Positively Affirming

I bet you run into this sort of thing as much as I do.

That thing where you’re talking with someone, and they claim ownership to something negative. An example would be someone saying, “My diabetes.” Or, “My multiple sclerosis.” Or, “My heart disease.”

When I hear things like that, it sets my teeth on edge. I’m in habit of not making statements in that fashion due to the influence of an old friend.

Had those words been coming out of my mouth, she would have been the first to reprimand me for it, stating that if I continued to claim such negative things as my own, they surely would be, and I’d surely be keeping them. And, I believe she would have been right to admonish me for it.

The above mentioned friend’s name was Robin. Robin died nearly two years ago. And, though we weren’t as close in the last years of her life, as we’d been for the twenty prior to that, I learned a great deal from her during the many years that we remained close friends and in frequent contact with one another.

Our friendship was an oddity in itself. I am of Christian belief. Robin was the nearly opposite. Her beliefs ranged, over time, from atheism, to agnosticism, to Wiccan, and then on to something more ancient and complex at the time of her death.

Robin was born on a Native American reservation in Montana. Before she was ten, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she finished growing up.

I met her in Texas when she was in her mid-30s and I in my early 20s, living far away from home and in a new, and strange environment. Fort Worth is a metropolis compared to the farmland I grew up in, and city people baffled me.

I think Robin viewed me as a lost puppy trying to find my footing, and she was the first to befriend me on my new job. We‘d even started off badly, probably because of my own foot ending up in my own mouth, inadvertently insulting her. She managed to be gracious, and chalk it up to ignorance, which it was, and after that we became very close friends.

Looking into Robin’s eyes gave me the feeling of being in the presence of a very old soul. Her description of me was of someone born yesterday and blonde to the brain.