Tag: Lifestyle

Waiting for a Break

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“We learn how to be resilient and handle difficult things by PRACTICING dealing with difficult things.” – Tina Payne Bryson

We went to our favorite beach on Whidbey Island this weekend. We rented an AirBnB that allowed dogs so it was our puppy, Cooper’s, first vacation.

The weather was really blustery. After a particularly stormy week in the Seatle area, there was driftwood all over the beach. When my son, four-year-old Mr. D and my friend, Eric, went down to the beach, Mr D busied himself throwing huge pieces of wood into the water. And by huge, I mean almost as big as he is.

When Eric remarked on this, Mr. D turned to him and said, “I can do hard things.”

Here’s the thing about that. Every day for the ten days preceding the vacation, I’d sent Mr. D to school with a note. In the note, it counted down how many sleeps until vacation, explained that we had to go to school/work in order to be able to go on vacation, and ended with the sentence, “We can do hard things.”

Normally Mr. D doesn’t need coaxing to go to school. But coming off of some crud he caught at Thanksgiving, and the dark and stormy days of the last couple of weeks, it felt like he was tired. You know that deep, soul-level tired where even after good night’s sleep it feels like you are exhausted.

Of course, Mr. D cannot yet read but he carried the note with him anyway. He didn’t say much about it. But I knew he was paying attention because the note started ripping in places because it’d been opened and refolded so many times.

Sometimes we have to push through to earn a break. And I’m incredibly heartened to know that when we do, it builds the confidence that “We can do hard things.”

Climbing Out of My Gunk

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“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir

This post was previously published on 12/14/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this!

The other day I felt like I was working at my desk when pressure tipped the scales and slid into anxiety. I had a client project that wasn’t going well, something that I tried to do for a friend didn’t turn out as I hoped, the holiday bills were adding up and I had strange red spots splotching the skin on my face. In response, I was eating all the Christmas candy I could find even though I knew the only way that candy would solve my problems was that it soon would be my biggest belly-ache. So I managed to put down the sugar and I went for a walk.

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

John Muir

For all the John Muir and Henry David Thoreau quotes that I love, the person that I often think of when I feel this way is Beck Weathers. I wrote a post about him – The Power of Stories. He is the Texas pathologist caught in the 1996 storm on Everest that Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air.

Beck tells the story that he climbed to escape depression. He’d head out into the mountains because climbing helped alleviate the darkness he was feeling. But it became a cycle of its own – he had to climb bigger and bigger things in order to keep depression at bay. Which is how he ended up at 27,000 feet on Everest in one of the deadliest storms.

I relate to Beck’s story not because I’ve suffered from depression but because mountains have given me relief from my own psychology. I started climbing in my late 20’s because I was bored after breaking up with a boyfriend and yearning for something bigger. I literally turned the corner on a street one day, Mt. Rainier lorded over my view, as it does so often in Seattle, and I knew I had to climb it.

What is it about climbing that makes it such a relief? For me it’s that when I’m having to work so hard to keep my body safe, my mind finally takes a back seat. When I’ve reduced what I have to do to the simple task of putting one foot in front of another and find a rhythm that works, I relax because I have far fewer choices about what to do or say next. At the same time, the perspective puts my ego into check because I’m no longer the main player in the small stage of my life, I’m a microscopic speck on the enormous stage of nature.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

John Muir

In many senses, climbing was the beginning of my meditation journey. It slows my mind down, it simplifies what I need to do and it puts my ego in its place. To a degree now even walking does that for me when the muscle memory kicks in.

My favorite meditation is one that makes me think back to my climbing experiences. It’s where I feel the weight of everything I’m carrying on my back – the way the shoulder straps dig into my shoulders and the hip belt cinches my gut, the pressure of it all pushing my feet heavily into the ground. And then I take off the metaphorical backpack and sit with it in front of me, emptying out everything I carry one by one onto the ground before me. As I watch myself unload my problems and worries, I get a sense of detachment from them, a space that opens ever so slightly because they have been separated from my back. And then, after a few minutes of unloading, contemplating and breathing, I reload my backpack with only what I need to carry.

I always walk away from that meditation feeling lighter. Like walking and climbing, it gives me a bit of perspective and distance. I still need to return and figure out my problems but I can do it from a more capacious sense.

That happened with Beck Weathers as well. When he returned from Everest, albeit without his toes, nose, most of one arm and the fingers from the other, he was able to deal with his depression more holistically. His story always gives me inspiration – that I can face what’s weighing me down, use the tools I’ve learned from my experience, and maybe even roll it into something hopeful for others.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

John Muir

And so it went the other day with my anxiety – I took it out for a walk and it came back in a much more manageable size. One where I could sit with one thing at a time, hold it in perspective to life and the world and then deal with it in its own rhythm.

I only scarfed down just a little more candy along the way.

I’ve written a post about a different type of letting go on Wise & Shine: Am I Copying? Getting Over Writing Defensiveness

Schools of Thought and Feeling

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“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” – Bruce Lee

I once had a client tell me, with a hint of irritation in his voice, that he believed the schools of today in America were teaching kids to become socialists. There was so much in that sentence to unpack that I didn’t even touch it. But I remembered thinking at the time, that it probably had more to do with his relationship with his kids than anything else.

My kids weren’t school age when my client said that but now that eight-year-old Miss O has a few years in the public school system, it is interesting to notice what has and hasn’t changed since I was a kid. What hasn’t changed is the great teachers and administrators who are dedicated, imaginative, and delightful and somehow make it all work.

What I’ve noticed that has changed since I was young is how much social emotional learning they include. The kids get to school and do their mood meters and they talk about feelings, inclusion, and helping.

My kids seem to love way-back-when stories so the other day I was telling them that I remember when not-littering became a campaign and something punishable by fines. My two delightful young ones were amazed that people thought it was okay to just throw things out a car window when they were done with it.

Four-year-old Mr. D, who is not yet in the public school system, has gone on “garbage walks” since he was two-years-old. The kids would point out garbage and a teacher would pick it up with gloved hands.

So the other day when there was a piece of garbage on the ground, Mr. D pointed it out to me and said, ”It’s not healthy for the earth to eat.”

The other day, Miss O was struggling with what to do next with a project and she suggested, “Instead of erasing unfairness, I could draw fairness.”

All this makes me think that what kids these days are learning in school today, in addition to the three R’s, is to be stewards. Stewards of themselves, the environment, and of others.

(featured image from Pexels)

Comparing Our Differences

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“Confidence isn’t thinking you’re better than anyone else, it’s realizing that you have no reason to compare yourself to anyone else.” – Maryam Hasnaa

This was originally published on 6/15/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

My 6-year-old daughter came home from school the other day and said she had a bad day. She explained saying that a kid on the playground was comparing her. Not understanding, I asked her to say more. She relayed that he was saying, “I can do the monkey bars faster. I can go longer. I can skip more bars.”

Oh, I get it – comparing.

We are all different – so why do we compare? To get some perspective, I turned to research professor Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart. She defines comparison as “Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other – it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out.”

And apparently, we all do comparison: “Researchers Jerry Suls, René Martin, and Ladd Wheeler explain that ‘comparing the self with others, either intentionally or unintentionally, is a pervasive social phenomenon.’”

So we all do comparison but what we have control over is how we let it affect us. I was struck by a comment I heard on a 10 Percent Happier podcast with TV commentator and author Alicia Menendez. She talked about management assessment she once did that measured the difference between who one naturally is with the way one self-presents in the work environment to show how much one is self-correcting. The evaluator said to her “So, you are a very introverted person who is overcompensating to be very extroverted in the environment you are in. You are really tired at the end of the day, aren’t you?”

Changing from who we are is exhausting. Maybe we do it because we compare or maybe we do it because we are self-conscious. When I decided to have kids as a single-person at age 46, I was self-conscious of being different. Not that there aren’t other older, single mothers in the world but because there weren’t any in my direct experience.

Comparison to what I thought was the norm made me feel ashamed. It was only after I knew I didn’t want to pass that on to my children that I started owning my differences. That has freed me to do many other things like the post I wrote last week about how I choose to use the time that I otherwise might spend being in a relationship to listen to podcasts and read great books. We are all different, might as well enjoy it. Reading the research that Brené Brown includes in her book reminds me that I don’t have to teach my children not to compare. I only have to teach them to understand how it affects them.

As Brené says about comparing herself to the swimmer in the lane next to hers, “My new strategy is to look at the person in the lane next to me, and say to myself, as if I’m talking to them, Have a great swim. That way I acknowledge the inevitable and make a conscious decision to wish them well and return to my swim.”

I also written today about how creativity might be one of our biggest assets for our resumes: Creativity as a Job Skill

(featured photo from Pexels)

Life Is An Echo

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“Life is an echo. What you send out — comes back.” – unknown

A couple of weeks ago, my son, four-year-old Mr D, got a new boxing toy, a small punching bag anchored on a vertical stick. We were home alone together when we assembled it and then went a couple of rounds with it.

We took a break in the yard to cool off and play with our dog, Cooper. As we were throwing the ball, I was coaching Mr. D on what he’d say when his eight-year-old sister came home and asked to play with his toy.

“What are you going to say when Miss O asks to box with your toy?” I started.

“Well, ummm, uhhh.” Mr. D stalled

“Say, ‘yes.’” I whispered.

And we went a couple of rounds practicing that which was every bit as hard as actually boxing.

Then Mr. D asked where his shovel was. As I looked in one hidey-hole and then another, he asked, “Want to go find some worms with me?”

“Uhhh,” I stalled.

“Say, ‘yes.’” he whispered.

And I did.

If we ever need a reminder that what we put out in the world comes back to us, just spend time with children.

(featured photo is Mr. D with his boxing toy)

Talk, Talk, Talk

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“We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong here.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

My daughter, Miss O, learned the power of words early on. She started talking at 10 months and it’s been off to the races ever since. Now she’s eight-years-old, and I’ve learned to get worried when she isn’t talking.

One Sunday when it was just the two of us and Miss O was about three-years-old, I was feeling overwhelmed by the constant talking, singing, and narrating. We were sitting and drawing at the dining room table as the last rays of fall afternoon sunshine filtered into the room. I said to Miss O, “Do you think we could just be quiet for 10 minutes?”

Miss O paused for a moment and then said, “Why?”

About a year later, a friend was at our house trying to troubleshoot a problem with his van. Four-year-old Miss O asked him what was happening and he started, “When hot air meets a cold surface and water forms…” She interrupted him and asked, “You mean condensation?”

I confess, I don’t always listen to her every word. But I recently had the honor of editing a podcast that Miss O did with Vicki and me. As I tuned in with ears to make sure the conversation flowed, I was stunned with the perspective of this delightful young person talking with the incredibly interesting and supportive Vicki Atkinson.

Am I biased? No doubt! But most of all what I noticed is that Miss O has learned to use her words well. And she’s found her voice – to express herself, to give voice to her feelings, to convey her delightful enthusiasm, and at the end, to share her delightful glow with everyone around.

Ha – I just realized this post could have been reduced to one sentence. Miss O is on the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast with the always amazing Dr. Vicki Atkinson and me – please listen. Perhaps wordiness runs in the family….

Creating Eyes that See

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“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

This was originally published on 6/29/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

The other day, my 6-year-old daughter and her best friend asked me what an optical illusion is. I didn’t have the Merriam-Webster definition, “something that deceives the eye by appearing to be other than it is” at the tip of my tongue so we talked about examples of when you think you see something but your brain knows it can’t be real or vice versa. I showed them the classic example of the picture that is either the young lady with a necklace or an old lady with a prominent chin.

They were fascinated. But of course this is more than a trick for amusement, it’s one of the pillars of our life. As Albert Einstein said, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is a miracle.”

It reminds me of a person I knew who believed she had to check on everything that someone did for her otherwise she would be cheated. In one memorable instance, she had left her dog with someone who was staying at her house and became convinced the dog sitter wasn’t walking the dog as far as she claimed. So she devised a series of questions to trip up the dog sitter when she picked her up from the airport. What time does the sun rise this time of year? What is the favorite route that you walk with my dog? How many times does my dog poop on her morning walk?

She was convinced that these questions would help her find the TRUTH which was predetermined in her head as a story that the dog sitter didn’t get up as early and walk as far as she thought.

In the meantime, she completely missed that the dog was safe, happy and healthy and that the dog sitter was willing to drive her to/from the airport, that the dog sitter loved to watch movies and also worked from home so that the dog had almost constant companionship while she was gone.

Because none of that mattered if the dog sitter LIED about the morning walk. No gentle reminders from me or anyone else could change the perspective.

This person might be an anomaly in that she didn’t believe anyone, more or less, in her life. She believed that the only reliable person was herself and everything that she got, had, earned was only because of her personal efforts. There was no idea of grace, coincidence, faith, or even luck.

The rest of us are probably not as extreme but I think what Albert Einstein implies is that it’s a way of seeing. We can’t consistently believe that life is completely up to us in one area of our life (work, relationships, money) without it affecting all the others.

We have to believe in miracles to see them. Whatever we have faith in – be it God, the Universe, optimism, magic – will deliver goodness if we develop our ability to discern it. When we open ourselves up to the possibility that miracles happen in our life, it’s amazing to find how many we see.

As an example, my daughter was sad because her best friend, the one that was with her when asking about optical illusions, is moving at the end of the summer. Then as we worked through that reality, she discovered that a family with three kids that she already knows and likes from school happened to move in one block from us. They’d been up the street for 7 months and we hadn’t even realized until one day we saw them on the street. What a gift! The miracle didn’t save us from having to say good-bye to one friend, but instead it was the gift of new friends.

How do you interpret Albert Einstein’s quote? What miracles have you seen lately?

I’ve published a related post on Wise & Shine – Creatively Seeing

(featured photo from Pexels)

Friendship Though the Ages and Stages

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“Well, you can’t make old friends.” – Zadie Smith

Have you thought back to how you survived middle school? I mean, I think it’s safe to assume anyone that is reading this is past the age of 13. I remember that age as being the start of understanding that there was a whole wide world outside of my family and it involved crushes, hopes and dreams, and weird things happening to my body that I didn’t want to talk about with my mom.

Katie. That’s how I made it through middle school. My dearest friend that I’ve known since age seven. She was over at my house yesterday spending time with me, Miss O, Mr. D and Cooper. I list us all out because we all needed time with her.

She reminds me of a line I got from Mark Nepo in the Book of Awakening. In German, the root of the word friendship means place of high-safety. With old friends, I think that might be especially so because they knew us from before we were anything. We had dreams of what we might become, but now that we’ve hit middle life, we’ve cycled through a lot of different ages and stages, and old friends, like Katie have seen it all.

Because to be friends for this long, I don’t think there’s any way to maintain any artifice. We’ve survived the ups and downs of life as well as testing out the waters of how we meet the world. We’ve had to work out whether we are friendly, trustworthy, and kind – and apologize and make amends when we’ve fallen short.

Watching Katie with my family, I realize that there’s an associative property of friendship. That my little ones trust her as much as I do. Probably because they can sense that ease that comes with old friends. Well, that and because Katie is simply amazing – present, smart, funny, kind, and encouraging.

I think back to my naivety and hopefulness in middle school. It was confusing and emotional as we worked out what came next in life. I’m less naïve now as I know that middle life also brings challenges with family, friends, aging, and loss. But I’m still quite hopeful – probably because I’ve been lucky enough to have a Katie, then and now.

(featured photo is me (left) and Katie (right) – maybe in middle school?)

In-Person Meetings and AI

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“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” – Jean Baudrillard

For this week, I’ve actually had to leave the house to go to work. It’s made me realize how much technology has changed our lives. I’ve worked remotely for years so somehow it was lost on me how different it is to have to walk out the door every morning, until I experienced a stab of anxiety at the beginning of this week.

Especially with two kids and a dog, the number of things I had to plan for was enormous. Knowing that I can dial-in to a meeting even if any one of the three is sick is an amazing benefit. I’ve been spoiled not having to plan transportation and care outside of their schools for my three when I work from home.

But this week I’ve been attending a Microsoft conference that is here in Seattle. No surprise – but the most predominant topic is Artificial Intelligence (AI). [Is it somewhat ironic that as I started to type Art…that Word suggested Artificial Intelligence to fill in?]

Microsoft has made something like a $20 billion investment in AI. The conference was awash with examples of all the things we can do with AI. I will never claim to be a prognosticator, but as someone that’s been in the computer consulting field for 30 years, it’s interesting to puzzle through the application of this technology. All of the below is just my opinion so take it for what it’s worth.

Fine line between helpful and creepy

The most recognizable use of AI is in natural language search. We can type in or say search terms and Bing (Microsoft’s search product) will return results that are (hopefully) right on target for what you want. I question whether it’s helpful to have that abstraction from where the data comes from which makes it harder to verify the veracity of the source of the research.

And then there’s a line between helpful and creepy. The other day a search result popped up about whether to store your open cheese block in a Ziploc bag. It was something I’d recently pondered but hadn’t done any research on. It must have been just a coincidence? Either way, I refused to click on the result – it was too creepy.

Fine line between cool and useful

I was talking about AI with a Microsoft program manager that was in the booth next to me. As we talked through some of the examples, he offered “that’s there’s also a fine line between cool and useful.” All the prototypes and fun demos that have been shown, there’s a cool factor – that still leaves most people scratching their heads over the utility. No doubt humans will figure out how to leverage it but for now, it’s still an idea that is not very real-world.

We’re not getting replaced

This brings me full-circle to the start of the post and why I’ve been leaving the house every day. Because there’s no substitute for in-person relationships. Meeting others, reading body language, having collaborative conversations – there’s no short-cut for that. Even online there’s a palpable difference between a real conversation and a bot supported one.

As I’ve been away from my computer this week, there’s no AI I can set to read my favorite blogs and leave meaningful comments. Not to mention that I wouldn’t get the benefit of reading them. [Yes, this is a roundabout apology for being behind on my blog reading.] So for many reasons, I’m looking forward to staying home, sitting on my couch, and catching up.

In a timely but also ironic way, we’ve started using Otter AI to provide transcripts of our Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast. See how it does by visiting our latest podcast: Episode 44: Hot Tips for Writing about Family With Brian Hannon

(featured photo from Pexels)

They Go Together Like Ra Ma La Ma Ka Dinga Kiding a Dong

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“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” – Rumi

To whoever thought of building a kid’s hair salon in the neighborhood toy store – wow, you are brilliant.

The other day, Mr. D needed to get his hair cut. So Miss O and I accompanied him to the back of the toy store so he could climb in to the fire engine shaped seat to hang out with “his best friend,” also known as Jenny, the stylist.

I sat on the couch in the toy store positioned just outside the salon while Miss O, and Mr D, when the haircut was done, roamed around to look at everything on the shelves. I was reading my book, but really was mostly reading the people.

I’ll start with my kids. Eight-year-old Miss O knew within minutes that she wanted slime and was willing to spend her own money on a second slime because it was worth it to her to have two fancy slimes, even though it was over the budget I had given her. She had a full story of why each one was important and how the characters portrayed for the slimes related to things she’d learned at school. In other words, she had an endless monologue for her shopping experience.

Four-year-old Mr. D roamed the store for an hour looking at everything, playing with display items, enjoying the experience but eventually rejecting each toy as not the right thing. Mr. D wasn’t aware of budget and so it wasn’t price that was informing his decisions. He either had something similar at home or it didn’t sing to him.

But he did pair up with Mikey who was about his same age. Mikey had $10 to spend which at a toy store in this day and age, doesn’t buy much. He was interested in a police car, and the small ones they had didn’t match his idea. But he didn’t complain about that, he just enlisted Mr. D in his help to find more options.

And then there was Teddy. I’d guess Teddy was halfway between Miss O and Mr D age-wise, probably 6-ish. He was playing with my kids at the train table by the couch I was sitting on. He was declaring all the demo trains were his, and might have taken a thing or two directly from the other kids. Miss O was facilitating play and just shrugged her shoulders and accommodated him, somehow sensing it was more important to him than to anyone else.

His mom was sitting next to me tried to get Teddy to modify his behavior. Seeing it was okay with the kids, she sighed, and said to me that Teddy was emotionally fragile at that moment. It was his dad’s birthday and he was having trouble sharing the spotlight. He’d had quite a few hard “no’s” to things he’d wanted that morning.

Holy cow! Great people watching. Each of the characters mapped to people I’ve known in my life and their approaches. Disappointment, idealism, pragmatism, story-telling, alliances. Yes, bravo to whoever thought of a salon (and couches) in a toy store.

(featured photo from Pexels)