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Advice From Shark-Infested Waters

April 11, 2021 / Gail Lowe

by Gail Lowe

Is anyone ever prepared for a life-altering crisis? I wasn’t.

Photo sharks swimming with cartoon person holding a heart imposed over top.

Our day started like any other day and ended with a back injury that left my husband with crippling pain. Eventually he had surgery where they fused his back using rods and screws and bone grafts to stabilize his spine.

In less than two minutes, an accident altered the course of our lives. It took years of purposeful living to rebuild. The following are lessons from our survival manual.

Learn fast.

Figuring out what to do in the middle of a crisis felt like learning how to swim in shark-infested waters. If I wanted to survive, I had to learn fast.

Separate your fear of today from your fear of tomorrow.

When things went sideways, fear became my constant companion. Suddenly, I had become responsible for everything. I worried that if I let go of a single thread the whole family would simply unravel. Once I had all of those threads securely fastened, I felt calmer. Even though we were facing an uncertain future, I had today organized.

Hang onto normal.

Just because one part of our normal was broken, I didn’t throw the healthy parts away. I held on to our existing routines whenever possible, it helped the kids feel safe and brought me comfort.

Get help.

When family and friends offered to help, I let them. [Ask the bank for extensions on loans and mortgage payments. Use the food bank if you have to. Let the schools know, teachers are a support system for your children.]

Rest.

It was hard to stop working. I felt as if I was one step ahead of a landslide. Then I realized that I was in it for the long haul and exhaustion, whether it’s physical, mental or emotional, created more problems than it solved. I learned to focus on my breath and shut off my mind. If it wouldn’t stop talking I would think the word “in” as I breathed in and “out” on the exhale. [Ear plugs help to quiet an extra stubborn mind. It increases the sound of your breath while shutting out the rest of the world.]

Accept what is.

Of all the things I needed to learn, acceptance proved to be the hardest. Even now, I have times when I do the “if only”. If only my husband hadn’t gone to work that day, if only there was a way to fix his back. There is a lot of grief when a person’s life is irreversibly altered. Focusing on the good frees you of the past. The anger, the fighting against what is, traps you.

Look for happiness.

Start small. I listened to my kids laughing, looked for their smiles and watched them play. I found moments that made me happy and stretched them out into minutes. A song, a cup of tea when nothing needed to be done or a snuggle with my husband.

Hold on to your future.

Every day I looked in the mirror and told myself I was strong enough, that we were headed in the right direction and everything was going to be ok. I stubbornly stayed in that place because, how was any other belief going to help me?

The new normal.

The new normal arrived without fanfare. No fireworks. No parade. Just fewer moments of pain, and longer periods of predictable, everyday life.

What I learned in those shark-infested waters became my life skills:

Text about staying strong when dealing in crisis imposed over a photo of sharks swimming

I don’t believe that anyone can truly be prepared for a life-altering crisis. But we can recognize the importance of life skills and have our survival manual ready before we need it.

Free Download:

Download and print the life skills list as my gift to you,
and remember to Breathe. – Gail Lowe Download

The Perfect Excuse

March 21, 2021 / Gail Lowe

I thought I wanted perfect.

I chased it with a list.

Until I changed perspective,

And found what I had missed.

Perfection is the ultimate goal.

That’s the incoming message, isn’t it? I see the cover pages of magazines while waiting in line at the grocery store. Perfectly organized pantries, closets and laundry rooms. Glorious kitchens with everything you need, perfectly placed and waiting for when you need it. Pure fiction, I suspect. At the very least, not my reality.

I have a panic room in my house that hides the real me. You know, the room where clutter gets stuffed while guests visit. Most people don’t go snooping in random rooms when they pop in for a quick visit but just in case, mine has a lock on it. For their own safety really.

I’m not proud of my natural lack of organization save the sock drawer. For some strange reason sock folding is a necessary task that fills me with joy at its completion. That drawer you can look in. Not the others.

I have created many lists over the years in an attempt to reach the ultimate goal of perfection. List completion doesn’t happen nearly as often as list creation. And list retention has proven to be a challenge. For the most part I am still the same messy, chaos-loving individual who has learned to live with clutter-blindness.

Except in my writing.

The need for every word of my novel to be flawless is worse than my sock-drawer compulsion. The story, the plot, the tension, the characters, the first line of each chapter, all of it has to be perfect. Is anyone surprised that my novel remains incomplete?

Learn From My Mistakes Moment: I am trying hardest to be perfect in the one area that needs perfection the least.

Why am I doing this?

Being a good writer is important to me. I always thought perfection equalled success.
The more I learn, the more I recognize how I can improve. Always.
Ultimately I am going to share my work with the world. Do I want to share anything that isn’t perfect?
And the real reason (drum roll): FEAR. Am I brave enough to share?

Fear keeps me working and reworking the same chapters, because until it’s perfect, I don’t have to share. No wonder my muse became completely bored and disillusioned and moved on to a different task. I found her last week reorganizing the Tupperware cupboard.

I have recognized PERFECT for the excuse it is and have struck a new deal with myself. I have posted it on my white board (in an effort to keep the left side of my brain happy):

Author Wanted:

Creativity is a must. A reckless, wild, limitless, crazy flow of unfiltered originality. The you that is you, spilling out onto the page, fearless, confident and irreverent.

Perfect not required.

Portals in Your Home, and How to Use Them Properly

January 25, 2021 / Gail Lowe

by Gail Lowe

Dimensional travel has fascinated me ever since I watched the movie What the Bleep Do We Know. I was hooked by all the possible science scenarios I could use in my writing, especially the idea of travelling by portal.

If you think portals are too unusual, just ask any kid about the Elf on the Shelf. For 24 days in December, elves all over the world travel nightly by portal to the North Pole.

I have portals in my house.

My Fitbit charger has returned to my bathroom drawer, and there is no other explanation. Over a month, I searched for it. Frustrated with all of my unrecorded steps, wondering if my resting heart rate was getting better or worse – it probably stayed the same…but let me not distract from the fact:

my lost charger showed up one morning, suddenly and without explanation.

That same morning, I found a candle in the middle of my Tupperware shelf. There is no way I could have dodged that candle for all this time and not have noticed it. To fully understand, you would need to see the precariously stacked Tupperware packed into every inch of space on that shelf. A candle would not go unnoticed in the very centre of said shelf.

A scientific impossibility…unless you consider portals

At least in my fiction, I have control over the portals. I provide rules so that everyone understands how to use them. And I put them in logical places which I don’t hide from my readers.

There are characters in my fiction who doubt the existence of portals. Just as there are people in my house who laugh at this idea. But, the next time you misplace your glasses, phone charger, or anything else that just vanishes only to return weeks later—in such a way that you question your sanity—consider the possibility of portals.

Gail Lowe