The Boomer Shrinks A Head

The Boomer has a sister, who is also a boomer, with whom he is very close.
It wasn’t always that way though but mostly it was. When they were kids they fought like cats and dogs, but then how many siblings didn’t?
The Boomer’s sister recently lost her husband, who was a good man. He was sick for a long time and so the Boomer’s sister had a lot of time to grieve this loss even before he was gone.
After he passed on, the Boomer’s sister had a lot to do to take case of the estate, and take a few well needed breaks with her travelin’ buddy, (the Boomer’s wife).
Over the past couple of days the Boomer’s sister came to hang out with the Boomer. Mostly she just sat beside the pool and read; she’s a reader and a seeker of knowledge, while the Boomer sat beside the pool and wrote, because, we’ll that’s mostly what he does.
But they also talked a lot. They didn’t talk about her husband, but they did talk about the nature of grief. If you’re a boomer, you have to deal with grief a lot, because people close to you are keeling over left and right.
According to the Boomer’s sister, a lot of people who are close to her were concerned that she hadn’t really done any grieving in the conventional way. And she was starting to feel that their concern for that was becoming stifling and uncomfortable for her.
So the Boomer and his sister talked a lot about that. They talked about how people carry around the impression, more and more these days, that their definition of (your thing goes here), is really the only definition there is, and that if you’re not conforming to the way they think you should be behaving, you are somehow doing it all wrong.
So they get critical.
The Boomer’s sister knew that the Boomer did not feel that that way. Instead he felt that we’re all like snowflakes and that no two are exactly alike. Therefore the way people processed experiences was unique the them, and would, by nature, always be a little or lot a lot different than the way others would process the same sort of experience.
Life is too complex and humans are too individual for there to be hard and fast rules about processing anything.
As it turns out, this sort of arm chair psychology was just what the Boomer’s sister needed to hear right about now. And the Boomer, who loves his sister like, well, a sister, was only too happy to oblige her.
The Boomer’s sister left this morning, feeling a lot better, and convinced that if she could just stop thinking so much about everything in an effort to ‘gain perspective’, and just started living again, everything would eventually work itself out.
As the Boomer writes this, it occurs to him that a lot of the things that fuck us up start somewhere inside our own skulls, with the marvellous little toy we have there, that always seems to be chugging.
There’s no way to shut it off. But there is a thing called freedom of choice, meaning you can choose to worry about stuff that you really can’t do anything about, or you can focus on the stuff that you can do something about, and just do it.
And the Boomer muses…Yeah…if I could just bottle that, I could sell a ton of it on Amazon.

This is Boomer Post #4. Other posts in this series can be read at https://www.bebee.com/@jim-murray

Jim Murray is a communication strategist, writer, art director, blogger and beBee brand ambassador for Canada. His partner, Charlene Norman is a business systems and operational analyst. Their collaboration is called Bullet Proof Consulting, headquartered in St Catharines, Ontario and designed to serve forward thinking businesses in the Niagara and Golden Horseshoe regions of Southern Ontario. You can find out more about us at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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