son was in college about an hour north of it. Knowing me as well as he does he advised me to keep my old memories and not go look at the area as it is now. Curious, I looked it up a few weeks ago. I should have listened to my son. What I discovered left me sobbing. The beautiful beach is now home of several high-rise hotels and condos. The wooded area is now a gated community of townhouses and a conference center. The website for the area describes it as beautiful and full of amenities. And yet those of us who spent those magical summers in tents and campers, showering in the bathhouses and using the public toilets, do not see the new and improved version as an improvement at all. One man said that he drove by a few years ago and was shocked at the emotional reaction he had when he saw the area. He longed for the old Trading Post, the rickety wooden footbridges, miniature golf and rowboat rentals. Our pristine, once almost wild beach now resembles a small city.

I know that the South had some ugly things happening in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of those things were shocking for me to see, and even at such a young age I felt anger at the inequality that was almost proudly on display. I had never seen a “Whites Only” sign until I went to eat dinner in that town. This was a time when many of our leaders who had the audacity to speak out in favor of equality for all of our citizens were gunned down. We were at war in Southeast Asia and we saw black and white imagines on the nightly news of soldiers returning home in body bags. Maybe that is what added to the innocence of those wooded acres of solitude and natural beauty. Maybe the contrast of the beauty of the unspoiled beach and the smell of the pine that hung so heavily was what soothed us.

I watched man’s first steps on the moon from a tiny, snowy black and white TV that my uncle plugged into the campsite’s lone electrical outlet. Reception wasn’t great, but the crowd that gathered round to watch with us hardly seemed to care. It was July 21, 1969 and I was 10 years old. In my heart I know that had I been on the 15 floor of one of those climate controlled luxury towers on that same South Carolina beach, watching a giant plasma TV when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the moon, it would not have been as magical.

Back To Black, By Lorie Sheffer

“Guess she shoulda’ said “Yes, yes, yes, to rehab!”  “Why all the fuss over some drug addicted singer when decent people were executed in Norway? They’re the ones who deserve our sympathy!”

The comments went on and on while all I could think was that this talented, troubled young woman was the same age as my son. Her family was grieving for her the same as the families of the shooting victims in Norway or the soldiers who died in wars or any other family who loses a loved one.

Why do we blame the victims of some illnesses? Lung cancer: That’s what you get for smoking. Addiction: Why don’t they just stop? Eating disorders: EAT already! Depression, anxiety and other mental disorders: They’re nuts! AIDS patients have been treated with scorn because surely they must have “asked for it” through their promiscuous homosexual behavior or IV drug use. HIV/AIDS was labeled “that gay man’s disease” early on, which was a very dangerous thing, as heterosexual transmission is the most common transmission worldwide.

My son and I had a discussion about the blame game not too long ago. Many of his patients are those who “asked for it”. He said that perhaps thinking that someone “asked for it” is a way for people to feel protected from such a fate.

Why do we give the person on a list for a heart transplant more sympathy than the person who is struggling with addiction in rehab? Perhaps it is because addiction causes behavioral changes in people who suffer from it? I noticed that, following my husband’s stroke 15 years ago, people were sympathetic to the fact that his brain had hemorrhaged and caused him physical disability. What they were unable to deal with were the changes in his personality. Sometimes he would burst into tears or fits of anger, which is expected when a person suffers from a traumatic brain injury. And yet comments were made to me about him “acting out”.  Sympathy could be felt for the wheelchair but not for the tears. He should have been able to control the emotions, I suppose, even though the brain injury was as responsible for them as for his physical disability. Certainly the behavior issues were not to be ignored. Physical rehabilitation and emotional rehabilitation have to go hand in hand. And yet, if someone says they are seeking treatment for a physical illness they will generally get a much different reaction than if they say they are in treatment for a mental illness. I recently read an article that said that most of us won’t think twice about holding the door for someone with a physical disability, but not many doors are held open for someone who is hallucinating on the street. In fact, those doors are usually slammed shut.

“Compassion is not weakness and concern for others is not socialism.” – Hubert H. Humphrey

Compromise, By Lorie Sheffer

When did compromise become a dirty word? When did it become something that is seen as a sign of weakness? What has become of our sense of fairness to everyone?

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of give and take being something that should be avoided at all costs.  I suppose the idea of compromise, as a sign of fairness to everyone, is just too ingrained in me. I am not an only child. I grew up with an older brother. We get along fairly well, but always have had very different interests. I have memories of wasting a good beach day by touring a stupid, boring battle ship when we were on family vacations. We had one television set and sometimes I had to give it up so that he could watch a football game. If one of my friends was at the house for a sleepover, my brother had to listen to the baseball game on the radio because we were watching a movie on TV.

As an adult, I have used the ability to compromise on an almost daily basis. One time an unmarried female friend of mine asked me why, if I love English floral patterns so much, there aren’t more of them in my house. Why do I have a pair of antique wooden skis on my wall in the family room when I detest skiing? The answer is simple; I do not live alone. My husband lives here, too. I have a few Dale Gallon civil war prints (Yuck!) on the walls of the living room, and there are antique botanical prints (YAY!) in the dining room. I will not have the Shaker style kitchen cabinets that were my first choice for our new kitchen, nor will my husband have his first choice of cabinet style. We compromised on a style that we both like.

When we get so entrenched in having to have our own way no matter the cost, it seems to me that we end up as miserable as the person with whom we are doing battle. Sometimes it all boils down to this: Do you want to win at all costs, or do you want to find a way to peacefully coexist in a world where you just cannot always expect to get your own way?

May I Have Your Attention Please, By Lorie Sheffer

One of the best gifts we can give to someone is listening to what they have to say. Really listening with our full and undivided attention.

Look around you. Take notice of how distracted most people are. We are so busy that we multitask while talking to our children and grandchildren, text while sitting down for a meal, and keep that cell phone turned on “just in case”. Distraction is everywhere. It almost seems as if the art of conversation, of being fully engaged in a verbal exchange with another human being, is becoming a thing of the past. There was a time when “restaurants” with big screen TVs didn’t exist. In fact, most of us were made to turn off the TV when dinnertime rolled around. In my home, if a friend called during a meal, they were politely asked to call back later. Remember when homes had only one, maybe two, phones? Even as recently as when I would drive my daughter to and from her dance classes, which were several nights a week, we had no cell phone to interrupt our conversation. You got your kids in the car and you had a captive audience for the duration of the ride. And so did they!

There is nothing worse than trying to tell a person what is on your mind while having them text someone under the table, or “having” to take that phone call, or being so distracted by what else is going on around them that they end up only hearing a portion of what you are saying. Worse yet are the “dates”, where you will see a young couple out to dinner, she sitting there smiling while he gets to watch the big sporting event on the billboard sized TV that is hanging in the restaurant. The sad thing to me is that there are young women out there who take this as normal and seem totally OK with it.

Those of us at midlife and older know that life exists without constantly being plugged in. We have a vague recollection of giving and receiving undivided attention. We know what it’s like to read facial expressions and pick up on body language. We have eaten meals- appetizer to dessert- without looking at a TV or taking a phone call or texting under the table.

The current heat wave most of the country is experiencing this week is straining the power grid with extra air conditioning demands. This morning I received a recorded phone message from my power company asking customers to please refrain from using anything but totally necessary appliances in an effort to avoid an overload. After all, what would we do if, God forbid, we lost power and had to sit for an afternoon and actually interact with one another?