Day 568: How am I supposed to feel?

“How am I supposed to feel?”

I’m wondering if that’s a question you’re familiar with.

Personally, I hear questions like that a lot, at work and elsewhere. For example:

How am I supposed to feel …

• about what just happened.
• in the morning/afternoon/evening/night.
• when I’m treated that way.
• about my family.
• at this age.
• about the future.
• regarding that news.
• when I’m dealing with all this.
• after you said that.
• when things seem so dangerous.
• if I’m having a different reaction from other people.
• when the weather is like this.
• if I don’t feel like myself.
• in response to what they did.
• with this unexpected occurrence.
• when I lose people.
• about this feeling.
• here.
• now.

…. and other questions (expressed with different feelings).

What’s the answer?

I don’t know.

Or, put another way,  there is no “supposed” about feelings.  Feelings just …. are.

How are you supposed to feel about THAT?

Or, about these photos I took yesterday?

How was I supposed to feel, when I was taking them?

What do you think?

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the words and images here, to people who have feelings (at work and elsewhere), and to you — of course! — no matter what you are supposed to do, today.

 

 

Day 523: A Day in My Life

Woke up, got out of bed,

Saw a cat there at the head,

Found my way downstairs, and had a bite,

Looking up, I thought I might be late.

Found my coat but not a hat,

Made my car in seconds flat.

Found my way up there and saw these things:

 

 

Somebody spoke …

When Death Comes – A Poem by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

And I went into a dream.

Thanks to the Beatles, to Mary Oliver, to the Longwood Medical Area of Boston (including Children’s Hospital, where I spent many days in my life), to my workplace, and to all the participants at the Northeast Society for Group Psychotherapy’s yearly 3-day conference in Boston (for which I arrived five hours early, yesterday). Many thanks to you, especially,  for glancing and observing, on this day in your life.