S.K. Brown's Blog, page 2

Home Above Gold

Today I’m borrowing a post from another blogger. Do you love the works of J.R.R. Tolkien? Do you wish you were a hobbit sometimes? What makes you truly happy? Read this post from thegloriousbookworm for a good reminder of the most valuable things in life.

Home Above Gold

thegloriousbookworm

6 days ago

“Go back to your books, your fireplace. Plant your trees, watch them grow. If more of us valued home above gold, it would be a merrier world.” – Tolkien

This quote resonates with me to my very core. In this modern day world too many people value money and material things above anything else. Can you imagine if everyone you met had a true appreciation for home and the simpler things in life? Oh, what a world it would be.

There’s nothing better than coming home after a long day in corporate America. The minute I step through my front door, all the worries and urgency of the day just melt away. Everything moves so quickly in our world today. No one takes a second to stop and smell the roses. It’s all about making money, buying the newest gadgets, and being better than the person sitting next to you. But life wasn’t meant to be that way, we as humans have set these impossible standards for ourselves. We’re constantly looking at ways that we can crush the competition. 

For a very long time, I lived my life trying to be better than everyone else. I’m a short Hispanic woman and I felt like, because of that, I always had something to prove. I didn’t want anyone to think I was incapable of “making it.” It took me being emotionally abused by an ex, who I’d chosen to be with because he had power, for me to finally realize that being the best of the best wasn’t what life was about.

Life is about doing what makes you happy. It’s about finding yourself. The day I understood that there was more to life than gold and riches, was the day that I truly started living. My newfound appreciation for life was such a foreign feeling. I wasn’t buried in my phone anymore. I actually looked at my surroundings and took them in, instead of power walking with my head down and my headphones drowning out all the beautiful sounds of life. I wasn’t comparing myself to the person sitting next to me. I was working to be able to be home doing the things that I love and being with the people I cared about. Instead of working to have more money and more things.

Take a look at the life you’re living. Are you happy? Are you doing the things you love? Are you working hard for yourself? Or just so you can be better than someone else? There comes a time when we have to ask ourselves these questions and when we have to realize that there’s more to life than gold. If you’ve come to this realization, tell me what inspired you. If you haven’t, tell me what’s holding you back. Maybe we can figure out how to get you there together.

thelifeofamoderndayhobbit.wordpress.com

Do you love a good road trip?

Sometimes there’s nothing like a good road trip, is there? You load everything up and hit the open road looking for adventure. But some road trips are more scenic than others. Sometimes the journey itself is the joy and sometimes the destination is the big payoff. The very best road trips are the ones that incorporate both elements. Today I’m on one of those kinds of road trips, riding a rainbow to a big, fat pot of gold. I’m headed down the West Coast of the United States through Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, weaving around the stunning Cascade Mountains until they come to their beautiful southern end at Mount Shasta. Then we’ll head west across farmland and olive orchards to the San Francisco Bay, uniquely scenic with sequoia, madrona, and eucalyptus trees. We’ll drive on to Palo Alto, which always looks like a Cezanne painting to me. This is the end of the rainbow and where the magical, precious pot of gold lies. Inside we’ll find a brand new baby grandson and a precocious two year old granddaughter, along with a beloved son, a lovely daughter-in-law, and our sweet, sweet daughter.

How do you cope with depression?

Everyone knows what it feels like to be depressed. It’s part of the human experience; you get laid off; you get rejected; someone you love dies. Lots of difficult things happen everyday around the world to bad and even good people. We don’t like pain, but eventually it passes or at least dulls with time and new experiences—until it doesn’t.

For some of us, the pain of heartbreak and disappointment remain no matter how good or easy life is. The physical and emotional agony is a daily constant, only ebbing and flowing in intensity. It not only sucks joy, but energy and interest in anything. If you have clinical depression, it’s hard to sleep right, eat right, do anything right. Getting out of bed everyday and putting one foot in front of another feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. Sometimes you’re just too tired to keep doing it and you keep asking yourself, what’s the point anyway.

Things that used to give you joy totally overwhelm you now. Everything overwhelms you. Then there’s the pain. The emotional pain is torturous, but it’s not the only pain you feel. Depression is physically painful too. It feels like you have the flu. My mom once told me that how bad she feels everyday would be a clear justification for most people to stay in bed for the day.

Probably the worst thing about depression though, is how it robs you of your happiness. You feel sad, frustrated and angry for no apparent reason, but it is real. It’s as real as any emotion anyone could experience. Because it doesn’t make sense, you obsessively look for the cause of your unhappiness, searching and searching until you find it. You fixate on something disproportionate to how bad you feel and blow it up into something bigger than it really is. Either that, or you become paranoid, reading things into everything anyone says to you and even how they look at you. You start trying to read people’s minds and since you feel so awful, you always read them negatively.

If you love someone suffering from depression, it’s painful to watch and incredibly frustrating. You want to do something to take the pain away for them. You want them to see how illogical they’re being because it’s just plain incomprehensible when you haven’t experienced clinical depression for yourself. Sometimes you have to stifle the desire to tell them to just snap out of it. Even more than that, it’s scary. It’s the most helpless feeling in the world to watch someone you know suffer and spiral down further and further into hell and wonder how far they can stand to go before they end it all. It’s happened three times in our family and there is nothing so dark and heartbreaking than to lose a loved one to suicide. It’s an oppressive cloud that settles on a family and lingers for years—maybe forever.

So how do you cope with depression? An interesting thing I’ve observed over the years is that most of the very best people I know suffer from it, many of them silently. Depression isn’t weakness, but seems to me to be a malady of the strong. Those who cope the best don’t give up trying to find the cure they need, whether that’s in a pill, an exercise program, a new diet, or a good counselor, but they keep fighting their way through it, one step at a time. If you have a day where all you can do is brush your teeth, then pat yourself on the back and try for more the next day. Depression is a horrible, hideous condition, but it also strengthens you. It makes you a better human being by making you more compassionate, more empathic, more merciful. If you love someone with depression, remember that and give them a hug. Remind them of all the reasons you love them. It will add another weapon to their arsenal to fight the deadly dragon.

Are you looking for a good book with a surprise ending?

Just finished reading A Butterfly in Frost by Sylvia Day. I read it in one afternoon and it was hard to put down. It was a really poignant story about two broken people who meet and find healing, both suffering from tragedy in the past. It has a surprise ending that totally surprised me. Great story in a lovely setting in the Pacific Northwest—a setting I’m particularly fond of.

Finding FollowersI had a new baby grandson born yesterday...

Finding Followers

I had a new baby grandson born yesterday that I’m totally obsessed with, making it difficult to work today. I have to admit, this business of being a new indie author is overwhelming and mystifying. How do you promote your book to followers if you don’t have any followers yet? How do you get followers? This is probably the most pressing question for me right now.

Outrunning the Devil

My first book is available on Amazon.com and in the Kindle store as an eBook now! The paperback version should be available sometime in the next two days. I need some good reviews, so please read my book. it’s the first installment in the Secret Haven series.

Preparation for the Launch

I’m working hard to launch my new series. it’s called the secret Haven series and includes three books: Outrunning the Devil, The Fisherman’s Wife, and The Secret Life of Ghosts. Building this website may be the most frustrating part of all! Why can’t coders have more intuitive brains??