The Magic of Not Being Prepared

Good morning, Cadre. It is 11:00 eastern standard time in Pennsylvania. My name is Cathy Joy. My Cadre handle is speak wonder, and today's topic is the magic of showing up unprepared. First, I want to tell you about the fair, the county fair in my hometown in Warren county. Yesterday was senior day and full confession. I got in for a discount with my Medicare. Medicare card. So now, you know I'm over the age of something something. It was a great day. I met my mom there, senior citizen day, and her nursing home actually took one of their vans, two of them, actually, because there were a bunch of residents who wanted to attend senior citizen day at the county fair.

And my mom had a delightful time. I loved it. She loved it. I was exhausted at the end of the day from pushing around her wheelchair. Keep in mind I'm post shoulder surgery, but I promise I was careful, and I watched. I was very careful, and I actually had people show up and help and say, hey, can I push your mom for a little bit? Yes, you can. And we went for fish fry, and we did the things, and she bought a couple of items, which was just a pure delight for me to watch that autonomy, you know.

Here's mom in a skilled nursing facility where she can't even get in and out of bed. They have to use a lift. And she was out in the world at the county fair doing the things, eating the fish fry, putting salt and vinegar on her fries, making decisions, and a decision as simple as getting her wallet and making a purchase because she wanted popcorn and she wanted to buy a gift for a relative at one of the vendors. It was amazing and beautiful to watch. Hello, Audrey. Hello, Stephen. Steph, I watched your live.

You saw me, we talked. This is what I love about the Cadre, is we can converse in the live stream, in the chat. And the other thing I love totally about Cadre, so many things, is that we can do the replay, we can go back and see something again, or we can see it when we were not able to join the live Steph, today, you talked about weathering the storm, and it couldn't be more perfect to inform my topic today, which is the magic of being unprepared. I shared on Steph's live that I'm in a grease storm, and I enter a storm every August because my late husband died in August, August 27 of 2008.

It has been some years, but I recently told a friend that my body informs me before the calendar. Truly, we hold grief in our body. I believe that, and I think it's okay that we do so. Hi. Anila was not prepared for therapy. And why would a magical. Sorry. I'm adjusting to my new glasses, guys. And so I'm supposed to look this way through bivocals? Getting old is not for sissies, I'm here to tell you. Anyway. I like what you're conveying about, you know, the fact that this is more than a coincidence.

When we have these so called appointments together, I really feel like the universe conspires to help it ring true for everybody. Luke. Hello. Body keeps score. Yes, Anila, so my body informs me before the calendar does. And I just go into this mode. It's different every year. But when Steph talked about storms. Lately, I've decided what I'm under is a cloud for the month of August. And I recognize that cloud. And some days, it's an all out, steady, soothing, nurturing rain that I can stand in and be nurtured by.

Sometimes it is sudden bolts of lightning, which are jolting, and I'm unprepared for those. And they take me down a bit. And then I have to sit in that. Maybe it's thunder. Maybe it's a rumbling in the distance or even the horizon. When we know a storm is coming, how the skies darken and the clouds roll in. That, to me, is a grief storm. And my body does like it aches. I hold space for my grief, and that's honoring to my late husband, who I loved and who went suddenly and unexpectedly on a hot August day on the top of a windswept hill on a beautiful farm where we thought our future was.

And he died of a heart attack. Sudden, unexpected. I was the one who found him. No indicator. Matter of fact, the. Not the coroner, I think it was. Our family doctor told me months later something that I never had heard. He said to me, kathy, I need to let you know that for heart attack victims, one out of two, that's 50% of heart attack victims. The first and only symptom is sudden death. That was a hard pill to swallow. Not everybody gets a second chance. And my roger didn't. He was gone in a heartbeat.

So, yeah, my grief storm, every august, I don't necessarily dwell on it or say, oh, you know, it's time for my grease storm. Like. Like I just mentioned, my body lets me know. Yeah, this is a tough time. You need to give yourself some TLC. And that's what I do. I give myself some downtime. I have two full body massages scheduled this month. Not one, but two. I'm going to do a mani pedi with my daughter, and so there's some nurturing things going on. Every time I enter the cadres. Fear I am nurturing myself, and it's a good place to be in.

It's a safe place. It's a place that welcomes me and nurtures me in every way. Lead with your heart was something I saw on the Cadre on Facebook. And that's where I want to go with my unexpected or unprepared talk today, along with weathering the storm. And also, Colleen was talking about releasing our kids when they're getting older and you're not hands on anymore. That's definitely worth the replay. Just listen to that. So thank you for that. I'm all over the place. The magic of being unprepared.

Thank you for sticking in here, Audrey. Thank you. I'm watching the comments and just letting you know that unpreparedness can be a gift. And it was on Sunday, guys. Okay, so I got my grease storm going on because it's August, and the family reunion, the annual family reunion. Normally my mama drives that. She will call me and say, hey, we need to get the list together and you need to pick a theme. And yeah, I'm the bell of the ball, I'm the hostess, the McDezd. I do all the stuff for the family reunion.

And this year, totally unprepared. Grease storm has hit me hard. Lots of things happening, you know, just logistical, day to day things. And as a result, I wasn't ready for the reunion. And mom didn't call me. She's 93, and she's having some cognitive issues and memory, memory challenges. So all of a sudden, I look at my calendar, I realize it's the family reunion. People are going to come up the hill. We have this beautiful hilltop venue in the woods in the Allegheny national Forest, where we have our reunion every year.

The Ohio people come, the Pennsylvania people, and the New York people from my mother's side. Beautiful time, around 30 folks, and we have a nice mix of generations. It's always great. And my niece, who's a 40 something professional in the graphic arts, is very busy, and she usually co hosts it with me. And she had texted me a couple weeks beforehand saying she could not attend. So that kind of put me in a spiral. I'm like, oh, boy. I don't have my partner in crime, my Amy, my niece, to help me with the reunion.

And I think that kind of froze me a bit into inactivity, and I didn't prepare so I arrived with my Mac and cheese casserole, everybody's favorite. They love Aunt Kathy's Mac and cheese. That was all I did for the reunion, was I got there and I brought my casserole. So, guys, I said to the group, I said, there are no name tags this year. There is not a theme, mind you, there's always a theme because Kathy brings a theme, right? We have done the wizard of Oz. We've done road trips, route 66. Last year's theme was birds of a feather.

And then there's usually decor that echoes the theme and centerpieces and door prizes. None of that this year. So again, I said to the family, no name tags. Didn't do them. No theme, didn't think of one. No games. But there will be the white elephant gift exchange. They were glad to hear that. But, you know, there was absolutely no judgment in the pavilion, not one iota. As a matter of fact, what happened to in my unpreparedness was helpers showed up. They materialized. They just materialized. So Kenny is a young man.

He's got a wife and two children, two sweet boys. He's very quiet. He stepped up and he did the blessing over the food. Thank you, Kenny. He just stepped up. What I was watching on Sunday at my family reunion was my harbor pilots coming in to the port where I was really not prepared, and I couldn't come safely and support my vessel at the dock without helpers. Kenny showed up. He did the blessing. His wife Kelly said, hey, Kathy, why don't I run the white elephant? I will select people to go up and get their gift.

And then, and she made it tons of fun. People exchanged gifts, and it was just a great time. That freed me up to visit with people, which normally I don't have time because I'm the administrator of the thing. Helpers everywhere. There was another sweet couple who said, how can we help with the cleanup? And so they put food away. All these things that I normally shoulder myself or with Amy, who couldn't come this year. And here's the beautiful thing. This is a sidebar to the real story. The real story is the magic of being unprepared.

And I invite you to experience that. I invite you to show up somewhere unprepared. Now, I'm not asking you to be irresponsible or to be lackadaisical, but if an event comes your way and you don't have all your I's dotted and your t's crossed, I'm here to tell you it's not only okay, but beautiful things will happen in the absence of preparedness. And I couldn't have experienced that if I hadn't done the brave thing and showed up with no name tags. I'm your name tag girl. And I showed up with no name tags.

Those details became minutiae in the grand scheme of visiting. One of the relatives said to me afterwards, you know, Kath, really, all we want to do at these reunions is eat and eat some more and visit a lot. And that's what we did, this reunion. We got to eat and visit all the things. It's okay. We'll do that. Other years, this was a really great reunion. And you know what? I think it's going to go down in history as my favorite. My absolute favorite. Oh, here's my sidebar. After the reunion, on the hill, in the woods, in the forest, under a billowy, partly sunny sky, it was just a beautiful day.

We decided we had decided this ahead of time. Anyone who could followed me in my car to the nursing home about 7 miles away. And we brought the reunion to mom. And we did it as a surprise. We had coffee and a dessert. We took pictures. Matter of fact, if you'll indulge me, I think I'll post a picture of mom on the stream where we chat on the conversation here on Cadre, if you'd like that. I'd like to do that. She was so delighted. She had no idea we were doing it. And it was just a tad confusing for her.

At first she thought it might be her birthday, and then she understood this was the reunion. And since she could not attend, we brought it to her. After we had the meal, we brought the people to her and. And it was such a great time. Yeah. What a lovely surprise. Thank you, Jules. Love that you guys did that. It was steph. It's a beautiful story that people will continue talking about, I'm sure, in our family, because not only did mom enjoy the sweet surprise, but the relatives saw the importance and the beauty of staying connected, whatever that looks like.

Different years. Mom's 93. We may not have her next year. We may have her for five more years. To be able to look back and say, we brought a reunion to mom is a beautiful look back, and we. The future is uncertain. The present is paramount, and that's what we live in. Or the thin space, as JC calls it. And you'll hear from him later today. So, yeah, that's my story. The story of our family reunion. The magic of showing up unprepared. And my harbor pilots came in, I had any important detail was completely taken care of magically, organically.

I didn't really have to ask. You know, folks looked around and saw what needed to be done. The tables got set, the tablecloths went on, the picnic tables. Things just happened, you know? So, yeah, it was a lovely day. And you know what? That beautiful memory inserted itself into my grief storm. And that is going to be what I ride on on my harder days. Probably the toughest will be the anniversary date, the 27th, when my honey left this earth. And the trajectory of our lives, mine and our two daughters, shifted monumentally.

I measure time by when Roger was alive and when he wasn't. A movie comes on my tv, and I look at the date, and I think, oh, Roger was still here. We watched it together. Yeah, that's how I measure time. And I think that's honoring. I think that's okay. So, yeah, Anayla, I'm echoing what you. What you're saying, for sure. It's how the universe works. I do believe that God wastes nothing, and so he uses our experiences to help others, and that's what the Cadre enables us to do. Have you been watching the Olympics?

Do you see the Eiffel Tower behind me? That's original artwork that I got from a relative who went to Paris. I didn't go. It's a beautiful way to measure time. Thank you. And it keeps his memory alive. Absolutely. Thinking, okay, did Roger and I, you know, were we a complete family at that time? That is how we mark time in the girls, too. Also, he was really a frugal man, a German. My frugal German. So my grown daughters and I, when we go out to eat, we tip ridiculously high, because he didn't. And we always laugh.

It's just, we say, let's make dad really mad, and we're going to give a huge tip. It's just something we do. So there is joy in the mix. There are pockets of remembering that are soul filling for me, and those come during my storm. And when you are in a grief storm and weathering the clouds and the sudden bolts of lightning, joy will be infused into that picture. And Joy will come at times where you think you're wholly unprepared, but really, you're totally surrounded by folks who want to pick up the balls you've dropped and very capably handle them and take care of things.

That door that opened for others to help also showed me their gifting. You know, this one's good at organizing. This one's good at keeping the littles happy. There were a lot of little kids trotting around. And so that's going to help me for next year's reunion, to say, hey, this is her gift. This is his gift. I can, you know, allocate some of those tasks. I don't have to do it all myself. You do not have to be the one shouldering everything. Recently on the Cadre, one of the speakers said, it's okay to ask for help.

That might have been doctor Charisse, and I've heard it more than once. It's okay to ask for help. But on this day of total unpreparedness, the magic was that people materialized and said, I'll do this. Let me do this. So if you show up somewhere not as prepared as you'd like to be, the fact is, you showed up. Maybe you brought your casserole, maybe you did something. But the other things you're kind of worried about, it will get handled, I promise you. And it will give others an opportunity to shine.

That's the magic. Thank you for being on the Cadre with me. Thank you for listening to my story, for sharing yours. And look for a picture of my sweet mama and her big sun hat at the Warren county fair. I'll be posting that in the conversation thread. You guys are amazing. Take good care. Take care of yourself. Schedule extra TLC. And that's today's Cadre from harbor pilots and speak wonder. My name is Kathy Joy, signing off for now. See you next week.