What's in Your Lunchbox?

Hello. We're live on the Cadre, and I forgot something, so I'm gonna let the camera focus on my sweet little corgi, Gracie, while I hop up. Can you see her there? I'm gonna hop up and grab the something I forgot that I need for this presentation. Hang in. Thank you. Be right there. So. Okay. I always think I'm terribly organized, and then I'm not. My name is Kathy. My handle here in the Cadre, my branding, if you will, because I'm a poet, is speak wonder. And I love to talk about all things harbors.

See the picture? It's an art rendering. It's an oil painting of a ship that my friend Dana did back in high school. He actually gifted it to my mom, and mom gifted it to me. Anyway, I have an anchor, I have a cross. I have some other pictures of boats and harbors all around my little apartment here on the lake shores of Erie, Pennsylvania. And I sound like a maybe a teenage boy going through puberty, but I'm. I'm actually getting through laryngitis. And I made a decision this morning when I woke up still with not my full voice, that I would still come to you on Cadre, because that's who we are in community.

We show up the way we are. JC Likes to say, I hope you're having a good day. If you're not, that's okay. If you are, that's great. However you show up and whatever you bring, it's all good. Hi, Andy. Joyful. Hi, Bri. There's Rick. You made it. Yay. Luke is here. Luke, you're taking a break? Are you still huffing it? Are you walking and watching? You're amazing, brother. Just amazing. Rachel's here. Yeah, you're right. That's exactly as it should be. We show up in whatever state we're in. Andi Mack is here.

Where'd I put it? I'm looking for a special place for a sign that says Airy Pennsylvania, compliments of one of our COD codes, one of our Cadre folk. And I have something really cool to show you. I've titled Today's Talk what's in your lunchbox? Look at this, y'. All. That's what I hopped up to grab. This is gun smoke. Look how tiny it is. I bought this in a little curiosity shop in Fraser, Colorado, up in the mountains when we lived out west many years ago. Feels like lifetimes ago. And this opens and shuts.

See, you got Matt Dillon there. I don't know if I can do a close up or if it's backwards or upside down. But anyway, it says gunsmoke right on the lunchbox. It was one of those had to haves. And believe it or not, it has moved many times to different households. And the reason I'm able to find it again is I keep it in my kitchen cupboard. To remind me, I guess. I guess because I'm a sentimental person. To remind me of back in the day when we used to pack our lunch boxes and remember how cool it was to have a thermos.

And usually it leaked, but that was okay. And you could take the top off this tiny little thermos. I mean, look at it. Compared to my hand, it's just teensy. This is a gun smoke thermos. Here's the cup, the twist off cap. My fingers are almost too big to really show it. Is that not the coolest thing ever? I know. I like little funny conversation pieces. So what lunchbox did you have? Do you remember carrying a lunchbox to school? Look there. I tucked it in. My go to you guys is Gatorade and tissues.

And this has been my life and my landscape for the last four or five days. While I'm powering through just a head cold, I seem to get them about once a year. I was reading a little bit about stress, and there is some of that in my life. And sometimes our bodies just kind of nudge us into a season of rest. And that's where I've been been resting, and it has been rejuvenating and just patiently waiting to get my voice back. There's a panel discussion tonight on the Cadre. I'm going to tell you more about that, but let's get back to the lunchbox.

Not only do you remember carrying a lunchbox or maybe a paper sack to school when you were a kid, I'm a baby boomer, so we had lunch boxes. Some of you probably remember Lunchables. Yeah, I mean, they still sell those. And I hate to admit I actually sent my girls to school with those. They're not the healthiest choice, but they're convenient. So do you remember trading stuff? I do. I remember being okay. So part of my growing up was in West Palm, Florida, and Palm Beach Gardens. So we ate outside every day in grade school and junior high.

Did you guys see Gracie? Gracie, you sleeping? You see her there in the background? A little corgi girl. She's also featured on my coffee cup. I remember if somebody showed up with something better in his or her mailbox lunchbox, I would offer a trade I would negotiate a trade and sometimes they wanted to, sometimes they didn't. Or maybe somebody would sidle up next to me and initiate a trade. Hey, I have an apple. Mom packed an apple. And I see you got Twinkies. You want to trade? And if it seemed like a fair trade, we did it.

We traded bologna for peanut butter and jelly. Some people had homemade cookies and they didn't understand the value of those, so they wanted Oreos. We didn't know anything, did we, when we were kids? Now I do anything for homemade cookies. But when you're a kid, the store bought kind are the ones to be sought after. Maybe you traded. I knew that. I just knew this would happen. I have natural light coming in my living room and I turned the lamp off because of it. And now it's hard for me to read my notes.

Winging it, you guys. Winging it with my pre adolescent voice. Okay. Oh, also, I remember I went through a time when I really liked. I really enjoyed hard boiled eggs and I'd bring those to school. And I had one friend, Kendra, who loved hard boiled eggs. I forget what we traded, but she would get my hard boiled egg and I would get her. I think it was a banana or some kind of local fruit. Being in Florida, we had all kinds of local fresh fruit, of course. Yeah. Trying to think of one of my favorites.

So many favorites from the tropical regions. So I'm setting this whole thing up to talk about negotiating a trade in a more subtle way. Here we're in the season of harvest, the season of abundance. In fact, harvest is our theme. And so I found this beautiful harvest picture on the front of a magazine. Don't you just love visual aids? I think they're great. And so we're going into autumn and we're trading T shirts for sweaters. I'm over here in the Erie area on the East Coast. I'm speaking to you in east coast time.

You're probably watching in central time. A lot of Minnesotans here. There's some others from other areas. Rick, you're from somewhere in the Boston area, Massachusetts. Most of us, I would say probably most of us across these United States are trading our T shirts for sweaters. And I'm thrilled personally to be in the midst of the approach of fall. Scarf weather. I don't know if you can tell these are little owls and it's autumn colors. I love me a good scarf. A good soft scarf. Something very comforting and nurturing about a nice scarf.

So, you know, we're putting away our summer clothes Getting out our winter clothes in preparation for the darker, colder season. What if on a more subtle level, we traded other things for other things? Just like negotiating that apple for Twinkie out of your grade school friend's lunchbox. What if we traded sighing for singing? Sighing for singing. What if we negotiated throughout our day a trade from the negative to the optimistic and not. Not something false or manufactured, something that comes from the heart.

Let's trade sighing for singing. Let's see that corner of the day that's not so great or that task that you don't want to do and put a song in there. Could literally put a song in there by singing it. Cueing up your John Denver on your Pandora. That's what I do. Somebody here is a Springsteen fan. Who is it? Come on. Come on. Yeah, it's Betsy Hodges. I think she's a Springsteen fan. Yeah. Love me some Billy Joel. All kinds of music, literal music or music that comes into your mind and your memory.

You're trading your sighing for singing. You're negotiating in that pause, in that recognition of something sad, in recognition of a grief point as you look at a difficult task. Today's caregiver day. Some things are hands on, some things are emotional. They're all difficult when it comes to caring for somebody. And as we do the daily of it, we can trade our sighing for singing. We can trade our anxiety for trust. We can negotiate a deal with ourselves through our faith, through our optimism, through the encouragement of others, through this wonderful mental wellness and health app called Cadre, we can negotiate trust in lieu of anxiety.

We can say, I'm taking anxiety out my LOS box and I'm going to have trust. I have a whole list. How about if we traded news grazing for window gazing? I've been trying to get a little less screen time lately and window gazing is the best. You guys, I'm looking out my window now. I see some fall colors. I'm not going to mess with my phone, but if I were to flip it, yeah, you would see some fall colors out my window. So instead of grazing the news or doom scrolling the news or seeing what just happened, maybe not even in in your vicinity, but what happened news wise.

But don't you look out the window and see what's happening in real time? Stress eating for deep breathing. That's a good negotiated trade. Trade in your stress eating for some deep cleansing breaths. Nice. Dr. Charisse talked about that. About resetting your neural pathways and your brain by taking in a deep breath. I think she said for five counts and Let it out for seven. I think she calls it the rule of five and seven or the rule of four and six. However you count it, it's a deep breath and then expelling of that breath.

So let's trade stress eating in for deep breathing. Let's trade in despair for curiosity and gloom for hope. Why not trade monotony for a switch in our routine? And a real practical example of that would be to take a different way home from work, maybe ask your GPS to take you the country way. And who knows, maybe it's 20 minutes longer. But isn't that a neat reset for your brain and your panorama? As you commute home, do something different. So that's trading the monotony for a switch in routine, trading the rut for the reset.

Very similar sentiment. Getting out of the rut or the predictability of your day and negotiating a reset of some sort. What does that look like? It could be as simple as walking outside and maybe walking to your mailbox, checking on a neighbor. Just trading your rut for a reset, trading the overwhelm for the quiet joy of organizing just one corner of your home. I get overwhelmed. I live in a small apartment, I call it. My tiny house is a converted garage, and it's probably a little more than 800ft all told.

I'm not even kidding. And people might say, wow, that's great. I bet you keep it so tidy. I wish. I wish. It gets cluttered really fast if I don't keep up. And so when I get overwhelmed, rather than, you know, being on my feet for a long time and making sure everything's just right, I'll do one corner, and inevitably that leads to wanting to be more productive. I'll take a little rest into another corner, and pretty soon, out of the chaos comes a tidier place. Now, I don't know about you, and I'm not gonna split hairs here.

I do not consider cleanliness virtue. I don't. I think it's great if that's something that you fixate on. My place is clean, but it's not tidy. And I've often told people that as a creative and as an author, I. I thrive in chaos. I do. I know where things are when I put them away. They're hard to find. But I'm learning. At my age, I'm finally learning a good filing system. Never could get a grip on spreadsheets. If somebody wants to take me on and teach me, I'd love to be your student, but I just couldn't quite grasp them.

So Instead, I carry around these little notes and put them in a journal and somehow it works. But I found a good filing system to keep track of my mother's things. My mother, June, is 94 years of age and she's lovely and she's funny and she's a spitfire and she's a force of nature and she lives in a nursing home and I go see her once or twice a week and I'm her administrator, so I really need to do well by mom and keep her stuff in one place, her paperwork. But I digress. I've already talked more than my allotted 15 minutes.

So I've talked about all the swaps, Rick. I exchanged the impossible for the possible. Whoa, you just added to my list. Yes, still in shorts. Oh, who's bragging? Rachel, Jocelyn, Pacific. So you're on the West Coast. The day's trading isn't even allowed. Oh, these days trading isn't even allowed. Are you, Rachel, you talking about the lunchbox or just the whole concept of trading? Not even talk about fair trade markets. Lunchables were basically a treat for me. Yeah, lunchables. Care Bears. Oh yes, I remember Care Bears in the lunchbox, not in mine.

Exactly the way. Okay, yeah. So I think I've caught up with your comments. Thank you for your interaction and for your patience with me. You would never know on this day as we're speaking that I used to be a radio dj. I did and I loved it. I miss it. So these are all glorious swaps, you know, trading gloom for hope. Let's trade. I was going to wrap it up here by saying let's trade scarcity for abundance. Since we're talking about the harvest in this month, in this season. Oh, I wrote another one down here.

Trading unanswered questions for peace in the. In the waiting. How about that one, you guys? Trading unanswered questions for peace in the waiting. Yeah, Glorious swaps. And I have the beginnings of a poem here. This is a gathering of size, colliding and collaborating to rise above the gloom. So our collective sighs become a chorus of song. Above the gloom, an abundant harvest of taking inventory, looking around for alternatives. And in those alternatives, in those choices, in those negotiated deals for a better day, we thrive.

We do. Coming up on today's Cadre, Jamie Larry visits us talking about navigating change. Ms. Shannon comes in this afternoon. Comedy and the chaos. And then a really special event tonight starting at 8 o' clock Eastern. Ask a contributor. And this is interactive, I think it's called. Rick, can you help me out here. Streamyard. Streamyard. Anyway, it's super simple. Just the way that you go into the Cadre and look at the one scheduled, you'll see Ask A contributor is scheduled 8:00-clock Eastern this evening.

You just go in there and it'll help you navigate how to get in there. And it's a little bit more than what we're doing here in that you can make comments, but you can also. I think. I think this is right. It's kind of like a zoom. So you can be on live with us and we can talk to one another and you can ask a contributor. Ask me something. Oh, I had a whole list of who would be there. Rick, I think you're planning to be there. Ms. Shannon, you had a previous engagement. Alex will be there. I don't know about the Walkers.

Luke. Luke. And I'm starting to. Starting to forget who I was walking. Luke, are you on here still? Who's walking who? Who are you walking with? You guys are intrepid. You are unstoppable. What a ridiculous amount of miles you're putting in for such a good cause. And I'll let Luke explain that later. Or. Or someone looking forward to. I think, Rick, you're saying looking forward to it. I've lost my lamp light. I'm telling you, I get everything all set up and there's always a bit of a glitch. I'm looking forward to it too.

And now that I've used my voice a little bit and you're still understanding me, I think I will definitely be a part of that group tonight. It should be a lot of fun and a lot of insight and a lot of good negotiating deals with each other as far as swapping disconnectedness and isolation with connection. Cadre certainly is a bridge to connection on many, many fronts. And it's lovely Gracie says goodbye. She's all curled up here. Gracie. Yeah, there she is. Her ears are moving a little. Great to be with you today.

What a great time. As we think about trading scarcity for abundance. And that's how I'm going to end it. Sail into safe harbor. Know that you are cared for and cared about and looked after. Even in moments when you don't feel it or are not aware of it, someone's always thinking of you. It's a lovely thought. I'll see you next week in Harper Pilots. And some of you I hope to see this evening in Ask A Contributor. Bye for now.