Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that the blogosphere is overflowing with foreign phrases such as “snow melt” and “frost thaw”, and pictures of blooming flowers, including those on my new-blogger-friends Amy and Edward’s pages. “Spring has sprung!” all the pictures declare. Only it hasn’t. It’s the start of Autumn (or “Fall”) where I live in Australia. We might notice leaves on a few trees turning brown and laying down, but mostly our natives are evergreen (or ever-olive-green I should say as our colors tend to be more muted to avoid the glaring sun).
Being in a different season is not the only way that I feel out of sync when I enter blogging land. When I post my little tales first thing in the morning, I sometimes get replies back that refer to the reader getting ready for bed. Or when I write something late at night, I realize it might actually be morning where you are. Even the fact that I post Monday-Friday is not entirely true, as I think it’s more like Sunday-Thursday where some of you are reading.
Changing all my “realises” to “realizes” to suit the American spelling setting in WordPress is another reminder that I’m out of sync with the world.
It gets even worse when I leave blogging land. There are some days when I get up, shower and have breakfast, and promptly return to bed to try to sleep off the beginning of a migraine, I can hear ‘daytime’ carrying on outside the window, just not for me. Or on days when I feel OK, I might listen to my family chat over dinner about what they’re going to do for the rest of the evening; what movie they’ll watch, or friend they’ll call, or homework they’ll do. For them, dinner is an interlude before more tasks take place. Whereas I often finish dinner, finish the dishes, finish the day; I’m done. 15-16 hours of being awake with chronic pain and moving around is enough for me.
Worse still when you leave home go to dinner with friends, and they’re all gearing up to kick on, while you’re planning your escape route out the bathroom window. Enough is enough, you think, but it’s always awkward letting it be known that you’re “piking out”. And as you make your sneaky back door breakaway – UGH – here come those other old friends (shame and guilt and sorrow) to cling to you on your way out.
But then – I was reading another blog, as I so often do, and there on Suzette B’s page was a Haiku poem ‘Not yet, Spring‘. There was the picture of flowers pushing through snow, but it was the phrase “snowblowers putt putt” that tripped my mind up on its mental pavement-stroll.
What’s a snowblower? Is it like our leaf blowers that are like reverse-vacuum cleaners? Then wouldn’t it make more of a “vrrrrr” sound? Or are they more like giant hair dryers so that they can melt the snow? In which case, I’m guessing they’re more like one of those generators you use in an emergency. Ours tend to make a constant “hmmmm” sound.
And just like that, along came another reminder of how out of sync I am with the rest of the world. But then I also realized that nature works differently – it’s more cyclical, more rotational. I might not be ‘aligned’ with your time, season, or language, but I’m not totally at odds with it either. Nature always accommodates light-and-dark, green-and-grey, snow-and-snowmelt.
In a weird way, Suzette’s “putt-putt” replaced the “tutt-tutt” that I had been carrying in my heart and head for a long time now due to chronic pain.
I don’t need to be so self-critical and judgmental – I’m not really out of sync – I’m not a failure – I’m not a foreigner – I’m just on a slightly different wavelength or time zone to many of you – FOR NOW.
And with that, on this fine Autumn day, I bid you farewell – for now.
Take care, Linda x
The Mindful Migraine 
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