"We were always in a rush, a rush to get better, a rush to get somewhere--somewhere else, wherever we were not." That's a quote from Dominique Brown's blog, which is one of the most consistent highlights of my little blog-reading routine.
I am frequently in a rush to "get better." I am always trying to improve things, come up with some new strategy or system or mantra that will make me just a little more organized, efficient, productive, diversified, happier, better. And I don't think that's necessarily bad, but maybe the question to ask is, better next to what?
I guess the contradiction within self-improvement is that on the one hand you try to accept yourself and your warts and enjoy the present moment. And on the other hand you are still always striving. And what are you striving for? If it's to be happier, or happyish, does having a running to-do list of ways you could be "better" run at odds with this? And then maybe that list and the striving for betterment is part of what makes us human, and is therefore deserving of acceptance in itself? Our dogged belief that what we are seeking is just around the next bend. Maybe that's just what keeps us going.
Can I be "enough" while simultaneously hoping to be more? Can I accept myself while striving to improve myself? Can I be both satisfied and ambitious? Grateful and dream-ful? Content and anticipating?
I guess it all comes back down to enjoying that hackneyed old journey. I like projects! Trips are fun. Adventures are great. I guess the trick is to remember, as someone once said, that now is the fun part. To use a leprachaun metaphor: it's not about the pot of gold, it's the thrill of chasing the rainbow.
Showing posts with label scientifically inaccurate statements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scientifically inaccurate statements. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Course Corrections
On Sunday, I was in the mountains of Pennsylvania on snowshoes, gazing at snow-sprinkled trees, trying to remember the words to "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost, spinning a historical fiction yarn in my head set in the adorable town-formerly-known-as-Mauch-Chunk, all but giving Spangles affectionate little eskimo nose-rubs.
Congratulations to me, I said to myself. I am turning the disappointment of a canceled trip to upstate New York into a spontaneous romantic weekend getaway into the foothills of Poconos with my beloved, not to mention living the life I've imagined, carpe-ing the diem, enjoying nature, all the types of things I'm always saying I ought to do to live a happy life.
Fast forward to Monday night, when I was in the car headed home from work, nauseous, scream-crying "I don't know! I don't know!" over and over again to myself in a primal-therapy-like fashion. I was what you might call a touch stressed out. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say the basic story was, too much to do, too little time, coupled with the all the rationality, reasonableness and perspective that accompanies the ole' cyclical female hormone spike.
How did my zen-like weekend state unravel so quickly?, is I want to know. Granted, Mondays are always hard, a crash landing back onto Planet Goal-Orientation, made all the more difficult by a pleasant, relaxed weekend shuffling and daydreaming my way through the sylvan hollows.
But I have been helped immensely in situations like these by an internal project I've taken on, which is the cultivation of my Voice of Reason. She's like my wise, sassy, kind, don't-take-no-shit-from-nobody sidekick, who's there to slap some sense into me when I go off the mental deep end (which happens in some form or another pretty much like every fifteen minutes.) For example:
Isn't she smart? She's nice but no-nonsense. Actually she kind of sounds like my Aunt Jane. And she always has something good to say, if I just let myself listen for her input. Last night when I was melting down in the car she was equally as wise and solution oriented. Regarde:
Lo and behold, the next morning after a good night's sleep life seemed a lot more manageable. And on my way to work this morning I had a chance to reflect on everything a little more and give myself a nice pep talk.
I gotta remember that there's never going to be some magic finish line that I cross, after which I will be sublimely happy and no problems will ever confound me again. It's good to have bright, sunny days when I feel like I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing in life, and it's good to work toward a higher ratio of those kinds of days. But it's also OK if some days are just OK. It's OK to work at a job that doesn't leave you squirming with pleasure to the tips of your toes at every moment, especially if it allows you to take care of yourself and enables you do other things in life that you want to do.
And it's OK to get stressed out sometimes, get out of control, and then pull yourself back in. One of my favorite little life analogies is the explanation of how airplanes fly - it's not a matter of flying in one straight line the entire time. In order to get to a destination, it's actually a series of a zillion little course corrections, moving from one side back to the other back to other over and over again until it gets there. And that's what we humans have to do to - keep your eye on the final destination, and if you go too far to one side, just scoot back a little the other way.
It's a balancing act, a dance, an airplane flight, all of that. It's not about fixing something once and then you're set for life. It's just habit, or mental hygiene, or whatever. The dishes get dirty, so you wash them again. Happiness isn't a goal, it's a lifestyle. It's figuring out the balance between working toward a goal and taking time to play. It's about getting caught up in the flow of working on something, and taking time out to notice your surroundings and the passage of time. It's working toward getting what you want out of life, AND letting yourself fritter away some down time without beating yourself up.
It's saying, OK, this week is shaping up to be a beeyotch and a half, so why don't I schedule an appointment to use that massage gift certificate on Friday? It's staying tuned in to what you're feeling and wanting, and acknowledging it, even if there isn't much you can *do* about it at a given time. It's about taking care of yourself, and the sense of - and I hate to use this term but - the sense of empowerment that comes from knowing that you have the ability to take care of your own needs (even if that means reaching out for help from someone else.)
It's acknowledging that hey, you don't have all the answers, we're all basically wandering around like confused but purposeful ants, each of us just trying to figure out how to operate this big ungainly gift we got of a stroll through the glass-paneled dirt farm.
It's about practicing using and listening to your own Voice of Reason, and the comfort and serenity it brings to know you can summon it whenever you want.
Like right now, she's tapping me on the shoulder, saying "All right, wrap it up, kid. We thought writing this post would make you feel better, and it did. Now what's going to make you feel better is getting down to business and tackling some of this big ole' stack of work you have. You can return to the blogosphere later."
So, like a self-schooled experimenter in home remedies with a long-winded hypothesis on how it all works, I will now leave you to ingest a tincture of my own making, hoping to add it to my shelf of not-so-magical potions.
Congratulations to me, I said to myself. I am turning the disappointment of a canceled trip to upstate New York into a spontaneous romantic weekend getaway into the foothills of Poconos with my beloved, not to mention living the life I've imagined, carpe-ing the diem, enjoying nature, all the types of things I'm always saying I ought to do to live a happy life.
Fast forward to Monday night, when I was in the car headed home from work, nauseous, scream-crying "I don't know! I don't know!" over and over again to myself in a primal-therapy-like fashion. I was what you might call a touch stressed out. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say the basic story was, too much to do, too little time, coupled with the all the rationality, reasonableness and perspective that accompanies the ole' cyclical female hormone spike.
How did my zen-like weekend state unravel so quickly?, is I want to know. Granted, Mondays are always hard, a crash landing back onto Planet Goal-Orientation, made all the more difficult by a pleasant, relaxed weekend shuffling and daydreaming my way through the sylvan hollows.
But I have been helped immensely in situations like these by an internal project I've taken on, which is the cultivation of my Voice of Reason. She's like my wise, sassy, kind, don't-take-no-shit-from-nobody sidekick, who's there to slap some sense into me when I go off the mental deep end (which happens in some form or another pretty much like every fifteen minutes.) For example:
Me: OMG I can't believe I ate TWO porkchops for lunch! I am such a glutton! I am like one trip to Pizza Hut away from being the subject of one of those late night documentaries on TLC about the morbidly obese people who have to be cut out of their homes with a bulldozer to get to the gastric bypass operation! WHEN are you going to figure out PORTION CONTROL you fat stupid lazy moron?!!
VoR: Yeah, Liklik? With all due respect, you were hungry, so you ate lunch. It was pork chops and veggies. This is not a red alert situation. You can always go for a walk or something later. Let's move on with our life. K?
Isn't she smart? She's nice but no-nonsense. Actually she kind of sounds like my Aunt Jane. And she always has something good to say, if I just let myself listen for her input. Last night when I was melting down in the car she was equally as wise and solution oriented. Regarde:
VoR: OK listen. You're obviously stressed out, so let's just take a deep breath. The Bosses already told you that the five-day business trip is optional. Why don't you go to the first part, but skip the second part? That cuts the trip in half and gives you time to work on the other projects. I know your preference is to be the best at everything at all times, but let's not let perfection be the enemy of the good, here. Give yourself time to do a quality job and cut out the non-essentials. Tomorrow morning we're going to go in there and let them know the plan. All right?
Me: *sniffs* Ok. Fine.
VoR: And tell you what, when we get home, want to put on your jammies and eat crackers and download that Tim McGraw song you like?
Me: Yes. Yes, I do want that.
VoR: I thought you might.
Me: I like crackers.
Lo and behold, the next morning after a good night's sleep life seemed a lot more manageable. And on my way to work this morning I had a chance to reflect on everything a little more and give myself a nice pep talk.
I gotta remember that there's never going to be some magic finish line that I cross, after which I will be sublimely happy and no problems will ever confound me again. It's good to have bright, sunny days when I feel like I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing in life, and it's good to work toward a higher ratio of those kinds of days. But it's also OK if some days are just OK. It's OK to work at a job that doesn't leave you squirming with pleasure to the tips of your toes at every moment, especially if it allows you to take care of yourself and enables you do other things in life that you want to do.
And it's OK to get stressed out sometimes, get out of control, and then pull yourself back in. One of my favorite little life analogies is the explanation of how airplanes fly - it's not a matter of flying in one straight line the entire time. In order to get to a destination, it's actually a series of a zillion little course corrections, moving from one side back to the other back to other over and over again until it gets there. And that's what we humans have to do to - keep your eye on the final destination, and if you go too far to one side, just scoot back a little the other way.
It's a balancing act, a dance, an airplane flight, all of that. It's not about fixing something once and then you're set for life. It's just habit, or mental hygiene, or whatever. The dishes get dirty, so you wash them again. Happiness isn't a goal, it's a lifestyle. It's figuring out the balance between working toward a goal and taking time to play. It's about getting caught up in the flow of working on something, and taking time out to notice your surroundings and the passage of time. It's working toward getting what you want out of life, AND letting yourself fritter away some down time without beating yourself up.
It's saying, OK, this week is shaping up to be a beeyotch and a half, so why don't I schedule an appointment to use that massage gift certificate on Friday? It's staying tuned in to what you're feeling and wanting, and acknowledging it, even if there isn't much you can *do* about it at a given time. It's about taking care of yourself, and the sense of - and I hate to use this term but - the sense of empowerment that comes from knowing that you have the ability to take care of your own needs (even if that means reaching out for help from someone else.)
It's acknowledging that hey, you don't have all the answers, we're all basically wandering around like confused but purposeful ants, each of us just trying to figure out how to operate this big ungainly gift we got of a stroll through the glass-paneled dirt farm.
It's about practicing using and listening to your own Voice of Reason, and the comfort and serenity it brings to know you can summon it whenever you want.
Like right now, she's tapping me on the shoulder, saying "All right, wrap it up, kid. We thought writing this post would make you feel better, and it did. Now what's going to make you feel better is getting down to business and tackling some of this big ole' stack of work you have. You can return to the blogosphere later."
So, like a self-schooled experimenter in home remedies with a long-winded hypothesis on how it all works, I will now leave you to ingest a tincture of my own making, hoping to add it to my shelf of not-so-magical potions.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
On Seeing Clearly
I’ve been thinking about windshield wipers lately, in no small part because nephew Edbear got "The Wheels on the Bus” stuck in my head. It’s currently the # 1 hit in Edbearsville, especially the wipers-on-the-bus part. Each rendition he sings (and he is generous with the renditions), begins and ends with that verse, with special emphasis on the "Swish swish swish”.
And frankly I think it’s time wipers got their day. I was reminded of their great utility while driving in the recent snows here. They are the unsung heroes of inclement weather. You don’t have to think about it, but dependably, as raindrops plop, the wipers clear. Yet without them how far could you really get? I remember vividly from childhood the time the driver’s side wiper of my parents’ car gave out during a thunderous storm, my dad driving with his head hanging out the the driver’s side window, getting soaked to the shoulders.
What I’ve been thinking is that sometimes life itself could use a good wipe. I walk around in a haze so much of the time, running from one thing to the next, trying to see between splotches and streaks on the windshield, a continual to-do list falling like fat raindrops from the sky and scattering across my field of vision.
But every now and again I’m aware of a feeling of clearness, like my feet are planted firmly on the ground and I’m awake, I see and understand the road ahead. When I am, however briefly, smarter than my everyday self. I’m all: yes, I am one with the universe! I understand the deep yin and yang of it all! I hold within me with great delicacy all the paradox and pain and deep goodness of the fragile and tantalizingly brief moments we spend spinning around on this precious blue marble! I become like Walt Whitman: all this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well. Her Wiseness Anne Lamott has described this feeling as a veil lifting.
I try to interpolate the graph, to understand which things I do (or stop doing) that lead to this feeling of calmness and solidity.
Sitting for a while with my thoughts helps. It doesn't really help while I’m sitting – a few beats after I close my eyes and tune in to my breath like you’re supposed to, I become privy to the deafening cyclone that is the inside of my brain. The whole operation sounds a lot like these cartoon viking kittens plundering the seas to Led Zeppelin, if the sound were piped through subwoofers and garbled with static and scattered sentence fragments and loops of conversations in which my part of the dialogue becomes increasingly witty and self-righteous with each repeat.
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to function at all.
The clarity part usually happens when I open my eyes and realize I’m back where I began, and the room is stunningly silent and still compared to the white water rapids I’ve been cruising down in my mind.
And the afterglow from that is that I tend to feel a little less like an unstable isotope, always whipping my electrons around me at maximum speed, unable to land anywhere to rest happily, slowly decaying into other things. I feel a little more like I live inside my body, and my body doesn’t stretch a block before and after my mind like it usually does. It’s like in the cartoon Peter Pan when he finally catches that hyperactive shadow and reattaches it to himself, where it belongs. It feels like I turned the windshield wipers on.
Another thing that helps me turn the wipers on is remembering a phrase I read in a book by Charlotte Kasl: what is, is. Here's what she says about it:
It’s kind of a reality check. It helps you identify and accept whatever’s going on in your life at that very moment. It puts the horrible and the sublime in perspective. Keeps you from sensationalizing. Helps you get a firmer grasp on reality.
Our eyes are flawed and we forget to see with them. It’s nice to put on a pair of glasses now and then, and see the sharpness and detail you’ve been missing. It's nice to get the high-def channels once in a while.
And frankly I think it’s time wipers got their day. I was reminded of their great utility while driving in the recent snows here. They are the unsung heroes of inclement weather. You don’t have to think about it, but dependably, as raindrops plop, the wipers clear. Yet without them how far could you really get? I remember vividly from childhood the time the driver’s side wiper of my parents’ car gave out during a thunderous storm, my dad driving with his head hanging out the the driver’s side window, getting soaked to the shoulders.
What I’ve been thinking is that sometimes life itself could use a good wipe. I walk around in a haze so much of the time, running from one thing to the next, trying to see between splotches and streaks on the windshield, a continual to-do list falling like fat raindrops from the sky and scattering across my field of vision.
But every now and again I’m aware of a feeling of clearness, like my feet are planted firmly on the ground and I’m awake, I see and understand the road ahead. When I am, however briefly, smarter than my everyday self. I’m all: yes, I am one with the universe! I understand the deep yin and yang of it all! I hold within me with great delicacy all the paradox and pain and deep goodness of the fragile and tantalizingly brief moments we spend spinning around on this precious blue marble! I become like Walt Whitman: all this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well. Her Wiseness Anne Lamott has described this feeling as a veil lifting.
I try to interpolate the graph, to understand which things I do (or stop doing) that lead to this feeling of calmness and solidity.
Sitting for a while with my thoughts helps. It doesn't really help while I’m sitting – a few beats after I close my eyes and tune in to my breath like you’re supposed to, I become privy to the deafening cyclone that is the inside of my brain. The whole operation sounds a lot like these cartoon viking kittens plundering the seas to Led Zeppelin, if the sound were piped through subwoofers and garbled with static and scattered sentence fragments and loops of conversations in which my part of the dialogue becomes increasingly witty and self-righteous with each repeat.
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to function at all.
The clarity part usually happens when I open my eyes and realize I’m back where I began, and the room is stunningly silent and still compared to the white water rapids I’ve been cruising down in my mind.
And the afterglow from that is that I tend to feel a little less like an unstable isotope, always whipping my electrons around me at maximum speed, unable to land anywhere to rest happily, slowly decaying into other things. I feel a little more like I live inside my body, and my body doesn’t stretch a block before and after my mind like it usually does. It’s like in the cartoon Peter Pan when he finally catches that hyperactive shadow and reattaches it to himself, where it belongs. It feels like I turned the windshield wipers on.
Another thing that helps me turn the wipers on is remembering a phrase I read in a book by Charlotte Kasl: what is, is. Here's what she says about it:
It helped me accept the moment and stop fighting with myself...It’s just what is. It’s the truth, it’s where my life is right this moment. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just what’s happening at the moment. Saying what is, is helps us stop demanding that situations and people be different. It also allows us to drop into our feelings, which connects us to our inner wisdom.
It’s kind of a reality check. It helps you identify and accept whatever’s going on in your life at that very moment. It puts the horrible and the sublime in perspective. Keeps you from sensationalizing. Helps you get a firmer grasp on reality.
Our eyes are flawed and we forget to see with them. It’s nice to put on a pair of glasses now and then, and see the sharpness and detail you’ve been missing. It's nice to get the high-def channels once in a while.
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