|  The words of today fly about—
idiosyncratic, erratic, Lurching and whirling like a storm’s harbinger when two fronts collide— brewing a haze out of the air, jammed in our fingernails and matted in our hair— strewn beneath our feet, trampled upon and breathed in and accidentally tasted in all their acridity and mediocrity. Ubiquitous. Vacuous. Something like dust they have become. So today I must ask, where have the other kind gone— The ones that once danced Like the aurora borealis, Rare and verging on the sublime— Alighting angel-like on our skyward faces Something like the miracle of snow on a moon-lit South Texas night; Found in ancient texts that smell of parchment and wisdom; Or whispered into perfumed letters of love By silent artful lines and swirls gracing the page? Where have the pages gone? The alpha and omega we could hold in our hands? A complete thought rendered with great care and precision. Le mot juste. But it takes time to find the perfect phrase—both artful and precise— to spin forth into orbit a fresh, well-formed idea, syphoned from the ethereal human consciousness. And who, after all, has time? Because there is simply so much that must be done, so much that must be read, absorbed, ingested, digested. “The more, the better,” we say. But what if more words mean less time, less meaning. Shall we make that trade?  Commitments are my salvation. They ground me, keep me from being a law unto myself. Without commitments, I can easily, infinitely go off on this tangent or that, leaving me feeling crazy.
For instance, one minute I may be saying to myself, “I am going to exercise today” or “I am going to start exercising three times a week,” and the very next minute be saying, “I have entirely too much to do today to exercise” or “I am really not feeling all that great, so I’ll go home and chill (or go to Starbucks and Half Price Books!) instead of exercising.” Whether my plan was to exercise for today or to form a new regiment, I end up, either way, not exercising. Bottom line: if I don’t actually exercise, my intentions become irrelevant. Worse yet, I waste time arguing with myself. But by committing to a class where there are other people reluctantly yoked to exercise in the same way I am, we form a group of kindred spirits, not really loving exercise, but together enjoying a nice mix of commiseration and the serendipitous realization that “hey, this was not SO bad…” However, knowing how well committing works to bring me more in line with the person I want to be (a person who is healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually; a contributing member of my various communities; a person following the unfolding of my life’s purpose; etc.), I tend to overindulge in commitment. I forget some of the other important aspects of a happy life: balance, proportion, relaxation, introspection…and perhaps the most important, prioritization. Simply put, I cannot accomplish everything in this life that runs through my mind. When I try to do so, I let you down and I let myself down. I must inquire as to my most pressing areas for development, my most significant community roles of the moment, my deepest passions that have revealed themselves as of late. Realizing that I love so, so many aspects of life, I choose to rotate through my range of interests, connections, and passions. (Of course there are a few notable exceptions that are permanent: you know who and what you are…*smiles*) Variety keeps life fresh and interesting. This is why I love thinking about the New Year. What part of me wants to grow this year? What connections feel most right to me at this time? To whom do I want to contribute? With whom do I want to share? What new things have I discovered that I love? And what things from my past would I like to rekindle and recommit myself to? My relationships are my favorite and most important commitments of all. I am thankful for all of you…my family, my friends, my colleagues, and my contacts in the wider world. May your holidays and New Year be a time of love and hope, a time of sharing and giving, and a time of reflecting and, once again, recommitting to your truest and highest Self.  I once had an instructor in college who presented a very simple and true concept: each of us has only one “100%” portion. All manner of time with which we fill our lives–our accomplishments, our downtime, our time for thinking, our time for enjoying the moment, our time spent plugged-in, our time with those we love–must be undertaken within this finite portion of time and energy.
So there are a few ways I use this concept. First, I actually guesstimate the amount of time spent doing this, that, and the other and then translate those guesstimates into percentages of the 168-hour week. Then, I consider the ways in which I am spending my time. Is it balanced between the things I hold important? Much good comes out of such reflection, including asking myself what really IS important. I also question whether I am actually spending my time in a way that is consistent with the person I perceieve myself to be. Okay, so I want to see myself as a writer: how much of my time do I actually spend writing? Usually, this questioning is followed by a period of sobering realizations. From there, I make adjustments. Another wise teacher had once impressed upon me the notion that saying “yes” to one thing meant saying “no” to something else. With this in mind, I shift, as needed, my “yes”s and “no”s to help me fall more in line with the person I truly want to be. This is a process I have refined and watched unfold over many years, and I have found it more and more gratifying to discover what is important and how to honor what is truly important in my life by way of how I spend my minutes, my hours, my days. Still, it is very much a work in progress, as life in these times seems to endlessly spawn new ways to spend, waste, enjoy, or lose time, as the case may be. I would love to hear from you…what methods help you consider your time and priorities? What have you learned from them? May your seconds, minutes, and hours 0f this day be joy-filled!  No matter what happens, do not forget you are human. You must move and laugh and breathe deeply. You must sit and stare into another person’s eyes, whether they belong to a lover, a friend, or a beloved cherub looking up at you with a muddy nose. You must not miss these things, my young ones!
Do not forget that you are NOT a machine. You do not live in the cloud, the net, the matrix. You live here, on Earth, for better or worse. And being fully human, you have so, so many choices open to you—these powers of reason and intuition and choice being gifts that belong to no other creature yet known in the universe. We are given brains to think, and bodies to love and work and play, and faces to express and connect, and souls to ask what it truly means to be human. And, best of all, we are given hearts to feel compassion and to know that our fates are intertwined. Do not miss this amazing human experience, my young ones, no matter what else may come. Do not trade one second of experience (the true, deep, rich something) for some poor substitute (the new, newer, newest nothing). Claim this day, this moment, as belonging to you, to us, to joy…. 
I read once that women who aren’t in a relationship are constantly scoping out men—and those who are in a relationship are constantly scoping out women (aka, the competition). I had read this curious factoid while in a relationship with someone who was about, I can say in hindsight, 99% likely to cheat—and, as such, was the poster-child for this factoid. After surviving that horrid shipwreck, I then moved to the other side of the equation. I found myself single and awash in a sea of men. It was fabulous! And horrible! And everything in between. I was, I must confess, always scoping. I checked out books en masse about the art of dating, finding relationships, etc. I became disturbingly proficient at eHarmony speak. I ran my dating life like a business, interviewing three candidates or so a week. Well, that is another story for another day. To cut to the chase, after 40 first dates (sifted from 30 times that many “matches”), I finally found what I had been looking for—my soulmate, who is today my husband. That is also a fabulous story for another day. But the point of all of this is to say that once I was in this new relationship—a very strong relationship with a very committed and perfect-for-me man—I found myself back on the other side of the equation, just as surely as if the Oracle of Delphi had foretold it! I was puzzled, to say the least. Psychoanalysts would tell me that there were perfectly valid reasons for this insecurity, stemming from extreme childhood issues. But regardless of its roots, I wanted it gone. I fought it in the futile way one fights a stomach virus. The more I fought it, the more soberingly aware I became of the stubbornness of this insecurity. When at last my soulmate and I were married and had flown away to our honeymoon destination, I found, yet again, this ghost of insecurity, this accursed third wheel, by my side as my husband and I sat in a sushi restaurant in Seattle. I thought to myself, “This is supposed to be a glorious adventure and bonding experience…What the hell is this about?!?” I got MAD. I was not having this anymore. I sat my unruly mind down and explained to her that I trust this man and that it is okay for me to not be the end-all-be-all of women—that he is going to love me regardless. But one last piece needed to be in place, and I consider this thought to have been inspired by some brilliant force external to my own gray matter. I had already believed in a simple principle: that turning and facing (and even embracing) an unwanted emotion would relax its chokehold, whereas turning away would strengthen its dreaded grip. I had tried to practice this principle in so many ways, but had never ”gotten” it….that is,until that moment. I somehow started, right then and there, practicing a simple acknowledgement of the beauty of the women who walked in the door of that restaurant. I simply smiled and said in my mind of each, “Isn’t she beautiful?” Doing this repeatedly melted away my insane insecurity. It helped strip down to right size the overblown power our society gives to certain types of beauty in women. I no longer felt threatened, and I found myself filled with a strange and blissful sense of closeness with my husband. This was an amazing first gift of “the beautiful game,” as I’ve come to call it, and I still practice it to this day. There are more gifts, which I will share in future posts, but in the meantime, I would love to hear from all of you. How have you overcome struggles with insecurity, whether related to relationships or something else? And in the context of relationships, how have you come to accept love fearlessly and wholeheartedly (at least most of the time  )? Thank you, as always, for joining me on the journey…..  I sometimes ponder the sociological concept of “Mean World Syndrome”–particularly around the anniversary of 9/11 each year.
I remember that, as a child, I watched lots of news programs and acquired a very definite “Mean World” perspective. One segment of the news, I recall, would reenact murders, supposedly to catch criminals (but perhaps also, I would now say, to improve ratings). The cumulative impact of the barrage of negative images and info was residual fear. I kept up with the news into my adult years, oscillating between a sense of compassion for the victims of horrid events and a sense of despair at the seemingly fatalistic nature of these events. As the despair increased, I finally came to the decision that I would listen to the news on the radio–or read thoughtfully rendered articles about the world that explain the possible causes of some of these negative phenomena–but that I would do so only in small doses. I don’t bury my head in the sand by any means. I have made a deliberate choice to act on behalf of the Greater Good with my money, time, and other resources as often as possible. Indeed, when I used to saturate myself in the tragedy and sensationalism of the news, I paradoxically found myself paralyzed, resulting in a sense that NOTHING is within my power to change. Today, I believe strongly that this is simply not true. Statistics reveal that the tragedy we see on the news, rather than being the norm, affects only a tiny percentage of us at any given time. Of course, for those involved, such tragedy is all-consuming in the moment, and we should all be filled with compassion for those affected. Tragedy visits us all at one time or another in our lives, and the giving and receiving of compassion is our life-line at those times. But what of the world as a whole, the vast majority of events in the lives of the world’s people, day in and day out? What representation do the other phases of life (the non-dramatic,the non-tragic) receive? As a community college instructor, I am fortunate to be in a position that lends itself to optimism. Day in and day out, I see all sorts of people trying to better themselves. I see the fruits of their labors. I see their determination. I read in their essays about the adversity they have overcome. I read about the families they go home to–about the love they share and the sacrifices they make. I see the stress they take on in the interest of reaching for something better. In the tragedy of 9/11, we saw an even more dramatic display of the inherent good in human nature. The willingness to help a complete stranger,even to one’s own detriment. The willingness to stand up to danger. The banding together of strangers to accomplish more than they could alone. The courage to walk into a burning building as a matter of duty, honor, and sacrifice for the good of others. The countless acts of compassion from one human being to another. And we have seen the same with many other tragedies–most recently, natural disasters–over the years. The fact is that decent people get up and do what decent people do, day in and day out, over and over. Not perfectly, but with a good heart. This is the truth of human experience. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu expresses it, ”Evil is an aberration.” Good is the truth of who we are. If we tallied up all the good in the world on a given day, it would dwarf any bad we could find. May we each choose, in our individual ways,to remember and honor and act on the good in large and small ways, day in and day out. What are your thoughts on the bad and/or good we see in the world? How do you recognize the good on a daily basis?  When all else fails in life–or when you’re just bored some Saturday–go find a holy person. For this exercise, you will want to pick someone who has abandoned the typical life for this path.
One Saturday many years ago, I chose Sam. I did not really know I chose Sam. I just knew that I had to go there, with there being this completely-out-of-place-in-the-suburbs-and-therefore-wonderful-little-house. It was a Buddhist monastery. I had grown more and more curious about it each time I had driven past. I would see the monks in the yard, dressed simply in orange; working in the yard in the frigid morning or in the blazing heat, always maintaining a peaceful expression regardless; never racing off to the next somewhere–and the next and the next. What must that be like? Maybe my ALWAYS-racing-off-somewhere-self needed to go in and find out more about this holy place—“when do you meet?” “what should I bring?” “should I sit or stand?” etc., etc. But when I walked in, I felt a different purpose had disclosed itself. I was invited by a monk with a tan face and a kind smile to sit down on the floor and talk. Imagine that! It was as though he had been there just waiting for me the whole time. No appointment needed. He asked me about myself, at which point I am sure I prattled off my latest goings-on because, after all, that’s what there is to know about me, right? But I did also express my sense of seeking—a sense that has followed me through much of my adult life. This sense of seeking has taken me on many a pilgrimage, scavenger hunt, and serendipitous excursion. The monk told me his name was Sam. The name fit him perfectly somehow. I imagine that, written down on some scrap of paper somewhere, I have recorded all that we talked about that day. But I don’t really need that; I have kept a few of Sam’s lessons in my heart even to this day. He first taught me simply by his smile. I must have been in my early 30′s at the time and had apparently been obsessing over the ever-so-slight (say I now, five years later!) worry lines between my brows. But when I looked at Sam’s face that day and saw the joyful contentedness in it, I decided then and there that I was going to have smile lines like Sam’s. If I can’t do away with wrinkles, I can at least decide which kind I will get….his were the crows feet of smiling,not the brow furrow of worry. :) A peace came over me before we even spoke a word. Sam taught me to thank the world around me for the life it provides me. Thank my bed for the sleep, thank my food for the nourishment. I saw that these simple mind-shifts (especially those that involve gratitude) can change so much. So again I saw that I cannot necessarily change my circumstances, but I can enjoy whatever is currently in my life. Toward the end of our talk, Sam turned to the nature of thoughts run amok, at which point he asked me, ”Are you driving the car? Or is the car driving you?” Ever since that day, I have realized that I can always take the car (my unruly mind) off of auto-pilot, climb into the driver’s seat, and steer my thoughts down a road of my choosing (one that is thrilling, serene, or scenic, as my mood may dictate). I can always thank instead of covet–and smile instead of worry.  One morning recently, I had sent a short text of encouragement to one of my dearest friends, who was experiencing a very recent and raw tragic loss. Apparently, my text had arrived just as she was walking through a flood of unbearable emotions. She called me immediately.
In this highly charged moment of my friend’s grief, I was (intuitively, it would seem) able to know what to share with her. I was able to pull from my life files a lesson that I’d absorbed while walking through a similar (yet much less acute) tragedy several years before. In the midst of my tragedy, life had taken months and many words of wisdom from friends to impress this lesson upon me—but I was able to express it to her in a single phone call. So dire was this moment that she absolutely needed her answer in a heartbeat—and life had given it to me to give to her. After I hung up the phone, I was utterly floored that such a moment had come into being. How had such a concept floated up so readily when I hadn’t given it thought in years? What was equally amazing is that she had been able to receive it from me instantly. Nothing much was lost in translation. Perhaps our history—16 years worth—had allowed this ease of connection. Perhaps not only the time we have shared, but also the depth, had made this moment possible. We have shared births,weddings,divorces,deaths. We have shared many of the same circles of spiritual friendship over the years, pulling our bond even tighter. We share a similarly tragic but increasingly hopeful life history that continues to unfold. But mostly, we have, time after time, shared of ourselves. Our fears, our discoveries, our god-awful character flaws—and always our lessons. Sometimes accompanied by insane laughter, sometimes by gut-wrenching sobs, and sometimes by the simple and cool breeze of calm, we have shared these many moments. The intuitive moment this morning, then, was not an isolated one. It appears to be simply another ring added to the very solid and old tree of friendship we planted a long time ago—and another limb to which we can climb, a higher vantage point from which we can perceive life’s unfoldings. It is fascinating to think of the progression of our friendship—that in our earliest days, my friend had been a mentor to me of such unfathomable discipline and balance that I found myself awe-struck on a regular basis—that over these years, this relationship has graced me, first through imitation and then in an internalized way, with some of those same traits of hers that were so unfathomable to me early on—and that these changes being in place in me, in turn, allowed me to grow more fully into my own skin, and ultimately, to have learned that lesson a few years ago— only to be able to pass it on to her at just the right moment. | |
The words of today fly about—
