Tag: vacation

Life is A Puzzle

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“Learn how to see, realize everything connects to everything else.” – Leonardo da Vinci

We did a few puzzles in the past couple of weeks while we were on vacation at the beach. Mostly Miss O and I chipped away at them with occasional assists from Mr. D and friends that came up to visit.

Five things I noticed about how doing a puzzle is like life. Or how life is like a puzzle.

  1. When you first sit down, all the pieces look the same and it feels impossible. The puzzle doesn’t start itself. Having an approach like turning all the pieces right side up and putting together the border pieces together makes it feel doable.
  2. You don’t find a piece unless you look. Sure, every once in a while you might get lucky and find something that fits as you walk by. But mostly, you have to be in the game if you want to make a match.
  3. There are many ways to find a piece – by color, by shape, by content. This reminds me of perspective and how we all see things differently.
  4. You can’t make something fit no matter how much you want it to. It goes easier when you honor the “no’s” in life.
  5. There’s nothing like the feeling of slotting in the last piece. But you can relish the satisfaction of connecting any two pieces if you aren’t too much in a hurry to get to the big picture. Enjoy the little moments.

I keep learning that playing IS life. It seems like we are just spending idle time but really we are gaining perspective on everything else. Because at least for me, those moments when you see the big picture help to inspire the awe in the everyday.

Just like the photo on the front of the puzzle box helps when putting it together. Right?

(featured photo is mine)

You can find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wynneleon/ and Instagram @wynneleon

I host the How to Share podcast, a podcast about collaboration – in our families, friendships, at work and in the world.

I also co-host the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast, an author, creator and storytelling podcast with the amazing Vicki Atkinson.

Planning: The Vacation Edition

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“Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.” – Winston Churchill

Miss O has been trying to predict the things she’ll tell her kids she didn’t have when she was young.

After watching a video and wishing she could smell what the person was holding up to the screen, eight-year-old Miss O said, “Someday I’ll be telling my kids that back in the day, we couldn’t smell our videos.”

Hey, it’s as good as anything I could come up with. In fact, I’m a terrible prognosticator. But I’m pretty good at figuring out a plan for things as they pop up.

Which made the podcast conversation Vicki and I had with blogger, writer, and planner, Brian Hannon, (Writing from the Heart with Brian) even more fun. Brian told us about how he plans family trips. He comes up with solid options and then his fellow travelers enthusiastically respond.

Well, that’s the idea at least. So, we talked about what it actually looks like to be a planner who is coaxing everyone along.

Brian brought forward the beautiful sense of calm that comes with having something on the horizon to look forward to. And we talked about how to blend planning and spontaneity.

This is a great podcast episode for the beginning of summer. Brian’s fantastic story-telling sparks our juices for how to enjoy our planned and unplanned vacations!

So I know you’ll enjoy the scenic and beautiful places we go when we share the power of story.

Here’s a sneak peek – you’ll love it! But don’t lean in – our videos don’t have any smell…yet!

Search (and subscribe!) for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts OR Listen to it from your computer on Anchor Episode 73: Planning It Out with Brian Hannon

Or subscribe to our YouTube channel to see a video clip of each story: @SharingtheHeartoftheMatter.

Links for this Episode:

Episode 73: Planning It Out with Brian Hannon on Anchor

Two Kinds of People by Brian Hannon

Brian’s blog: Writing from the Heart with Brian

Vicki’s personal blog: Victoria Ponders

Vicki’s recently released book: Surviving Sue

Wynne’s book about her beloved father: Finding My Father’s Faith

Other podcast episodes featuring Brian Hannon:

Episode 58: Creative Heart with Brian Hannon

Episode 44: Hot Tips for Writing About Family with Brian Hannon

Episode 34: How to Write Family Narratives with Brian Hannon

Episode 17: Building a Base with Brian Hannon

Unstructured Flow

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“To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of things that are happening inside of you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

My kids and I on vacation this week at a beautiful spot on Whidbey Island – one of my favorite places in all the world and only a couple of hours away from home. We’ve rented a place right on the beach and it is stunning. I’m typing this on a crisp summer morning sitting at the picnic table on our patio. It’s an extremely low tide so one of the local herons is fishing in a tide pool 100 yards front of me. The morning is so calm that I can see the shadow of the heron reflected on the water. The boat just beyond it is glinting in the first light.

My 84-year-old mom joined us here for a few nights, my friend Eric is coming for another few nights, and then my kids and I have had a couple nights and days on our own. Given the proximity to Seattle, we’ve had a parade of other visitors – my meditation teacher, Deirdre, came for a few hours, a gang of Eric’s long-distance cycling friends paraded through, and a different friend is coming today.

Now the heron in front of me is chasing a seagull away from its tide pool that it must consider to be its own. I could be anthropomorphizing here but it seems to have lost its focus on its own peaceful pursuit of what it was doing and now has concerned itself with what the seagull is doing instead.

Which is a lovely allegory for how vacation feels to me. Without the regular routines and structure to key off of, it seems like vacation is a constant negotiation of what we all need and want to do. The wide openness of it makes me feel I have to maintain some definition of my own in order not to be swept away in the tide of what everyone else wants, and my own desire to please.

Like the heron, I spent the first part of the week maintaining definition of what’s mine – my sacred time, my bed, my plate, my activities – and that left me feeling like I was playing defense. Then I read this paragraph from Mark Nepo during MY sacred time and it helped me to realize that the key is permeability:

“Another paradox I continually struggle with is how to let others in without becoming them. How to open the door to compassion without the things and people we feel for overpowering us.”

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo

For me it has come down to relaxing my boundaries so that I can feel the flow. It’s not guarding my space like the heron, but instead finding the play and playfulness in being with others. Coming closer when we are exploring on the beach, and snuggled up after time in the pool, and then moving away when I need a moment just to expand my senses and take it all in.

Which brings me to the quote from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh that I used for this post. When I meditate, I almost always find some answer or ease that helps me to navigate life. When everything else is unstructured, as it is here on vacation, or hectic, as it is in regular life, this is the practice that helps me with both. Usually by finding that I can release whatever I’ve dammed up and find that flow and faith in the Universe again and again.

Vicki Atkinson and I talk about meditation and how self-care can make us better humans on this week’s episode of the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast. Search (and subscribe!) for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts OR Listen to on Anchor Episode 28: How Self Care Can Make Us Better Humans with Vicki Atkinson

(featured photo is mine – the beautiful beach in front of me)

On Our High Horse

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“Life is like dreaming with your feet.” – unknown

My kids and I went to a wedding out of town this weekend. Staying in a room with side-by-side queen beds, we didn’t get much sleep and I caught a stomach bug but it was an adventure. In a post this spring, I wrote about lantern awareness, the idea from professor Alison Gopnik that kids’ brains have an awareness that is like a light held up high in the dark and illuminates everything around whereas adult brains tend to have spotlight awareness that focuses in on what we need to get done.

I found that traveling with my kids to someplace completely new to them is like being completely immersed in a treasure trove provided by their lantern awareness.

So we found a lot of treasures and I wrote about one for the Pointless Overthinking blog in a post called Cookie Cutter Faith.

The Peak-End Rule

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“All’s well that ends well.” – William Shakespeare

On our way home from the airport after 9.5 hours of traveling, my kids broke into a scrum. Mr. D was saying, “This is not our car. This is not a Toyota!” and Miss O had discovered on the trip that giggling softly when he talks is a truly effective way to make Mr. D mad. After doing so well on all the different legs of our journey including all the waiting when our plane was delayed, we were at risk for falling apart.

It made me think of the research of Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, behavioral economist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow who found the way that we remember both painful and pleasureful experiences as defined by the peak moment and the end moment. So, if we are getting a painful medical procedure, we’ll generally not remember how it felt all the way through, just how it felt at the end and at its most intense. Research bears this out for positive experiences as well.

Applying this to life, it made me think of my relationship with my ex-husband. Over 8 years of marriage, we laughed a lot. In fact, that was probably what we did best. But I have a hard time remembering that because I most often think of the moment my business partner told me of my exes infidelities and I not only had to deal with that in my personal life but also walk into work the next business day and face all the people I worked with who knew. And I think of the end of the marriage, when no amount of talking could overcome the defenses we’d built.

Now, a dozen years later with the remove of time and healing, I strain to think of the fun times and I honestly can’t. I come back to the peak moment and the end moment.

Conversely when I think of every mountain I’ve ever climbed, even though I know it was a lot of hard work, what I picture is the summit and having beers with friends at the end. The peak-end rule as applied to fun stuff is capable of filtering out a lot of discomfort.

Not wanting the same rule of memory to apply to our very enjoyable recent vacation, I sat in the car trying to think of how to turn around these last moments when we were all tired and past our limits. But the kids did it for me when they started singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight from the Lion King and we bopped along to wim-o-weh. I needn’t have worried – it felt so good to be home, we all ended on a good note!

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?

Photo of the week: Jan 1st

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We went for a couple of nights to a cabin on an island about an hour and a half from home. Although our circumstances didn’t change much – we went from being snowed it at home to being snowed in on vacation, our perspective did. Being all together in a different house with different board games magically renewed our spirit of joy and delight.

Fascinating view of a crane on a barge
This is an almost identical pose to a vacation picture I have from the summer – but instead of running in a tide pool on a beach, she’s running from a snowball fight!

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year with a renewed spirit of joy and delight!

Vacation

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“Another name for God is surprise,” – Brother David Steindl-Rast

Twenty years ago my friend Jill and I were looking for something to do for a vacation and considered going to a spa in Arizona but as lovely as the hiking, yoga and pilates schedule and menu sounded, we never could pull the trigger. We thought we’d get bored. Instead signed up for a trip to climb two Mexican volanoes, Mt. Ixtacchuatl (17,200 feet) and Pico de Orizaba (18,500 feet). While I already summitted Mt. Rainier (14,400 feet) once (as had Jill) on my second attempt, that was in my backyard since it was 60 miles southeast of Seattle where I live. This trip was the start of what I came to think of as vacations in my early adulthood. I’d sign up for a trip, usually with a friend or two to climb something as time and budget allowed. It was how I saw Russia, Nepal and Peru when I was single – usually dirty, tired and out of breath but so delighted for the change of perspective and chance to adventure.

Now I’m redefining what vacation means as a mom with two young kids. Our range is a lot closer to home and my budget is a lot tighter so we’ve tried a few things pretty close to home. The first trip we tried was six hours by car – that was too far as I can feel all you experienced parents inclining your heads in agreement. The second trip was eight hours by boat but a big boat that we could move around on. Better because the boat was an adventure in and of itself but we came home a little stunned from all the pounding through water. This weekend we went with a friend to a AirBnB cabin on Whidbey Island about an hour and half trip from our house. Better yet!

But regardless of how we have gotten to our destinations, I’m fascinated by how the kids take it in. They get to the new environment, and then regardless of what is outside, explore every nook and cranny of the temporary quarters.  In the first place we rented, they seemed to have a plethora of toilet cleaning brushes and my toddler discovered each one and wanted to carry each one around until I confiscated them. Nothing is familiar so it seems the kids spend a lot of energy mapping out their new world as I follow along making sure it’s safe.

Then come the new activities – beach combing, swimming in the pool, finding new playgrounds. Everything, even if it’s an activity that we’ve done at home, seems more adventurous. If it’s a beach like it was this weekend, it seems to come with cataloging it as a new entry of what a beach looks like – more sandy, less rocky, more sea life, less driftwood. My five-year-old daughter ran through every tide pool with her arms outstretched yesterday in a glorious expression of taking it in.

So eating and sleeping become huge issues. They seem to consume massive amounts of food to support all the novelty. Going out to eat is not only new because they are places we haven’t gone before but also because we haven’t done it much during COVID. There is a dichotomy of wanting to have the staples I’ve brought from home as one form of familiarity and willingness to try something new since everything else is new. Sleep, I’ve learned is much harder if we all try to do it in one room. WAY too exciting when it’s WAY too necessary.

I come to the end of each time away absolutely exhausted. This is where I have had to redefine what vacation means to me. It certainly isn’t less work. It’s definitely less predictable. But now I see that’s part of the joy – to find the Universal where we go. Somehow God makes it so that by switching everything up, we are renewed in our life together.

I’ve realized that I never liked vacation where I just sat around and thank goodness, because that doesn’t seems to be part of this new era. And I’ve found in another way, it’s like my mountain climbing vacations – I’m usually dirty, tired and out of breath but also delighted for the change of perspective and chance to adventure, this time seeing the world… through the eyes of my children.