Tag: positivity

Proving the Positive

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“One moment can change a day. One day can change a life and one life can change the world.” – Buddha

The other day I took my kids to an outdoor shopping center. They’d been excited for three days because I said we could go there to visit the one store that makes honest to goodness cotton candy. Not the stuff you can buy prepackaged on shelves in the grocery store but a machine that spins a cone of it. I don’t like cotton candy but my daughter wanted to try it so I agreed she could if we got the real stuff.

On the way to the cotton candy machine, my kids were playing in a fountain and my daughter put her face down to lick the water. “Arghh” I said, “Don’t drink the water. It isn’t treated and probably has dirt, bird poop and maybe worse. It could make you sick.” She stopped but two minutes later she made the same motion and I had to stop her again. “Listen” I said “I know as a kid you are programmed to test the limits, but this is one where you need to believe me. Even if you don’t drink it, your little brother is going to see you, imitate you and he might actually drink it. So you are just going to have to trust me and not drink it.”

I could see the wheels of her 6-year-old brain working. She was thinking something like
“I’ve never tried it so I’ve never gotten sick. How can I know what Mom is saying is right?”

There’s no way to prove a negative. If we don’t do something and it the consequence is avoided, how do we know what didn’t happen to us?  I heard an interview once with Matthew Weiner, the creator of the TV series Mad Men, and he said the show’s driving philosophy was actions have consequences. But what about inaction?

What if we don’t do the work to deal with our internal BS so we can see others more clearly?

What if we don’t write the letter to a sick friend?

What if we don’t go out of our way to compliment or help someone?

What if we don’t put the grocery cart back in the return slot at the store?

What if we just aimed for a grade C life? Not great, not bad, just average. Would anything happen to us?

Perhaps the consequence for inaction is nothing. Nothing exciting happens, nothing revelatory occurs, no random goodness pops up, nobody remembers us. Nothing. We aren’t a hero – just a zero.

On the other hand, we’ve done acts of kindness and felt the afterglow, we’ve made the effort to reach out to friends and experienced the relationships that carry us through tough times, and we’ve done the work to clean our internal windows because we see how more light gets in. In addition to these rewards, we’ve heard the thinkers throughout human history telling us to do our work:

“Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.” – Plato

“Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do well.” – Minor Myers, Jr.

“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or the life of another.” – Helen Keller

We all have our different ways of doing our best and our personal limits. But part of the we likely do it is because our mom, dad or someone else with authority told us and we believed them. Like with my daughter, there’s no way to prove the negative – what would happen if we did nothing, so we take the advice and continue to try. Thank goodness for that.

Just Say Yes

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“Respond to every call that excites your spirit.” – Rumi

A couple of months ago when my high school friend generously offered me and my family a free place to stay in Vail, Colorado for 4 nights, I didn’t think about it much and just said “yes.” Now my little family and my friend Eric have made our way here. It took us 10 hours of car, bus, airplane, bus, and car transport to get here but we made it.

Then we walked in to a place so fancy I have trouble believing it’s a vacation place. If all the coffee mugs match and the appliances are not cast offs from some other home, it somehow doesn’t match with my image of vacation accommodations. But I have proof that we are on vacation, because I’m saying “yes” to most everything.

“Mom, can we stay up late?” – YES

“Can we make s’mores out by the fire pit tonight?” – YES

“Will you go swimming with us in an outdoor (heated) swimming pool when it’s 50 degrees out?” – YES

“Can I put this dirty brown snow in my mouth?” – NO

Okay, so I’m not saying yes to everything. But I’m finding that this adventure is all about living life without the rules and schedules that mark life at home.

And the effect has been to shake off the sliver of patina that grows between our hearts and living on a regular basis. Getting everything done in a day means keeping a bit of wildness in check and not listening to where our adventurous souls want to go.

Now we have a couple more days of leaving behind the rules and finding our natural rhythm close to nature and close to each other. As long as it doesn’t break any matching coffee mugs, I’m up for saying “yes” for just about anything today.

What are you saying “yes” to today?

The Best Kept Secrets are Boring

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I find meditation hard to write about. Even as a cornerstone of my life and day, it seems so hard to describe sitting still in an engaging manner. So I’m feeling gratified that I managed to write a post about meditation for my Pointless Overthinking post this week. Here’s how it starts:

At a meditation retreat I attended a few years ago, the leader off-handedly told a story about a moment when she was doing a large group meditation practice with the renowned meditation teacher Jack Kornfield.  The six of us sitting around laughed politely at her description of 500 people doing a slow walking meditation practice at the Seattle Center while a group of kids right next to them were playing a dodge ball game so that the meditators were occasionally getting beaned by rubber balls. But the truth of the matter is that meditation stories aren’t very interesting – even to other meditators.

More of this post at Pointless Overthinking

It’s a Sign

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“If you were waiting for a sign, this is it.” – unknown

It seems like we’ve had an outbreak of creative energy into our signage in Seattle lately. I’ve noticed so many fun and inspiring signs and they have me thinking about our personal sphere of influence.

We all get our space to write our message – maybe it’s within our family, or a blog, or a sandwich sign. We can update that message as often as we want. And we’ll never exactly know what passers-by are influenced by that sign. We can make people laugh, think, cringe or cry. We can inspire fear or faith.

The impact of the sign might vary by how many people drive by or if anyone is paying attention. But our work is to know that our lives are our message: we channel our creativity and essence into the message we are broadcasting every day.

So, here’s my sign for today:

I see you.
Blink if you’re awesome.
Now believe it!

What’s your sign?

Upward Spiral

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“Your ability to understand and empathize with others depends mightily on having a steady diet of positivity resonance, as do your potentials for wisdom, spirituality, and health.” – Barbara Frederickson

On Monday Mr D and I went to the grocery store between dropping Miss O at school and dropping him at daycare. While its our special time together, I also love to get some things done and he gets to ride in an elevator so it works all around.

As we were going down a narrow aisle, two boys from the nearby middle school or high school passed us and I thought to myself about the one with the blue hair, “What a nice kid!” I can’t put my finger on exactly what he did – maybe it was the way he looked me in the eye or moved his body to the side to give us extra space, but it was a noticeably pleasant passing.

Two mornings later, we were in the same store, doing the same thing when we came upon the blue haired boy in the self-checkout section. He was asking the attendant to cancel his purchase because he didn’t have enough money. But before they could do that, I stepped across and put my credit card in to pay for the $5.46 purchase. I suspect the boy had $5 and hadn’t counted on the extra cost.

He thanked me, no big deal, and went on his way with his friend. It was a beautiful full circle moment.

It feels like several things I’ve read and listened to lately have had a similar theme – the science of how much our bodies respond to the people around us, even strangers at the grocery store. That our nervous systems are wired to pick up signals from others. The more that we focus our minds on what our bodies already know which is that even our small connections to other people matter, we create an upward spiral of positive resonance.

With the mask mandate lifted in my state so that I see more faces, it feels like I’ve been noticing so many delightful moments of connections with strangers. It’s amazing how wonderful they feel when I make an effort to notice them, recount them to others or remember them and feel the little zing again.

So I pass this one on to you and the upward spiral of positive resonances continues!

(featured photo is of Mr D in a grocery store at a younger age)

Crossing the Chasm

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“Beautiful days do not come to you, you must walk towards them.” – Rumi

Yesterday was the first day that my daughter could be in school without a mask on. I found it to be a trepidatious experience. As a single, working parent, one of my biggest concerns is for school to be able to continue in-person. If I had to send my child in a full haz-mat suit, I would happily comply.

But broader than that, now that our state mask mandate has ended, is the question of whether I would continue to wear a mask when going into a store or resume activities like an in-person meditation class now that we seem to be transitioning to endemic mode from pandemic mode.

I’m not an epidemiologist so I don’t have an authoritative answer on mask wearing so I’m happy to follow their advice. But some of this return to normalcy feels like taking a big step to cross over the chasm.

Crossing over the chasm makes me think of some of the scariest things I’ve had to jump over or traverse when I was climbing mountains – like crevasses on Mt. Rainier. In most cases, I was lucky enough to have traversed them the first time going up the mountain in the dark. That way I couldn’t see the pit we were walking over on horizontal ladders with some plywood on them while wearing crampons our on boots which made the balance on top of metal spikes feel even more precarious. (See featured photo of my friend preparing to do this).

When I saw the full scale of what we had to do to cross back over in the light of day, that ladder was between me and the parking lot. That I had something to get back to was big motivation to conquer the fear and discomfort of crossing over.

Looking for the lure to other side of going back to pre-COVID practices and it reminds me of a Ten Percent Happier podcast that I heard with Professor Barbara Frederickson about positivity resonance. Our bodies and minds benefit greatly every time we experience a positive emotion in concert with another human. It could be as simple as a smile exchanged at the grocery store or being interested in the same topic with another person.

The more of these positive resonance interactions we have, the more we are buoyed by them and the benefits extend to our creativity, openness, willingness to get out of bed in the morning and on and on. Her two caveats for these to be possible – we have to feel safe and we have to be face-to-face. (She did say we can get somewhat of a boost on screen or over the phone but it’s harder).

There is a boy in my daughter’s class that she is particularly fond of. In Kindergarten, he was one of the two and a half boyfriends she’d told everyone about. (The half boyfriend talked too much to be a full one). Miss O was so excited yesterday to go to school to see his face which she has only really seen fully at his birthday party without a mask on. That in and of itself helped me get over my fear of this new phase of our public school lives.

May we all reap the benefits of more positive resonance.

Out in the Open

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

Last night we sat on a picnic blanket eating our umpteenth meal outside and on the go, I marveled that my kids rarely fuss when we are outside. It reminds me of a story I once heard about a Hindu sage and his apprentice.

The apprentice was constantly complaining so the sage put a handful of salt in a glass of water and said, “drink the water.” The apprentice took a drink and when the master asked how it tasted, the apprentice said, “Bitter.” Then the master took a handful of salt and put it in a lake. He asked the apprentice to drink from the lake and when the master asked how it tasted the apprentice said, “Fresh.” The master then said, “Be the lake, not the glass.”

Sitting on the picnic blanket with my kids leaning against me, a gentle breeze keeping us cool, looking up at the vivid blue sky, it was easy to be the lake. Reminded me of Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.” It must be why God made summer. Having these times to practice easy living and the expansive view makes it easier to remember being the lake for all the rest.