Tag: Lifestyle

The Return Trip

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“You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain.” – Miyamoto Musashi

I was walking on the beach right at twilight on the first night on my mini vacation on Whidbey Island. I walked past a shell and went about five paces before I registered that I wanted to pick it up. I turned around to look for it and couldn’t find it – the tide line looked completely different.

It reminded me of a lesson I learned climbing Mt. Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico. My guide friend, Phil, brought along a roll of crepe paper – lightweight, colorful, and paper, not plastic. At every decision point, Phil tied a small bit of crepe paper to a tree branch or stick.

When I asked for more detail about route-finding, Phil told me that when we make the choices about which fork to take and think we’ll remember, we often forget to turn around and look at what it will look like coming back. He pointed out that the light, the contrast with the surroundings, the angle, it all looks different on the return. What we think is memorable going one way looks completely different when we turn around.

This rings true for me in life as well. The choices I’ve made on the route I’ve taken through life – the scary, vulnerable, or leap-of-faith ones – they look different when I look back at them. Sometimes the return view has me asking why it took me so long while other times I just want to get on my knees and pray in gratitude that I choose the way I did.

The past few months I’ve been struggling with charging my iPhone. Every time I went to charge the phone, I’d have to fiddle with it for upwards of five minutes to get the plug in just right so that it could charge. Then I’d carefully pin the cord in its position with a book so that nothing would move. Then when it was charging, I’d try not to use it, or if I ABSOLUTELY had to, touch it so tenderly as not to disturb any part of the delicate configuration.

Finally this past week, I couldn’t get the cord in to charge it at all. In the middle of my workday, I just had to suck it up and go to the Apple store. It took about 20 minutes of waiting but the helpful tech dug out a small particle jammed in the charging port and now it takes all of 5 seconds to get the plug in. During the time I waited, I realized that I’d avoided doing it not only because it was time that I felt I didn’t have but also because I was scared the news would be that I had to buy a new phone.

Yes, things look different on the return trip. It something that I’m reminded of when I’m deciding something – that there’s another perspective I can’t even see yet, but as soon as I decide and move on, I’ll get the benefit of looking back. Knowing that helps me to keep fluid.

Like when I went back to find the shell, it took me some time to get adjusted to the new perspective, but I eventually found it.

This is a sister post to A Brief Interlude Provided by Nature on the Heart of the Matter blog.

The Art of Packing

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“Strip away the non-essential, and the essential will reveal itself.” – Tao Te Ching

Mr. D has been really excited about vacation, or as he says it “bacation.” For several days now he’s been piling rocks into the car for us to take TO the beach. He tells me, “This is a rock for vacation water.” Also, in his suitcase – two pairs of pjs, a robe, three books, and a toy boat.

What’s not in his suitcase? Undies, socks, or shoes. But hey, he’s only three-years-old.

Miss O at seven-years-old is a little more practical. She’s got her toiletries, two pairs of pajamas, some skorts and tank tops, her iPad, and a lot of room for stuffies.

Also, no undies, socks, or shoes.

Packing fascinates me. Mostly because it can be so illuminating to see what’s top of the list. Like on mine is a scrub brush for dishes because we’ve rented this AirBnB before and they have no tools for scrubbing dishes. Also, undies and socks because last time I was so focused on packing those for everyone else that I forgot my own.

Isn’t that terribly utilitarian? What about remembering to not bring my busy-ness? And speaking of things to leave at home: my penchant for schedules, the belief that I have to get everything done on my to-do list, and my expectation that I’ll time while on vacation to catch up on some emails I missed. Instead, I can have room to bring an expanded sense of wonder.

My inspiration for this is from one of my favorite meditations from my meditation teacher, Deirdre. With our eyes closed, she leads us through feeling the pack on our backs as we hike down a trail. We feel the breeze tickle across our skin, the sun peak through the trees to create occasional warm patches as we glide along the path. But then, when we are a couple of minutes in, we realize that the pack on our backs feels heavier than the water and snack we put in there for the trip.

Deirdre offers us the opportunity to sit down and unpack what we don’t need. For me that is when I get a good look at the things I carry along without thinking about it: the worries, the hidden expectations, the weight of past failures, the anxiety about where I’m going in the big picture. Then, as I repack my backpack, I can decide which one of those things, if any, are worth bringing along.

To me it’s an exercise of intention. It’s okay if I want to bring along whatever agenda I have for a vacation as long as I’m doing it purposefully. As soon as I say that, I know that I don’t want to. As much as I gently tease my kids for what they don’t bring along, it also reminds me that they might have the right spirit.

When I was coordinating with my friend, Eric, when we should meet up to leave for “bacation,” he offered we better meet earlier. Because after hearing what Mr. D was packing to bring to the beach, he quipped it might take him some time to get his driftwood in the car…

Useful at Any Age

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“A lifetime is so precious, and so brief, and can be used so beautifully.” – Pema Chödrön

A while back, Miss O asked me if teenagers wanted to be little kids. When I said I didn’t believe so, she explained the question – if she, at age seven, wants to be a teenager, and her aunt in her 50’s wants to be younger, then what age do teenagers want to be?

I recently learned from Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic, that it is fairly common, especially in people over 40-years-old, to think of themselves as an age different than their years. This concept has the name “subjective age.” In her piece, The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, she explains that, “Adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.” People under 25 tend to think of themselves as older.

The article is delightfully filled with data, anecdotes, and links to research, as one would expect from The Atlantic and Jennifer Senior. A few things stood out to me:

David C. Rubin, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke, has found “the adults have an outsize number of memories from the ages of about 15 to 25. They call this phenomenon ‘the reminiscence bump.’ (This is generally used to explain why we’re so responsive to the music of our adolescence)”

Also, the gap of perceived age is greater in Western cultures than in Asia or Africa, or places where elders are more respected.

And one of Jennifer Senior’s conclusions about this mental trick really stuck with me, “If you mentally view yourself as younger—if you believe you have a few pivots left—you still see yourself as useful; if you believe that aging itself is valuable, an added good, then you also see yourself as useful.”

The three ways of seeing our subjective age: wanting to be older like Miss O does, seeing ourselves as younger than our actual years, or liking the age we’re at because we’re seen as respected and valuable, share the common ground of wanting to have agency and feel generative. It reminds me of my dad whose motto of service to others was “I just want to be useful.”

May we all feel useful, at whatever age we believe ourselves to be.

For a related post, about the perspective gained when I met someone that reminded me of who I was 15 years ago, check out my Heart of the Matter post: Better Off Without

(featured photo from Pexels)

Connecting Through Stories

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“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde

At night after we’re done reading, I’ve been telling my kids stories from my life. It feels like a lot of work sometimes after a long day, but it also has this strange power of connecting past to present.

Some of their favorite stories are about Simon the bad cat. He was a cat that a neighbor left with me when she moved to Hawaii. Before he was my cat, he’d wait outside my house in the morning for me to take my 150 pound mastiff for a walk, jump out of the bushes, playfully smack my dog on the rump and then walk with us for 12 blocks.

Suffice it to say, he was a character perfectly made for bedtime stories. He got into all sorts of trouble – he’d break into other people’s houses, get stuck, and he fought with other cats. One time he must have ended up with a tooth or a claw stuck in the area between his shoulder blades because it abscessed and the vet had to do surgery to drain it. Simon died on the operating table and they had to do kitty CPR on him. It worked and he sprang back to his adventurous life.

There was one neighbor, Steve, who particularly hated Simon. One day when Steve was showing the new tenants of the duplex he lived in the shared basement laundry room space, he was telling them something like, “Whatever you do, close the door because there’s this terrible cat that comes in here if you don’t.” The new tenants asked what the cat looked like and as Steve described Simon, they pointed to the shelf behind Steve’s shoulder, “Oh, you mean that cat right there?” Simon had snuck in to listen to Steve’s whole speech.

When Steve worked on bicycles in his front yard, Simon would memorize where everything was laid out. And if Steve moved something or added a part, Simon would pee on it. It drove Steve crazy – but also fascinated him that the cat was that smart…and that bad.

Surprisingly, given all his dangerous antics, Simon lived to a ripe old age of 19 year old and died right after Miss O turned 3 years old. When we got the new cat, we just added an “e” to Simon so that Simone could share his Xmas stocking (always filled with coal of course). The quote for this post is a little tongue-in-cheek but I admit I felt a little relief when Simon went to Cat Heaven that I wouldn’t have to be apologizing for his antics any more.

Steve, the neighbor that hated Simon, has also moved on. He no longer lives on our block but must be in the area because I see him from time to time.

After several nights of these Simon the bad cat stories, one morning last week the kids and I were stopped at a stop sign on our drive to school when a man rode by the front of our car on a bike. It was Steve from the Simon stories! I yelled, “That’s Steve.”

We laughed all the way to school.

If you have a moment, I have another fun story from my past, a climbing story on the Heart of the Matter blog this morning, On The Way To the Top

(featured photo is mine)

Looking in Through the Sliding Glass Door

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“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” – Nelson Mandela

The other night, I was standing at the kitchen sink putting the final dishes for the day in the dishwasher when my kids walked into the kitchen after bedtime. I caught sight of them – seven-year-old Miss O in the lead hugging her stuffy close and three-year-old Mr. D seeking a little comfort by standing in the shadow of his sister and wearing his little dinosaur shorty pajamas. I had to turn back to the sink for a moment to try to put my game face on. It was a clear violation of bedtime rules and I needed to try to assemble some sort of serious countenance because seeing them quietly standing there had totally melted my heart.

It was like I caught a vision of the reverse of Brené Brown’s sliding glass door moments. She describes those as the small glimpses where you see the life you could have on the other side and have to decide whether or not to cross the threshold.

In this case, it was like I was on the outside looking back in at the life that I created for myself when I made the choice to have kids. I had a fleeting flash of what walking through that sliding glass door into this life has delivered.

I saw my life has been redefined to drop most standards of cleanliness and order, and all attempts at perfection. Instead it has become a continuous re-sorting of my priorities so that I’m trying to do what is important in the moment. And in the shuffling, I’ve come to discover that I can repeatedly choose my kids, myself, and family instead of arbitrary external markers of success.

The glimpse let me see that I’ve gotten better at “being” instead of “doing.” My kids are a lot of work and in a strange paradox they have taught my how to let work go – to relax and slow down. I get so much less done – but I laugh so much more while I do it. And when I don’t laugh, when I’m all bound up and tight – these two are my sanity check to reground myself in why.

I glimpsed how the power of believing this all is my choice has carried me through some really tough times of sickness, sleeplessness, and carrying too much weight. Simply knowing that I chose this has given me strength I didn’t know I had before.

I saw my transformation to believe in miracles – because I’m living with two. And my kids continue to be miracles long after they were born because they’ve become my teachers. I thought I would be the teacher and they would be the learners – only to find out that I’m the one learning about how to have a meaningful and authentic life. Those lessons come from the myriad of interactions that we have had to crouch and look at bugs, stuff our pockets full of rocks, snuggle together to talk about feelings, quietly draw and color together, run excitedly to the beach on vacation, fold into each other while reading books, lash out in anger at boundaries, fear, and discomfort, and heal together holding hands when we’ve talk/acted/laughed it out.

By becoming their lightening rod for big emotions, I have learn to cultivate my own emotional intelligence about the weather inside me. They’ve taught me to choose joy. Not happiness, but joy!

In that moment, I caught a sense of how everything that transpired before I had kids has come together to help – my love of outdoors, my family, my gaining a sense of going with the flow, the endurance training. And most of all, my faith, and that has the goodness of my dad all wrapped up in it too.

I saw that “me” had been completely replaced with “we.” That I have given up the ability to make unilateral decisions and in return have been gifted with a life filled with heart.

From all of this, I was left with a heart melting feeling. Seeing my kids both as the precious, earnest, and delightful little ones that they are and the courageous, free, and integrated people they are becoming. And seeing myself as the same.

After being gifted with this glimpse of things, I finally turned to my kids to hear them out as to why they were out of bed. They’d been fighting and needed a referee. My little flash of perspective helped me choose not to be irritated or impatient but instead just listen. I told them I loved them and sent them back to bed.

My post on Wise & Shine today is about my mom’s choices: The Choices We Make: My Mom the Spy

Leaning in To Letting Go

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“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts

It seems like for every lesson I’ve learned in my life, I can trace it back to a particular story. Is that a sign of middle age? In this case, I’m thinking of the lesson of learning to let go and a consulting project I did for Microsoft about 25 years ago.

My colleague, Bill, and I were assigned by the consulting firm for whom we worked to write a white paper for a client at Microsoft. It was the late 90’s and Microsoft was in that phase where it was growing so fast that there wasn’t a lot of process but instead a lot of hard-working but perhaps egomaniacal cowboys.

Our assignment was to write this paper about how a group of these cowboys rolled out a new email software at Microsoft. Bill and I were experienced at deploying that software and had published a book about it so theoretically, this project should have been a snap.

After interviewing the key players, we drafted the paper. They hated it. We revised it. They still hated it. They would call us to meetings to tell us in detail how much they hated it. The problem wasn’t the technology – it was that we didn’t get the tone right. We didn’t think they were as cool as they thought they were so we missed the mark over and over again.

I can’t remember how many versions of that paper we wrote. Maybe five? But after torturing us for a while, they finally fired us and wrote it themselves. It hurt. I felt like I’d been at a rodeo and had hung on way too long.

I went on to learn that lesson about letting go in many ways as a consultant. I’ve found out that no matter what kind of a job that you are doing, if the person that hired you is replaced by someone else, you will most likely get replaced too.

I’ve hung on too long in those cases as well – trying to pretend it’s not going to happen. I’ve been sure I can make the new person pick me, and like a puppy at the pound, try to do any number of tricks to prove I’m likeable and reliable.

I’ve also done the opposite and just walked away when the staffing changes happen. Finally, I’ve figured out that when the changing of the guard happens, I say, “Here’s what I’m working on. I will continue to support it in whatever way works and if you prefer to have someone else do it, I will facilitate that in the smoothest way possible.”

It’s so natural to want to cling when things are coming to an end. Sometimes, it really hurts and is scary. I’ve found that acknowledging that, feeling it all the way through, helps. Because projects, groups, and companies, like life, have a cycle. I’ve come to learn that to stay loose is the best way to ride the current. That way, I’m ready to lean in to the next thing that comes to fill the opening. Because that happens too.

Leaning in is just one of the things I’ve learned to do the easier way. For a mountain climbing story that taught me the difference between doing things the easy way versus the hard way, check out my piece on The Heart of the Matter: Doing It The Hard Way Or the Easy Way

(featured photo from Pexels)

Cultivating Abundance and Perspective

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“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” – Rumi

When I wrote the post the other day about The Games We Play, Jane Fritz (of the delightful, informative, and inspiring Robby Robin’s Journey blog) posed the question of why kids act that way. We bandied about some ideas like competition, and while I don’t know the answer, it made me observe my kids a little more closely to find some clues.

My completely unscientific survey of my little family, and I’m including myself in these results, reminded me of a couple things – that we don’t come hard-wired with a sense of abundance and that it takes some work to see a bigger picture.

The method that works again and again for me on both these points is to be grateful. And I say again and again because somehow I forget and have to find my way back to my gratitude practice. This makes me think of a quip that Brené Brown made on the subject – that having yoga clothes in her closet didn’t qualify to make her a yogi and neither does knowing the concept of gratitude make her grateful – it has to be practiced.

So, needing to cultivate the feeling of abundance and perspective, here’s my gratitude list today:

Let’s start with the basics – that I’m awake, alive, and typing this.
For the science and people that remind me that it’s also good to write things out longhand sometimes.

I’m grateful that spring has come to our neck of the woods to warm my bones.

That I got to sit in the warm evening last night and watch my kids in their uninhibited nakedness run around the back yard and squirt each other with (warm) water guns.
That they didn’t squirt me.
That when they need a break, they run into my arms, wet, out of breath, and loving life.

For the smell of BBQs coming out for the first time in Spring and wafting into my yard.

That I was able to do yoga this morning and since I was alone, groan and moan through all the tight places in my body.
That doing yoga reminded me of how grateful I am for my body that I often forget to thank for all that it does well.

For my neighbor that has planted an incredible garden of tulips and daffodils so that I slow down and enjoy it every time we go past.

For the neighbor that surprised me with a loving touch on my back at Costco and asked me to grab something from the top shelf. And for the warmth lingered long after the conversation ended.

For the warmth that exists between people.

For friends, near and far, that share their stories and lives with me.
That I get to talk with them about the things I haven’t even begun to process and then receive their wisdom.
That I’ve gotten old enough to be able to receive wisdom.

For the quiet feel of my house early in the morning.
For the way the glow of the candles I light each morning as I meditate makes me feel lit from within.
That I’m able to find peace at least once or twice a day.

For words like momentous and singular that wake me up to my experience.

That words come pretty easily for me.

For the tenor and vibration of male voices, the light touch of female voices, and the joy in young voices.
For my five senses that vie for attention and also allow me to shut my eyes and open my ears for a different experience.

For old friends that remind me of my journey through this life.
For new friends that come with that opportunity of discovery.
For the way we are all connected.

For the joy on my daughter’s face when she learned to whistle this week.

That I can ask Alexa to play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah anytime I want.

For Jack Canfora’s gratitude list: Dear Lord, Not Another Post on This Blog About Gratitude and  WritingfromtheheartwithBrian’s 100 Things I Love that inspire me.

For the opportunities that I have to keep growing.

For the technology that allowed me and Vicki to have a podcast conversation with blogger, Brenda Harrison, from three different timezones and locations and then post it so that others can be delighted and inspired by her energy and enthusiasm. (Episode 15 of the Sharing the Heart the Matter podcast – listen and subscribe!)

That this blogging journey has allowed me to meet and converse with so many interesting people from all over.

For the hour I’ve spent writing this list and that the power of gratitude will touch me every time I go back to edit it and extend with each comment.

(featured photo from Pexels)