Sorting, sorting, sorting

What have I found? Memories of so many events in my life, so many friends, so much love in my life. As a multiple-time cancer survivor, I have been through my share of troubles and remember laughing out loud when I first read Winston Churchill's quotation "If you are going through hell, keep going!" However, on balance, it is enjoyable finding past parts of my life, deciding what to keep, what to recycle, what to (gasp!) send to the dump, what to even re-gift. My younger son said it best when I asked him what I should do with his favorite thermos from grade school (DuckTails). He said thinking about it gave him good memories, and then he told me that he would like me to donate it to the Ann Arbor Thrift Shop so that someone else could have good memories, too. What a thoughtful response. Done!

I also found the box of all my class outlines, tests, case studies, resources, etc, etc, etc from a course I taught to undergraduate dietetic students back in the mid-90's. Oh, now that was hard to decide what to do with, however, I quickly wrote a good friend who was my grad assistant for that course, asking her for "permission" to recycle all that paper. She quickly and wisely responded "It's out of date - get rid of it!". Ha, ha - I didn't even think of that, only all the effort and love I put into that course and those students. Thus, it was then easy to simply remember the good memories and let the paper go. :-)

However, I did find within that heavy box of paper the transparencies (yes, another sign of being "out of date") of the quotations I had used to start each lecture. There were 12 of them I had selected to share with these undergraduate students. I enjoyed reading all of them; here are four that I still love:

Progress always involves risk

You can't steal second base

and keep one foot on first.

~~ Author Unknown

In the middle of difficulty

lies opportunity.

~~ Albert Einstein

Challenges can be

stepping stones or stumbling blocks.

It's just a matter of how you view them.

~~ Author Unknown

The larger the island of knowledge,

the longer the shore line of wonder.

~~ Ralph W. Sockman

I used this last quotation at the final session of my teaching that semester, in effect telling my students that everything I tried to expose them to that semester was just the tip of the iceberg of the knowledge needed for practicing at the cutting-edge of the dietetics profession and hopefully would lead to a lifetime of having more questions than answers. I hope it did for some, even most of them. :-)

Back to sorting, sorting, sorting. Step by step by step, we are getting closer to actually moving out to the farm!

By the way, my husband actually heard two groups of coyotes yipping and howling back and forth last night at our farm. I missed them as I had already gone back to our Ann Arbor house to make supper, but I heard one group yipping this afternoon. Although neighbors at the farm had told us about seeing and hearing coyotes, this was our first time to hear them in the nearly two years we have owned this property.  We can't wait to get out there full time!

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD