The (Real) Secret to Being Happy

Sometimes complete strangers say things that can change your whole life.  That is not what this post is about, though.  This post is about something that happened to me several years ago on a flight from Newark to Chicago, where I was sitting next to an older Asian man who, out of nowhere, turned to me and asked, “Do you want to know the secret to being happy?”  As I happened to be wondering exactly that thing at exactly that moment, I said yes, I would indeed like to know the secret to being happy.  I can still see him, silhouetted by that white above-the-clouds light that comes through the windows on planes.  I turned my body towards him, he raised his index finger and said, “There are three things.”  And that, my friends, is all she wrote.  I don’t remember what he told me.  I FORGOT whatever it was he said. 

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Things Mostly (Not) Green

My friend Tom once shared a story of a woman he knew who kept a journal about gardening.  One entry that always stuck with him was a short observation on a day when the slow transition from winter to spring seemed to sharpen into visibility.  She wrote: “Things mostly green.”

While we can definitely feel the return of life to the ground here in east central Illinois, things are mostly not green.  The air has been more forgiving, the sunlight gloriously welcome, and yes, there are a few tiny shoots poking through in the yard, but this is the time right before the green, the time between.

not quite winter, not quite spring

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Why Balance is an Unhelpful Ideal (Unless You Are a Gymnast or a Tightrope Walker)

Whenever I see a flyer for a workshop or talk on “Work/Life Balance,” I get a very bad feeling in my chest and my head starts to hurt.  Unless there will be someone at the workshop with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet for volunteers to come over and dust my floorboards, cook dinner for my family, buy the batteries at Walgreens that I keep forgetting, or clean out the box of stuff from when I moved my office last December, I can’t think of a single good reason to attend.  
My bottom line belief on work/life balance is this–it’s a hoax, and a dangerous one at that.  But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Here’s David Whyte in his most recent book, The Three Marriages: Reexamining Work, Self and Relationship: “People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance.  Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another.  We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.” 

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A Case for Running Backwards

There was a lady in our old neighborhood who used to walk up and down the sidewalks backwards.  Sometimes she carried what appeared to be two gallon jugs of drinking water, one in each hand.  She was very thin, made all her own clothes, and had a very complex relationship with her health.  She was extremely concerned about air quality, for example, and yet was married to a man who smoked so much that not only his teeth but both of his hands were yellow from nicotine.  I hated seeing her, not because she was so odd, but because I recognized her as a fellow neurotic.  Even on days when I was feeling completely normal, catching a glimpse of her lurching down the sidewalk was like a magnet for all of my wacko health fears.  They would just come shrieking to the surface like little monstery kids who jump up and down and yell “BLAAHHH!” right in your face.

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Arguing: Fun for the Whole Family!

When our friends Markus and Almut had their third child, we asked Markus how it was to go from being a family of four to a family a five.  He’s a Classics Scholar—insightful, deliberate, a little quirky with a pleasing neurotic edge.  “Well, it’s less…monolithic,” he said, making the shape of a column with his hands.  “Four is just so tight.  With five, there’s more movement.  It’s more dynamic.”  Then a bewildered look crossed his face.  “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I try to keep them all in my head at the same time and I can’t.”

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The Antidote to Exhaustion

“‘Tell me about exhaustion,’ I said.

 He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. 

‘You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?’

 ‘What is it, then?’

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness‘”
(David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, 132).

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Your Worst Fears Come True/”Everything is Going to Be Alright”

Good writers seem to know a lot about neuroses.  Anne Lamott, for example, is so exactly right when she describes her students’ fears about being writers because she  is smart, observant, and has experienced them all herself: “[They] want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout—the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia” (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life).

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New Week, New Month, Same Two Choices

Last night on the phone my dad reminded me of a priest who used to serve at the church I grew up in.  His name was Fr. Reginald.  He often gave these short, succinct homilies, with one main point that stayed with you because it wasn’t weighed down with a lot of extraneous rhetoric.

Today’s poem is like that.  Today is the start of a new week and a new month (and only three more months of winter here in the midwest!).  Yet this poem reminds us that in every moment, we have the same two choices–love or fear.  Despite the poem’s repetition of the words “there are” in each line, despite the insistence that love and fear are the only two states of being, you always have a choice about which to claim, to see, to believe.  This is not to imply that’s it’s an easy choice, because God knows, it isn’t.  Nor is fear a “bad” thing.  Without fear, there is no need for courage.  And luckily for us, no matter what, it’s a choice we get the chance to make, over and over again.

Love and Fear

There are only two feelings, Love and fear:
There are only two languages, Love and fear:
There are only two activities, Love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, Love and fear,
Love and fear.

Michael Leunig (contemporary Australian cartoonist, philosopher, poet and artist)

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“God Says Yes To Me”* (& other brazen beliefs)

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

*Kaylin Haught, The Palm of your Hand, Tilbury House Publishers, 1995

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“Weathering”*

Today is the second Friday of Lent, and day ten of my Radical Lent: A Poetic Approach to 40 Days in Wilderness project.  I had hoped to write a particularly meaningful post to mark this small occasion, but unfortunately could not pull one together.  Today’s post is, I’m sorry to say, about wrinkly skin.

But not to worry.  This isn’t going to be a long, narcissistic whinge about aging and appearance.  For one, I save those for my husband who LOVES to listen to them; second, too many other people have written hysterical, insightful things about this topic (Nora Ephron in I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman, Carol Leifer in When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror, and Anne Lamott on “the Aunties” in Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, for example); third, there is nothing new or interesting to say on this topic–looking older sucks, especially if you are married, as I am, to someone who seems to be getting better looking each year (and I say this with spite, not appreciation).  And finally, I am 42, old enough that some Botox and Restylane would not go to waste, but too young for REALLY old people, like my dad, to take anything I have to say about aging seriously.  Right, he might say, talk to me again after you’ve had your first colonoscopy. Continue reading ““Weathering”*” →

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