it feels really good to be free to write again… philip has this thing about being able to say his words and it’s just nice to be able to do that again. The past 5 years of silence was quite a learning experience. It was a process of His replacing my natural man with His spiritual man… not that that process is over… it is never over…. till it’s over…it never ends… until it ends here… then what happens? hmmmmm… guess I’ll find out when it happens.
2015 was my 80th year… not sure how many more He will give me… even looked like my 80th might be my last one for a while there. I had lost all my energy as 2014 came to a close… both my IT bands were hurting so bad I could hardly walk… then my sciatic nerve on my right side went a bit nutso to start off 2015. Saw the doctor in February and my sugar went double nutso to 419… and philip got a real wake-up call.
I had always joked that “you gotta die from somethin’… might just as well be ice cream”…well… almost got there. Had even started making my own ice cream and was having “some” for dessert both lunch and dinner…. on top of that I was doing a honey/cinnamon cure-all. So it all had to stop. No ice cream since February 2015.
Still had to pay the piper though. My diabetes had really taken its toll. Walking up to the corner leaning on Ellen was all the exercise I could handle… and more than she could handle! She bought me one of those fancy “walkers” with a “seat”, “brakes” and everything. We even walked together past the corner and on to the “blinker” light where I sat in my walker to watch the 4th of July parade!
Changing my lifestyle radically began to give me some energy back, my IT bands stopped aching and the sciatica healed up as well. I bought a “Fitbit” in September and accepted the challenge to reach 10,000 steps. By December of 2015, I was doing 12,000 steps a day and beginning to feel so much better and the walker had been parked in the loft for over 2 months! Began thinking I may even be able to golf again come Spring.
The “old fella” was pretty pretty excited… then December 20th arrived.
The Book I Never Wrote
Stories like the one I wrote yesterday became the norm for my life…. mountains moved, miracle after miracle, impossible situations and circumstance totally changed, year after year… I was asked to publicly tell my stories and always…. always ….people would come up to me later and say….”Phil, you need to write a book!”
Of course, as the years rolled by, and God was continually changing me, the conclusions I would have drawn in the writing of the book had changed as well…over and over and over… I finally came to the place where (after telling my latest version of my experiences with God to anyone and being told once again that I really needed to write a book)….I would say “I’m sorry but I will never be able to write a book because every year I would need to buy up all the remaining copies of the last book…. burn them…. and start writing all over again!”
It’s closing in on almost 50 years of ever changing stories… I guess this blog is actually the “Book I Never Wrote”…. all the stories I’ve written will eventually be posted on Philips Musings under the year they were written.
I hope they will help others on their journey. Learning these things certainly helped me on my journey.
#10 – About telling… “Stories”
Yesterday I talked about principles… applicable to both business and life … even threw in a “Philip Rule” for each of those principles….
Principles, rules, dogmas, doctrines only have a value if we actually have experienced these things in our life… not just things to try to do but a life actually lived…. We need to be able to live with these principles freely operating in our lives… as a part of us. Trying harder to live by a principle only brings us into more bondage…. then we fail again… feel terrible again…. and what….? Go try harder again?
This is where God comes into the equation… this is why we just tell our stories… Philip’s stories are valid because Philip has experienced what is being told in the story. Here is a story to illustrate what I said in that last paragraph.
I had just given my life to the Lord and experienced peace for the first time in my life… I was 32 years old. The only “peace” I ever had before that, was after the 3rd martini, or the third shot of scotch… then I would pull out my pack of Camels (smoked 3 packs a day)… there I was, sitting in my car, experiencing “peace” and taking out my pack of Camels… then this voice speaks… gentle, quiet, loving voice… saying “You never have to do that again”.
I looked around but couldn’t see anyone… just a voice… I thought “Wow… this sure is different”. I threw my pack of Camels out the window on June 24, 1968 and haven’t had a cigarette since… and… I was “free”…
I had tried so hard for years to stop smoking… at least 3 or 4 times a year… you know the drill… it was a principle… a good one… you shouldn’t smoke Phil, you are killing yourself… try harder Phil… it didn’t work… more stories.
What a difference this time… no withdrawal, no cravings… no anything… it was just gone.
It’s one of my stories…. it’s valid… I have lots of them… discovered over the years that the only way for Philip to obey any principle is to talk about it with the Lord and then agree with He says… then experience freedom.
#9 -More on the simple Life
#8 – Just got even more simple!
We piled into the car Monday morning and took off for a week down in Wenham.. stopped to see some old friends of Ellen … had a nice lunch, and played “catch-up” with them.. then continued our journey to Massachusetts….
Although life got sooooooo simple for Philip, Ellen put it into hyper-speed playing “Super-Nanny” as Jen and Dano went off to some major conference where Jen was one of the speakers. They get back very late Sunday… and we head back to Vermont on Tuesday. At least that is the plan…. we shall see…
Meanwhile, Philip gets almost 10 hours in the rack every night, runs the office from the computer between long walks… you know… those walks I talked about the other day.
Simple… nothing to it… at least for now…
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#7 – The Simple Life
It really is so simple… just doing what you have to do everyday…. realizing that you really are not in charge of what happens a minute from now, much less a week from next Tuesday… much as we like to think we are…
It took me about 70 years to come into the full realization of this (being careful about using the word “full” since I am sure I will never get the “full full” this side of heaven)…. knowing that when any”big one” finally happens in my life, there is always more to follow… in that area… and there will always be new areas… the only danger is when we stop and think we now “know” everything. The place Philip had to get to was that place of knowing that he knows absolutely nothing! 70 years is a long time… I learn slow.
Having come to that place at 70, I have been walking that out now for the last 10 years… each day I realize more and more, just how little I really knew about life… one cannot “explain” that which is inexplicable… one can only tell our stories… our stories are always valid… they are what we have experienced and tasted of the happenings of life.
The simple life is really “seeing” that God is in control and He will bring about His plan and purpose for our lives… allowing the good, the bad and the ugly to get us there. I know I can trust Him to do that, all the while showing me what it is that He is doing with each new experience… usually after the fact, not before…
I call this “Simple Life”… “walking and talking with Him (every moment, every day) in the Garden of my Life.
#6 – So it’s almost April
Making some progress with my health… pretty encouraging to the old fella… 🙂
When I asked Dr. Kiely if I was going to get healthy again, he responded with his wry little grin… “Healthi-er” …. I was just thinking though that it would be nice to be able to walk around the golf course and get in a round now and then.
This will be my 22nd day in a row getting in my 10,000 steps or more on my Fit-bit… also warming up on my Air-dyne bike most days and back to working out with my dumbbells … that had been a while.
Continuing to eat properly and making good progress with my sugar… yesterday had a 150 reading without taking any meds since going in the hospital back before Christmas. Doctor was concerned with all the weight loss then. Hitting that very unhealthy 204 concerned him so he took me off the pill to keep my sugar low. We will see what he says when I see him again middle of April. I think he will be thrilled that I am back up to a healthy 220 again!
It is an interesting process to eat exactly the same food for breakfast and lunch every day, small changing dinners… and watch the weight go up over these 3 months.
Anyway… happy to report we seem to be on an up…
#5 – So… what did Philip see…?
What sort of a year was it? A year like all years, filled with those happenings that change and alter the course of human events…. and I was there ! 🙂
I was talking a lot over the past several years about Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” where he explains to his son what maturity is…. maturity is when I can treat both those imposters, triumph and tragedy, exactly the same. I had even experienced it on a number of levels over those years… winning/losing… successes/failures… lots of reservations at the B&B/no reservations at the B&B… writing/ooops-stop writing….
That’s the only way we can get life principles out of our heads and into our lives… experience them!
But who-da thunk I’d have a 2015 like what happened…. didn’t even pick up a golf club all year… may not this year… one of my major enjoyments over the last dozen or more years (and great exercise)… yes/no…that’s another of those things that are not my department… just treating everything the same these days… He brings the mountains down and the valleys up so Philip just has to walk along His highway, and be who Philip is, where Philip is …today … and then deal with whatever He puts on my plate each day.
Ahhhh… the simple life! More on this next time…
#4 – What a way to start the New Year!
I had a nosebleed on New Years Eve…. hadn’t had a nose bleed in what seemed like a zillion years… then… at 2:00am New Years Day I get another one… really making a mess in the bedroom… :(….but.. was able to stop it. At 2:00am January 2nd I got yet another one… only this time I couldn’t get it to stop. So….at 3:00am Ellen runs me over to Copley’s Emergency Room… only they can’t stop it either… so… they stick Philip into an ambulance at 5:00am and send him off to Burlington…. while Ellen goes back to clean up Philip’s latest mess and then prepare breakfast for the guests… who… somehow… had no idea that anything was going on….
Jonathan met the old fella at the hospital and hung out till I was released. … wow! Our neighbor Sherrie who works at the hospital in Burlington also appeared in the room and “made sure they were taking good care of her BFF”…. wow! Then our neighbor Michelle comes over to help serve the breakfast with Ellen, does the clean up for her and sends her off to the hospital….. wow!
Got released that afternoon with this unreal “plug” in my nose…. resisted the temptation to publish a picture… That thing stayed in my nose for a week… but…nose hasn’t bled since.. yay!
Life continues to happen each day…. the good ,the bad and the ugly!
And what has Philip seen in all of this? Next time!
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#3 – the year closed with a bang
2015 closed with a great big bang. I finished my second walk with pain in my left ankle… came in and took my shoe off… more swollen than usual and ugly like somethin’… big red blotches, and all very sore to the touch… made an appointment for Monday to see Dr Kiely… He took a very short look and sent me across the street to check myself in at Copley Hospital.
Spent 3 days in bed with an intravenous drip of antibiotics…. I had cellulites… the infection had spread very quickly into my blood stream… I was one sick puppy. My weight dropped from 220 to a very skinny, unhealthy 204…. I was back using a walker to get around. Got released from the hospital on Christmas Eve to help with Christmas guests at the B&B… then Jen,Dano and the kids arrived on 12/27 so we had dinner with them, as well as Jon and Amy and their 3 boys… so… it was a wonderful Christmas…. things were looking up again….
And then there was the New Year…. oh my… what a start to 2016.
🙂
#2 – a special day
it feels really good to be free to write again… philip has this thing about being able to say his words and it’s just nice to be able to do that again. The past 5 years of silence was quite a learning experience. It was a process of His replacing my natural man with His spiritual man… not that that process is over… it is never over…. till it’s over…it never ends… until it ends here… then what happens? hmmmmm… guess I’ll find out when it happens.
2015 was my 80th year… not sure how many more He will give me… even looked like my 80th might be my last one for a while there. I had lost all my energy as 2014 came to a close… both my IT bands were hurting so bad I could hardly walk… then my sciatic nerve on my right side went a bit nutso to start off 2015. Saw the doctor in February and my sugar went double nutso to 419… and philip got a real wake-up call.
I had always joked that “you gotta die from somethin’… might just as well be ice cream”…well… almost got there. Had even started making my own ice cream and was having “some” for dessert both lunch and dinner…. on top of that I was doing a honey/cinnamon cure-all. So it all had to stop. No ice cream since February 2015.
Still had to pay the piper though. My diabetes had really taken its toll. Walking up to the corner leaning on Ellen was all the exercise I could handle… and more than she could handle! She bought me one of those fancy “walkers” with a “seat”, “brakes” and everything. We even walked together past the corner and on to the “blinker” light where I sat in my walker to watch the 4th of July parade!
Changing my lifestyle radically began to give me some energy back, my IT bands stopped aching and the sciatica healed up as well. I bought a “Fitbit” in September and accepted the challenge to reach 10,000 steps. By December of 2015, I was doing 12,000 steps a day and beginning to feel so much better and the walker had been parked in the loft for over 2 months! Began thinking I may even be able to golf again come Spring.
The “old fella” was pretty pretty excited… then December 20th arrived.
For the rest of the story, click on the link to 2016
#1 – It is time
Yessss…I can write again…. 🙂 Writing was a wonderful experience for me from 2007 thru 2011…until it was necessary for me to stop… I took a 5 year sabbatical from writing… but not from discovering Him….
Just got the OK to start writing again… what an incredible journey it has been. Love to have you join me in the journey…. comments always welcome… it is a great adventure. It will never stop…. it will just continue on the other side….
Philip’s Musings began in December 2007…. I started to say all the things that were running thru my head. Then in 2011 I needed to stop writing. I am in the process of copying those years of blogging into this site, starting with the heading “2007” and on thru “2011”…. feel free to catch up… it’s probably the only “book” I will write…
Visit as often as you like…
