but I just have been.

Some of my Spark buds were worried. I did comment on a few of your blogs and updated status... so some of y'all know I'd been under the weather. But it has been more than that. It's been fatigue, and discouragement, and fear, and many roiling emotions (grief among them), and just landing after having been so tightly wound for so long.

The problem with having decades of experience in the battle of the roller coaster pounds is that you remember the drops from the heights of success to abject failure... sometimes very rapid drops. It was the fear of that starting a couple of years back that got me started on my streak of near-daily blogging. If you have a fear of heights (as I do)... yep, this teetering on the brink (or slipping over, as I have several times since the first of the year) is scary.

Now let's mix in the illness side of things. The major fear that accompanies not too specific symptoms "at my age" is the most basic fear of all: mortality. Sprinkle in recent deaths of folks you care about or anniversaries of such deaths in your calendar with symptoms like "dizziness, fatigue" and the solid knowledge that you are within a few years of the age at which a parent passed... and you come up with a soup you just don't want to write about... even if you had the energy.

Yet, here I am, typing this. Sorry for the potential downer, folks. Yesterday would have been both my paternal grandmother's and my nephew's birthdays. Both are now gone from the plane. Reality is, one day I will be gone from it, too. So will you. We may not want to think about it, but our time in these bodies is "boxed".

The essential question is: what do we want the quality of that time to be like? I want to feel as good as I can for as long as I can. I know at this point in time (even if I don't always act like it) that it is the behavior: good solid nutrition, hydration, activity, stress management, and sleep... that support feeling good.

Now that I'm about back to feeling human, I have a few "to do" items for the week: schedule a chat with my doctor and get my thyroid levels checked again. Climb back on the nutrition wagon and apply some of that infamous "mental toughness" / "kindness" to helping me feel better. Add back in gentle amounts of activity, as I can handle them. Oh, and allow myself to cry over the loved ones who no longer share space on the planet.

Spark friends, thanks so much for being there, for being consistent, for accepting wherever each of us is on the journey... for knowing we're in this together is part of what keeps me going!