It's Thanksgiving. Leave your politics in the driveway. They'll wait.

Note: Three years ago, after Trump was elected, and after I'd been reading about the political divides that were infecting friendships, family relationships, and marriages, I worried for the first time about immunity. 

Thanksgiving was coming, a day I have always cherished for its power to bring even far-flung, diverse family members together in a place of warmth, trust, love and gratitude, things that should always be more important than politics. 

I wrote the piece I've re-posted here,  the third most popular of all I've written. Now, with three years of back-story, it's more relevant than ever and so, here it is, on this newest, ever-cherished Thanksgiving day.  

Before we begin...

It's Thanksgiving. Leave your politics in the driveway. They'll wait.

Near my computer I keep a doodle page. I decorate it with swirly designs when I'm in thoughtful conversation with someone on the phone. Other times, I write down true, clear things that come from nowhere. 

The other day, I wrote:  

"You can't write with reason and balance about a thing until your passion has been captured by the next thing." 

Since the election, I've been reading stories about relationships – some lifelong – that have ended, or will, over the way people voted  two weeks ago.  

One couple moved their wedding to another country to make it financially out of reach for their family members. 

That sort of thing.   

Those stories of broken relationships captured and saddened me for days. To imagine how friends or family who have known and loved each other forever could estrange over the election was beyond my powers of empathy or imagination. 

Today, it is Thanksgiving. My children are home. It is the next thing, and I am captured again. 

These days are precious to me. We are apart geographically, now, and often too immersed in our own daily lives to catch up. 

And I have missed them.  I have been craving their company, their stories, their voices. I'll get those glimpses of how they've changed since we last gathered, I'll hear of other people they've encountered who changed them, maybe enlightened them. 

Our kids took serious interest in this election, and some of us were immensely disappointed over Hillary's loss. Reflexively, I tried to offer some explanation of why others might not have shared that choice. With one daughter's help,  I realized that everyone deserves to own their  disappointment, however sprawling and angry it gets, and for however long it takes for the next thing to capture them.

But we need Thanksgiving.  Had it been necessary, I would have extracted a promise from every individual to leave their politics in the driveway, because politics won't disappear or run away, while people will if they have to.

I hope others can find a way to do this today.  

Because rage will quell. The craving to lash out will pass. 

And mostly,  next things will continue to happen. 

Our lives will change, end, and begin.

Our elderly will leave us and our babies will arrive. 

We will fall in love, and we will be claimed by illness. 

We will fall into stretches of terrible luck and we will shine with good fortune.

We will drive into telephone poles, lose our homes, get fired, get arrested.

We will get fantastic job offers, become engaged, marry, divorce. 

We will be joyous over bigger wins, and disappointed over bigger losses. 

The longer we live and the more next things that happen to us, the more we will wish to be near the ones who have known and loved us from the start.  

Won't we? 

In my house, and in my world, the next thing is here. It's Thanksgiving today and my kids are home, where they will  forever be more important than anything – even politics – for a few precious days. 

Love to you all. 

I wish you glorious next things, and mostly, loved ones to share them with.

Today, praise a parent who is trying.

As a parent, I was never as challenged, relative to my experience, as I was when I was the at-home mother of four children under eight-years-old. No other period compares to the unknowns, and twists and turns, and sudden joys and gifts of perspective of that one.

However, as chaotic as this dance with the universe may have felt, it was greatly balanced by the illusion of control. I had everyone where I could see them.  At some point, when you don’t have them where you can see them, they begin their own dance with the universe.

From the smallest beautiful things – seeing my small son lost in a book, singing on the swings with my daughter – to all the rest, emergency room visits, boundary issues, worn out teachers, mean kids,  and so on, my gift from the universe was the awareness that  praise for handling everyday uncertainty wasn't what I needed as much as the everyday certainty that I would cope with whatever I had to. 

But praise was nice, too.

At a local youth organization, I have just implemented an “empowerment” program for little kids.  I will be witnessing their introduction to the universe in real time. In large and small ways, I will see them step into it every day, and witness the good and not so good choices they make to get along. They are just learning that there even is a universe beyond the driveway, so I feel privileged to be a person who might help them stay upright.

I think about their parents thinking about them, out of sight like that. At the end of my day at the club, I sometimes see them at pick-up, signing their kids out. Some are cheerful and ready for their second shift of grocery stops, dinner and homework help. Some look like they may be dealing with residual worry from the work day they’ve just left, others look like they are hovering between patience and fatigue. Some are solo parents, and some are guardians or grandparents. 

Few look like they expect someone to hand them a reward for their coping skills.

Yesterday, I met with my new group – four ten-year-olds – to sign them up. They must have crept into my heart through an open door while I was asking their names and what kind of things make them worry, but smitten, I was.

As I was leaving, I saw a mother signing her child out who happened to be one of my group kids.

I was headed her way, and I could have kept walking – it was cold and rainy and I wanted to check texts in my warm car. But this mother, now quietly standing and waiting for her daughter to appear, looked like she could use a bit of unexpected praise.

So, I turned around and walked back.

“Are you (name)’s mother?” I asked.

She looked startled, guarded.

“Yes,” she said, as if what I said next could go either way, a discipline thing, or a behavioral observation. You don’t expect those things when children are still asking you for juice and grapes,  but out of sight, where they will make their tiny choices, you begin to expect anything, from any direction.

I told her that I’d just met her daughter, and about the group she’s in. Her face was still fixed in that startled position, so I said, “I just want you to know, she is probably one of the sweetest, nicest and kindest kids I’ve met here. I was charmed."

And now the face changed. She gave a big relieved laugh and said, “Oh! Yeah! She’s quite a pistol, yeah!”

“I’ve noticed, that kids like that, who are so good with others, usually come from some example of that. So, nice job," I said.

On the way home, I thought about the way she looked when I said that.  When people don’t get, or stop expecting rewards for things they are doing with all their heart, but then do get a few words of praise, well, the look is like one you’d get if you walked up to a child,  handed them a cheerfully wrapped gift with a big bow and said, “Here. This is for you because you work very hard and it’s something you really want.”

It was a gift for both of us, from our friend, the universe.

Today, find a parent who is trying and tell them, "good job." They don't expect it, they don't need it, but it's something they really want, and they won't forget it. 

If you can't live happily in your moment, live happily in someone else's.

The other day I saw a meme that urged us to be happy right now, in the moment because life is the moment, and so on. A person was walking with flowers in her hand. 

My first thought was that if all it took to pivot and be happy right now was a meme's advice, why would we be any other way? Nobody doesn’t wish they were happy and it's simple to suggest that it’s simple. 

And then I thought about it all day.

People post things all the time that are so obvious to some as to be banal, while others may find sweet perspective that they've been craving in that simple string of words, and you know what I should do about that? 

Seize the opportunity to shut up, as my psychology professor advised us in child development.

I take happiness seriously. Everyone should.  And, the first thing to know about happiness is that it is not another word for mood.

If you are inclined to be happy, it is a drive that steers you, day in and day out, toward bigger life outside of yourself where you can test your expectation that good things will probably happen. Happy people tend to have that in common, an interest in the lives around them, even if they themselves are recovering from a slip and fall on the here and now.

Not-happy people, on the other hand, just want everything they're doing to be done and don't really notice or care about what other people do. They disagree and they take offense for the sake of it, like they didn’t get invited to something they wouldn’t have gone to anyway.

I thought about happiness a lot last week when a string of unrelated bad things happened to different people in my community. Things from which I think I'd maybe not recover, but know others will have to, who live in houses I can almost see from here.

This is the tails to the heads of the happiness coin. As lives outside of your own can inspire and energize you, so will they depress and immobilize you from time to time, and that is when you might need to go somewhere and see other lives that are happening as well, for balance.

In our rural, socioeconomic mongrel of a town, we have a medium size supermarket that serves all of us, on every walk of life between the locals and the newcomers, the wealthy and the barely getting by, groomed professionals and raggedy ones, teens, the elderly, young parents with a lot of babies, young married people with "dogs for now."

There are always things worth looking at for a little longer than usual at this place.

It might be a group of wry, cool millennials making hilarious observations about something, because millennials do this like the rest of us walk around and breathe.

It might see a clutch of very elderly people in the parking lot laughing at each other's stories. 

Or someone embracing his minimum wage job with cheer and pride.

Or a worn-out parent, being further worn-out right in front of you by her worn-out children but who still musters the patience to say calmly, “No, you can’t have that, we already talked about it.”

You might see content older couples who listen carefully to each other, or content young children who sing and can’t be still, or content other people who study boxes of cereal like they're picking a paint color for their house.  

I write a lot about change – conceiving it, making it happen, and celebrating it. But today, I’m thinking of happiness, and the joy of living in the moment as we are, when we can. And I'm thinking of other times, when we must live close to the lives of others, and accept the sweet perspective we've been craving when the moment hands it to you.

If you're the happy type, that is.

When we encourage others but can't give ourselves a break

My daughter, who teaches music to small children, bless her, said something the other day that made me think very hard.  

How can we – especially educators and parents – express such faith in another person’s potential, forgive their mistakes so easily, yet give ourselves so much grief when we mess up?

It spawned a discussion about how this habit can, over time, become so automatic you may not know you’re doing it, and would not do it at all if you knew what it does to your inside person.

We all have them, inside people. They embody our purest wishes, hopes, strengths, power, intelligence, humanity and talent. I have come to believe that what you understand in your bones about someone else is your connection to your own inside person. Whether you’ve struggled with, or conquered, or still have to overcome, or make a decision about the same issue, connection to your own inside person through another can change your life. 

I used to feel stressed and anxious so often I stopped considering it unusual. It was with me all the time – restlessness and uncertainty that I would have urged anyone else to resolve as quickly as possible. The more I listened to others, the more my bones felt it, and after a while, my inside person raised her hand and said, "Um, over here."

  

It took a long time to realize that in writing especially, I was choosing the thought stream that created the feelings, which created the behavior in response: I don't want to expose my true feelings about this. The period of procrastination before I became a more authentic writer was long.

However, where there is choice, there is the freedom to change. 

When you understand that you're doing this, you can focus on identifying and disabling such self-rebukes. I compare it to catching an arrow in the air before it can get in my head. Somewhere on this misty, wonderous path, I became good at arrow catching, being my own anxiety guard, asking the arrows to please show me their I.D. and tell me the nature of their business.  

I don’t know how often your inside people clash with what life tells you to do, but for many people, it is problematic from the beginning.  It not only can leave you conflicted between wish-I-could, and but-I-can't, it and can set up an inner clash between you and the idea that life is always bigger and smarter than you are. 

It’s the quiet kid who is told (or forced) to be more social. It’s the exuberant kid who is always told to chill. It’s the nervous kid who is told not to worry and just be who they are, which is exactly what the nervous kid is afraid of being at the moment.  It’s the conflicted kid who needs to know, but isn’t always taught, that at ages 12 thru 16, all feelings can be scary and weird and okay at the same time.

Life, with its rules and shoulds, and people who know better, and passive shaming responses to our organic ideas and plans, will, in the beginning, overwhelm the inside person. But later, maybe much later, after the inside person has shared its notes with you about why you're perfectly fine and has shown you the proof - look at your sweet friends, look at your capacity for love, look at your extraordinary kindness – well, life will start being more agreeable.

Inside people may not be ferocious, but they’re tenacious and patient. They wait. They don't leave. 

And it might take some of us longer than others, but  when you do get close enough to see how much that inside person looks, and actually is, exactly like you, be sure to notice the pile of arrows at their feet that were once too fast for you to catch.