Category: Life Lessons

Bide A While

I am stepping outside my usual 3-4 minute post length (a full 8 minute read!) to accommodate the wisdom in this thoughtful piece by Maria Popova from The Marginalian.

Maria Popova has been running this one-woman online publishing show for seventeen years.

I consistently find value in her offerings. And while this is a little longer than my norm, I decided to republish this piece in toto to honor the exercise and wisdom Popova has collected.

You can choose to skim read just the bulleted highlights. Or dive down into the accompanying text. In either case, you might consider taking to heart her wisdom about life. She is a seeker.

She encourages us to remember: If we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish. 

Herewith, 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring(though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion. 

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass. 

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”: 

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one
way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

Maria Popova, The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/10/22/17/?mc_cid=c7335a91fc&mc_eid=82e7b7e93e

Unfussy Christmas

Christmas doesn’t fuss me much. Not these days at least.

What a production it was earlier in my life though. The tree and its trimming and laying in special Christmas goodies like mincemeat tarts and shortbread cookies and cranberry/orange relish and fruitcake if it was good enough. It was quite the process.

I get that mincemeat is not to everyone’s taste and that there is no meat involved. Still, to me, it was a delicious annual treat, if one with a confusing name.

Obviously Christmas intensified when children arrived on the planet. Not in their early years, of course. But by about four or five years old, they were beside themselves in the weeks leading up to Christ’s so-called birthday, to say nothing of Christmas morning.

Such memories I have. I took the kids to a ski hill one Christmas and we rented a cabin for the weekend. Truth was that by early evening, I was bushed. I couldn’t haul myself back to the car in the parking lot to grab the wrapped presents from “Santa Claus.”

No worries, I thought, I’ll get out and get them before the kids wake up. Every right-thinking parent knows – and prepares for – kids being up before the sun cracks the horizon.

I was confronted by two teary-eyed children, bleating: “Santa didn’t find us!!!” My heart sank into my boots. I’m still not sure how I managed to retrieve the gifts and get them back into the cabin. Maybe I said Santa left them in the car? I expect the kids treated all of their Christmas gifts and Santa Claus with well-deserved skepticism after that.

An indelible Christmas memory was getting together at my sister’s house to make Indian food as the celebratory dinner. We had travelled in Asia back in the day and had fallen in love with Indian food. Masala dosas became my favorite breakfast food for a time.

I am convinced we discovered butter chicken long before the North American marketplace did. Butter chicken everything – sauce, frozen dinner, “ready to cook” kits – is now ubiquitous in grocery stores everywhere. But we found it first! (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

The Indian feast had as many elements we could replicate of the fabulous dishes we discovered in India. Butter chicken (of course). Saag paneer (spinach and Indian cheese.) Chickpea curry. Vegetable curry (for my vegetarian sister.) Pappadum. My own handmade puri.

That simple fried bread is a miracle of cookery. Three ingredients. Throw them together. Roll the dough into hand sized rounds, flatten them and throw them into heated oil. And voila! The puri puff up and look like mini-footballs to sop up butter chicken and all the assorted dishes and pickles and chutneys. Delicious mini-footballs, I might add.

Over the years, we experimented by trying on many different Christmas traditions. I bought a book called the $100 Christmas and tried to pull off the demands of the season on a strict budget. Another time, it was a baking-focussed Christmas.

One year, I made shortbread cookies – my absolute favorite – and boxed them up to send to my father. I was so proud to have actually finished the project, packed them up and got them in the mail well before Christmas Day.

When they finally arrived, Dad expressed his appreciation for my thoughtful gift. He said he was going to really enjoy the box of shortbread crumbs I had sent him.

As the years rolled on, Christmas traditions fluctuated based on a number of things. Who of our friends or family was around for Christmas. Cost of travel. Our ability to meet those travel costs. Work deadlines or school deadlines. Romantic interests who preferred we spend Christmas on our own. Whether the kids were expected to spend that Christmas with me or with their Eastern family.

These days, Christmas is pared down to the basics. A two foot rosemary tree is the Christmas tree now and sits on the coffee table. The heat of short candles powers traditional metal angel chimes which adds some festive ambience. There is a fresh evergreen wreath on the front door. That’s about it.

Adult children make their holiday plans now with friends and family. I’ve even stopped giving them the traditional fine chocolate-filled Advent calendars that I gave them every year since they were little.

We make Christmas. Individually and collectively. Ours will be a little toned down from years past but no matter. It works perfectly well for me and mine.

That seems the best way to honor the meaning of the season in this house. Hope JC and his family approve.

It’s Not All About You

When I was younger, I was sure I was the source of every problem that cropped up in my life. And why wouldn’t I? I had a parent who was devoted to that narrative.

She flatly told me: “I love you but I don’t like you.” I couldn’t disagree with her. I didn’t much like myself.

But it takes a certain insidious brilliance to turn a struggling child’s every misstep into making them believe they have some core defect. Even moreso to blithely disregard the deficiencies and exposure to harm in the child’s upbringing into which that parent placed the child.

I guess I was supposed to take responsibility for that, too.

The dynamic is all too common and well understood in the therapeutic community. A child whose needs are not met and whose pain and needs are ignored will slowly come to the conclusion there is something wrong with them.

They cannot place the blame on their caregivers as their lives literally depend on them. And if they did, what power would they have to change anything? None.

I’ve been considering this lately in light of certain struggles in my life. I have been trying to evaluate where to draw the line between my responsibility and that of the perpetrator. It is not easy to work out when you were raised as I was.

Throw into the mix that I am a woman. Women are often perceived as bossy and mouthy and difficult and “other” when we speak up or out about something we take issue with.

I once read about a woman (maybe you know who it was; I don’t) who said: “I don’t know whether I am a feminist or not. I do know I am labeled a feminist whenever I speak up or take any action that distinguishes me from a doormat.”

I was lately labelled “fiery” by a new neighbor. I have often been called “intimidating.” I never got what that meant exactly. It probably meant I was not completely on board playing the requisite political games to advance my career. I paid the price but have no regrets about speaking up about what bothered me.

I may have extended my life (I hope the Universe doesn’t smite me for making this comment) by giving full voice to my pain and aggravations. I have not often held back my opinion or silenced my voice in the face of present or pending harm as an adult. Corrosive or angry feelings were often given full voice. Not very sophisticated or smart, I know.

All to say, I can relate to those who struggle with finding and using their voice. I am always surprised by the blowback experienced by people who choose to speak up. Like whistleblowers.

If there was ever any doubt about the power of words and expression, you need look no farther than the fate of recent whistleblowers for examples. Perception is reality. When a whistleblower speaks up about something that they feel is wrong, the usual defense tactic is to smear that person’s character and discredit them in the public eye. It usually works.

It strikes me how similar this is to the dynamic of the dysfunctional family. Truth is elusive and can be very subjective. This is in direct opposition to what we are led to believe about “honesty” and “transparency.”

In truth, it is a balancing act we struggle with from cradle to grave. Even a person raised in a perfectly happy and functional family soon has to learn “the rules” of whatever world they get involved in as adults. Some “worlds” are more desirable than others. All depends on whether you choose to make your career on Wall Street or Sesame Street.

Wherever you land, you are making constant judgment calls and tradeoffs between your truth and the shared reality you operate in. Most can suck up the shared reality and its inherent imbalances and hypocrisy for the payoffs in money or good reputation.

Children raised from childhood without consistent support for their emerging voices and inclinations may have more difficulties. They may have much more trouble discerning and acting on discrepancies in problems not clearly and easily attributable to “them” or to “me.”

It is a learned vulnerability. I am discovering that – while infinitely better than it was earlier – the grooves of self-doubt can be hard to surmount. Even knowing that makes it much easier than it was to discern between the “true” ownership of a problem. And its resolution.

You may play a part in your struggles but you are not operating in a vacuum. True, you must take responsibility to resolve problems as they arise. Determining the level of responsibility you must take comes down to a decision about what you can and cannot control.

Know that and sort out whether or if you can do anything about a problematic situation. If you can’t, do yourself a favor.

Walk away.

Florida

Sun, sea and sand!!! The enduring image of the state of Florida. It seems it has been advertising its sunny and seductive presence to winter weary northerners in a palette of pinks and pale blue and orange forever.

Invariably garish. Gigantic billboards. Often in neon. Bigger than life. Florida and oranges have always been closely associated.

I have lived in Florida off and on now for over eight years. I could not be more surprised to find myself here but such are the mysteries of both life and love. It is much less gaudy place than I remember it from the Fifties.

One winter, my parents decided to drive to Florida. They followed the route snowbirds still take today. The I-95 interstate highway opened in 1956 and started on the Canada/US border from New Brunswick at Houlton, Maine.

The impetuosity of that trip fits what I remember about my father’s character. A new and interesting option had opened up. I can see him intrigued and eager to explore. So that is what he did. Headed South on the big, brand new highway, with his family in tow.

We often stayed at Howard Johnson motels along the way. My heart would jump when we pulled into the parking lot and saw the familiar orange and blue logo looming large in front of us.

Howard Johnson no doubt had amenities like swimming pools and vending machines to lure families in. All I cared about were the clam strips. Unreplicated in any restaurant I’ve ever been to until this very day. Perhaps that is nostalgia’s memory.

My most real and enduring memory of Florida was driving our car on the beach. I was beside myself with excitement. We drove on the sand in our big maroon Chevy with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and miles of beach grass beside us as far as the eye could see. I was surprised we didn’t sink.

I remember the wind whipping through the open car windows. The sun beating down from a blue and cloudless sky. The sense of joy and freedom of that day is unmatched in my memory.

I remember little else of that vacation except warm, happy memories. I must give a nod to Georgia. The old plantations were open to tourists where beautiful Southern belles sauntered in elaborate and colorful hoop skirts with parasols to match. There were demigoddesses in the eyes of an impressionable child. I may have aspired to be one when I grew up.

What was not evident at the time were black people. Maybe I couldn’t make a distinction back then. Perhaps there weren’t any in the locations we visited. Black voices would have been mostly silent in that time. Especially in the South. Blessedly, we saw no strange fruit hanging anywhere. It may simply have been that they were kept well away from the tourist traps.

Florida today has not lost the natural beauty, warmth and tropic lusciousness it has in my memory. But I cast my mind back through the tumultuous social history the US has gone through in the sixty-odd years since our family had that momentous vacation.

Florida today is a world where unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was brutally and senselessly murdered by a paranoid white man. It is where the USA’s only female serial killer was executed, less than an hour from where I still live. It is the home of radical, lifelong Republicans to whom Trumpism is next to godliness. Store clerks still wish everyone a “blessed day.”

Change when it comes can either be painfully slow and way too sudden. We seek oases of calm and stability in a world that is marked by constant change. In Florida, it is a fascinating and perplexing mix of old South, tourist mecca, retirees’ paradise (no state income tax is one hell of a draw) and ongoing tension between races and social classes.

We live in a predominantly white community. Yet only a few miles away, in a poorer section, a young black mother of four was killed on her doorstep by an angry white woman because the black woman’s children inadvertently trespassed on her property.

That seems the general Zeitgeist in America today. Uneasy tensions abound. The center cannot hold. Indeed, these days there doesn’t seem to be much of a center at all.

But Florida is still here. If the world does not soon implode, it always will be. Sunny. Seductive. Awash in sun, sea, sand and Disney characters. It changes when you live here. You see these elements for the marketing advantages they are. Day to day life is different. Just day to day life.

A more personal pain point is that Hojo’s went bankrupt and has gone out of business. No more exquisite clam strips.

Such is the egocentricity of self-interest. Such is the refuge of the politically impotent. And the politically discouraged.

Think I’ll head to the pool for a swim.

Advent One

I’m going to go to church today. It’s been awhile.

With all the stresses and strains of the past few months, I am deliberately seeking sanctuary. I have tried to create it in my home environment. That has helped some but it is not enough.

I need people. I need community. After living in a new place for such a short period of time, church beckons me back. Attending church was once central to my life.

In the Christian tradition, today is the first day of Advent. It is the first of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day. On each consecutive Sunday, we celebrate getting closer to the blessed birthday of Christ the Lord. It is such an enduring and compelling story.

Do I buy the whole Christ the Savior story 110%? Not really. He was undoubtedly a wise and good man. Deeply wise like many others who had come before him. Confucius. Buddha. Mohamed. All great humanitarians who contributed great wisdom and advice for how to live a good and godly life.

I have always been impressed by the consistency in their messages. Delivered and interpreted within vastly different cultural contexts and languages and eras. But the basics seem similar.

Love is a big one. Love one another. Help one another. The greatest value we can offer to life is our time and talents. That is how love is actualized. Pretty simple script. Pretty difficult to stick to.

There’s all those pesky ego desires and physical and emotional demands and limitations on whatever we do or want to do. So life is an ongoing struggle between selflessness and self-preservation.

It is disheartening to see how highly evolved spiritual visionaries have fared in history. The messages of peace and love the greatest humanitarians – starting with Jesus Christ – are contrary to the more common and baser human interests of power and control.

Assassination seems an alarmingly common fate for many visionaries that walked among us. Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy. Martin Luther King.

Preaching the gospel of love and peace is clearly in conflict with the more worldly interests of those who believe that glory and salvation are only achievable here on Planet Earth.

As the Advent season begins, Christians collectively gather to focus and reflect on this monthlong journey towards the biggest birthday party in their annual calendar. We can try to stiff the incessant material come-ons, difficult as this may be.

Same story every year. We are reminded to put “Christ back into Christmas.” “Remember the true meaning of the season.” Hard to argue with that logic. A debate over the inconsistency of those sentiments is for another time.

Personally, I am happy for the inherent annual reminders in this season that aren’t about buying stuff. Reminders about the importance of love, magic, unity and harmony.

My thoughts turn to Christmases past and present. I especially like memories when the elements of love, family, sharing and joy came together and were there in abundance.

Here’s to an upcoming season of the same.

Never, Ever Give Up

Giving up can be so tempting. Chucking it all to free up your calendar, your head and your peace of mind. Easier said than done in some cases. Too easy in others.

The advice is age-old and profoundly wise. Necessary, too, if we are to keep moving forward. We recommit to life every single morning. I have found it easier when there is an endgame at play. A specific goal to work towards that would take me somewhere I wanted to go.

I also found that the motivation to keep going was intimately tied to how I felt about myself. It was also tied to who I was living for. I think that goes for everyone.

What we do every day shapes our daily activities and our self-image. Choosing to engage with life is a decision that we make over and over again.

The harsh truth is there really is no lasting form of escape, save death. And even that is debatable and creates consequences we cannot fully determine after we are gone.

The thought of inflicting mortal emotional and psychological wounds on our loved ones should be enough to dissuade anyone from making rash decisions. But it does happen and its outfall can be hideous.

I once read of a hapless son whose life was upended when his relatively young mother died through assisted suicide against his deepest wishes. He appeared incapable of surviving her loss and, worse, that he had been helpless to prevent how she died.

His tirade was leveled at the administrators of her assisted death and how they acted in spite of the impact of her untimely loss on her loved ones.

I have been deeply emotionally distraught and felt helpless and hopeless to change my situation. I don’t believe I was ever in the type of pain that would have justified choosing death when there were other options to resolve my difficulties.

It was not enough that my situation seemed unresolvable to me. It was more that I was not fully compos mentis or mature enough to make that determination.

Life sheds many souls who can no longer bear their circumstances or the chronic despair they cradle inside. I can only imagine the mental agony that drives them to self-annihilation.

A soldier who watched his best friend rent asunder by an IED. A woman trying to make sense of why the “good guy” she knew casually raped and humiliated her. A terminal stage ALS patient who is on the brink of losing any capacity to function independently. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Staying the course through the worst physical pain imaginable or by carrying unbearable emotional agony changes us. It can soften us and lead us to a deeper level of empathy with our fellow human beings.

The gritty and painful parts of life are as much a part of the whole as the good bits. Integrating its’ agony and ecstasy not only offer the opportunity to become wiser and deeper human beings but more capable of relating to others.

Of course, it is only by hanging in and staying the course that we have a chance to apply the lessons of the pain we’ve survived to the life we create moving forward.

And to belabor the obvious, we can only do that if we are still here. Never, ever give up.

Lifesaving Advice

We learn lessons every day of our lives. Some of it can be lifesaving.

Here’s advice worth internalizing.

Trust your subconscious to pull these lessons up if and when needed.

(Although I admit it might be a stretch to find a tampon to stick in a wound at the exact same moment you have been hit by a bullet. And disheartening to learn that in a polar bear encounter, you are essentially a dead duck.)

What trivial knowledge might one day save your life?

  • When having a heart attack, you don’t swallow aspirin, you chew it. Then swallow.
  • If someone is stabbed or is punctured by a sharp object. Leave it in. The object is blocking the blood from spilling out.
  • If you ever get shot by a small caliber weapon, one of the best things to use to plug the hole and stop the bleeding is a tampon.
  • If you are choking or having a heart attack get out of your car. You can’t signal anyone if you are unconscious inside the car, but if you are draped over the hood of the car you are sending a distress signal.
  • If you vomit and it looks like coffee grounds, you need to get to a hospital. You’re bleeding somewhere and it’s reaching your stomach. The partially digested blood comes up looking like coffee grounds.
  • If being attacked, never strike in the torso, this is not the movies. Instead, go for the groin, eyes, or ears and then run and scream as fast and loud as you can.
  • If you ever almost drown to the point of throwing up water or passing out, even if you feel 100% fine, get to a hospital. Your lungs can unwittingly self-fill up with fluid over the next few hours.
  • Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.
  • If you’re ever somewhere really high (e.g. hiking) and you hear crunchy/crinkling noises in the air and/or feel static electricity (like your hair standing up), get out of there immediately, lightning is on it’s way.
  • Use this helpful rhyme if you’re ever facing a bear: If it’s brown, lay down. If it’s black, fight back. If it’s white, good night.
  • They rarely put Barnes and Nobles in bad areas, so if you are lost and need to find a decent area to stop, put “Barnes and Noble” in your GPS.
  • Don’t walk down the stairs with your hands in your pockets.
  • If you are stuck on a train track and have to abandon your vehicle to an oncoming train, run away from the track but also run towards the train itself. If you run in the same direction as the train is traveling, you will be standing where the debris of your former car lands.
  • If you’re at the beach and the ocean suddenly recedes, get to high ground. ASAP
  • If stuck in a riptide, remain calm, and swim parallel to the shore. You’ll still be pulled out some, but it’s better than fighting against the riptide, which is inevitably stronger than you are. Once you’re beyond the riptide, you can swim to shore.
  • When drowning, use your jeans as a life preserver in water by tying the legs together and filling them air.
  • Rohypnol, the date rape drug, has a salty taste to it.
  • When crying for help, try and call out specific people (“You with the red shirt, help me, I’m being mugged) instead of just screaming generally (“Help! I’m being mugged”).

    Most important: You were born with instincts. If you feel something is wrong with a person, place, situation, it probably is. Don’t discount those feelings in your gut that something isn’t going to work out, or there’s something hazardous about the situation. Also, in these situations, don’t be afraid of being rude. Just leave.

Hafiz Suboor, https://darkpsychologyfacts.quora.com/

Sayin’ Ain’t Doin’

I heard “I love you” a lot when I was growing up. I wasn’t one of those who could complain their parents never told them they loved them. Quite the opposite. I heard those three words repeatedly.

As a consequence, I had a hard time knowing or showing love when I grew up. I guess I believed it was enough to say those three magic words to cement and support a relationship.

In spite of this conviction, my relationships kept falling apart. Friendships foundered. Romantic relationships sizzled for about three months and then fizzled out. I was a great sprinter but a poor marathoner. My education was just beginning.

I had no idea how to back up professions of love with action. It never occurred to me that three square meals on the table every day was love. Or that clean clothes washed, dried, folded and put away in my chest of drawers meant love.

That someone would stand up for you or step in for you when you were flailing and out of your depth was a show of caring. And protection. Which is a form of love.

I am not sure when the disconnect between “sayin’” and “doin’” started to become obvious. My family lauded my early accomplishments and were happy to associate and claim me as their own. Every scholarship I earned, every public show of support was backed up by my family 100%.

It all seemed to fall apart when I foundered. There wasn’t an iota of support from my family when I was hurt or vulnerable or – God forfend – if I failed.

In generous moments, I like to think that my family was “training” me to be successful. A sort of weird Pavlovian positive reinforcement thing. I came to realize it wasn’t that at all.

When friends would tell me my family was jealous of me, I couldn’t wrap my head around that. “Jealous of what?” I would wonder. I could never really put my finger on the source of the disconnect between how they said they felt and how they made me feel.

If I didn’t “feel” the love they clearly had for me, I was deficient. Not them. Then, one day, everything became clear. The learnings came hard and fast once I had a baby. Whatever else a woman may be and however strong and confident she is in life, a baby will make her vulnerable. Physically and emotionally.

I assume most families get that and support women through the process of pregnancy, birth and early infancy. Mine didn’t. It wasn’t built into our family mantra of external success and worldly accomplishments.

Having a baby was, after all, a common accomplishment almost any woman could achieve. (Fully knowing as I write that how heretical a statement that may be to women who have struggled to conceive.)

I don’t know if anyone is adequately prepared for the unrelenting and challenging needs of an infant. It is one of those “fine in theory” moments in life that becomes a stark, 24/7, non-stop arena of incessant demands that you ignore at your (and your infant’s) peril.

I remember the mantra I devised when my son was crying. “Is he hungry? Is he tired? Is he wet?” If I was pretty sure all those boxes had been checked, I too rarely made the obvious conclusion that the infant just needed to be cuddled, hugged, rocked and reassured that he was safe and not alone on the planet. That there would always be someone there for him to rely on.

I did not learn that at home. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the controversial baby doctor from the 50s, was no help either. Let them cry themselves to sleep,” he exhorted. “It builds self-sufficiency.”
I don’t agree.

It was another lightbulb moment when I realized my children needed little else from me BUT love. My presence and listening to them and my implicit support was pretty much the whole package. Plus the occasional twenty bucks now and then.

Sure, they needed constant material support when they were little. But I honestly believe, as I have read about some families, that if there was enough joy and love in their upbringing, their material situation didn’t matter all that much.

So I am wary now when I hear the words, “I love you” and more cautious when and to who I say them. The ones I say those words to frequently have earned them. The friends who hear those words have been there with and for me. There are friends who literally lived through thick and thin with me. There are some about whom I truly believe I would not still be here without them.

“Sayin’ ain’t doin’.” This rule has served me well in later life. Where I used to easily trust, I am now inclined to wait until people prove what I mean to them before I grant them access to my inner world. It was pretty junky in there for a while when I was awash in confusion, regrets and unmet promises – given or received.

Because life is a marathon and not a sprint. Once I recognized that, I was more inclined to rely on others who consistently showed up in the race with me than those who sat far away on the sidelines – cheering me on.

Listen Up

I like the piece below because it is sensible and realistic. Platitudes abound in society and they can be useful. For a minute or two.

But there are a few widely shared platitudes in life that are a little TOO optimistic. They prevent us from internalizing and accepting how life really is for us at any given age and stage.

There are platitudes that prevent us from taking full responsibility for our lives whatever situation we find ourselves in. Not doing do can open us up to crushing disappointment and regret. It is all up to us.

This is a helpful guide (I found) for adding perspective to those helpful comments people make that aren’t quite as easy to attain as they sound. Accept the reality of these prescriptions and you have a better than average chance of making it to the end of your life with your eyes wide open.

That is, having lived a real life based on the real opportunities and people you have had come into it and those you built your life around.

Only then do you really have a better than average chance of dying in peace and acceptance with minimal regrets. When you have only yourself to blame or thank for its outcome.

The older you get the more you realize that a lot of things you were taught in your youth are just plain wrong.

  1. You can be anything you want to be. No, no you can’t. There are tests you won’t score high enough on that will prevent you from being accepted into whatever program you desire. All this despite having the intelligence and skill needed to excel at whatever the profession may be. Even if you have the right credentials and experience, if they are not hiring for what you want to do…well…you may be out of luck. There are miles of reasons why you can’t be whatever you want to be.
    • But guess what? You can be the best at the opportunities life does present to you.
  2. Hard work is rewarded. No, not always. Sometimes the power of the universe conspires against hard working individuals and unfairly rewards our lazy, short cut seeking, less intelligent friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
    • But if you knuckle down, and don’t let the unfairness of the world ruin your attitude, show up everyday, and do your best, then because of your hard work, you definitely increase the odds of having a fulfilling life.
  3. Money and wealth are your greatest asset. No, no they are not. They are important and provide security and freedom.
    • Your health is your greatest asset. If you have terminal cancer or some other horrible condition, all the money in the world does not matter. In fact, if you get type 2 diabetes or heart disease, what you can do is radically impacted. So invest in your health daily.
  4. That others care about your house, your clothes, your toys, and you in general. No, no they do not. We all think others are concerned with what we have or don’t have. They’re not. In fact the people we think are thinking about us, usually are not thinking about us at all. The world doesn’t really care about you.
    • But, if you are lucky, you have a few people who do truly care about you. It’s usually a very small number of people. They are the people that truly matter in your life and they probably could care less about all your toys.
  5. That we will all live forever. No, no you won’t. Sure, no one ever comes out and blatantly tells you that you will live forever. But every message we get on TV, social media, or culture in general seems to want us to believe we are immortal. Worse yet, our own minds seem to lead us around as if we are going to see the next two centuries.
    • But, you are going to die. Everyone you know is going to die. That should not scare us. It should free us. Free us to be present in every moment because this moment is all we really have. The past is gone. The future is not guaranteed. We have today. Embrace it and allow it to grow the love you have inside you. Then share that love.

Run The Dishwasher Twice

This story below didn’t just speak to me. It screamed.

I have been in the place of the protagonist in the story. Utterly spent with the seat out of the pants of my life and metaphorically mismatched shoes. No prospects. No hope. Ready to cash it all in.

I had two young kids. That was motivation to keep going. I wasn’t functioning well and had no support nearby. Caring friends or family or even professionals can provide a shoulder to lean on. It is often the most important job anyone can do for us.

Still I continued to place expectations of normalcy on myself. I needed to keep up the guise of “functioning.” I needed to tell myself I wasn’t beaten and could still perform my usual daily tasks. I was so kidding myself. It was like asking someone with two broken legs to run an obstacle course.

Just like the protagonist in this story, I sought validation from a counsellor or two seeking some reason for me to hang on. When the seat of the pants is out of your life, trust me, nobody wants to hear about it. Except maybe a paid professional.

It can take some time for us to figure out that we are the only ones who can come up with the answers we need to change and take charge of our life. It is a necessary emotional transition from dreamy adolescent to in-your-face-reality adult to do that.

Because figuring out whether, or if, to do the things required to save our lives is strictly up to us.

“When I was at one of my lowest (mental) points in life, I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I had no energy or motivation and was barely getting by.

I had therapy once per week, and on this particular week I didn’t have much to ‘bring’ to the session. He asked how my week was and I really had nothing to say.

“What are you struggling with?” he asked.

I gestured around me and said: “I dunno man. Life.”

Not satisfied with my answer, he said “No, what exactly are you worried about right now? What feels overwhelming? When you go home after this session, what issue will be staring at you?”

I knew the answer, but it was so ridiculous that I didn’t want to say it. I wanted to have something more substantial. Something more profound. But I didn’t. So I told him,

“Honestly? The dishes. It’s stupid, I know, but the more I look at them the more I CAN’T do them because I’ll have to scrub them before I put them in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher sucks, and I just can’t stand and scrub the dishes.”

I felt like an idiot even saying it. What kind of grown woman is undone by a stack of dishes? There are people out there with actual problems, and I’m whining to my therapist about dishes? But my therapist nodded in understanding and then said:

“RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE.”

I began to tell him that you’re not supposed to, but he stopped me.

“Why the hell aren’t you supposed to? If you don’t want to scrub the dishes and your dishwasher sucks, run it twice. Run it three times, who cares? Rules do not exist, so stop giving yourself rules.”

It blew my mind in a way that I don’t think I can properly express.

That day, I went home and tossed my smelly dishes haphazardly into the dishwasher and ran it three times. I felt like I had conquered a dragon. The next day, I took a shower lying down. A few days later. I folded my laundry and put them wherever they fit. There were no longer arbitrary rules I had to follow, and it gave me the freedom to make accomplishments again.

Now that I’m in a healthier place, I rinse off my dishes and put them in the dishwasher properly. I shower standing up. I sort my laundry. But at a time when living was a struggle instead of a blessing, I learned an incredibly important lesson:

THERE ARE NO RULES. RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE!