Tag: inspiration

Life Lessons

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“Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.” – unknown

The other evening on a clear night my kids and I were out riding bikes. As I pumped up a hill, my two-year-old son sitting on the back on my bike noticed the moon bright in the sky. He softly said, “I want to hold the moon.”

It’s a good thing parents and lovers aren’t omnipotent. I assume it would result in the moon being pulled out of the sky on a regular basis.

A few days later my 6-year-old daughter was excitedly awaiting a new clock to arrive from Amazon. She was so excited to have the very first clock that she picked out herself and could set the alarms on. I question why she’d want to start with alarms so early in life but keeping my opinion to myself, helped her track the package. On the day it was supposed to arrive, the status went from “out for delivery” to “undeliverable” right before bedtime.

My daughter was so disappointed. Rightly so and exacerbated by being tired. In that moment, I would have driven the Amazon truck myself to make sure there wasn’t a tired six-year-old lamenting about unpredictability.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m teaching my kids. Fortunately life partners with me so that I have plenty of opportunities to talk about what we dream about. I get to review what we can and cannot control. And I can demonstrate how we can to flex our muscles of patience and perspective when things don’t work the way we want.

Gratefully, I have the chance to assure my kids that we might not always get what we want but we always get what we need. And remind myself of the same along the way.

(featured photo from JOOINN)

Influence

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“Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.” – unknown

I went back to look at footage of an interview with Madonna in 2012 that has stuck in my mind. In the interview, she’s being asked about Lady Gaga’s music and she calls it “reductive.” Something about her facial expression made it stand out when I watched it even though I’m not deep into either of those artists’ work.

When I went back and watched it, I saw a lot of things that I didn’t remember. The ABC News interviewer was really pushing Madonna to say something unkind about Lady Gaga’s music – to weigh in on some perception of “feud” that was being circulated online. Madonna says a number of things about influence and being amused before being pushed to call Born This Way reductive. When the interviewer pushes further to ask what that means, Madonna gets this sassy look on her face and says, “Look it up.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary, it means, “tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.” Setting aside the issue of what we do to celebrities to try to stoke a controversy or conflict, I suspect I’ve always remembered this because I wonder if what we all do is reductive.

Speaking for myself, I think everything I do is derivative or reductive of someone else’s work. I’m endlessly influenced by the books I read, especially the Mark Nepo and Frederick Buechner meditation books that I read every morning before I write. But more than that, I’m influenced by all the posts I read from everyone else and the podcasts I listen to when driving. I try to carefully quote and link when I use material but often times what I get is inspiration or ideas about how to think about a topic.

Celebrity feud aside – isn’t what we are here to do to influence each other? And isn’t that an honor to be a part of someone else’s path? I’m not talking about plagiarism or giving credit where credit is due – but just knowing that our content might touch one other person in a way that is meaningful, isn’t that a good thing?

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Beauty of Failure

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“Don’t let the internet rush you, no one is posting their failures.” – Wesley Snipes

The other day I failed for the second time to guess a Wordle and learned another life lesson as exemplified by this word game. By the way, no knowledge or affinity for Wordle is necessary to understand this life lesson but for anyone who hasn’t tried Wordle and is curious, here are the basics:

You have six tries to guess a five letter word. You are not given any information to start with but when you enter a guess, you are told if you have any right letters and they are green if correct in the right spot and yellow if they are used on the word but in the wrong spot. There is one word per day.

By the third guess I’d figured out the pattern was _ O _ E R

There were too many possible combinations – LOWER, MOVER, CODER, JOKER so I didn’t work out FOYER within the allotted 6 guesses.

But here’s what I noticed – it was WAY easier to fail the second time. The first time ended my 50 win streak and I was pierced, more than felt reasonable for a silly word game.

Noticing this, I think failing helps me shake the belief that I can be perfect. The longer streak that I had, the more brittle I became about not failing. It felt like there’s a longer way to fall, even if it’s just a silly word game.

It reminded me of a definition of perfection that Brené Brown provides in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. “Perfection is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment and shame. It’s a shield. Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it is the thing that’s really preventing us from taking flight.”

I’m not advocating practicing failing. But I am suggesting talking about it and laughing about it when we do. For me, it doesn’t change the impression of anyone around me who are well aware I’m not perfect. But it does penetrate my illusion that I think I can or have to maintain some persona that is impervious to failure. Even the fact that I have an ego still after years of meditating to find the Unity in life needs piercing.

So, thank you, Wordle. Not only for the two minutes of daily entertainment but a few good life lessons too!

(featured photo by Pexels)

Feet

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“May your feet take you where your heart wants to go.” – unknown

When my mom went to the marketing seminar five years ago for a senior residence community she was considering moving to, I went along with her. In the presentation, they talked about how important care of the feet is for the elderly. Specifically the presenter mentioned an anecdote from Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal that what geriatricians often look at when they see a patient, regardless of the symptoms presented, are the feet. Because when the elderly don’t take care of the feet – if they are overly callused, have ingrown toenails, or have sores, it exposes them to falls. And falls for older people are hard to recover from and can cost them their independence.

I was chastened by the discussion because even though I was only in my late 40’s at the time and not in any particular danger of falling, I was taking terrible care of my feet. Case in point, the massage therapist I’d seen on and off for years had commented that I needed to shave down the corn on my left pinky toe and I’d replied, “Why? It’ll just grow back.”

And indeed it will but clearly I was missing the big picture – that feet need to be cared for, just like the rest of the body, repeatedly. In fact, my feet are a disaster. They have calluses from jamming them in rock climbing shoes and bone spurs sticking out of the top of my big toes, maybe from my hiking or climbing boots that restrict range of motion, and plantar fasciitis from all the dogwalking, hiking and climbing. And given that I like to be on my feet and walking, one would think that I would have learned earlier to care of these precious platforms on which everything else balances.

I read a delightful meditation on the foot by Frederick Buechner in Listening to Your Life: “I say that if you want to know who you are, if you are more than academically interested in that particular mystery, you could do a lot worse than look to your feet for an answer. …when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.”

And adding to that, I’d add that if you want to check in on how you are taking care of your body, we could check with our feet for evidence for how well we are doing. Because as the geriatrician in Atul Gawande’s book notes, they feel further away and harder to care for as we age.

What are your feet doing today?

(feet pictured are my own)

Pain and Suffering

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“The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for!” – Thich Nhat Hanh

This weekend my son wanted to be like his sister and asked me “Can I have a pony?” Which is his shorthand for a ponytail, but before I’d even touched his hair to make a teeny-tiny ponytail, he said, “I’m going to say ‘Ow’”!

That little snippet of interaction so clearly illustrated the idea of pain versus suffering. I was fascinated by this idea when I first read about it in Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation. In the book, she discusses her work as an animal scientist from her unique perspective as an autistic person. Her fascinating work brings together so many different perspectives.

Dr. Grandin talks about all the tests and observations they’ve done to study whether animals experience pain. Because animals, especially prey animals, mask pain so that they don’t stand out in the flock, in the case of sheep, it’s sometimes hard to observe whether they are in pain.

But then she moves on to talk about suffering. Looking at humans who have chronic pain, she cites studies that show that chronic pain patients have a great deal of pre-frontal lobe activity which suggests something other than pain which is a lower-down brain function. In cases where a patient with intense pain had a leucotomy, which disconnected the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain, the patient still had pain but didn’t care about it.

Pain and suffering are two different things. Whereas I can address pain with a bandaid, ice or other treatment, taking on suffering for me is a spiritual practice. It is best treated by bringing light and breath to it and then having faith that it will not only move on through but also usually inform some enlightenment. As the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says in the quote for this post, “The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for!”

The most prominent of this for me was my divorce a dozen years ago. After my marriage fell apart, it was so easy to stay stuck in the storyline of my husband’s infidelities that I mucked around for a couple of years without owning my part of the story and acknowledging that I wanted out. Until I found meditation and faith as a tool to empty those pockets of stale dead air, I suffered from lack of perspective and inability to listen to the larger chorus of the Universe inviting me out of the pain and onward.

When I started to make the pony for my son, he said, “Ow” and decided he didn’t really want it. I guess he know it wasn’t worth suffering for.  

(featured photo from Pexels)

Spiritual Leaders

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“Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom. Sharing it, is the first step to humanity.” – unknown

Several years ago I had a friend who was struggling to keep his marriage together after it was revealed that his wife was having a long-term affair. From time to time he’d recount some of the help and advice they were getting as they tried to heal – from therapists, friends and books. One of the most insightful pieces of advice he got was from his pastor who sagely counseled, “You are going to have to say ‘good-bye’ to that marriage. If you two are going to go forward, you will have to build a new marriage together.”

It takes a special role to be able to drop truth bombs and still be heard. Friends might be able to do it, but often have a vested interest in offering up advice. More often than not, they offer idiot compassion as therapist and author Lori Gottlieb calls it. “Idiot compassion is where you want to make somebody feel better, and so you don’t necessarily tell them the truth. And wise compassion is where you really hold up the mirror to them in a compassionate way, but you also deliver a very important truth bomb.”

Therapists can deliver truth bombs but I think we often forget that our spiritual leaders have that capacity too. Given that church affiliation in the US has dropped below 50% for the first time ever, I wonder if we are losing touch with a unique group of people who want to help and also celebrate with us.

Twelve years ago when I was in crisis going through a divorce, I was lucky enough to find my way to a meditation teacher that helped guide me into that practice that has changed my life in many ways. And often when I have a spiritual question or even a lapse in understanding, I will go to my meditation teacher.

I also have the added benefit of relationships with a number of pastors since my dad was in the profession. They teach me again and again that our spiritual leaders whether they be pastors, rabbis or yogis have deep wisdom and history to access whether or not you agree with every bullet point of their theology.

When I asked my dad about that job/role/life calling as a Presbyterian pastor in the years before he died he said,

“I never would have imagined, at 20 years old when I finally made the decision to go in to ministry, I never would have thought that this is what my life would be like. I am so grateful to God for what that has meant, the number of lives that I’ve been able to be a part of. One of the unique things about ministry is that you are able to be with people in some of the most precious, important, holy moments of their life . . . birth, death, baptism, marriage, funeral, crisis. A pastor steps in to the middle of someone’s life at those unique times and that is pretty rare.”

So on this day that is Good Friday for Christians and the start of Passover for Jews, I dedicate the post to all our spiritual leaders that are willing to help us through the important moments of our lives. May we all find ways to support and honor them.

(featured photo is one of my favorite pictures of my dad)

Sacred Objects

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“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso

My two-year-old son has a stuffy he likes to carry everywhere. It’s a small pink bunny that fits perfectly in his hand and he carries it when we are biking, hiking and most everywhere else, except swimming.

Knowing how important this bunny is, I ordered a backup of the same stuffy. Fake stuffy isn’t worn in the same way so it doesn’t work to soothe if he’s lying down for a nap and I can’t find the real one – it just infuriates him. So when fake stuffy went missing for 6 months, it was no problem.

Until he resurfaced a month ago and now my son likes to carry around both the real one and the fake one, multiplying my problem of making sure we have the necessary parts before embarking on the next part of the schedule.

So, I ordered 6 backups of the fake stuffy for $2 each on eBay and implemented a rotation schedule so there’s only one out at a time but they all look more of less the same amount of worn.

It’s a silly routine but it’s made me appreciate the power of sacred objects. I drink my tea every morning from a mug that says “LOVE” and was the first thing my daughter ever bought me with her own money. Everything tastes sweet in that mug.

And when I use the tools that used to be my father’s, I feel his warmth, energy and enthusiasm welling up inside me and I’m more certain the project will turn out fine.

I have a gold-plated Angel token that I bought for $3 and carried in my pocket a dozen years ago when I was going through my divorce. The touch of it reminded me to have faith that life would work out. Although I don’t carry it anymore, when I come across it in my drawer, I smile and celebrate what faith has delivered.

I can visit the places I’ve traveled in a short trip through my house remembering the laughter with friends as we picked out Tibetan singing bowls or travel through time when I touch my stuffed koala from childhood. They are just objects but they open doors that are shortcuts to places that I want to go.

So I happily do the stuffy dance with my son. He’s taken to telling me “Don’t say ‘Yay’” when I want to celebrate a potty training victory. Something about my natural enthusiasm is overwhelming to him in that private context. Instead I channel it along with my love, sending it along with him in his sacred objects.

What are your sacred objects?

The Unified Theory of Breathing

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“Sometimes it’s okay if the only thing you remembered to do today was breathe.” – unknown

Long before I learned to meditate, I learned a breath practice while climbing mountains. Guides call it the “pressure breath” and it involves intentionally breathing out all the air in our lungs so we can take a full inhale. They explained the reason for the pressure breath because we often don’t exhale all the air in the lungs. Without consciously thinking about it, our bodies can short cut a full exhalation. But at altitude, the air is thinner so we need a full inhale.

If you climb to Camp Muir on at 10,000 feet on Mt. Rainier where I learned the practice, you will be taking in only 2/3 the amount of oxygen that you would at sea-level. For every 1,000 feet you climb, it decreases by about 3% so at 18,200 feet (my personal high point), it is about 45% of the oxygen at sea-level.

So the pressure breath helps to counter the effect of thinner air by forcing a breath that takes in more air and therefore more oxygen. (For anyone who is interested, the reason there’s less oxygen is that there’s less pressure at altitude so that there are fewer oxygen molecules in the same volume of air).

Twenty years after I learned to pressure breathe on a mountain, I’ve stumbled on the science of other reasons to fully exhale. It feels like a moment of a unified theory – understanding why something I learned in one context is so healthy for many other reasons.

The book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor inspires me to try to reform everything about my breathing. It is so well-written, researched and told through personal anecdotes and other living examples. In his chapter, Exhale, he cites two studies that set out to measure lung capacity as it related to longevity. They both found “that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity.”

And the way to bigger lung capacity? James Nestor provides a couple of different examples but they involve extending the range of the diaphragm (the typical adult only uses about 10% of the range) by practicing exhaling fully. In short, Nestor said we need to take as few breaths as we can to sustain our metabolic rate. Take fewer breaths and get more oxygen and then the diaphragm moves up and down and helps with circulation and moving lymph fluid. The perfect breath is 5-6 breaths/minute. Cite the Ava Maria or Om Mani Padme Om or the Sa Ta Ma Na (Kundalini Chant) – they all take about the same amount of time of 5.5 seconds.

Adding to this science, I also recently heard Ten Percent Happier podcast with therapist and author, Deb Dana. In it she explained poly-vagal theory and the three states for our nervous system:  ventral state which is calm and regulated, sympathetic which the fight or flight response and dorsal which is when the nervous system has been so overstimulated that it shuts down. And while all three states work to help us navigate particular circumstances of life. But when we need to get back to a ventral or calm and regulated space, there are breathing practices that help us do so. A longer exhale is one of them.

So there it is – the unified theory of the full exhale. I thought living at sea-level made pressure breathing unnecessary for me. Until I realized that I’ve been doing it in different ways all this time – the exasperated sigh, the mindful breath practices and everything in-between that continues to teach me that the things we learn in one context continue to be effective everywhere else, helping me climb all sorts of metaphorical mountains one step at a time.

(featured photo is mine of a team of climbers leaving the summit of Mt. Ixtacchuatl, 17,600 feet)

Worth Quoting

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“Do small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa

I like quotes. I curate them the way my dad did humor – but instead of using notecards, I use an Excel spreadsheet with a column for where I’ve used them and where I got them. I loan my spreadsheet out now and again – like to my friend who was taping quotes to her teenager’s mirror every morning as they waited for college admissions results to come in.

Quotes have such an elegance – a succinctness of capturing a particular idea so that it can be passed on. It’s an amazing gift to be able to do that, to coin a phrase or sentence worth repeating. And worth repeating outside of the context of any longer writing.

There is also an inferred meaning of a quote based on who said it, if attributed to someone. One of my favorite quotes is from Anne Sexton “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” It doesn’t take much looking to find that while Anne Sexton tackled some deep and revealing subjects in her work, she also is alleged to have physically abused her children. Knowing that, I find it harder to use that quote because who said it matters.

When I first started writing, I had a difficult time believing my own voice had any credibility so I wanted to rely on quotes as a crutch. To counter that, I changed my process so that I wrote and only when I was done or had trouble pulling together the last sentence did I go and find a quote that helped me clarify my topic. In that way, I’ve found a way to add another voice to what I’m writing without silencing my own.

The quotes that I think of when I’m in a crunch or stuck change with the major themes in my life. I had a different set of go-tos when I was trying to work up the courage to have kids then now when I’m in the thick of parenting. With that said, here are a few of my personal favorites.

“You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t – you’re right.” – Henry Ford

“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” – Roald Dahl

“Everything you’ve always wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Adair

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.‘” – Erma Bombeck

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” – Matthew 7:3

“The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain

“God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.” Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know.” – Carl Jung

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” – William Blake

“You don’t have a soul, you ARE a soul.” – Dick Leon

And the perfect one to end this post comes from the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, “Everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.”

Do you have any favorite quotes?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Do One Thing Well

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“A year from now, what will I wish I had done today?” – unknown

Deep into the section on expectations in Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart, I had a huge a-ha moment. She was talking about a conversation with her husband in which they both confessed to each other that they had an easier time parenting on the weekends they did it solo. Because they set aside their expectations to be able to do anything other than parent for that weekend.

This put a shape to the experience I have had as a single parent. Because I never expect that someone else will take the night shift or be there on the weekend, I have had to set really clear boundaries on the work and hobbies that I do because I know I won’t be able to duck out for a couple of hours.

That means that nights and weekends, I pretty much focus on hanging out with my kids. I do get a few chores around the house done with their “help.” The tradeoff for giving up Saturday morning hiking with my friends has been the gift of not believing I can try to do both things.

I know many of my parenting friends do an incredibly great job of splitting up the parental labor. One person will do the 9am-noon shift on Saturdays so that the other can go swimming and then they switch and the other gets “time off.” I have a pretty good inkling that if I was doing parenting with a partner that I would try for that approach and be a lot more confused about what I could handle.

I don’t know who said “Do one thing at a time and do it well.” My mom? Winnie-the-Pooh? Or maybe it’s not ascribed to a particular person because everyone who has learned the wisdom repeats it. When I wrote the post a couple of weeks ago about being invited to climb a mountain this summer, so many of my dear and wise blogging friends reminded me that parenting goes fast and there will likely be time to return to my hobbies later.

I believe that at some point I will have a partner again and more personal freedom. However, there isn’t anything I would trade for this uncomplicated time where I learned to really spend time with my children and enjoy it. Sometimes not having help forces us to distinctly draw boundaries we wouldn’t know to set otherwise.

(featured photo from Pexels)