{"id":1302,"date":"2021-04-27T19:12:52","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T23:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/?p=1302"},"modified":"2021-07-17T15:00:03","modified_gmt":"2021-07-17T19:00:03","slug":"when-life-calls-just-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/?p=1302","title":{"rendered":"When Life Calls Just Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"<section class=\"kc-elm kc-css-701806 kc_row\"><div class=\"kc-row-container  kc-container\"><div class=\"kc-wrap-columns\"><div class=\"kc-elm kc-css-914450 kc_column kc_col-sm-12\"><div class=\"kc-col-container\"><div class=\"kc-elm kc-css-566997 kc_text_block\"><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em><strong>By Deborah Blackwell<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">My phone rang at 8 a.m. and I had barely opened my eyes after a night of sinus mucosal misery from some kind of non-Covid winter plague. I had turned off the alarm an hour earlier deciding that staying in bed would be the most I could manage.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I peered at the phone without my glasses. Should I answer? It was my friend LuLu. I love her but I just needed to sleep.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">She must want something, I thought. She\u2019s also my copy editor and usually only calls that early when she\u2019s working on one of my stories and has a question about a quote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But today was different for Lulu. When I finally answered after four rings (because I do adore her), she was trying to stave off a cigarette\u2026and she doesn\u2019t even smoke. She did, decades ago, while roaming around as a reporter in newspaper newsrooms, or tents in Afghanistan, working on her assignments.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><b>Lulu is a world-travelled, fascinating woman. She\u2019s a journalist-turned-copy editor, who like the rest of us, is trying to stay sane in a scary world. <\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But she refuses to turn away from the news \u2014 perhaps the only self-survival mechanism available to any of us right now.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The news seems meaningless. Fake news, contradictory news, breaking news, or boring news, there is no real ability to grasp our global reality without a cigarette \u2014 for Lulu anyway. I don\u2019t smoke, and other than the daily glass or two of wine, have pretty much just gone numb.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">\n<p class=\"p1\"><b>Sometimes, and a lot lately, things can feel so meaningless. There isn\u2019t much bringing joy to the world right now, so I suppose we have to do it ourselves. Find whatever it takes to add some meaning to life in a way that resonates for us, and even for those around us. <\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">For Lulu, that\u2019s a morning smoke with her hot coffee and a paper newspaper. For me, it was her wake-up call.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So I didn\u2019t roll out of bed haggard, fever-sweaty, with a fuzzy mouth and fluid-filled nose. I curled back up and talked to Lulu about the present moment, old habits, new routines, and simply about life. We traded stories, gossiped, bitched, moaned, laughed\u2026and found meaning.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">An hour passed before I decided to finally hang up and get up. I needed a shower and still couldn\u2019t breathe, but I smiled because I remembered, even in the simple act of answering the phone ~<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><b>Sometimes life lets us decide just how we want things to be.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1304,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[52,51,31,43,30],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-connection","tag-friends","tag-joy","tag-life","tag-perception"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1772,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/1772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahblackwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}