Category: Life Lessons

The Unknown

Every day is basically an unknown. I remember periods in my life when it seemed things would always be the same. But it turned out they weren’t.

I think about the leap of faith it takes to jump out of bed each morning and face the day. We really don’t ever know what is coming.

I am presently grieving over the fate of a beautiful young black single mother not too far from where I presently live. She was killed in cold blood by an irate neighbor. A white lady if that matters. Guess it does around these parts of the American South.

The single mother’s kids had been playing outside and drifted onto the white lady’s lawn. The white lady threw a roller skate at one of the kids. She scooped up another kid’s iPad that was laying on the grass. Naturally, the kid ran to his mother for help.

When the beautiful black mother went to the white lady’s house to retrieve her son’s iPad, the white lady fired four shots through her unopened door. The white lady then claimed “self-defense.” Didn’t seem to matter that the white lady was the one that was aggressive to the black lady’s kids. The white lady told the 9-1-1 dispatcher that she “felt threatened” by her neighbor’s presence at the front door.

I listened to an interview yesterday with Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who in NYC in 2020 was falsely accused of harassment by Amy Cooper, (no relation) a white woman who refused to leash her dog in an on-leash section of Central Park. Cooper calmly recorded on his phone the white woman’s hysterical phone call to police complaining “a black man was threatening her and her dog.” The video recording told the tale. The white woman lost her job, was roundly condemned, and faded into infamy.

Christian Cooper wrote a book on birdwatching and just landed a gig as host of a National Geographic birdwatching show. Finally, at least one story of a white person and a black person’s confrontation ended well. For Christian Cooper at least.

I don’t get racism. Not saying I have plenty of best black friends. Not saying I can comfortably put myself in the shoes of a black person’s day-to-day reality in North America.

It’s just that I know and have met too many wonderful people of all races and nationalities. Standards of decency for humans are pretty much the same around the world no matter what color their skin is. Character, class, and manners count more in any individual than their race.

So my heart is heavy and grieving for that beautiful young black woman’s family. I don’t know how her kids will make sense of their mother’s loss as they grow up. No more than their bereaved grandmother can make sense of the loss of a beautiful daughter.

And then there is the unknown of how justice will play out in this case, as if that even matters to those most intimately affected. This is the land of Trayvon Martin, a skinny 15-year-old black kid who was shot dead for just walking around his neighborhood. His murderer got off scot-free based on the infamous “Stand Your Ground” laws that exist in Florida.

And so it may well be for this murderer – already charged with the lesser violation of manslaughter. It is an unknown almost too terrible to contemplate. That she might walk free.

Whichever way it goes for the hate-filled woman who coldly and viciously took this young woman’s life, it won’t matter to her kids. All they’ll know is facing the unknown every morning of waking up for the rest of their lives without their mother.

Rocking Nothing

Today I am thinking about nothing.

Nothing in particular. What doing nothing means. What having nothing means.

Generally, people seem to be very scared of nothing. The requirement to be doing something all the time is especially tyrannical in the middle of our lives. It can take a concentrated effort to slow down and do nothing. Some people simply can’t handle it. Not comfortably at any rate.

We are all aware of how limited our time is on Earth. That can make us anxious about “filling” every minute of every day. That is not to be confused with living “fully” each day. Our anxiety can grow as the years begin to speed up, quickly at first, and soon they start to fly by.

Joni Mitchell’s advice to a young man in her song The Circle Game captures this: “And they tell him, Take your time, It won’t be long now before you drag your feet to slow that circle down.”

Death is perceived as the greatest nothingness of all. Unless we believe in reincarnation, we may believe only darkness and oblivion await us after death. I am not so sure of that anymore. The Universe is far too complex and convoluted to let us off that easy. But, I don’t really know. No one does.

So in light of life’s inevitable endpoint, and if we’re lucky, we start to slow down. After years of frenetic dedication to raising kids and making a living and staying in the mainstream of life, I stopped. One day, I found myself looking out my window at a pleasant scene whilst doing absolutely nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I was just sitting.

You can’t imagine how foreign and far-fetched that scenario was for a Type A personality like me. I was steeped in the virtues of the Protestant work ethic. If you were too, you may get how odd and slightly terrifying doing nothing is.

This is the paradox of the human condition. We set goals early in our lives for the things we want to have and accomplish in our lives. Many of us metaphorically break our necks to get what we want.

But we rarely sit down and take a hard look at what we really want and need. Then we make our lives more difficult and less peaceful by comparing ourselves to our peers. If we don’t have what they have, we can get scared and sad. When we ignore the wisdom of stopping to smell the flowers, the memories of our life might be but a blur.

Stopping to smell the flowers can be the very place where we find joy and feed our sense of wonder. Only by stopping can we marinate our souls and senses in the wonder of what is all around us. We often fail to recognize that the little things are really the big things in life. I blinked and my children were adults. They will never be little again and it makes my heart hurt. I missed out on many small and tender and precious moments with them in my drive to survive and succeed.

These days I can be perfectly happy doing nothing. That is progress for me. I grab the chance to do absolutely nothing whenever I can get it. It is not that I dislike being busy or having something valuable to occupy my time. I actually quite like being busy. But these days, it is more of a choice. When life gets too crazy, it is up to me to slow it down.

It has become necessary to consider what avocations make me happy. Beyond the necessary mundanities of day-to-day life, I mean. There are only a few. They could be considered silly and frivolous pursuits but they are mine. I no longer need to justify them or justify my existence.

I have a friend who is a genius at this. He walks in the world at his own pace and is directed by his own interests. He goes on long daily walks just to exercise. He has been known to sit for a couple of hours on a park bench and just watch what is going on in the world and the people around him. I have always admired and envied him for that capability.

So I’m thinking I’ll sit awhile today and just watch the world go by. With no lives on the line, or mandatory issues that require my attention, I’m free to do that. It likely isn’t what the expression carpe diem was supposed to mean. But instead of “seizing the day,” I’m just gonna sidle up to it with a cup of hot tea and watch it amble by.

Jeff Brown, Redux

When you’re good, you’re good. I have followed Jeff Brown with equal measures of respect and resonance for some time now. His writing is consistently strong and insightful. His new book, Humanifestations (link below this post), is another marker on his journey to make sense of the human condition.

Brown’s most recent post (below) resonated strongly.

He points out a human tendency to credit exceptional creative output or the deeper insights of talented individuals as “Gifts of the Divine.” He disputes this and calls out the human tendency to hide our light under bushels. I both agree and disagree with him.

Brown argues that if humanity believes the wondrous works exhibited by individuals are based only on external factors, it discourages us from accessing and owning what is inherently great and gifted in ourselves. Without owning it, Brown suggests, humanity will continue to marinate in mediocrity.

Jeff Brown argues – the former lawyer dies hard – that his writing insights and clarity have come from the hard emotional work necessary to overcome a difficult childhood.

Again I agree and disagree with him. I had a hard childhood. I have done a ton of personal “work.” At the same time, I also feel I was given a “gift” for writing. And, yes, sometimes it feels like a Divine “gift.” Sometimes I have written things that I have to read over and over again to fully get what I have written. I cannot fully credit or connect what I have written with “me.”

Dale Estey, a dear author friend, and I have a throughline in our friendship. We often talk about our mutual belief in what we call “invisible hands” that overtakes our writing. We agree we do not always consciously “think up” what we write. How words get put together often feels unbidden. Painters, dancers, and even athletes all speak of this phenomenon, too. Think Flashdance.

Jeff Brown is right. Humans tend to downplay genius when they find intimations of it in themselves. Or credit a “higher power.” Well, I also believe there could be “something else” at work in the creative process.

For the love of god, do not ask me what that something is or ask me to explain it. For the most part, our society is just plain incompetent at handling “the gifted.” A perfect storm of luck and opportunity, and will is needed. It takes a certain social alchemy for a child’s gifts to be recognized early, encouraged, and supported to develop their talent over the long haul.

And it can be a very long haul, fraught with emotional and other landmines. [Read the late Swiss psychologist Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child for an analysis of this dilemma.]

I am happy to feature Jeff Brown on my blog again as he triggered one of the biggest issues I have faced in writing. My work or god’s work? Who’s to say? And to what end? Who knows?

All I know is that it is a good thing when coherent messages that promote the value of each human life get pushed out there – over and over again. Because we are human and need to be frequently reminded of that.

Whether humanitarian messages come from “the Divine” or are a distillation of our own hard-won insights that come from processing “hard things” is more or less immaterial to me. Any writing that promotes a greater appreciation for the sanctity of humanity and individuals gets my support – whether it comes from Divine inspiration or inspiration from deep within ourselves.

Take it away, Jeff Brown … Let me know what you think, dear readers. It is a legitimate point of contention for debate and wider discussion. Jeff Brown argues his point brilliantly. Like the genius he is.

“I went through a particularly potent writing phase some years ago. I was writing one clarified quote after another, and immediately sharing them in social media. What I found interesting was that many people would come onto my walls, and remark that I was “channeling.” At first, I imagined this a good thing. As though I had somehow formed a bond with the Divine, and the Divine was using me to bring their m, I arrived at a different perspective. I had worked long and hard, and overcome much, and whatever insights I had arrived at did not come from the beyond. They came from within me, from the heart of my lived experience, from the depths of my story. And then I looked closer at many of the ways that we associate moments of achievement with something beyond ourselves: “Her performance was out of this world”, “He rose above his circumstances and channeled greatness,” “Her genius is heaven sent,” “He has found his DIVINE purpose.” It is as though we are only allowed to own our mediocre achievements. Anything clarified or brilliant or awesome had to come from somewhere beyond our humanness. Little wonder our views of enlightenment and awakening are frequently associated with transcendence. We haven’t been taught that we are the marvel, and that our lived and learned experience is the source of our most profound creations. If we don’t come to get this, if we continue to bury our magnificence below a bushel of judgment, we will continue to look for our greatness outside of ourselves and our species will never actualize its possibilities. Because we really are marvel-us 🙂. Each of us, a living marvel...”

Step by Step by Step

Have you ever stopped to look back on your life and think about how many things you have done and been? The roles you have played? Does it strike you how all-consuming and exclusive some periods were for your time, energy, and attention? And then, one day – just like that – those times are left behind in the rearview mirror and are gone forever.

Think about heading for a high school diploma. Then maybe a university degree. What about certain trade certifications? You worked like crazy for weeks, months, and years. Then you get your reward: the paper, the job, the crop. Your life – and your role in it – changes again.

We don’t approach anything the same way twice. Immersed in the learnings and experiences of the day before, we approach each new day essentially as new people. Incremental changes maybe but change nonetheless.

Think of your first day at your first job. How exciting and scary and confusing it was. Compare that to the type of days you came to have ten or twenty years into your career when it had become pro forma. “Just another day at the office.” Even the second day at your first job was different from the first.

In relationships – if we’re lucky – we are constantly changing and growing. The best marriages come to mind when they are respectful and mutually beneficial loving partnerships. But every day, we become different people and so do our partners.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be a parent to adults. They don’t “need” me now. So I often find myself in deep conversations with myself about how to approach certain topics with them. I did not have that level of caution and awareness when they were children.

I have also thought back on myself as a university student. Nothing else mattered in the world except showing up for classes, reading the prescribed books, and doing whatever it took to ace those courses. Then, you graduate. And somehow that all magically disappears. Mind you, in the workplace, it often feels much like term papers when a draft article or speech is due.

I am an inconsistent cook but mostly love it. Without question, my most ambitious and complicated dishes have been tackled when I was in a partnered relationship with someone. There was more balance for me in the domestic arena.

I made homemade liverwurst once. I have made surprisingly good stuffed green peppers. I have made a Crosse & Blackwell-worthy apple chutney. But then life got busy, and bazinga, I am relying on cold sandwiches and hot soup as mealtime staples for weeks.

Fitness and exercise is another area where I – and I believe many others – blow hot and cold. I have been a full-out gym rat for some periods of my life. And then something happens. I stop going to the gym. Six months later, I am like some slug of a couch potato who never worked out a day in her life.

So I am wrestling with what’s up with all that. I am back into a renovator’s role to set up a “new to us” house. I am picking paint colors and flooring and imagining how rooms will look and function. It is not as all-encompassing as it was on my first few tries. That is something of a relief. Now I have a better idea of how it will play out. I have a better idea about what to expect.

I know more than when I first started doing the renovation and decorating thing decades ago. So the process goes a little faster and with a little more certainty. But is still a step-by-step process that can’t be rushed. The walls must be painted before the laminate is laid and the furniture is moved in and the housewarming invitations are sent out.

Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be. We are meant to weave in and out of various passions or pursuits and roles in our lives. We are meant to get stronger at what we love and are good at. We finally arrive at a place when we recognize and know better what that is.

When we achieve what we need to learn or do or change at each of our life stages, we get some ephemeral internal message to move on. Not a bad system when you think of it. Step by step by step.

Peace and Quiet

I am in need of peace and quiet. Watched two movies recently that brought that message hurtling home. The first was The Wolf of Wall Street. No one has ever accused director Martin Scorcese of a light touch or oozing subtlety.

The movie is one of those that plays to investors’ worst fears about what really happens on Wall Street. We see a sleazy operator who turned the hopes and dreams of countless minor investors into dust.

The debauchery and machinations of Jordan Belfort’s short dance upon the stockbrokers’ stage were unsettling and hard to watch. It was entertaining only in the sense that it provided insights into a world many of us will never encounter. The sensible among us would never want to.

Then I moved on to Babylon. No relief there either. The film opens with an elephant transportation problem exacerbated by the beast’s diarrhea (or so it was graphically depicted.)
I was heartened to see Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie on the marquee as they are both stellar actors and personal favorites. But the movie’s cachet ended there. A lot of naked bodies and scenes of debauchery and histrionic acting. Exhausting to watch.

I use to enjoy living life to excess. My motto was: “Everything in moderation, especially moderation.” I was so desperate not to feel desperate painful feelings. I cozied up to and crawled into an alarming number of booze bottles over an excessive number of years.

Finally kicked booze some 20+ years ago, but that was the easy part. The hard part was facing all the feelings I had been trying to suppress by drinking to excess. I spent. alot of time in nightclubs when I was young. Dancing hard. Drinking hard. Laughing way too loud and for far too long.

Every image. I have in my mind’s eye now is focused on creating consistent peace and quiet. Not boredom but peace and quiet. The two are sometimes confused. I have never been bored a day in my life. With all there is to learn and to know, I cannot even understand how anyone could ever be. Simple laziness and lack of imagination as far as I am concerned.

So it is ironic that in seeking simple peace and quiet, I ran into these two movies. There is this tendency in Hollywood these days to overblow everything or blow everything up. A recent New Yorker piece talked about how Marvel Comics has taken over and come to dominate Hollywood. No secret to that. Eager audiences. Easy money.

The new house we are moving into backs onto a forest. It may be the forest that sold us on the place. Or the pool. In any case, I have been craving an oasis vibe in my living space for most of my life.

I’ve discovered the secret to peaceful living is holding back. Taking your time before making decisions. Savoring the savory dish in front of you or the tinkling ice in the cool beverage you are drinking. Balance in as many elements of your life as possible.

I know for sure there is very little peace to be found in modern Hollywood storylines. Maybe that was alright and is alright to burn off the excess energy of youth. But I don’t really believe that. In a society where excess and living large outranks every other consideration, messy, messianic movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and Babylon are natural consequences. Everyone can handle being jazzed up for an hour or two. But it is not a natural place to live a life.

I am very happy I can reserve the right to not actively partake in the delusions portrayed in these films. I can take them or leave them. Feed my curiosity or taste for the mundane. Then I can turn the movies off, turn on my nightly sleep meditation and enjoy the peace and quiet of a good night’s sleep.

Happy 35th Birthday, Katie Mac!

Daughter’s birthday today. Her 35th. A milestone of sorts. The fact she has been on the planet for three-point-five decades seems a significant chunk of life worth celebrating.

Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Your children come through you, but not from you.” My Katie couldn’t be a clearer example. She is very much her own person. For that quality alone, I am delighted by her and having her on the planet. She is a little like me, as genetics inevitably dictate, but mostly she is like herself.

Day by day, Katie discovers with more certainty who she really is. And what she really believes. And what she really wants. Those are not automatic givens for anyone. A lot of people flop around in life without much internal structure and an ill-defined self-image.

Katie was literally a miracle starting from the circumstances of her conception. She outwitted the murderous intentions of an IUD to be born on the planet. As miraculous to me anyway, she was a VBAC birth. That is, she was born vaginally after her brother’s C-section two years earlier. That birth protocol was rare back in the day. And she topped off all of the other improbabilities by being born on her grandmother’s birthday. Talk about a suck-up.

As a toddler, Katie shimmered. In her christening pictures, she looks sweet and angelic in a white floor-length lace and ribbon confection of a dress. I believe that sweet, angelic, and loving spirit she exuded that day is who she is at core.

Me and Katie did not have a particularly normal day-to-day parent-child experience, but we did have some adventures. I flew to Paris with her during a school break to get her to Austria where she would au pair for several weeks as a summer nanny. We rented a car at D’Orly Airport. As I haltingly made my way into Parisian traffic, I remember being hyper-vigilant about driving in Europe for the very first time.

It was Katie who spied a traffic sign directing us toward Versailles Palace. The playground of King Louis XIV and his court should have been on our list of must-sees. With no set itinerary, Katie and I were happy to stop and wander for a few hours through the luxurious palace and its gardens. https://en.chateauversailles.fr/

On another occasion, I flew from Ottawa, Canada and she from Christchurch, New Zealand to meet up in Los Angeles for the last post-Oscars taping of the Oprah show at the Kodak Theater in 2011.

Most memorable, beyond seeing Oprah live, was a major earthquake in Christchurch that occurred the very day Katie was supposed to fly to LA. With communications out of NZ badly damaged, it took hours before I learned she had safely boarded her flight and was on her way to Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrBA5ddfMc

One cold winter morning, we headed East in my new-to-me RVR SUV to drive across North America starting in Calgary, Alberta. We headed straight south into Montana and drove across the northern United States until we hit Long Island. Surprisingly, road conditions were summer-like for most of the way until we hit Iowa when a snowstorm hit us right between the headlights.

On another of Katie’s birthdays, we stayed at a dude ranch in BC and rode horses through a thick, tall forest. From the forest’s edge, we watched black bears gamboling at a distance in a large open field.

On one of my special birthdays, we climbed Seongsan Ilchubong Mountain on Jeju Island in South Korea. Had Katie not been there, quietly but firmly pushing me upwards on the treacherously steep trail to that peak, I m not sure I would have made it to the top. Which was so worth seeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seongsan_Ilchulbong

A few days later, Katie and I flew to Hong Kong so I could visit her workplace. The best description for the place is rustic. Right beside the floor mattress I was directed to sleep on, a baby pit viper was coiled up in a clear Rubbermaid container with a top riddled with breathing holes. That it was really incapable of inflicting serious harm on a human was slight comfort. I put in a rather fitful night.

In the intervening years until she bore down on her academic pursuits, Katie amassed an impressive resume of international travel from New Zealand, to Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Yukon Territory and the Arctic Circle. Always with a job and with a goal in mind.

She graduated from the University of British Columbia two years ago with a degree in geography. She now applies that training to her job in a technology startup doing infrastructure assessment projects for engineering firms. In the past year, she has bought a house, is at work on several entrepreneurial ideas, and manages her household and business affairs well.

I am so damned proud of her. And happy for her though she isn’t always happy herself. She is a learning machine. She is saucy, sharp, fun, super-bright, fashion-forward, and athletic and she never quits when the going gets rough. She is logical and a problem-solver. I’m not sure that she yet fully knows how important those qualities will be to her in the future.

I sure hope she knows how vitally important she is to me. And to a buncha other people. Her older brother, for instance, who is a going concern in his own right.

Happy Birthday, BBH! (Have I finally made up for your screwed-up twelfth birthday? Surely an amnesty is in order what with a special birthday coming up for me, too. Think about it? :-))

Time to Vote

These are the very best desserts on the planet.

  • Fresh strawberries kissed with maple syrup on a freshly baked tea biscuit and real lightly-sweetened whipping crea.
  • Italian tiramisu made from scratch with freshly baked lady’s fingers soaked in real coffee
  • Tarte tatin which is little more than apples, vanilla bean, cinnamon sticks, butter, and a pie shell
  • A raspberry Pavlova with fresh whipping cream then raspberry coulis laid between layers of perfectly baked sweetened meringue disks
  • Lemon meringue pie with meringue piled high and lightly browned and honey marks in the crusty meringue
  • Gingerbread served hot with either cold, lightly sweetened whipped cream or a warm, tart, and silky smooth lemon sauce
  • A four-layer deep rich chocolate Devil’s Food cake piled high with homemade white boiled icing
  • Trifle: the true English variety served in a glass bowl made with fresh whipped cream, fruit, cake, and sherry and topped with slivered almonds
  • Creme brulee (in any permutation)but I prefer the classic caramel variety
  • Baklava in a crunchy phyllo crust with crushed pistachios and honey
  • Burfi in almost any flavor
  • Gulab jamun served cold out of the fridge floating in sweet syrup
  • Zabaglione: rich, sweet, and heavily laced with a robust Madeira wine
  • Homemade ice cream either served alone straight from the canister or on a fresh piece of warm fruit pie

Vote on one to three of your top favorites. Discuss your memories of them or any other not on the list. Surprise me. Have a delicious day.

Qzzohsnzlk, One event can change your life

I needed a humorous distraction today. This appeal landed in my inbox from a hungry entrepreneur.

Hey Qzzohsnzlk, One day I was casually scrolling on Facebook and came across a business conference invitation. I didn’t know the host but from what I could see, the information was exactly what I had been looking for…“

I believe the sender of that message meant to address it to me. It landed in my inbox after all. But the name Margot – my name – showed up nowhere in the invite, the salutation, or the body of the email.

It would have been personally addressed to me if my name was Qzzohsnzllk [quiz-oh-sen-zilk – my best effort at spelling it phonetically].

It is clearly a technical glitch. (Or is it? Now I wonder if I am the only one. I wonder if there is a whole population of Qzzohsnzlk relatives out there for me to track down.)

As a child, I was a devoted fan of Mxyzptlik [Mix-yez-piddle-ick] in the Superman comics. Myxyzptlik is usually presented as a trickster in the classical mythological sense. He possesses reality-warping powers which he uses to torment Superman and make his life difficult.

All that aside, I mostly just loved saying his name: Mix-yez-piddle-ick. It felt like the password to a secret club where you gained admittance only if you could say the “secret” name.

That is sorta how Rumpelstiltskin tried to trick a young woman. Through circumstance, the husband believed his wife could spin straw into gold when it was, in fact, Rumpelstiltskin who had done it. The young woman was clearly in a bind from which R. would only extricate her if she could guess his real name.

R. gave her three chances and the challenge was not going well. Had she not followed him one night and overheard his name said at a campfire, he would have taken her firstborn son. She guessed right, he didn’t and thus the story ends well for the wife, though R. was pretty ticked about it all.

And speaking of fairytales, you gotta laugh at some pitches that pop up in your inbox. Absolute strangers are taking an absolute flyer on seducing you into parting with some serious coin with their bold promises.

They work hard to get you to pay them money to find out how THEY did it (whatever “it” is, but usually almost instant fame and wealth). This pitcher apparently made $100,000 IN HER FIRST THREE MONTHS and now “so can you.”

She assures us her journey was not entirely a cakewalk: “I showed up. Got the answers, did the work, and the results came quick!“

Deliciously vague, no? As a curious type, I have questions. What did she show up for? What were the answers she got? What were the questions she asked to begin with? What work? And what were those quick results you got? I need to see the evidence.

I’ve pretty much learned what does and doesn’t come quickly in life. I have learned that the most valuable things and things we truly value take time to acquire and grow. Family. Career. Friendships. Equity.

I have also learned the value of getting someone’s name right as a basic element of a successful marketing pitch.

I get the appeal of the “get-rich quick” schemes. I have been in financial hot water before. There are a few times I would have grabbed and held fast to a blade of eelgrass if I thought it would help me improve my situation faster.

The nice lady closed with this: “Qzzohsnzlk, sometimes you are only one idea away from a major breakthrough.”

Copy that. I have decided – no personal slight intended – I won’t sign up for your life coaching, get-rich quick scheme … I mean, offer. In my world, that counts as a minor if not a major breakthrough.

It comes down to this. I followed gurus and chased mentors my whole adult life. No question they were valuable. But at a point, your definition of success and the path to get there must be mapped out by you. That is, we apply the lessons we have learned and hold our breath. Of course, we all need support and encouragement and a few bucks here and there to get by.

I’ve learned a true feeling of success and the self-esteem that goes with it starts when you are finally conducting your own orchestra, not just sitting in first chair. I wish the life coach lady well. I know she is only trying to make a living like the rest of us. Who knows? She may be fabulous at what she does for many people. She just isn’t going to do it for me.

Respectfully yours, Q

The Waiting Game

I’ve always wondered about English Literature curricula. I dutifully swallowed stacks of Shakespeare shoved at me in high school. More like nibbled at the juicy bits if I’m honest.

I could recite the entire balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet. But I couldn’t much relate to the two kids in the play. At best, my analysis described “two crazy kids overwhelmed by hormones from two families that didn’t get along and their story does not end well.”

I think about places where we so often have to be in life. Where we wait. Grocery stores. Banking machines. Doctor’s offices. Dentist’s offices. Just about any office associated with a medical practice.

Sometimes we know exactly what we are waiting for. At other times, it is a more vague kind of existential waiting or “I’ll know it when I see it” type of feeling. A generalized type of ennui.

Another confounding play we learned about in high school was Waiting for Godot. Two Italian guys keep holding themselves back instead of moving their adventures down the road because they are waiting for the selfsame Godot of the title, who never actually shows up.

The play is often interpreted as a depiction of the pointless, uneventful, and repetitive nature of modern life, which is often lived in anticipation of something which never materializes. That something is always just beyond the horizon, in the future, arriving ‘tomorrow’.

Well, now. Aren’t they a couple of cheery storylines to share with fragile young “chidults” which teenagers are? Their storylines are major buzzkills. These plays emerged from a time by writers who understood almost nothing promotes any certainty. Not love nor patience nor good deeds.

We are encouraged to “wait for absolution, or benefit, or reward or forgiveness.” The thing is if we don’t intervene and take active charge of our lives and the experiences we want to have in them, we are almost certainly going to be let down. And likely left out.

“Motion is lotion,” says my physical therapist, referring of course to the prescription for keeping joints limber. I would take that advice and apply it to all elements of life. Unless we are moving, we are stagnating. All fine and good if it is a temporary state of a few hours, even a few days. Both stasis and stagnation should be the breeding ground for devising your next move and for picking which direction you want to move in.

That direction should hold the promise of what you want to learn and how you want to spend your days. Want an education? Fill out an application form. Want to go on a date? Head to “target-rich” environments where there are other single people like you. Want to be rich? Study money. Watch how you spend it. Most important, clean up your relationship with money so it can be a good friend and not a constant torment.

Wait and see is a statement you can only make after you have planted the seeds or set something in motion. Then, and only then, should you settle back with a cup of coffee and wait for the phone to ring.

Ain’t It Awful?

There is a personal payoff in being a little withdrawn and isolated from the world occasionally. Many people spend a lot of time observing the world and listening to the news and hearing politicians expertly and bloodlessly dissect their opponents. Those people, understandably, often have a very dim worldview.

A common complaint I hear about the state of the world is that it is awful and they can’t do anything about it. For the most part, they are correct. But what most people don’t get is that what happens out there in those other theaters of life isn’t of much importance or relevance to their own daily lives.

Yes, of course, the decisions of politicians and policies and laws that are enacted affect our pocketbook and standard of living. They may decide what we can and cannot do or where we can and cannot go. As for our regular daily lives, they are simply so much noise. It is our choice whether to listen to that noise or not.

I feel sorry for young people today who are held sway by the endless pageantry of new developments in technology and the Internet. There is this influencer who must be followed and then that one and have you seen whats-her-names newest trend-setting video but he’s all the rage now and she no longer counts. How in hell do they keep it all straight in their heads. Maybe they don’t.

Unplugging from technology seems analogous to committing social suicide these days. It is particularly sad that young people – teenagers say – who are at the very point of trying to discover who they are and what they want to be in life, have to dig through, filter out and mirror their life choices against the preaching of dozens of online personalities. Strangers in point of fact.

I am not as vulnerable to this information overload as I once was but I cannot say I am not influenced. Some websites and video reels catch me and have an uncanny power to eat up a half hour or more of my time before I am even conscious of it. There are several excellent writers out there who have my attention and I feel I can barely keep up with their output.

The chief culprits in my life presently are Facebook video cooking reels. A revolving cast of chefs from all sorts of genres display feats of culinary prowess that I would give anything to replicate. The videos are almost choreographed ballets as much as they are recipe-sharing. Happily, I am old enough to realize, that while they are dazzling, I am not inclined to beat myself up if I cannot recreate their splendid creations in my own kitchen.

I take that analogy and apply its potential to more impressionable and searching young people. I can only imagine that they must suffer for not always having the “right” clothes, or the most up-to-date cellphone, and maybe spontaneous weekend trips to anywhere but here. It is kinda diabolical.

As old as I am and with the resources I can draw on, some of these come-ons attract me. I don’t act on them and I don’t suffer for not acting on them. But if I were younger, I might feel left out.

I was at first bemused by and then a little sad to learn there is an actual thing out there called FOMO – “fear of missing out.” It seems to be there is so much technological space litter available out there that you can’t help but be missing out on something.

It is like some kind of fiendish device that is deliberately designed to keep us all “off-balance.” It seems to force people to rely exclusively on “significant” “others” “outside” themselves to find joy and happiness. They even seem to rely on them to tell them who they are. That is the biggest fraud of all. And a dangerous one if you are particularly fragile or vulnerable.

My version of “Give Peace A Chance” is unplugging from time to time. I rarely watch the news on television anymore. It is an irritation to the spirit and has an eerily similar sameness with its litany of tragedy, and skulduggery, and focuses on the worst of what humans are and do.

Books give me greater comfort. I can pick and choose among them for lessons I want to learn and master and access the emotional experiences I want to have. That is why popular successful authors are so popular. They are reliable and predictable in their style and output. Sure seems to me that in a world that is most kindly described as a little topsy-turvy, I’ll take a circuitous John Grisham novel bashing the legal system over CNN and Youtube anytime.

It keeps a rein on my sanity and a paddock for my well-being.