Until

Here would be a nice place  to visit right now.

A while back, having not lied about my skills but fluffed them up a bit, I was hired into a position that was too big for me. I mean, I was thrilled and told everyone about it, but a few weeks in, despite good performance, I still felt like a worried forest animal all the time.  

I was not suffering from feelings of incompetence, I was suffering from thinking I should know more, right now.

A few special words turned things around.

I might have seen them once in the Ask Beth column that I read in my teens, or they may have been scrawled on a bathroom stall in college, but they circled back years later to tell me :

“Act as if you already feel the way you want to, until you do.”

With practice, I could imitate a feeling of confidence, until it came naturally. I lost the feeling that at any moment, I would be discovered and eventually, my eyebrows came back down.. 

The terms “imposter syndrome,” and, “fraud complex,"  refer to the fear of not being truly matched with, or passionate about, or skilled enough to live up to a hard-won goal, despite measures of success. They get tossed around a lot, particularly by young people in their first significant jobs. 

It had been exactly that suspicion I grappled with back before it became a syndrome.  I felt I’d been nailed selling myself long when actually I had not yet tested the reach of my experience and had to, as they say, "fake it ‘til you make it.”

  

I like my adage better, but here’s the word that makes both of them worth putting on a post-it and sticking it where you’ll see it every day: until.

Not only because of its truth – that all things – flying, public transportation, presentations – become less daunting with exposure, but also because all wrapped up in the word “until” is the reminder that the present, with all its power, comes to our lives just once, to inform what will come next.

Because, as I have told myself, my friends, my children, and sometimes their friends, and occasionally strangers and fretful dogs,

Everything, up or down, is just right now.

All moments that come after right now, suggested by the word until, will be influenced by those that came before. Whether they’ve made you richer or poorer, or educated about how to live better, no moment will find you less knowledgeable than you are right now, only more. 

And imagine that, what you can do with those moments of smarter.

You may love feeling free and independent and mobile until you learn that your maturity and self-awareness have left you with gifts to bring to a relationship, maybe a marriage, maybe even at some point, small people who will spend years literally, and then figuratively looking up to you. 

You may be frustrated with the cost of living and bored with the job that once terrified you until you realize you have also earned the courage to go after the thing you’d rather look back on in a couple of decades.  

You may be new and awkward in a strange place until you master your surroundings and wish to build a new memory of conquering change because, look! Now you know how.

You may be tired of understanding and learning and changing your mind about yourself, until you realize that at the same time, you were also understanding and learning and changing your mind about others too.

The word “until” is weighty. It suggests that you can stay or go, but are always on the way to something else that will draw on your cumulative smarts, and hopefully enrich your spirit and sense of humor about life.

Whether you long to leave, or dread when you will have to, “until” is a word equally full of promise and relief that gently asks you to trust the future, while you get ready to create it.

How to put a little more "Guess what I did?" in your life

This looks like a place where you
could do some good reflecting,
not the tedious kind.

I love and don’t love my reflective nature. On one hand, it serves my writing, particularly fiction.  

It's also helpful to be this way when too many issues have been left hanging, or when I suspect that a thing I’ve been blaming someone else for is actually a thing of my making.

Reflective time has shown me that it can feel good to be wrong. 

And, when that happens, a reflective nature can help you person-up, unless you’d rather remain difficult and wonder why others can’t just be more like you.

Other times, a reflective nature is a needy, slow-talking neighbor who stops you when you’re on your way out the door, ten minutes late, with no gas, and a headache.

In this blog, I’ve talked about many things that come down to giving yourself a break – not reinventing yourself which, okay  – but just giving yourself a little breathing room.

For most of us, the years ahead have the potential to be satisfying and illuminating, but many of us, and truly – because I read and read and read about how we are – many of us are stopped by mistakes of the past or doubts about the future that line up at the steps of that future like little bouncers and say, “Yeah, but wait. What about this?” 

This is how "wish I had" happens. 

It isn’t terrible to have a file in your head called “Wish I had,” in fact, try and reach forty without having such a file in progress. “Wish I had” feelings happen to everyone, but they are not meant to just lie there and be useless. They are not meant to punish you for blowing your only shot because there is no such thing as "only shot."

Rather, “wish I had” feelings are meant to pry your eyes open to the things you have become ready for, or are trying to become ready for with just a little more age, growth and experience that is not like anyone else's.  

People can be maddeningly reluctant to pursue their known dreams. They can fill your head with so many ideas of why that is, you’ll start to agree. These are people who need reflective time; not the tedious neighbor kind, but the good, centering kind, . 

A while back, I knew an unhappy someone who was so averse to coloring outside the lines of her life, she could only trivialize the activity of reflecting and redirecting by calling it"navel-gazing."

But all of us, even that unhappy someone, are reflecting all the time - when we cook, when we drive, when we run or walk, and when we sit on planes if we are not next to people who take off their shoes and socks and eat chips. 

Reflective time was born to solve "wish I had" problems before they take over whereas navel-gazing is passive and hurts your neck. 

It's active, and like drinking water or moving our bodies or avoiding people who psychologically injure others, it supports good mental health. 

A well executed, reflective pocket of time - with a solid question at the center - can quiet the mind enough to hear the soul speak and unless the soul has been bound and gagged and put in the attic where it can't urge you off the path of "have to," the soul knows what it's talking about. 

So here is a fun activity that worked for me and might work for you and that unhappy someone if she ever looks me up.

Imagine saying to a person who loves you, “Guess what I did?”

Imagine the person saying, “What? What?”

And imagine telling them a thing you did, which at this moment, seems like nothing you’d ever attempt, but in this fantasy-exercise, is something you planned for, then went ahead and did.  Try it on.

"I decided to open a restaurant."

“I decided to run for office."

“I decided to change careers."

“I decided to sell my art.”

“I decided to see a therapist about…”

I had this imaginary conversation before I went back to school, and it made me feel too good to abandon the idea. Abandoned ideas that feel good never really go away.

If you’re lucky.

So, practice this.

“Guess what I did?”

“What? What?”

But make the loved person you’re talking to your very own self.

And make some plans without pressure, but with the counsel of your  soul. You may be surprised. 

Caution: You may not act right away. You may only have created a nice fantasy to visit now and then. But that's how many, many good things happen, and not for nothing, how a whole lot of fiction gets written.

Word-of-the-year is a popular concept, and yes, it works.

Here is a place I often move to in my head.

I would love to be a person who wakes, flips the covers back, and says: 

“Hi, new day! I’ve been looking forward to seeing you since yesterday! And, look! The sun’s not even up and my novel is waiting, my essay is nearly done, and I’m doing arms and legs in my work out today! I love arms and legs days!”

Instead, I start writing before dawn, but often  interrupt myself to check news, and Facebook, and texts, and email before coming back to the (now relatively) less compelling page. 

If I’m really lazy, I’ll think about what I should be doing instead, until it’s too late to do the instead.

I fight this more often than I like to admit. Most of the time I win, but the point is, I struggle to muster the discipline so often, I wonder if my goals are realistic if I have to work that hard.

They are, and I know they are because I am never happier than when I’ve written something I like, and completed a respectable work-out and moved through my day so that at a decent hour, I’m preparing a great meal and reading while I wait for things in the oven. That’s it. That’s my daily satisfaction-map.

My sister-in-law, Christine Cook, is a personal health coach who runs a successful health and fitness website called Positive Energy  as well as an online self-improvement program on Facebook called Positive Energy Insiders. The members consist mostly of women over forty who are pausing at this midlife juncture to think hard about the things that make them happy, or could. With prompts from Christine, members are learning to execute routes to happier living.

And why must we rely on prompts if we know what makes us happy?

Because it's easier to remain behind the start line where it’s warm and comfortable, than it is to do the work of moving forward and then staying in motion. 

In a stressed out world it can be easy to confuse a low-conflict life with being happy. But real happiness can involve work. It may not be work to be grateful, or pleasant, or compassionate and creative or nice. But to the extent that happiness is about getting back what you put in, it can be work to be happy. For many of us, the idea of putting into each day what might feel just outside the reach of our will, can lead to putting semi-stimulating but less energy-producing things first.

Like news, or videos, or articles or who ate what, went on vacation, had a baby, got married or is celebrating a friend-versary on Facebook. 

But.

If you’ve discovered the spirit and self-awareness to a) know you need something more, and b) have visualized what that is,  and c) have identified your own obstacles, there is a pretty good chance that in direct proportion to the effort you make, you’ll experience more happiness than you're used to. 

Inspired by Melinda Gates, one of Christine’s prompts recently was to create a word that speaks to our general desire to accomplish or produce or realize goals and tasks that we know will relax our minds, energize our bodies, and open our hearts to humor, love and gratitude. 

I resist how-to’s in general if I think I can do things through sheer will.  But this prompt – a word that encapsulates drive, passion, and who you wish to be, well, sign me up. 

My word is Move, and it’s working.

Forget should-haves, or when will I’s, or why can’t I’s. All of those are things we tell ourselves about unmet goals, and if we’ve developed a plan to live more happily around a warm-up routine of regret and self-pummeling, it’s like trying to run in deep water.

So, if you are lucky enough to be able, body and mind-wise, to even work toward “happy,” let that word of yours pull on your sleeve, and make it your partner. Because, the right word may be all the power you need to push you over that start line, where it will feel too good to go backwards. 

Me? The sun isn't even up, I wrote this whole post, and now I am in motion.

The man in line behind me

This would be a good place to
 sit down and get a grip

Recently, after I was finished with appointments for the day I stopped at the grocery store for dinner ingredients and low-hold hair spray that wouldn’t make my hairstyle look like a helmet or smell like air freshener. 

My mood was neutral but vulnerable given the weather which was sleety, and the crowd inside the store which was thick and slow moving, like tired cows.

I got my things and headed for a register. This store has probably a dozen of them, but this day only three were open in addition to the express lane which has laws about how many items you can send through. Even if fatigued, rushed people at that hour of the day customize the limit to mean 14 large items, and therefore send their more than fourteen small items through, I obey the law and I had sixteen items.

So I rolled to another register, making sure it was next to a closed one because, you know how this goes; eventually a nervous manager will survey the look of three open registers serving a crowd that is worthy of seven or eight, and order someone to get a key and open up another one. Shoppers know to be in position to get the eye contact from that incoming cashier to “come over.”

I got into position behind two full carts next to a closed register. A man got in line behind me. “What’s going on?” he asked me, “Are they opening up over there?”

Did I look at him with a flat, how-would-I-know expression like people have given me?

No.

My busy day was almost over, I had been successful in finding not only a pork roast that looked manageable, but a nice low-hold hair product, and I was feeling cheerful. 

So, I turned and said, “You know it’s anyone’s guess, isn’t it? I mean, look over there,” and I nodded toward the next register. “We see the signs, they’re lining up a bagger, right? And there’s someone with a tray so I would say we’re in good shape to be first in line.”

I smiled then, and he responded with a blank face as if there was nothing funny about registers that might or might not open.

Sure enough, the cashier opened up, looked over at the woman in line before me and gave her the “come on over” face. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and over she rolled.

The man behind me got upset.

“Hey, whoa. Hold on,” he said to me, “why did they pick her?”

I shrugged, and said "Maybe they saw her and not me."

“But I mean, you were right there!” He pointed at right there and said, "That's ridiculous."

He was a big guy, on the heavy side. He was not badly dressed in khakis and a brown polo shirt topped by an okay jacket, also brown. Probably he worked in a place where you don’t have to wear a suit, but can’t wear jeans either, maybe a tire or paint store. He had sandy hair with bangs that fell over his forehead, a large face, glasses, a fair complexion, a too-large gut, a nice watch and jumpy eyes that probably never failed to observe something aggravating.

“You should have told them you were waiting!” he said, arms folded.

I turned then and said, “You know what? I just don’t feel like worrying about something like that right now.” I looked at his eyes when I said it, and for a second, a second, I wanted to share with this grouch a philosophy that I keep taped on my outlook:

Aggravation is optional most of the time.  

We all encounter unpleased, cranky people and we all feel that way ourselves from time to time. It’s my nature to allow for a person’s bad day, or maybe-bad news, or perhaps a tangle of irritations they couldn’t resolve that day.

But there are other people who are so easily irritated, so often, and so bent on expressing it they’ve begun to see the world as full of irritating people who leave them no choice. Meanwhile the rest of us know that irritable people leave us with no choice but to shut them out.

There are people who would take that man’s behavior personally, maybe a spouse, or an employee,  maybe his children. I have had stretches where I would have felt as inept as he wanted me to, back when I thought too many things were probably my fault.

The holidays are over, the credit card hangover has arrived. We’re heading into the crappiest weather of the year, and we have a president who models one form of hate or another toward others every day. There are a lot of people like that man in line behind us.  It isn’t only good mental health to steer clear of them, it leaves us with our grace and civility intact, and a new choice to put it where it will do some good.

It will be the perfect story to tell my little group of ten-year-olds who are observing, and learning not to personalize, the actions of others:

Aggravation is optional most of the time.

Here's to more gentle living and a better view of everything in 2020

This looks like a nice place to practice
  some gentle living, doesn't it?

Wouldn't it be such a waste of all we learn, all the time, from each day, from each other, from our mistakes, from our brilliant ideas if all we did was lament not knowing it sooner?

Yes, is the answer to that. It would be. 

"Forgive yourself for not having the foresight to know what now seems so obvious in  hindsight," is what a recent meme said about that.

With that, I've put together some favorite takeaways from the past year that I will refer to often while I travel as gently as possible through the next. I hope you like and can use them as well.

My favorite rules for a gentler life, brought to you by experience. 

Share things about other people that you hope will get back to them.

When something is beautiful and unexpected enough to make you choke up, that is your soul saying,  Hi, I thought you'd like this.

You were not ready to use that thing you know now, but wish you knew a decade ago. Back then, you knew other things you could have used when you were ten. Respect, don't regret this gift of age.  It doesn’t work any other way.

Don’t assume that caring about you is motive enough for a person to change their behavior. It may be a behavior they’ve been trying to get rid of for a long time for their own sake and can’t. Have your line in the sand, but if you must ask, make it “will you?” and not, “why can’t you?”

Where there have been issues in the past, there will be triggers in the future. Fix that shit before it jumps out of the alley and steals your hard-earned, well-deserved peace of mind.

Most of the time, there’s nothing wrong. You’re just tired. Go to bed.

It’s sometimes those people who are least likely to be one of your people, who teach you very important things about yourself.

You can get through anything as long as there is one person with whom you can fall apart and feel better for it, not worse.

Your most important job is to know who you are and what you want. Your heart is where those answers are. Even if you decide to defy it and do something else, your heart is not wrong.

It is perfectly okay to be with someone who is in distress and not have a single thing to say as long as you are holding their hand.

Use and love your skill set. But now and then, also say hello to your flaw set and give it some attention. It’s there to make sure you always have something to work on, and improve your opinion of imperfection.

And finally:

Compliment a stranger every now and then – their clothes, their dog, their baby. You will turn whole days around for some people doing that and probably like yourself a little more, too. 

That's it, that's the stuff that made me love my life and days more than I did the year before. It is the stuff that makes me look forward to all of the days, of every year. 

With love, and best wishes for more gentle living and a better view of everything in 2020,

Susan

It's December 20th. Pencils down.

A little arrow of joy sailed into my heart this morning to realize it is the twentieth of December. 

Because. When you are in the twenty-somethingth of December, you are not close, but really close to Christmas. And, in my blue exam book of what holidays should really mean, this means pencils down. 

This means it's time to do stuff that matters. If you're a list and task freak, all stressed out over what you haven't done yet, it's time to realize that if the only holiday plates and napkins left at The Paper Store have toys and snowmen on them, that's fine.

Ever since I was a wee me, there has been something magical about December 20. 

Back then, it meant the start of classroom parties and school vacation and the long awaited (and single showing) of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Frosty the Snowman. 

Afternoons started to turn dark before the bus finished dropping us off, and little homes with candles in the windows made every neighborhood look like villages in a snow globe.  

For me, December 20th starts a short stretch that is not about undone tasks on the real list, but stuff that you've been adding to the spirit list like this:

Thank someone for making a difference in your life. You know someone did.

Pick up a simple sugar cookie mix, make many of them, and only use green and red sprinkles.

Say something encouraging to a stranger who looks like they're making an effort.
Change the whole day of someone who is off, or down, or anxious with a heartfelt compliment.
If someone needs space, give it to them. If someone needs attention, give it to them. 

For me, in these last days, have-to's become hope-to's which eventually yield to want-to's as time, blessedly, runs out.

I was hoping to receive and wrap the balance of gifts I've ordered by now. I was hoping I'd find a new centerpiece for the Christmas Eve table. It would have been nice to replace some of the linen and towels before everyone arrives. I should buy new candles. 

But it is December 20th now and my "want to's" are here.

Handwritten cards - meaningful ones - will be composed  for best friends and others.

There will be a date with my husband in a quiet place where we will likely have a conversation about life; how it changes, how it doesn't, and how it should, and what memories that we'll embrace in the future have yet to be made.  

There will be a reunion with our other-coast daughter who just got married and is bringing her new husband into our mix of festivities and traditions for the first time.

There will be meaningful conversation with another daughter and her husband about career dreams and marriage and life goals and raising children and other stuff that matters.

There may be attempts on the part of both of our sons to teach me about football again with diagrams on post-its of tiny figures and directional arrows. I will not understand them a week from now, but will add them to the others that I keep in a box near my bookcase.

And as this day fades into tomorrow, marking exactly two years and one month since my father's death, I will focus on a memory I've gone back to a few times over the last four weeks.

It was Dad's last Christmas Eve with us, his nineteenth.  At the end of the night, he said the same thing he said every year. "This was the best one ever. I don't think you can top it, next year."

In a few days, when Christmas is finally here and we raise a glass, I will think about that and offer a special toast to Dad, the best one ever. 

Happiest of holidays to you. Make them the best ever, surrounded by people who know what they mean to you, because you've told them.  

An airport, a three hour delay and the loveliest parenting I've seen in a while.

That looks like a lantern, but it's actually
 the picture of of a young teen's parent

Recently, I got stuck at the airport waiting for a plane which was being treated for mechanical failure, thank you very much. Hour by hour, the flight was delayed into the later part of the day.

I’m the only person I know who really doesn’t mind this kind of wrinkle. I use the time to watch how people talk to each other, and handle the unexpected. 

They say it is a test of character to be faced with tangled Christmas lights, an unexpected rainy day, or lost luggage.

I would add: knowing you may be boarding an aircraft that is currently undergoing plane surgery, three hours late, with a small child who badly needs the nap that was supposed to come with that plane and now has no choice but to fall apart.

Any parent who is still soft-spoken and patient with a child after all of that is a person who can probably handle anything.

One mother took out her ponytail and asked her very little boy to help her fix it. It took forever, and that mother is a genius.

It is the way of a young child’s world to expect a parent to be bigger and stronger when they are small and messy.  And here is where good parents understand their truest power – that responding with only the strength of their presence may not feel like enough, but usually is.

And while this stage may be exhausting, it doesn’t last forever. In no time, they're in the middle-school tunnel and our role is no longer about keeping them busy, but being the lantern hanging at the other end.  

Note to parents of toddlers: there actually is something harder than answering eight or nine questions a minute from your child when you’re tired, and it is silence when you’re worried. 

I run a small support group with young children who are often struggling to understand their family lives while they navigate their own. Despite what hardship might challenge them, what I hear all the time is “My mom said,” or “When I told my dad…” because bigger and stronger is in the eye of the smaller and messier. 

Bigger and stronger is about someone who respects their child's world, even if they also must expose that child to a more complicated one they don’t understand.

If there can be only one thing that we do every moment of a child’s life, it should be that - to think about their world as much as we expect them to think about ours. 

Later, when children are off the grid collecting themselves, will be when this matters most. Because, what helps keep kids upright is the known – not hoped or wished or longed for, but known – presence of a person to whom they know they can say anything, and around whom they can fall apart safely.  They may know all of this in silence but then, they'll say to someone like me,  "Well, my dad said that I should..."

Note to parents of teens who answer questions with facial expressions: it’s still easier to be you.

Putting aside the outliers for a moment – parents who are abusive, living through their kids,  narcissistic or addicted – it becomes truer with every too-mature child I meet, that the best parents can possess the least, and still give the most if they can do that – separate those worlds, and visit the smaller messier one, often.

Maybe with a ponytail to fix together.