When this is over

Here is a  nice thing that is
 coming no matter what.

In  Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott's book on writing, she discusses a kind of story-sprawl, when the possibilities for an idea can go in all directions, and overwhelm the writer. 

Says Lamott: “E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” 

However long this period of "distancing" lasts, and even knowing that some things will change forever, you will look back on this. What you remember will depend on how far into the dark you tried to see and what you did about what you couldn't.  

We are dealing with frightening things, yes. Contagion. The stock market. Unemployment. Upended events.

Our daughter will give birth in less than three months. I've worried that I might not be able to be there until well after the baby comes. She worried that she might not be able to have her husband with her in the delivery room.

We don’t know.

But maybe I will be.

Maybe he will be.

Two weeks ago, at the beginning of this how long will we be here period, I couldn’t see this day from there. I only hoped I had enough pantry staples and stuff to read. 

Two weeks ago, in the headlights, I saw extended opportunities to start and finish projects. I became more mindful of the people I don’t talk to enough, and asked them to tell me about their experiences, and I shared mine. Without interruptions or appointments or dates, I didn’t hurry to finish a piece, and I didn’t leave tasks unfinished.

There was now time for everything, some things I might not otherwise do.  

I’ve had long walks with people I love and have been reminded of how I need them.

My husband and I have become excellent at offering comfort and reassurance to the one of us who needs it most, and it isn't always me. Well, yes it is.  

Our conversations with our kids often stretch past an hour.

We’ve been silly and awkward on video calls with people, but have learned to actually like them a LOT.

We’re talking candidly with all of our friends and family about the deepest anxieties we share, and ways we are dealing with uncertainty. 

The connection that many of us have made so mindfully while apart, has made me understand that  proximity is a luxury. If you are sharing conversation, worry, humor, fears, you are sharing.  

That said.  

Eventually, all of us look into that dark and think, Wait, we’re still here?

HOW LONG ARE WE GOING TO BE HERE?

We crave answers, we’re frightened when they don’t come, and for some of us, not knowing how long we’ll be here is akin to thinking we’ll be here forever.

We won’t be.

The virus will be contained.

The death toll will slow and stop.

The market will come back.

Offices and businesses and schools will open.

The rest of our lives will resume and we’ll be free to roam again.

We will have lighter hearts when that happens, and I look forward to that. But the truth is, what you do while you wait, is what you’ll remember.

They will be memories of some connections we created or came back to. Parents will know their children better, friends will be more grateful for each other, partners in love will thank their stars for the luck in finding each other, neighbors will have practiced selfless acts of food drop-offs and well-checks that made them better people. Complaints over minor irritants will be a thing we used to do, now that we know what really matters.

It won’t be just the hard and awful stuff we remember. It will be the way we reached for each other if there was any way to do it, and learned to live with not-like-before-but-enough.  

I will remember my video calls with my daughter, in her glorious third trimester, and how, even if I could not hold her hand as I desperately wish I could right now, I will still have been able to look at her eyes and smile and hear her voice and say, “You just look so beautiful right now.”

I will remember talking through the anxieties and sharing the weird humor with my loved ones that comes from standing (six feet apart) in shared headlights, group-summoning faith that right things will be right again.

Right now, make the choice to practice acts, words, deeds, communication and gratitude that may have required exactly the fertile soil of these difficult circumstances to take root and bloom.

Never forget that for all the pain and worry and anxiety of unknowns, this time in life will end, and you will get to keep the gifts.

With love and gratitude,

Susan

When a parent listens: for my mother and my children

Here would be a nice place
to listen to someone you love.

There comes a time as you’re growing up, when you realize that your life would be easier if your parent would not always shine a big flashlight on the parts that aren’t quite right and start asking questions.

Because, when you’re growing up you just can’t know yet that everything is in progress. You are sure that what is true about you right now will be true forever, and some of those things, you’d like to keep to yourself, thank you very much.

And, you don’t need your parent asking you how you’re handling this, what you are doing about that, what’s going on with whatever that thing is that’s going on. Because, you don't even know yourself.

No, you would like your parent to notice the highs, not the lows, please. Ask about the achievements, not the missteps. Not worry about you.  See you the way you wish to be seen, as a smart, independent person who doesn’t need a parent hovering.

And so, that’s the story of you that you offer.

And that is what your parent does.

Your parent celebrates the story you offer.

A day comes later, when you realize your parent probably knew there was more to that story you told, but knew it was more important to let you sit with it for a while, maybe look back at a few pages, maybe do your own guessing about what would happen next.    

Later still, you begin to realize that what you say, what you look like, what you’re wearing on the outside makes people form opinions about you. And while only the outside cover of your story is available to them, you will eventually want to share some of the inside pages too.

Because, you have learned that trusting another with your inside stories, and hearing theirs, is also known as love.

There comes a time when you’ve grown up, and you realize the weight of your worth. You know your gifts, your capacity to love and be loved. You’ve accepted your flaws, and know your empathy. You understand compassion and pride. You realize that where your mind goes, your heart is already there waiting to ask your mind a few questions, just to make sure they're on the same page, looking out for you.

You like your story a lot now, even if you’re still writing it. You are still sharing it with your parent, because now, there are parts they won’t know any other way. You have learned that they will listen now, to learn about you again.

Later, when you have your own small child, they will begin to tell you their own first lines, and soon, it won’t be a page they give you, but a small stack of pages. You will know what they’re leaving out, and you will let them do that.

Being listened to has taught you that you are lovable as much for what you don’t show, as what you tell. 

Being listened to has taught you that for all you would give to those you love so much, if you have been listening, you have offered it already. 

When couples differ politically, it might feel like a test because it is.

Here would be a nice place
to gently discuss politics

My husband was scheduled to have surgery recently. It was a procedure that would require general anesthesia and so, the night before, without a hint of drama, he asked me to sit with him so he could show me how he’d organized our vital documents.

Now, he said, they were sorted and placed in a good sturdy binder with tabs and cover sheets that described them.

When I came in, he had the binder on his lap, and he laid a hand on it. "Everything you need is right here," he said, while I thought about the words, everything and need and the binder that will never exist to guide me toward them.  

My husband leans right and I lean left.  Sometimes, we lean so hard we fall over. But, fingers crossed, neither of us has been so “far” in either direction that we've lost sight of each other.

But in moments of intense disagreement, when I can’t square a conservative view with what I know of his heart, I have wondered how people like us remain close while feeling apart on something as important as politics.

Later, away from such moments, when I am wondering what I need at the store, or whether to submit this or that piece, or want to share something my husband will find funny or poignant or surprising, I remember those moments and shake my head to understand:  politics does not just create arguments, it creates arguments that dwarf everything else that is important.

Political differences are more illuminating than our similarities. They reflect who we’ve become on the spectrum of personal change as we age and experience. They challenge the couple culture that formed around earlier versions of ourselves. If we’re some of us, political differences drive us to shore up the core and remain connected in the ways we always were. If we’re others of us– even people who have weathered far worse storms – they are grounds to separate from each other.

Our most resilient bonds lie there, at that core where it isn’t about politics but our family and friends and feeling for someone who is struggling, and whether our children are okay, and what we want for dinner, and how to communicate so that we think about the way we’re heard more than what we want to say.

At the core is the worry and joy we share when things happen to one of us, in the world of both of us.  Like surgery. 

Do I have to remember that when we disagree? I do. We’ve worked hard to respect our differences without seeing each other differently.

Our president’s divide-and-conquer mentality, and the vulgar way he demonizes those not willing to support him unconditionally, have taught his more combative followers to see those with whom they disagree the way our president sees his critics. The exchanges that are caught on video are heartbreaking.

In these times, in many of those minds, you are or you ain’t.

You’re right or you’re left. You’re Trump or you’re Warren. You’re a liberal who cares for the less fortunate or you’re a conservative who tells homeless people to get a job.

My husband and I are mindfully closer to the middle. He still makes me breakfast on Sunday and I still make beef stew when we're snowed in. We watch stuff on TV together, and I encourage him to think about a second dog because it would be good for him. He asks me about my writing and my ideas. When one of us isn’t well, or happy or sure about things, the other one steps up to reassure, comfort, make jokes.

We have had to learn new ways of having simple conversations if disagreement is likely. He has had to stop interrupting, and I have had to stop making bad faces. Both of us are learning to say to each other and to others from whom we differ, “Tell me why you see it that way,” and not, “Let me tell you why you’re wrong.” 

Before Trump, we were and still are, parts of the past, the present and the future that we imagined for ourselves. The future, as it always has, will borrow from that core that brought us together and make us stay put.

My husband’s surgery is in the past now, and he is fine, I still have everything that I need and I know two new things. Where the documents are, and that what exists between people who love each other is not about what stays the same, but what lasts.

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.