Question of the day (7th October).

   This question is overdue for yesterday, but feel free to answer it in regards to either today or yesterday or whenever you’re reading it. 

   How has your day been? 

   My answer: 

   I’d say today has been quite decent. I really overslept though, so it feels like it’s been a pretty short day. Right now I’m in a phase where I fall asleep around 1-3 AM, even though I actually do feel kind of sleepy/tired much earlier but at the same time my brain can’t shut down or something, and then I naturally sleep for around 12 hours. I always have an alarm set to 8, which I don’t have to get up or even wake up for if I really don’t feel like it, although generally that’s what I do usually try to aim for to have a bit of a structure regarding my messy sleep-wake cycle and I like being able to wake up around that time, but even when I don’t and I’m pretty sure I won’t do it the next day, I still have it just to have some sort of sense of time. But the last couple of days I’ve been oversleeping my alarms completely and when I wake up I can’t even recall ever hearing or switching them off. And it’s not as easy with my phone to switch an alarm off on autopilot without waking up at all even for a few seconds, because at night I have music or radio going from the iPhone via my Bluetooth speaker, and VoiceOver doesn’t like Bluetooth speakers because it always yells through the phone speaker at max volume whenever it has to say something at the same time as the speaker starts or stops playing, and it’s impossible working around that bug. So when my alarm goes off, the speaker stops playing for a while, and when I switch the alarm off, VoiceOver starts babbling on about notifications and whatever and the speaker starts playing again so VoiceOver yells at me. I always silence it as quickly as possible so that no one wakes up in case someone is still sleeping, but yeah, the point is that it’s impossible not to notice that unless you’re so sleepy that it’s more like some other altered state or manage to silence VoiceOver on autopilot just in the right second before it starts yelling. So, my little theory is that the problem isn’t me, but my Apple Watch might be messing something up. It’s not really founded in anything other than that I heard my alarm go off only once over the whole time that I’ve had it, and I usually charge it overnight, during which time you can’t use it, so perhaps it thinks that if I’m charging and not using it, I don’t need the alarm either, be it on the watch or the phone. I hope my sleep patterns change some time soon so I’ll be able to verify if that’s true. Anyway, because of that alarm thing I only woke up after 1 AM and was quite horrified with my lack of moderation. 😀 I mean it’s one thing to fall asleep late but sleeping 12 hours?! Not that it doesn’t happen a lot to me but I usually don’t like it very much unless I have fun dreams or am depressed so sleep is the best thing in the world but otherwise it feels like I’m being totally lazy. I can’t imagine having a normal job with such habits, lol. 

   After I woke up, I did all the usual things most people do after waking up, except I had lunch for breakfast, as Mum was already making it when I got up. 😀 Then I talked for a bit with my Mum, and then Misha called me ‘cause he was already in my room and wanted to go to sleep but he won’t go to sleep without his usual routine, and he can’t do his usual routine by himself. So I gave him snack and then he laid on Bibiel for a couple minutes and had a quick ear massage, and then moved onto his sheep skin and fell asleep till 7 PM and made lovely sleep noises. 

   I then did my usual weekend Norwegian learning session for an hour and then some Welsh reading that I didn’t manage to do during the week for about 20 minutes. After that I read today’s Mass from the Latin missal which I do every day like Mum and Sofi, and then prayed the Rosary for an hour. I normally only pray one part of Rosary daily or sometimes less frequently than that, which lasts only fifteen minutes, but since October is the month that is especially devoted to praying Rosary, and because I’m having a sort of intensive prayer time since last Thursday for two weeks as I’m praying for someone important to me, I figured I’ll at least try to challenge myself a bit more and pray the whole Rosary every day for at least those two weeks. 

   Misha was very quiet for all that time and lay sweetly on his sheep skin, so after that I couldn’t resist and laid down for a while with him and we had a bit of a cuddle time and I read a book meanwhile. I’m now reading a book about the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich concerning the lives of Jesus and Mary as well as Jesus’ Passion, I guess it must be in English as well but I’m reading it in Polish and don’t know what it’s called in English. I don’t think this whole book can be treated as her authentic visions, because it was written by a German poet Clemens Brentano based on her words, but it’s been said that he could have likely added a lot of details into that to make the descriptions of everything feel richer and more in-depth, and even without knowing that it seems kind of weird that someone would have such detailed visions of what people’s houses looked like or what plants grew in Palestina etc. etc, I mean it’s interesting but not relevant spiritually. 😀 Still, it doesn’t contain anything that would be contradictory with teaching of the Church and I just treat it as a sort of very religious and soul-enriching historical novel inspired by Jesus’ life and Passion that can help one’s imagination a bit when, for example, reflecting on the mysteries of Rosary, rather than a super factual account of what Jesus’ and Mary’s lives were like and that everything that is said in this book necessarily had to happen exactly like it’s described and that Jesus seriously said all that he does in this book. I’m really enjoying it overall, though it’s super long, so even though I tend to be a very fast reader, I’m chewing through it very slowly, because I started it a week ago and am still barely 30-something percent into it. 

   After that it was already well after 4 PM, and I checked my emails and all the other stuff that needed checking, and then wrote in my diary, which also took me quite a while because I didn’t yesterday so had a lot of stuff to get out of my brain. In the meantime my Dad’s colleague visited. He hadn’t visited my Dad in ages but he got divorced very recently and now he seems to have finally remembered where all his colleagues live and visits everyone to share his woes. Sofi also came back from our grandparents’ and we chatted for a while and she played a bit with Misha but he was super sleepy so not much of a playmate and soon went back to sleep. But now Misha is up and crying downstairs ‘cause Mummy has disappeared somewhere outside and he’s upset. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Today, I…

Recently, I came across this simple, mini prompt in the PaperBlanks app, and so I thought I’d share with you what I am doing, thinking, feeling etc. today.

Today I… feel really tired and sluggish. My sleep has been fairly weird lately, lately meaning a couple weeks, I think. It’s like as soon as it’s night time, my brain suddenly gets a kick of energy and I just can’t settle myself down for sleep, whatever I do. I had a proper zombie day on Friday, having not slept for the whole night, then the next night I crashed as is usually the case with me after a zombie night and so got a lot of good sleep, but my sleep system didn’t reset, for some reason, as it normally does after a zombie day. Today it was back to where it was. Well, except that I actually did feel rather tired and in need of sleep this time around, but was at the same time kind of wired or something and it just wasn’t happening. Since I had to get up at 8 AM, I’ve only got like 3 hours of sleep and my brain’s not impressed. I generally don’t like taking my anti-anxiety medication for sleep even though it does work, but if this keeps up I’ll just have to resort to it for a while, I guess. Since I guess Jack the Ripper is about to visit any time, PMS coupled with little sleep means I’m having a rather shitty day mood-wise.

Today, I am finishing a sort of prayer challenge or whatever it could be called, that I’ve set myself. I promised God and myself that I’ll be praying for three weeks in July, until this Sunday, for someone that I sort of know and am rather concerned about, even though I don’t know him very well. He seems to be dealing with a lot of yucky stuff, multiple addictions being one of those things, and many years ago I’ve decided that I am always going to pay particular attention and have special dedication in my spiritual life to those people that I know or have come in contact with, with whom it seems unlikely that anyone prays for them, or at least not consistently and seriously, despite it seems that they might need it particularly much. I’ve learnt it well in my life that God loves creating what we’d usually call coincidences, and so this time, when I got into it I learned that July is actually considered a month of prayer for people who struggle with addictions. At the same time, addiction is a sort of… hmm, hot topic in my family currently, and my Mum is also praying for someone who has this problem who is our family member, so I felt a bit stronger having company and support like that, especially that my Mum really has been my best spiritual director and always has the strange talent to say or point me towards something that is exactly what my soul seems to need at a specific time. This whole challenge thing has been rather difficult, with a lot of ups and downs, and I wasn’t even sure if I was seriously going to stick to it, I mean, I really wanted to, but some part of me didn’t think I could manage with all that praying, IFing etc. for long. I also often had thoughts that I don’t believe strongly enough in that God could actually do for me what I was asking Him for, because from a human perspective, a dramatic change for the better in this person’s life doesn’t seem very likely and is even hard to imagine. But I tried my best to believe as strongly as I could, and even though I always experience a lot of hurdles with praying, in that I find it difficult to actually concentrate on it properly, I have a feeling that, while I don’t know if I could have put more effort into it, I’ve put a lot more of it than I thought I even could. I am so hopeful for some better, fuller, more valuable life for this person, whatever God considers that to mean in practice for this guy. Pretty much exactly at the time when I took up this little challenge, I also learned about a 30 day Gospel challenge that is a thing now on Hallow (a Catholic prayer/meditation app that I sometimes use). The goal is to read 2-3 chapters of a Gospel every day, so that we’ll be finished with all four Gospels in 30 days. And while I thought it wasn’t for me at first, because I’d never be able to stick to it, and because I’ve always been somehow apprehensive of reading the Bible in English mostly because then I tend to focus on the language more, haha, eventually I figured that the timing of this is very telling, and that I probably should take this up too. I have previously read all four Gospels chapter by chapter several times, as well as the whole Bible, but I initially thought it would be challenging to stick to it every single day and finish exactly in thirty days. But so far it’s going extremely well and I’m actually very surprised! It’s day 14 and I’ve never missed a day. The linguophile in me also manages to keep reasonably quiet, and I feel like I’m more actually engaged into it than I was all those times before, when, despite being Christian, I’d always read the Bible more like I would any other great work of literature, more intellectually than anything else. It is rather difficult for me to just sit down and listen to the Gospel for 20 minutes without doing much else in the meantime, I usually do several things at once and it feels more natural, but at the same time it feels weird to be listening to the Bible while doing something else very trivial in the meantime and give God only part of my attention. So this has been an interesting time in this respect and I’d never have expected it.

Today, I am a little anxious about living practically on my own for the next two weeks. You might recall that in one of my recent posts I was saying that I’m going for a trip into the mountains with my family on Friday/Saturday. The Friday/Saturday eventually was postponed until this coming Tuesday, because my Dad’s leave was postponed until then. Then Sofi decided that she’d like to take our cousin along, as she thought she’d be rather bored otherwise. As I’ve said, I’ve been feeling a bit off recently, very crampy and with rather little energy, and am pretty sure Jack the Ripper’s coming any time, and I started to feel kind of doubtful whether going for that trip is a good idea in my current hormonal and brainstate. So, as our camper isn’t very huge, I thought that was a good enough reason not to go, ’cause our cousin could go in my place. And so that’s what going to happen. Olek is also going to stay, as he always does, since he has work and stuff to do, but he’s out most of the day, so it’ll be mostly me and Mishmish. Which is fabulous, but, like I said, I’m a bit worried. I’ve never really lived on my own for this long, and, while Olek will be here in the evenings and he’ll also bring dinners for us both, so that at least I won’t have to deal with any delivery people or anything like that every day, I’m kind of scared, like, what if something goes wrong? I don’t even know what… anything could go wrong. From Misha choking, to Olek forgetting to clean his litter box, to me letting him slip out accidentally, or having some sort of an accident and doing something to myself, like in the kitchen or whatever, as usually if I do something in the kitchen Mum supervises me more or less, to needing an “eye” to help me with something asap, to having a bad sensory anxiety flare in which case I really don’t cope well with being totally alone. My sensory anxiety has actually been pretty bad this week, and it’s the sort of thing that is extremely easy to set off or exacerbated by thinking about it, more than any other anxiety that I have, so in a way that feels kind of unavoidable, especially if we consider my shitty sleep lately. Still, an equally big part of me is really looking forward to this, and, if things go reasonably well, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for Misha and me to be pretty much only by ourselves for so long.

Today I am very glad that Misha has been with me all day so far, and not hiding under the bed or anything like that, but properly laying in his own bed, and he’s very cuddly. I hope this state of things won’t change soon and he’ll be like that once my family leaves for the trip.

What has been your day today like? 🙂

Question of the day.

Are you learning anything new?

My answer:

Of course I’m always learning new words and structures in, and new things about my languages, but this is the everyday standard. Other than that, one major thing I’ve been learning lately is, I’ve recently started exploring and also practicing a bit Christian/Catholic meditative prayer, which I was a little bit apprehensive to before for all sorts of reasons, both totally personal/emotional and more spiritual, and a bit confused by it, but now I feel like it could be both a good thing to encorporate into my life long-term for strengthening my relationship with God and becoming a better Christian, but also a very valuable alternative to secular mindfulness for my emotional well-being and healing. That being said, I still haven’t made up my mind whether it will be a regular thing in my daily routine and whether I’ll stick to it, I’m trying to get more of a feel for it for now and if it could work for me on a regular basis.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What’s the most impactful meeting with a stranger you’ve ever had?

My answer:

It was during the last year of my stay at the boarding school, actually during the last month. I’d been really into all these things like lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, new age-y stuff, anything that could provide me with some escape from the real world and from my own brain as it was. I desperately tried to convince myself that I don’t believe in God. At some point, my eyes started to open again and I started to see how something’s really wrong with all this and it doesn’t have the best influence on me or the way I feel, or people around me, or anything really. It was supposed to make me feel better and it often did for a while, but then things spiralled down even worse after some time. Some things in my life also prompted me to think more about God and also to go back to something that’s quite a big thing in my family, thinking about purgatory souls. But that wasn’t really anything serious yet, I was just thinking.

On the day when this meeting that I’m going to talk about happened, it was a weekend day so there were only a few other girls in the group plus me, and the staff who was on shift in the afternoon encouraged us to go see some sort of spectacle that was going on near where we were, which was all about the afterlife and what it looks like, and apparently its message was quite strong. We were all quite reluctant from what I remember, but we did go in the end, and it made a very strong impression on me indeed, the way people’s last moments in their lives were portrayed. It was like someone suddenly jolted me awake with a bucket of freezing cold water and a slap in the face, which wasn’t pleasant at all, but was definitely what I needed at the time. I think this was one of the major factors which contributed to my re-conversion, which was quite a longer process, but maybe if I didn’t see that, it wouldn’t happen, I don’t know.

If I remember correctly, there was also a big about purgatory, or maybe it was just my mind which kept going in that direction, anyway after we saw that, on our way back to the school, we were talking about our impressions and also about the purgatory souls. We were waiting for the bus, and we did so, chatting at the bus stop, an elderly lady came over to us, as she overheard what we were talking about, and told us about how she grew up in a children’s home, and at some point she got very sick, that everyone was thinking she was going to die. She was very religious already as it seemed so they asked a priest to come to her and give her the last rites. After that, she had some sort of a vision or I don’t know how it should be classified, of a man who came close to her and looked like he was suffering a lot, and like he was on fire. She got really scared but then was told by him that this is what happens to people in purgatory, that their souls suffer so much because of the longing for God, whom they cannot see yet, that it feels as if they were burning. And he asked her to pray for him. ANd then she somehow recovered and since then has had a deep devotion for the purgatory souls.

That was really interesting for me to hear, especially that it was such a weird coincidence that I’ve been thinking about it so much and now all those things to do with the purgatory were happening. At the same time though, I still felt rather skeptical of whether her story was actually true, maybe she just wanted to make some sort of impression or whatever.

But then I talked to my Mum about all that stuff, and she was of course very happy that I suddenly have been brought possibly a little bit closer to God, and she said that it doesn’t really matter whether this woman’s story was true or not, and that it’s not really my business. There wasn’t anything wrong with it like theologically, and whether it did happen to her or not, my Mum felt that perhaps this happened to me because God wants me to also pray for the purgatory souls – which I used to do years before, as does my Mum, my grandma and as did my great grandmother, and my great grandmother had actually quite a strong bond with them. –

So I did decide that I’ll indeed see it this way, and so even though I didn’t really know what I’m going to do with my spiritual/religious life yet, I started praying for them, and that’s how it all started.

Now I have quite a large group of souls of people who passed away that I pray for, or offer up anything I can for them to be released from the purgatory as soon as possible, if they’re still there. If they aren’t, that’s not a problem, because there still are a lot of other people who need it and God knows who needs it most instead. We also believe that such purgatory souls are extremely grateful when we here on Earth help themm with our prayers and other things that we can help them with, so they want to help us too. In our daily lives, and afterwards, and they pray for us all the time. I like how it makes a sort of connection between us, and how it makes me feel that I’m actually helping people somewhat.

How about you? 🙂