Tag: inspiration

Rebranding Exercise

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

Somewhere in the middle of yesterday morning, I realized that, although I was in the middle of a scenario that I dreaded, I was doing fine, in fact better than fine. The scenario: quarantined alone with two kids for days on end, no other grown-ups allowed in for help or distraction, not able to go outside which is both my and my kids’ happy place, feeling sick and trying to work.

It made me wonder – how much energy is wasted imagining dreaded scenarios? They may or may not happen. And this one has taught me, that even when they happen, they don’t feel like I feared they would. In fact, I felt so emboldened by the fact I was facing this nightmare down that I skipped through the rest of the morning.

This sparked a tidbit that I learned many years ago from someone who was researching how we RSVP events that are 1 month or 6 months out. They found that our minds have an image of who we’ll be and how we’ll feel in the future that isn’t accurate. When we respond based on that image, we often don’t predict well whether we’ll want to go. The trick, the research said, was to RSVP as if the event was tomorrow or next weekend. Because we just don’t know how we are going to feel about an event until we are facing it.

Also in my dread, I couldn’t imagine the beautiful difference that how other people would react would make. My friends, neighbors and colleagues have been so supportive and offered to drop off groceries, dinners and things for the kids. And in my imagining, I couldn’t factor in the great community of grown-ups that I’ve found in blogging. Reading other people’s blogs and writing through this has kept me in touch with the big picture reality in such a delightful way (thank you so much!). And finally, my kids have done pretty darn well in this break from normality. They’ve bickered and gotten grumpy but also taken it in stride.

And finally, the fear of the unknown made the idea of the quarantine much scarier than it is. When I fear things, it adds a patina to the image that doesn’t appear in the reality. Dealing with and dreading are two different things. Of course, that is also thankfully because our cases are mild, it gets better and more known each day and now the end is in sight.

The more often I face something I dread, the more I learn to return from that feeling. I think we all leave the present for someone imagined scenario but like just like blinking, we have the chance to clear our vision and return. No need to spend any time in the future – because how I think I will feel when I have to have a tooth drilled, hold a child that is hurt or face disappointment is not how I will actually feel.

And building on the other things I’ve learned this week, I sat my kids down to do a meditation last night after dinner. It worked wonderfully to settle us all into a fun evening routine. They loved it and my 6-year-old especially thought it was great.

So I’m rebranding this quarantine as a meditation retreat.

A Meditation on Evenings or Evening Meditation

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“Wear your ego like a loose fitting garment.” – Buddha

We all have Covid (mild, thankfully) and are on day 99 (feels like) of quarantine. The one household member that doesn’t have Covid, the cat, is on a diet because a recent trip to the vet for her check-up revealed that she’d gained a lot of weight under all that fluffy fur. On top of that, she has to put up with us all home and as you can see in featured photo, my daughter trying to shoot her with a water gun. So, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all a little grumpy.

In the midst of this, I’ve noticed something interesting. We do pretty well until right around 6pm. Then it turns into a scrum unless I can find a way to redirect the energy.

What I find fascinating is that corresponds with about the same time of day that the voice in my head turns self-critical. The other night I was getting ready for bed and thinking about a proposal that I needed to do the next day when my inner narrator popped up with “There’s no value you can add for them that they can’t already do themselves.”

What?? The voice was talking about what I have done for 20 years that I do day in and day out and I know based on my track record of doing it for happy clients that keep me employed that I do it very well.

This reminds me of the preface to Dan Harris’ book 10 Percent Happier in which he said the working title for his book was “The Voice in My Head is an Asshole.” My voice doesn’t usually stoop to that level until after about 6pm. And then it is always a JERK!

I am a congenital optimist. For example, when I gain weight, it usually makes me think, “Well, at least I don’t have one of those hard-to-detect cases on cancer where the primary symptom is unexpected weight loss.” There is nothing I have knowingly done to foster this optimism but life has largely worked out for me – or maybe it hasn’t and I just think it has because I’m an optimist?

That’s the problem with the voices in our heads, right? They are completely subjective, often influenced by food and sleep and given how much they change in a day, totally unreliable. But I like my optimistic voice, just not the self-critical voice that kicks in for the evenings.

This is where meditation has saved me by creating an awareness that these voices are not me. That if I sit with ideas, actions and my path for a little while, a way that rises above the fickle swings presents itself. As the quote from Buddha above suggests, wearing the ego like a loose fitting garment helps remove it more easily. Just a moment’s space between thought and speaking or action can allow peace to prevail.

This gives me an idea for the rest of our quarantine. Maybe tonight I’ll try to get the kids to sit and meditate with me after dinner and we’ll have a completely peaceful and cooperative transition to bed. As you can probably tell, I’m writing this in the morning when my optimist voice is strong…. 🙂

Underneath the Urgency

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“Either you run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn

I woke up this morning at 5:30am – a little later than usual. In the dark of a morning in January, I rolled out of bed thinking that I didn’t have enough time to do yoga in addition to meditate, write and read before I need to get my kids up.

I frequently feel like I don’t have enough time. I feel it on weekdays when I know I have a hard deadline to wrap things up with work so that I can go pick up my kids. I feel it on weekends when I’m immersed in kid chaos and can’t get personal to-do items done.

The more that I think about it, the more urgent it feels. Gripped by that feeling, I flail and get less done. It’s like a secret of physics that noticing the speed of time makes time go faster.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never enjoyed a moment in which I was gripped by scarcity. And the majority of the mistakes I make are done when I rush.

And sometimes I can sense that it’s not a feeling of not have time (lower-case t) as in just that day but Time (upper-case T) as in before I die. Recently a 63-year-old friend died of complications of cancer treatment and I have another friend who is experiencing some progressive cognitive diminishments in her mid 60’s.

When I think about these friends, not only do I feel grief for them and their families but also a little frantic. Because having kids as an older parent means I will be 68-years-old when my youngest graduates from high school. I want to be fully present for my kids all they celebrate all their growing-up milestones. And beyond.

When feeling that urgency, the only thing I’ve found to do is to slow down. It’s a sense of reaching underneath the urgency to grab the fabric of life that’s just under the surface. Gripped by that ache of not enough time, I force myself again and again to return to this moment.

This moment, the one right here where I’m quietly sitting and writing these words is full of abundance. It’s a rich moment of quiet and calm. It’s a celebration that I haven’t yet run out of time because I woke up this morning.

Sure, I have to make choices about what I can get done today and prioritize. But making those choices when in the throes of scarcity usually means I make the short-sighted one. When I’m plugged in to the power of now, I can choose more wisely. And the other secret is that most of the time, the wisest choice is opting not to clean. 🙂

Secrets

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“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” – Anne Sexton

This week when we are returning from holiday breaks always reminds me of one of the wackiest stories from when I was in business with two partners and we had almost 20 employees. On the Monday after New Years Day in 2008, I was in the office when the office manager came in to say that we hadn’t heard from our program manager, JE, since the Christmas party two weeks prior.

JE didn’t work for me but in a small company, I certainly knew him. I liked him too. He was smart, quiet and diligent about getting his work done. He’d left Microsoft six months before to come work for us and except for one scheduled break in late October, he’d always shown up. It wasn’t unusual for our folks to work from home, especially over the holidays but not answering emails and phone calls was definitely odd.

Since my two business partners to whom JE did report were in Mexico on a hang gliding trip, I jumped in to help. Thinking that maybe we could find his girlfriend’s name and call her to check in, I googled his name. The top result was a memo from the United Stated Department of Justice dated in October of the previous year (the same days of his scheduled absence) that read something like this:

“<JE’s full name>, 27, of <city>, WA was sentenced to six month in prison for his role as the leader of a software pirating group. He will be reporting to <low security prison> on January 1, 2008.”

Well, that explained why we couldn’t get ahold of him! When we finally talked with his girlfriend, she said that JE would be disappointed to know we’d found out because he didn’t want to let us down.

Of course, had he quit before he went to prison, we would have never looked for him!! Granted he had bigger things to worry about in the 8 weeks between sentencing and reporting to the facility but as a logical young man, it seemed obvious that if you don’t want people to look for you, you need to break up with them first.

I think of this often when someone is carrying a secret. It is an immense burden that sometimes precludes thinking and acting rationally. And often the secret itself prevents the carrier from finding the tools to heal – because developing any depth is dangerous, lest it unearth the core of what they are carrying. The secret has a life of its own that requires it to stay buried and drains a lot of energy to support itself.

At the time of my life when this happened, I had a secret too. I was unhappy in my marriage and way of life and I was diligently trying to keep that a secret, mostly from myself. I drank too much wine and then smoked cigarettes when I drank as a way to numb myself from feeling what was really going on.

Thinking back now, I realize that I was forcing myself daily to keep walking down a path that didn’t feel right. I was in a relationship that wasn’t supportive of me, I was in a business partnership with a charismatic that was making me crazy and I had developed no spiritual depth with which I could heal these wounds. All these secrets were a prison in their own way.

As it turned out, I kept my misery under wraps for another year after JE went to prison. Then the charismatic business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities and it all blew apart – the business and my marriage. Finally, no one had any secrets left and I could begin to heal. With nothing left buried, it was finally safe to develop some spiritual depth that carried me out of my prison. I can only hope that JE was able to heal once his secret was out as well.

(featured image from Pexels)

Pushing Our Limits

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“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot

I just took care of my kids for 11 days without a break. Turns out that was two days too long. It was fine -we had lots of fun activities with our family and friends, new Christmas toys to play with and even two nights away at a cabin on the water. But without taking some intentional time to myself to take an hour’s walk alone or just sit on a bench and listen to sounds around me that wasn’t my kids’ voices, I hit my limit of tolerating chaos, my patience was thin and I didn’t have any of my usual zest for the experience.

Being pushed to the limit makes me think of the judgment calls mountain guides have to make on a climb. The ones that I’ve climbed with are very good at assessing an individual’s physical and mental state and making that call whether to push through or turn back.

On a five-day expedition climb of Mt. Rainier that I once did, there was a team member who when we did the group introduction said that he’d come from St. Louis, hadn’t worked out in preparation and was there for the most painful experience of his life. Then he disappeared for a few minutes while we were all packing up and returned with a chili dog. Just the thought of a chili dog in my gut as I cinched down the waist belt on my pack made me a little queasy.

When we left the lodge at 5,400 feet altitude for a five-hour climb to our camp for the night, the climber from St. Louis fell behind right away. A guide stayed with him and started the process of understanding his limits as I’ve seen practiced in the mountains several times.

Guides start by asking how you are doing to gauge a sense of your mental state and attitude. In between the lines of answers like “I just got a stitch in my side”, “I didn’t sleep well last night” or “I just can’t seem to get it together” are clues about how the climber is feeling about the journey.

Then they slow the pace down for the climber or take an extra break to see if that will help restore the equilibrium. I’ve often wondered why they don’t just turn people around right away if it seems to be a problem. But sometimes just a few minutes of rest can change the attitude from “I can’t” to “I can.”

And then, if someone is still struggling, the guide will walk the climber to the base. I’m know this is a safety thing to not leave people wandering around a mountain trying to get back but it’s always struck me as a beautiful act of kindness to walk someone home when they are done.

The climber from St. Louis hit his limit pretty early on that first day of climbing and turned back about three hours in. I never saw him again so I don’t know whether it was the chili dog or approaching the trip as the most painful experience ever that did him in.

As we face this new week, new month and new year, I think about the guides’ formula for understanding our limits: talking through how we feel, slowing down and take a rest and if necessary, having someone walk us safely back to the base when we have reached our limit so that we can climb again another day. It gives me inspiration for not only knowing when I’ve had enough but guiding others through theirs.

Sometimes we have to carry on in spite of our limits – like I had to my kids because the unusual Seattle snow hampered the breaks that I had planned. It worked out fine but I learned once again to respect the balance of life, pushing my limits and also finding a way back to home base when I’ve reached them.

Other People’s Writing: Dec 29th

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I don’t know where I got this book, The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates nor can I even say that I’ve read her work extensively. But this author of 58 novels who was first published at age 26 and taught at Princeton for 36 years certainly has so many great stories to tell about writing with sections on inspiration, self-criticism, memory and more. But it’s the description of her process that caught my attention and charmed me.

The Writer’s Studio

It’s a room much longer than it is wide, extending from the courtyard of our partly glass-walled house in suburban/rural Hopewell Township, New Jersey (approximately three miles from Princeton) into an area of pine trees, holly bushes, and Korean dogwood through which deer, singly, or does-with-fawns, or small herds, are always drifting. Like the rest of the house my study has a good deal of glass: my immediate study area, where my desk is located, is brightly lighted during the day by seven windows and a skylight.

All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980’s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming, or brooding. Most of the so-called imaginative life is encompassed by these three activities that blend so seamlessly together, not unlike reading the dictionary, as I often do as well, entire mornings can slip by, in a blissful daze of preoccupation. It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am “prolific” and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spent most of my time looking out the window. (I recommend it.)

The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates

And as a bonus selection – here’s a small part of her reflection on inspiration.

Inspiration

Yes, it exists. Somehow.

To be inspired: we know what it means, even how it sometimes feels, but what is it, exactly? Filled suddenly and often helplessly with renewed life and energy, a sense of excitement that can barely be contained; but why somethings – a word, a glance, a scene glimpsed from a window, a random memory, a fragrance, a conversational anecdote, a fragment of music, or of a dream – have the power to stimulate us to intense creativity while most others do not, we are unable to say. We all know what it was like to have been inspired, in the past; yet we can’t have faith that we will be inspired in the future. Most writers apply themselves doggedly to their work, hoping that inspiration will return. It can be like striking a damp match again, again, again: hoping a small flame with leap out, before the match breaks.

The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates

(featured photo from Pexels)

Other People’s Writing: Dec 27th

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I’m dedicating this dark and quiet week before the New Year begins to posting writing that has inspired me this year. To start, this meditation by Frederick Buechner who was a writer before he became an ordained Presbyterian pastor.

In addition to being an author and pastor, he has taught both religion and writing at a number of places including Exeter, a boarding school in New Hampshire. One of his students was John Irving, who included a quote of Frederick Buechner in A Prayer for Owen Meany. His meditations often strike me often as a writing lesson as much as spiritual guidance.

Silence of the Holy Place

What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, as the huge monk in cloth of gold put it, than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.

God knows I am no good at it, but I keep trying, and once or twice I have been lucky, graced. I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt a promise promised.

I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved by only lived for and loved.

Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner

(featured photo from Pexels)

Together In Sickness

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

This week of my family coming down with a cold has made me think of attitudes about getting sick. Rina, my best friend in college, was the first person I learned from that being sick could be fun. From her stories, I gathered that her mother made the days she had to be home sick to be like spa days with lots of good food, sympathy and glossy magazines. Rina is Finnish and I’ve wondered if this particular way to embrace sick time is cultural.

By contrast in my family when you were sick, you stayed in bed, had no special privileges and if you were sick in the morning, you had to be sick all day so you couldn’t go play with your friends in the afternoon, even if you felt better. It was an experience designed to make sure there was no psychological advantage to being sick. In our house of Protestant productivity, being sick and the resulting impact on our usefulness was to be avoided at all costs.

So I find myself torn when my kids have to stay home from school because they are sick. On one hand I want to enjoy the break from routine and sympathetically help them feel better. On the other hand, it usually represents a stress to my work productivity that I have a hard time setting aside. But more than that, it goes against the grain of the self-worth as measured by productivity that was ingrained in me from the early days.

When I heard of the word hygge (pronounced hooga) it made me think of Rina and her mom. Hygge is a Danish word without any direct translation to English but according to this article on Quartz, has a meaning that encompasses both coziness and togetherness. It makes me think of that warmth that comes from deep companionship through better and worse.

The warmth of that word and idea, combined with my sense that being together should be celebrated in a family plus the lack of compassion I have for myself when I’m sick has spurred me to try to forge a new path for my little family when we are sick. I’ll probably never be able to reform so much that I drop everything, buy glossy magazines and bath bombs but I think a little fun and great food to help make it through when we feel crummy is worth aiming for. May it bring a sense of hygge to us, especially when we aren’t feeling well.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Packing Lists Are Not Optional

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“Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow.” – unknown

My kids and I were recently playing in a small space nestled on the top floor of house that we don’t use often. My daughter caught me picking some dried playdough out of the carpet, looked at me and said, “I was younger then so I didn’t know any better.”

Ha, if I had a nickel for all the things I could say about that in my life! That thought prompted me to think of what I would say that about. Lessons like:

Not believing that the sign meant it when it said 45mph for the curve.

Not knowing that wool shrank when you put your mom’s borrowed skirt in the dryer.

You shouldn’t ever try to park a U-Haul by yourself.

Thinking that sleeping pads were just for comfort and packing lists were just suggestions.

The last one in particular made me chuckle. It came from the time in college when spent 5 weeks in Ecuador on a study trip – 2 weeks hiking in the Andes, 2 weeks living with the Cofani Indian tribe in the jungle and 1 week camping on a remote beach near the Galapagos Islands.

In the weeks before my trip, I kept choosing to spend all my time with my boyfriend instead of preparing so it came down to the night before I was to leave that I really started to get everything together. I looked at the packing list and was surprised at the entry for sleeping pad. I hadn’t spent much time hiking or camping and my family didn’t have any so I decided they were optional, probably for comfort, and I skipped it.

It wasn’t until the first night we spent camping in the Andes at 12,000 feet that I understood why sleeping pads are necessary. Lying on that very cold ground without anything but the thin nylon of the tent to insulate me from below, I absolutely froze in my sleeping bag.

Fortunately one of the items on the list that I did manage to pack was plastic garbage bags. The group leader showed me the next day how you could wrap your body in garbage bags for additional warmth. That trick got me through those nights in the mountains – just barely.

I’ve been very diligent in my packing for expeditions ever since. But I look back on that and think, “I was younger then so I didn’t know any better.” 😊

I’m guessing that for every person who reads this, there is a life lesson that pops up for you. Please leave it in the comments if you want to share!

Growing and Blooming

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“What we love, others will love and we will show them how.” – Wordsworth

When I was 22-years-old and moving into my first post-college rental, my dad helped me find some used furniture. Some people he knew where moving into a retirement community so we looked at the items they were getting rid of and bought a kitchen table, two chairs and a Christmas cactus. I donated the table and chairs when I bought my first house a few years later but the Christmas cactus has been with me now for 30 years.

It was my first proof that I could keep something other than myself alive. Now I look at that cactus and see it as a reminder of my most important lessons.

It blooms beautifully once a year and then sheds all those flowers as it prepares for its next feat. It’s best to shed the past so you can work towards the next thing.

The cactus does not appear to be doing anything for 50 weeks but then bursts with color for 2 weeks. Most of our work happens on the inside.

Every now and then it’s drooped in the soil it is in and needs to be repotted as its roots grow deeper. We need some new perspective/work/material from time to time in order to stay vivid.

Sometimes it blooms closer to Thanksgiving rather than Christmas. As you get older, you learn to care less about expectations and more about flourishing in the way that works for you.

The growth on the side nearest the light blooms first but eventually, the darker side blooms too. If you water all of yourself, both your bright side and the shadow side will bear fruit.

 Although it’s a cactus, it has no prickly parts. It’s possible to live a long and beautiful life without thorns to protect you.

This weekend I came across my son picking up the dropped flowers with some tweezers and putting them on the stand. It made me think of my most important work. Trying to create a calm, loving space in which others treat things with kindness.