My thoughts are with all who lost loved ones on this day.

May we always remember.

Karin

• Adoption Corruption 17) Tell the bad stories

• Do you prefer spur of the moment or planned?

• Thinking about prayer

• To recover: talk lovingly to yourself

• What about the future?

• Lost in Space Science Fiction Collectibles

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Reading Kinsella’s book has got me thinking.

Who is the keeper of my memories? Is there any one person who would know enough about my life to help me put it back together again?

I tend to be a reticent person, picking and choosing what and when to share, while at the same time being out-going. Some aspects of my life I haven’t shared with anyone, and some things I might yet share at the right time with the right persons under the right circumstances. I suppose that says that I don’t trust easily.

It used to be in pre-writing societies that the Keeper of Memories was a revered person, one who kept memories alive of the families and their history. It was important that it be remembered exactly and told in the same manner.

I’d have to get together with several of my friends and family in order to piece together the fabric of my life. And I suspect that some memories would clash with each other. Not all views of me would be the same.

It’s quite a heady subject. One that hopefully I’ll never have to test.

How about you?

Karin

• Remember me? by Sophie Kinsella

• Happy Passover to those readers who celebrate Passover

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• Lonestar Memories, Andy Tauer Perfumes

• Neil Morris Fragrances, Part 2 his bespoke fragrances

• Memories of Yesterday Enesco Decorative Collectible Brands Decorative Collectibles Collectibles

• 1-2 Person Tents Tents Canopies Camping Hiking

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This was a really interesting book. Imagine if you wake up in the hospital after a car accident and your most current memory is three years before when you were out with your friends for the evening. You slipped and fell getting into a taxi. In the hospital, you think this is what has brought you to the hospital. But it is three years later and every vestige of those three years is lost to you.

No one is sure how long your memory will be gone or if any parts of it will resurface.

But ‘you’ as you are now are not the ‘you’ that you remember. The old you had the nickname Snaggletooth. Now you have perfect pearly whites. And that’s just the beginning. All your friends have changed. You are now a high powered executive (or you are told you are one…and you weren’t particularly likeable.)

And how are you to figure out the truth when there are lies in abundance around you?

Oh! and don’t forget you are married — and you have the wedding album to prove it — but not a single memory. Never mind that he is handsome and wealthy and perfect — or not.

That is the premise of this book and Kinsella keeps it up through 389 pages.

Is there any three year portion of your memories that you’d be willing to give up? Not likely, not when every single memory is wiped out.

And who is Lexi to trust? her husband who is more than a little creepy? the colleague in her office who covets her job? the man who says they were lovers and she was going to leave her husband?

And those who knew her during these years are not so quick to fill in the blanks, or they revise history if it would show themselves better, so whose ‘memories’ can she trust?

Her life is perfect — or is it?

She is a heroine you root for, with spunk, courage and joy, and you are not disappointed. She manages to get the best of those who want the worst for her, while finding herself, and the memories she makes are worth having.

This book is a delight to read. Nearly every page has some humor in it. It’s told in Lexi’s voice and takes place in London. I think it might be good to listen to this book read, if the reader is British.

Kinsella has also written the Shopaholic books, which I intend to read in the near future.

Have you read this book or any of her books? I give it a 4. Whose memories of your life would you trust? I suspect there are some parts of my life that would be lost to me as I’d have a hard time believing it all!

Karin

• Remembering and forgetting

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• Adoption Corruption 16) Speak to PAP’s formally and informally about finding ethical agencies

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Count us in. We are going. I’m not sure if we will take the 12 and 10 year olds, but the other three of us will go.

We had an Indy marathon the other night so we’d be up to speed again.

This is the kind of movie we would have gone to at 12:01 a.m., but life conspired this year to get in the way. Next time!

Karin

Who’s going to see Crystal Skull?
	I already went!
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	Count me out, sorry.
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This is fascinating stuff! It’s amazing to me that the book survived, much less is readable (after 9 years!)

This is about an ancient book called The Archimedes Codex, bought for $2.2 million in October, 1998, at an auction in New York City by an anonymous collector who sent it to the Walters Art Museum, here to be restored, conserved, and probed for its content. It was thought to contain mathematical theses conceived by the genius of Syracuse (287-212 BC), whose name it bears, ideas not found anywhere else in the world.

The Walters faced a daunting task: what arrived was a clump of folios, crushed, torn, punctured by worm holes, in the inflexible grip of old carpenter’s glue, charred at its edges, and covered with mold and water stains.

It’s a miracle it still exists.

It took four years just to remove the glue, and open the book sufficiently to allow experts on ancient Greek texts to access much of its content and, with the help of ultra sophisticated imaging systems, to read it.

Modern technology is opening its information to us.

Imagine being the man who is in charge of this (for nine years).

The Archimedes texts were copied in the 10th century by an unknown scribe in Constantinople, then a major center of the Christian world eventually to become a center of the Islamic world. Three centuries later, another scribe washed, scraped, and otherwise tried to remove the text from the book’s parchment. This person undid the book, rebound it in the opposite direction, then, on the imperfectly cleared pages, wrote his Christian prayers in Greek over the original text, which was also in Greek, and still discernible in a faint rust-colored thread running beneath. This procedure was common in medieval times: Parchment was scarce. Thus, the Archimedes Codex became a palimpsest, a twice-used book.

The findings gleaned from it have raised Archimedes’s status as a thinker higher than anyone might have expected. Noel describes him as “the most important scientist who ever lived.”

Karin

• Gifted children

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• Being Godlike, God centered

• Back of Book Canada Stamps

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Maybe, I put blinkers on, but I can’t remember any miserable times in my life. I see the present moment as a sacrament. It’s all about sacrament — eating, conversing, being with friends, telling a good joke and making people laugh. Sister Immaculata Knox

Seeing the human and divine coincidence in the particular, individual, mundane, even normal moments of our lives is a way of recognizing and appreciating the sacred in our days. Maybe if we connect the dots of these moments it is a help when we are going through rough waters.

Because you will forget your misery and remember it as waters that pass away [water under the bridge.] KJV Job 11:16 and commentary on NKJV

It is certainly something to hold onto and claim when things are tough. And when they are easy, it multiples the good in it to recognize it and to see God as the source of it.

Sometimes we go in the strength of our reserves. It’s a truism then that we better have some. Every time we see the present moment as a sacrament, I think we are adding to our reserves, then we have something to draw upon when needed. Other things that build reserves are getting enough rest; taking care of ourselves, not putting ourselves last; making sure we eat at regular times; being with those we love and who love us; laughter; growing spiritually; a little inspiration; reading a good book; listening to a mentor…

One pathway to hope is to choose your memories very carefully….put a frame around them. So many hopeful things happen day in and day out, but we lose them if we don’t stop for a moment, think about them, and consciously frame them. Arthur P Ciaramicoli

How do you build your reserves? Make it a priority.

Karin

• What about the future?

• The Past In Light Of The Present

• Live and wrestle in this time

• Do you prefer spur of the moment or planned?

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Nola is about to graduate college at age 95. She sounds like a pip!

I want to be like her when I grow up.

When you consider how much negative news there is, it is refreshing to have something so upbeat. Maybe it won’t be bad to be 95, ya think?

You go, gal!

Karin

• Elder role models

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• Stranger than Fiction (movie)

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I know anger is a universal emotion. But the juxtaposition of my short remark yesterday about dealing with my own angry anger was followed by receiving this message into my email box. I had to laugh. Again, I think this reaches way beyond the bounds of divorce, into universals.

Defining Anger
Day 59

Dr. Les Carter says that having anger means standing up for your own worth, needs, and convictions.

“You don’t get angry when folks are kind, pleasant, or understanding. Anger shows up when someone has rejected you or is being uncooperative, or when a person is being critical, harsh, or difficult to get along with. When anger appears on the scene, it arouses your sense of self-preservation.

“You want to preserve one of three things. You want to preserve your worth as a human being; your anger can be your way of wishing to say, ‘Please, show me some respect, will you?’ Anger can be your way of preserving your basic needs: ‘Recognize that I have needs, and acknowledge them, please.’ Or anger can be a way that you stand up for your deepest convictions. It is your way of saying, ‘I believe in things, and I don’t want to back away from them.’”

You will feel anger at some point in your divorce. [You fill in the blank for whatever is making you angry. Karin] Do not try to deny or suppress this emotion. God does not condemn you for your anger when it is justified. God Himself is described as “slow to anger”–not “never angry.”

“And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness’” (Exodus 34:6).

Lord God, sometimes my anger is justifiable; sometimes it’s not. Help me to be slow to anger, like You. Amen.

For more information about DivorceCare, including how to sign up for these daily emails, please visit.

I can’t figure out if I have very little anger (because I hardly ever feel or express it) or if it is so sublimated and running so deep that I’d better get a handle on it. Who knows. I’m not going to waste any time over it. I imagine it’s a bit of both. The Serenity Prayer comes in handy at times:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr

It’s a truism that progress happens because of discontent, even anger. Otherwise, we’d still be living in caves.

A Bible verse I especially love is:

Eph 4:26 Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. KJV

Karin

I do not know about the workbook that is presented below as I have never seen it.

Suggested reading from the DivorceCare HelpCenter

The Anger Workbook
Les Carter

A 13-step interactive plan that explains how emotions and unmet needs can feed anger–and tells how readers can find healthy ways to express and control it. This unique workbook offers answers for anyone who struggles with destructive anger and wants to develop healthy alternatives for dealing with it. The only anger management program on the market that offers interactive exercises to help the readers understand and modify behavior.

Go to the following link to order this or other resources from the DivorceCare HelpCenter:

• In the wake of my son, Khabar magazine

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I refuse to replay the mistakes that we made yesterday.

• Mistakes! Mistakes?

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• Adoptive parents who see the world through a rigid set of lenses

• Memories of Yesterday Enesco Decorative Collectible Brands Decorative Collectibles Collectibles

February 22, 2007
The Past In Light Of The Present
Knowing Better Now

When we look back at the past, knowing what we know now, we often find it difficult to understand how we made the mistakes we made. This is because once we learn new information, it is nearly impossible to reenter the headspace we were in before we learned that information. And so we look back at parents who spanked their kids, for example, and wonder how they could have thought that was a good idea. Similarly, our personal pasts are full of mistakes we can’t believe we made. We did things then that we would never do now, and this is precisely because we have information now that we didn’t have, or weren’t able to access, then.

From ideas about how to raise children to how to treat the environment, our collective human past sometimes reads like a document on what not to do. In many ways, this is exactly as it should be. We learn from living and having experiences. It is from these past actions that we garnered the information that guides us to live differently now. Just so, in our personal lives, we probably had to have a few unsuccessful relationships or jobs, learning about our negative tendencies through them, in order to gain the wisdom we have now.

In order to live more peacefully with the past, it helps to remember that once we know better, we tend to do better. Prior to knowing, we generally do our best, and while it’s true that from the perspective of the present, our best doesn’t always seem good enough, we can at least give our past selves the benefit of the doubt. We did our best with what knowledge we had. Beyond this, we serve the greater good most effectively by not dwelling on the past, instead reigning our energy and knowledge into our present actions. It is here, in this moment, that we create our reality and ourselves anew, with our current knowledge and information. Daily OM, see link at front page

• What about the future?

• Precious angel, Bob Dylan

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