The little love story that made me cry in my pedicure.

I cried in my pedicure the other day.

My pedicurist and I have known each other for probably a dozen visits. She is around 27, and her boyfriend, who has lived with her for a while, just turned thirty. I know, because my pedicurist has been planning a surprise party for him since at least ten visits ago.

She talks about him in our visits, what he does, the funny things he says, how sweet he is, how kind, how he will suddenly stop in the middle of a sentence to apologize for an insensitive remark. She loves him. He loves her. They have two cats who publicly dislike each other but, according to my pedicurist, are playful and affectionate in private when she and her boyfriend spy on them.

That was the story she told that made me like her, and her boyfriend, very much. 

There is a lot to love about love, especially young love when two people probably have the least of what they will come to have, and yet feel they have everything they need to live happily. Of course, like all of us, my pedicurist would certainly like more of good things, but need? No, she has what she needs and it is her boyfriend, and their wily cats.

I have seen a few young couples get married over the last year. Every time, it strikes me how the life side of things -  paying off loans, maybe looking for a house, settling into the first or second big jobs, establishing good credit and saving what they can, is dwarfed by the large-looming love side with all the giddy fun and laughter, easy joy and endless getting of Sunday morning breakfast.

For several months, I have been thinking about the simple beauty of a less-is-more mindset, even if the couples I've seen getting married may not know they share such a thing. The happiest people I've seen this year, are the ones who are firmly rooted in the pursuit of needs first, wants later.  

The last two times I came in for my visit, unsure of the time frame, I asked my pedicurist if she’d had the party for her boyfriend yet. “Nooooooo,” she dragged out the word. “But!” she said, “I think I know what to give him!” She went off topic for a minute, getting her things together, asking me if I had picked a color, and then, when we were settled, she said, “I just wish his parents could be here. He’s bummed that they can't do it.”

A while back, his parents had moved out of the state to begin the next leg of their life in another climate and he’d taken it “really hard,” she said.

He’d been a close kid, stopping on the way home from work, coming over for games, that sort of thing. Apparently, he and the dad were close, but he and the mother were also good friends.

“He’ll be okay,” my pedicurist said, “he just misses them, that’s all. But he’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ve been telling him that."

The comment hung there for a moment. 

Two weeks ago, I went for my appointment and as soon as I sat down, she pulled out her phone, “We did the party. I have a video!” she said, pulling it up.

Her cover was to bring him for a tour of a friend’s new house.  In the video her boyfriend is shown being led from empty room to empty room to check out the place. He’s making nice comments about the house when they reach a closed door. He is asked to open the door and when he does he finds his mother and father standing on the other side.

You hear him, “Oh my GOD!!” and he wraps his arms around his mom and sobs, as does she, and as does the dad, and as did I at the sight of them all reuniting.

My pedicurist laughed very hard at this. “Oh my God, my boyfriend’s party made you CRY! You’re such a mom!” 

Less really can be more when it comes to happiness; for many of us, needs are simpler than wants, easier to meet, way less expensive, and, when met, produce happiness dividends for others. 

It's okay to get what you want. And you can see just how much that is, looking around at where and how you spend your time. That's fine.  But, we need our loves, we need our attachments and we need our huge hugs when we reunite. 

Always. Always.

And cats. Many of us need cats, too.

Moods that happen for no good reason at all

I have fallen in love with dahlias,  and so I'm going
to just leave this here on the blog until it's time to show
 you my Christmas tree, if that's okay.

First, I'm stealing this line that I overheard someone say:     

"My partner says it stresses him out the way I empty the dishwasher." 

We know what she means; all that bang-crashy, clangy noise from the other room sounds like anger, even if the person who is tossing and dropping things into place is humming  while doing so. 

I'll come back to that.

Last night, I talked with my newly married daughter about “let downs,” or, what I call post-moods, those weird, low-energy valleys that can follow a major event – two weeks after the holidays end, a month after the baby comes, three weeks after a glorious wedding, etc.

They happen of course, because the mental energy that has been expended in ever-higher amounts as an event looms is suddenly no longer required but shows up anyway, like a stray party guest who is still there the next day and wonders where everyone went. 

I experienced this in June, after I received my degree. One Friday I was celebrating the completion of the last final that I would ever take, awed by the prospect of graduation in only a few days.  The following Friday, I was rearranging things on my desk and spending a very long time trying to figure out what to have for dinner.  Eventually, my post-mood passed, as they do when they are tied to something that makes sense like a baby, a wedding or a degree.

But what about moods and attitudes that feel like post-moods but aren't tied to any good reason at all, or, the what's wrong with me mood?

People will do anything not to deal with these sluggish mindsets. They will put on music, and dance. They will go for a run. They will call a friend to go get a smoothie, or post something on Facebook to jump start a positive, if fleeting connection to something other than their thoughts.  

I drive. If I’m balled up, stagnant, or not in motion, I drive. I listen to music. Often I will add an overdue conversation with a good friend to my mood salad and enjoy a shiny new attitude about everything for a while.  

Or not. Because sometimes, none of it works. And when it doesn’t, I stop trying to change the mood, and think about how to use it.  

Life is full of wisdom-moments that remind us of what we know, and others that tell us what to do with what we know. They can come and go too quickly to process on the spot, or use, for what they bring. I believe that this is the purpose of no-good-reason moods – a way to let those moments come back around. I liken them to unopened mail, there's stuff in there that you probably need to know.  

Before you dart away from such a state, or quickly distract and switch to another rail, use the mood for what it might be trying to give you. Let your mind wander the way it's supposed to when you meditate. Don't stop it or argue with it, just see what it comes back with.

You may be suddenly aware of something you didn’t know before and now, will never not know in the future. 

It could be an answer to any of these questions:

What do you want? What do you wish you were doing? What do you wish you’d accomplished last week? What is a single focused thing you could work on for just this one day that would, to paraphrase Anne Lamott, get the birds all flying in the right direction for a little while? 

I’m dancing with my next novel again, which is great but which will be horrible at times because completing a novel is a long road with many, many exits leading to self-doubt, arguments for finding a real job, and confrontations with your partner over how his dishwasher noise is scaring your muse away.

It will be finished, I know that now. I know that because once, in one those no-good-reason moods, I realized that I don't meet all the goals I say I will, because even if I really want to, I'm truthfully unsure I can. You would agree if you saw my goals. You'd feel nervous for me. They're too big.

In one of those sluggish moods, I understood that as long as I could only settle for too-big goals, I'd do nothing at all to avoid a feeling of failure. 

And so, I kept the doable ones and made a choice to work on only one each day. They are my allies, these smaller goals. They sit on my desk in the morning and tell me that just for today, I should not post any cat cartoons on Facebook. I should do nothing at all until I give a character a trait.

Two or three or four weeks after it’s finished, and I’m in my “post-mood," I will gaze upon the forest of what now. And then, I'll go in and find the path of things I still need to know forever. 

Forests are a lot like no-good-reason moods that way.