WHY I DON'T FEEL BAD

I’ve decided I don’t want to feel bad anymore.  If you are curious about why I was feeling bad to begin with, I thank you for your interest but I’ve also decided not to share that.  Because I just spent a whole week feeling bad and it sucked, and every time I thought about the “bad thing” that made me feel bad, my stomach tied up in knots and I had the urge to cry or puke or maybe both.  Feeling bad about the thing I was feeling bad about was also a slippery slope, as it made me anxious and my mind naturally went to other places of anxiety for me and before long I felt like I was having a full blown “nervous breakdown”, like people used to have in the old days before we invented medications to prevent such a thing.  But I knew I wasn’t actually having a nervous breakdown because I was still able to function in a way that appeared normal from the outside and also I knew intellectually that most of the stuff I was feeling so bad about was complete and utter bullshit.

Our attention is a powerful thing.  Whenever we focus on a situation or emotion or person, we are literally becoming one with whatever our attention is on, at least for a little while.  Quantum physics explains to us that we are all pure energy fields, vibrating at such a high rate of speed that we appear to be solid beings when in fact we are not.  We are fluid, transformative and capable of changing our world just by putting a little attention on it. We have all encountered people who can bring the energy of a room full of others either up or down, depending on their attention.  Every time you walk into a room, the option is open to you to be that person.  Are you the life of the party or Debbie Downer?  It is up to you and the magical powers of your attention.  What we focus on we see more of, good and bad.  This is why feeling bad is a really bad idea.

This is also why the expression “the rich get richer” and others like it are so steadfastly true.  Whatever we have our attention on we get more of, and the rich have their attention on…well, their riches.  Whereas most of us have our attention on our bills, our escalating health care costs, our wobbly job security…that is what we are looking at and that is what we are seeing.  Unfortunately, (also:  fortunately) that is how it works for all of us.  Ever notice you have the same fight with your spouse over and over?  Or you keep running into that same vexing person at the grocery store?  Or you keep recreating the same dynamics in new jobs, new relationships, and new neighborhoods?  It has to do with your attention and your expectations.  My father was EXTREMELY fond of saying, “The good news is life is a do-it-to-yourself project.  The bad news is there may be an idiot in charge.”  Thanks for that, Dad.  But he was so very right.  About a lot of other things, too.

 It is easy to get overwhelmed by input, both desirable and undesirable, and just throw your hands up in surrender to the inevitability of it all.  But you do actually have control and you do have choices.  For example, have you ever met someone and had the (unkind?  uncharitable?) thought, “This person is homely (ugly)?”  Then you get to know them and suddenly they are not so homely anymore?  Suddenly, they are quirkily attractive?  That is because your attention on them has shifted.  When you didn’t know anything about them, all the information you had was physical appearance.  But when you learned more, you realized they were intelligent, or funny, or charming, or kind or all or some of the above and magically, how they look shifted.  When you start focusing on what is desirable about the person, you see more of what is desirable about the person.  And the rich get richer.

This works for other things as well.  If you focus on what you hate about your job, you get a lot more of what you hate about your job.  But if you focus on what you like about your job, you get more of that and ***BONUS*** the stuff you hate get less “ugly”.  Here’s an experiment:  if there is someone peripheral to you that drives you nuts…a neighbor, the mailperson, that lady from the PTO…next time you see them, pay them a compliment.  It can be anything, nice sweater, whatever.  Then start doing it every time you see them.  See how they shift, both in your perception and in their behavior.  Seriously, I have worked miracles with this and I dare you to try it.  Focus on something positive, no matter how insignificant, and see if it doesn’t become significant over time.  And hey, try that one on yourself as well.  I don’t care how bad your hair looks or how big that zit is, you can find something kind to say to yourself every day.  Several times a day would be even better.

I want you to be rich.  In life, in love and yes, in money.  So look at what you have and bless it.  Notice it.  When your attention gets drawn away to the bad stuff, what is going wrong, who is letting you down, drown out those thoughts, shout them down.  Clap your cymbals like Jehoshaphat and insist on noticing what is good.  The more and more you do this, the more and more your attention will be drawn to the good.  My grandmother used to say, “Don’t go borrowing trouble” and I have shared this wisdom many times with people as they invented catastrophic scenarios that had not yet occurred and were really unlikely to occur in their lifetime.   I would like to amend this to, “Don’t go looking at trouble.”  Because the more you look for it, the more you will find it.  So seek the treasure you actually want.  Put your attention there and see if it doesn’t find you.

WHY IT'S LIKE RIDING A BICYCLE

Over the holidays I had a nice phone chat with my elderly neighbor.  That is to say, the neighbor I lived next door to when I was 4-11 years old.  36 years ago.  I have seen her perhaps 6 times in those 36 years but I will tell you—no time has passed when we talk.  It is yesterday that she was making me cookies and complaining about our dog pooping in her yard.  We have kept in touch mainly through the lost art of “letter writing”…does that ring a bell?  No?  Anyhoo, it got me thinking about the nature of true connection, what makes some people “stick” while others fade away. 

We all have those people in our lives…it doesn’t matter if you have been apart for 100 years; you can always pick right up where you left off.   The expression “If you don’t use it, you lose it” is in this case far less accurate than the idiom “It’s like riding a bicycle”.  True connection is like riding a bicycle.  Once you have it, you can never lose it

Moving around quite a bit in my life, I have discovered this as the ultimate truth:  what is real is forever.  It is just waiting for you to put your attention on it again.  We have all heard the silly Sting song “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”.  We have, right?  Sting may be silly (oh, come on, he IS!!!!) but this is actually profound common sense…chase it, and it flees.  Accept it without attachment and it is yours, almost definitely. 

As a Cancer (crab) and a clinger, it goes against my inborn nature not to be grasping after all that I love.  But I have learned the hard way that without a doubt “letting go” is the quickest path to stability, as counterintuitive as that may seem.  I have experienced the joy of many relationships spanning multiple decades and I am always astounded and relieved to realize that no real “work” is necessary.  Just being present for whatever occurs when it does is the “trick”.  But it is a trick fewer people can accomplish in this day and age.

I hate to beat a dead horse here…oh, let’s be honest, I am a dead-horse-beater from way-back-when and I always will be.  HA.  Today’s dead horse is technology.  There is truly no sight that I regularly encounter that I despise more than the vision of an adult human walking along hunched up over his or her phone or other portable electronic device.  Stupid thumbs stupidly texting away; it is like going to visit “The Zoo of Idiots” for a laugh, only to discover the idiots have all escaped their cages. 

Life is short.  Look around, smell the coffee, meet the eyes of the person you are talking to and try not to salivate when your phone BINGS!  Slave to it, you know you are, while actual experiences fade from relevance.  And stop defending yourself in your head, you know I am right.  I’m not even going to mention the “while driving” thing.

Alright, now that I have gotten that out of my system…well, no, actually, I have more to say.  Did you know that there is technology available to let you know when someone has read your text (or e-mail)?  Meaning you are essentially STALKING the people you communicate with electronically and are not allowing them the privacy to respond in their own time.  Did you know there is technology that allows you to see what the other person is typing to you BEFORE they hit send?  That gives me chills, seriously. 

This strikes me as the pinnacle of desperation and fear based logic.  Clinging, grasping, looking for reasons to be upset, searching for reasons to be offended.  I am also not a big fan of Facebook as a tool in personal relationships; the sheer number of stories I have had to endure about a party that so-and-so wasn’t invited to or a snotty comment that was “liked” by a supposed ally are legion.  So I remain blissfully, ignorantly Facebook-free; I won’t even know you had a party if you don’t invite me to it, so there.

I am not going to convince anybody to give up Facebook--believe me, I have tried!!!--but I am going to issue a challenge—in this electronic age, it is so easy to find virtually anyone.  So why don't you call (don't text!) an old friend you haven’t seen in person for ages and plan a meeting.  You can talk and eat and gossip and laugh, just like old times, wouldn’t that be great and fun?  Just do me one favor, will you please?   Leave your phone in the car; unplug for a second and enjoy being human again. Let’s stop dogging each other electronically, what do you say? 

What is real is forever.  You don’t have to hover over it, breath down its neck or micromanage it.  What is, IS.  The magic of technology has allowed me to be in more constant contact with beloveds who are scattered across the land, but it hasn’t changed the nature of the connection.  When you are face-to-face with the truth, it is undeniable, palpable and unchanging.  Put down your phone and look into another person’s eyes.  If you see something there, it will always be there, waiting for you to put your attention on it again.

 

 

WHY EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD

Who does not love a good coming-of-age story?  That indescribable, indefinable moment when a child becomes an “adult” (whatever that means); or more accurately, the moment when a decision is made that sets the course for adulthood.  We all have these moments, starting about the same time as the dreaded puberty, where the road forked and we made a choice to go this way or that.  The decision to stand with classmates getting stoned but not get stoned ourselves.  The decision to kiss the nice, “appropriate” boy (or girl), or the one who makes your heart race. 

The decision to break a curfew, skip a class, defy a rule.  The decision to be yourself, even if that means facing rejection, punishment or “failure”.  The decision to grow up.

The problem with my coming-of-age is that it happened in the 80’s.  I literally turned 13, officially a teenager, in the summer of 1980 and spent 1981-1989 in high school and college and so THOSE are the most formative years I had when it came time to “discover myself”.  The 1980’s, for those of you who just crawled out from under a rock or were born later (???!!!???), were known as the decade of “greed” and “excess”. 

Look it up, if you don’t believe me.  Or watch Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”, that explains it pretty well.  My generation, known by the less-than-loving moniker “Generation X”, has developed something of a reputation for a particular brand of selfishness, supposedly born out of the unfortunate timing of our coming-of-age years. 

I’d like to explain our refusal to conform to societal standards to music.

The music of your youth (especially your coming-of-age) is a powerful, powerful thing, and there have been studies to prove it.   Lock a bunch of geezers up for the weekend and make them listen to the music of their younger years and guess what happens?  Stamina returns, medical tests improve. 

Like a magic trick, immersing them in the music of yesteryear makes their bodies respond as though it were yesteryear, and if that isn’t an amazing thing, I don’t know what is.  So let’s talk about the music of the 80’s, and the powerful, regenerative force it holds for my generation.  Actually, first let’s talk about the universal agreement we now all have that the music of the 80’s sort of sucked.

Ahhhh, it feels good to admit that, doesn’t it?  At the same time, I am the very first person in the world to crank Hall and Oates “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” when I hear it on the radio.  No shame in it, either.

The thing you have to appreciate here is that teenagers are CRAZY.  Right?  Even the ones who seem okay, we know all about their poorly developed brains and how they respond to a zit like a five alarm fire, so let’s just accept that point. 

Being crazy, not only do they attach incredible significance to things that are utterly unimportant, but they also feel a bizarre level of passion for some really lame things (shout out to Taylor Swift!!!)  Take me, for example.  I wore pink and green when preppy was in, wore designer jeans so everyone knew my ass had good taste and LOVED the groups A-ha and Naked Eyes. 

I’m not saying any of it was right, I’m just telling you how it was.  And if you think I don’t belt out “Take on Me” EVERY-SINGLE-TIME I happen upon it, you are very naïve indeed.

So now, my point:  remember Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”?  Hahaha, of course you do, who could forget a song that still gets an otherworldly amount of air play?  That song, in addition to being pretty craptastic, is also obviously dictatorial, but without a real point.

That song, bossy in a universal way, seems to promote stalking and controlling but not planning or even making sense.  “Stop Making Sense” was a hit in the 80’s, in fact.  This music, this credo, became sort of emblematic for my generation. 

We desire to rule the world in a theoretical way, not in the way of planned mergers or hostile takeovers.  We want to rule the world by being ourselves and not letting anything interfere with that.  The 80’s, that much maligned era of “greed” and “excess”, seems to have spawned an army of people who would rather not play by the rules. 

Who would rather not conform to the standard.  Who would rather not “play nicely with others”, if the others feel there is a “right” way to do things.  We want to rule our world, and we don’t really care if anyone else plays along.

It seems ungenerous to pin this whole thing on Tears for Fears, so let’s spread the wealth of blame:  how about The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”?  Holy cow, stalker, what an unconvincing case you make for yourself!  You better start loving me again or we will both be sorry?  I am going to force my will upon you, even though I really can’t tell you why (does he even once say it’s because he loves her?  Brrrr, CREEPY).  Or take Animotion’s “Obsession”…please.  On the one hand, I am a possession, unopened at your feet.  But on the other hand—I will not accept defeat, I will find a way and I will have you.  Hmmm.  Sounds like SOMEONE needs a restraining order.  And don’t forget “We’re Not Gonna Take It” (self-explanatory),  “I Want You to Want Me” (let me tell you how to feel about me), “Every Breath You Take” ( let me tell you how I feel about you even if you don’t care one bit.  Oh, and btw I’m stalking you), and “One Way or Another” (Jesus Wept). 

The list goes on, my friends.  People talk a lot about Gen X being “anti-establishment” and I think you can look no further than the music we grew up with to see why we are such a my-way-or-the-highway generation.  I was brainwashed into being a bossy, megalomaniacal, stalker-like, vaguely-informed madwoman!!! 

If only I had been a teenager in the 60’s, THEN I could accept that you can’t always get what you want!  Or in the 70’s—I’m easy, I love the one I’m with, we’re all be free to be you and me!  80’s, you screwed me!!! 

And now I am going to hunt you down and force you to be the way I want you to be, just like you taught me to do.  B-wah-hahahahaha-Ha!!!! 

But then again…my fellow Gen-X-ers, my peers, are the most unique, interesting group of people I have ever encountered.  There is no “greed” in the traditional sense, only a driving desire to be authentic and whole.  And yes, we seek out like minded souls and attempt to create together by thinking outside the box and understanding that our authority is the ONLY authority as far as we are concerned. 

Is that wrong?  If you think it is, then you don’t understand that everybody does actually WANT to rule the world.  But only a few of us have the guts to try.

WHY "NO" IS YOUR REAL NEW BEST FRIEND

Have you ever eaten at a restaurant with really bad food?  Did you ever eat there again?  The answer is probably “no”, if I know most people, and I think I do.  But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s “yes”.  Maybe some smokin' hot prospect asked you to go there and the chance to spend time with a hottie trumped your taste buds.  Or maybe you had a friend who worked there and slipped you free drinks, which made the badness of the food go down easier.  Point being that there are some scenarios in which you would return to a restaurant with really bad food, but not many.  Even if the service is good, even if the place is clean, no one wants to spend cash on a night out eating Alpo.  Because life is short and whenever circumstances are in our control, we like to make choices that are pleasing to us.  This sounds simple, right?  Like why-in-the-hell-am-I-bothering-to-write-about-it?simple.  Well, not so fast, friends…you may be eating really bad food without realizing it.

Growing up, my parents were big fans of the expression “waste not, want not”.  This played itself out in many arenas, some comical and some not so much.  On the topic of bad food, my Mom went through a prolonged phase when I was in elementary school where she prepared many dishes traditionally made out of ground beef with ground lamb instead.  Knowing my mom, and again, I think I do, this had to be a bottom line issue, because ground lamb is dry, chewy and tastes like metal.  So she was not “wasting money” on delicious beef.  And even though the ground lamb was disgusting, we were not allowed to “waste food” by not eating it.  And yes, we had to clean our plates, this was the 70’s.  Now you can cut to, in your mind, a montage of the many ways I devised NOT to eat ground lamb, including feeding it to the dog, excusing myself halfway through the meal to flush the lamb I had hidden in my napkin down the toilet and sneaking my portion onto my sister’s plate (sorry, sis!).  When you are a little kid, you are not allowed to say “no”.  At least we weren’t in the 70’s.

So then you go to middle school and high school, where “no” is like a dirty word—you sure as hell don’t say it to your teachers (at least not in the 80’s) and saying it to your peers can have devastating social consequences.  I have a vivid memory of standing behind the Grand Union grocery store in a homemade dress (thanks, Mom!) while a group of kids passed around a bowl of pot…I was supposed to be at a school dance with my friend, but when she asked me to go meet up with some guy so she didn’t have to go alone, I couldn’t say “no”.    I did say “no” to the pot, however.  There I stood, feeling like a fool and a geek, in a weedy backlot wearing my ribbony, flowery party dress watching a bunch of classmates getting stoned.  But I never regretted that “no”.  And it taught me that saying “no”, while often difficult in the moment, is very empowering in the big picture.  “No”, when used judiciously, can be your very best friend.

How often do you ignore the bad restaurant rule and say “yes” when every fiber of your being is screaming “no”?  Once a month?  Once a week?  Or one-a-day, like a vitamin-in-reverse; your unwanted “yeses” sapping you of energy, strength and frankly, just putting you into a bad mood.   I have a couple of girlfriends who don’t seem to have the word “no” in their vocabulary…if there is a situation they can volunteer for, they will.  I like to joke that God put me on the planet to teach them to say the words “No, thank you” and be at peace with it.  We are all of us, to some degree or another, eating at that restaurant we don’t like.  There are relationships and situations in our life that “serve bad food” but we stay, or we return because for some reason or another we don’t think saying “no” is an option.  But “no” is your ONLY option if you don’t want to live a life of continuous discontent.  “No” is your only option if you want to make a decent meal of it.

When we are little, we are not allowed to say “no” to grown-ups because grown-ups have gone ahead in life and made discernments—about what foods and activities and input are good and appropriate and healthful for a growing child.  Children need to be exposed to many different things in order to learn discernment, so that as they grow, the power of choice becomes an earned privilege.  As adults, we have, through our experiences and learned preferences, earned the right to say “no”.  Saying “no” does not devalue us; neither does it devalue the person or situation we are saying no to…”no” is often the most respectful thing we can possibly say.  Rather than dragging ourselves through the unwanted motions and resenting the whole time, give the opportunity to someone who genuinely wants to say “yes”.  Respect and trust yourself enough to know what is right for you.   Once more, that bad restaurant —how would it feel to ONLY eat good food, for the rest of your life?  Does that seem like an outrageous ideal?  It’s not…it’s actually the bare minimum you can do to take care of yourself.  So take better care of yourself…by saying “no” to toxic foods, people and situations.  And this can be the best year of your life.

WHY LOVE STINKS

God bless the J. Geils Band for pointing out the obvious in such an amusing way, am I right?  You know what—people are always talking about love as the thing that “makes the world go round” or “all there is”—and technically, these sorts of assertions are correct.  Love is the whole point of being alive.  Everything we do is for love, in some way…even if it is a love-of-not-being-hauled-off-to-prison-for-delinquent-taxes.  Ha. 

But seriously, when you boil down the motivating factor behind every single behavior you have, it always comes back to love, love, love.  We want to be loved, we want to love, we want perhaps most of all to be HAPPY, and it doesn’t take a genius to know that happiness is an impossibility in a loveless environment.  So why do I feel the need to remind you that LOVE STINKS?  Because that’s the rub:  you can’t be happy without love, but avoiding love is the ONLY way to avoid pain.  The ironic duality.  The stinking mess.

Anyone who has ever truly fallen in love can tell you this:  love is an involuntary reaction.  Forget all the ideas you had in your head of what Prince (or Princess) Charming would be like…love is a tsunami that destroys all reason and rationality in its path.  “Love is blind” is absolutely NO JOKE.  This is another of love’s delicious ironies.  We all believe that to find “true love” we need to perfect our look, our personality, our life…we need to lose weight or dress better or smell better or have a tan…what a joke! 

My Father, who was demonstrably in love with my Mother for over 50 years, once launched into a rhapsodic monologue about the cute little “dimples” on my Mom’s butt…much to the horror of my sister and I.  When he finished I felt the need to inform him that the “dimples” he found so charming were actually an undesirable condition called “cellulite”; his response to this was a shrug, a smile and “Is that what they’re called?  They’re so cute!”  AHEM.

When you have fallen head-over-heels, there is NOTHING that cannot be construed as beautiful, charming, alluring. Your beloved becomes your personal true north, with every molecule of your being keening to be closer to that body, that soul, that mind. You want to read all of their favorite books, watch all of their favorite movies, know all of their favorite songs...you will leave no stone unturned in your efforts to merge closer to this being. 

 The things we do for love know no limits...raise your hand if you've ever cleaned up a loved one's puke (kids don't count)!!! Testify if you have ever melted over someone's crybaby tantrum (again, no kids)!!! Fall to your knees if you have ever forgiven frankly unforgivable behavior in the name of love!!! Can I get an AMEN, somebody???

LOVE STINKS.  It melts your brain, makes you see through rose colored glasses, carries you off in a (tsunami caliber) wave of hopes and dreams that may have no bearing on reality…love can fill your stomach with butterflies, your head with fireworks, your heart with lead.  Love can lead you so far down a path you had no intention of travelling that by the time the smoke clears, you are quite too far gone, quite hopelessly lost. 

Love can rattle you to your core, make you foolishly brave, turn you into sentimental fool.  Love can leave you high and dry when you least expect it; it can also sneak up on you in the most unexpected places.  Love is unpredictable, undeniable and terrifyingly vulnerable.  Love can bring you to the highest heights and the lowest lows, love can crack you so wide open there is no place left to hide; love can leave you for dead at the side of the road…love stinks. 

I had a friend in college who used to say “You can’t pick who you fall in love with” and quite frankly, at the time, I interpreted this as an excuse for her piss-poor taste in men.  But now I understand the wisdom in this…love is not a choice.  There are a lot of self-help gurus out there who will disagree with me, but I am going to side with lady-boss Bonnie Raitt, who sang “I can’t make you love me if you don’t”.  You can’t make yourself love somebody and you CANNOT MAKE SOMEBODY ELSE LOVE YOU.  So put down the credit card and take off your Spanx…if somebody doesn’t love you, fitting into those skinny jeans will not be persuasive. 

And conversely, if somebody does love you?  Go ahead and puke in their car.  Ha.  Seriously, though, this is the secret of love that nobody talks about.  You can’t help who you love and who you don’t.  The only “choice” in love in whether or not you demonstrate it and how.  Sometimes you love someone who doesn’t love you back, or vice versa.  No one “chooses” this experience, at least not consciously.  But we do choose how we deal with it, and whether or not we let it take us down.

“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is one of those brutal truisms that well-meaning people spout to the broken hearted, the bastards.  When you have “lost” a love, this hardly feels true…instead it feels like death would be preferable to the pain.  But when we are still in love?  We know this to be the truthiest truth of all the great truths.  Being in love is da’bomb, the top, the pinnacle, the reason for living.  Being in love is beautiful, magical, wondrous, amazing. 

Sometimes love can last forever; more often the shelf life is a bit shorter, because the world and people are ever changing commodities.  We grow, we explore, we move, we work, we evolve and it is very difficult to keep doing all of these things in reasonable tandem with another person for an indefinite period.  So there are endings, transitions, changes and sadness.  But what is life without it?  To paraphrase M. Scott Peck—Love stinks.  Once we see this truth, we transcend it.  Once accepted, the fact that love stinks no longer matters. 

Because love is all there is.

 

 

 

WHY IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Another Old Lang Syne)

So we made it, my friends.  Another year under our belts, another “old lang syne” as the songs go.  A time to look back and reflect on all that has been and look forward to all we hope for.  In this spirit of honoring the past, over holiday break I decided to take my Mom, who turns 80 in this year, on a trip down memory lane…literally.  Between the years of 1978 and 1992, my family called western CT home, in both the now much misunderstood Newtown and also the very tony Ridgefield.  As I live approximately a 2 hour drive from these places, I determined a road trip was in order, complete with hotel reservations at the very spot my younger sister learned to swim and of course dinner at our favorite family restaurant, the aptly named Rosy Tomorrows.  We set off, a kind of New Yorker magazine cartoon version of Thelma and Louise, and revisited the happy haunts of our past.  It turned out to be a deeply satisfying journey on so many levels, as we rudely snapped pictures of homes we used to call our own and other landmarks pertinent to the years we spent taking them for granted.  We made a wrong turn (or two), laughed A LOT and mocked the rest of the family by texting them pictures of the fun they were missing. 

But old lang syne reminds us, as with any visit to the ghosts of the past, there is always a profound resonance of the bittersweet.  Wrapped in a deep, thick, cozy blanket of nostalgia, we felt grateful for all that had been as well as all that has come to us since; yet we were ever mindful of loss, both our own and the losses of others.  We mourned our next door neighbor from Newtown, a brilliant, funny woman who was taken from her family too soon.   We mourned for the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School, this unrecoverable and bizarre aberration of violence in a peaceful and beautiful town.  We mourned for the way “things used to be”, while knowing that in truth the world only expands and becomes more inclusive with each New Year…we prayed for the day when no child is ever truly left behind, a day when we can all feel safe in our communities.  We mourned my father, now sorely missed for 9 new years, who would have totally been up for such a journey if he was still with us…

My Dad was a fearless optimist, a man a clever writer would have referred to as “consciously naïve”.  He believed in the intrinsic goodness of mankind and always viewed life through a prism of hope, no matter how dire the circumstances.  His sense of humor was always fully intact and my Mother used to jokingly refer to him as “Harry the pusher”, because if there was anyone who wanted the people around him to enjoy life more, I have yet to meet him.  Like Dickens’ Fezziwig, my Dad thought every day could be a party, and his enthusiasm was both infectious and healing.  My Dad always made me feel safe, no matter what.  Even when we battled through differences of opinion (and we did this often enough), he always made me feel accepted.  With my Dad I felt known, I felt seen, I felt highly regarded.  And I would be surprised if there is any person who knew him who feels any differently.  My father was a gentleman and a philosopher, and his spirit is a guiding light in my life to this day.

M. Scott Peck, one of Dad’s favorite authors, famously wrote:  “Life is difficult. This is a great truth…because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it…Once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters”.    We say hindsight is 20/20 because it gifts us with perspective, the gift only time and experience can give.  In retrospect we realize that great challenges give us our greatest rewards.  Looking back, who do I appreciate more than the kid who brought a flashlight and a Reader’s Digest magazine to a performance of a play I wrote and directed?  In hindsight, who is wiser than the alcoholic I dated who told me I would be “insufferable” if I “had boobs too”.  I have often said today’s bad experience is tomorrow’s funny story and thank God for that.  But while real tragedy infrequently lends itself to humor, it does always inevitably inspire everything that is beautiful about mankind—heroism, compassion, generosity, and the understanding that we are all in this together.

When my Dad was dying, I used to lie next to him watching him sleep.  Each breath struck me as a precious gift; I cherished every rise and fall of his chest.  One day he awoke and caught me in my vigil.  I looked at him with all the seriousness of a young person contemplating death for the first time and asked “Do you know how much I love you?”  Without batting an eyelash, my father smiled his impish grin and said “Yes”, his tone conveying the “of course, silly”.  He knew then what I had not yet figured out—we are all dying.  At difference paces and in different ways, but it is happening to each and every one of us.  And that is not a bad thing.  Every day we die to yesterday’s self, and are reborn with more wisdom, more depth, and more truth.  We die to who we used to be and are reborn to who we are now.  We have the gift of looking backward to understand it really is a wonderful life, when you take it as a whole.  When you wake up in the morning, remember this:  every day you have a clean slate.  Not just New Year’s Day, EVERY day. Life is difficult and wonderful and new with every breath you take.  So celebrate your wonderful life, and be happy in it.

WHY I AM EMBRACING MEDIOCRITY

I am a recovering perfectionist.  When I was in kindergarten, I had the stunning realization that I was the only kid in the class who couldn’t tie my own shoes (no fault of my parents, who had tutored me with endless patience).  I immediately went into self-imposed exile every day during recess, staying alone in the classroom to practice tying and retying the wooden boot that was provided for such a purpose.  Needless to say, this OCD-like behavior concerned my teacher, who contacted my folks.  She admonished them for pressuring me, and they assured her they had not (and they had not).  “That’s just Kara”, my Mom told her, and that was the truth.  Even at 5, I was unusually driven to “do things right.” If practice actually did make perfect, I would’ve been the gold medal winner in the shoe tying Olympics.  But ultimately (it would take me another 20 years or so to accept this), it turns out I just don’t have very nimble fingers and activities that require fine motor skills are never going to be my strong suit.  I am just not wired that way.

My best friend is another recovering perfectionist, and for many years I have teased her that she would be a lot happier if she could just learn to embrace her mediocrity, as I have.  Ha.  I am so mediocre at so many things, it is downright dazzling!  You should see my half-assed bed making skills (yawn), my remarkably lame baking abilities, my powerfully lazy form in nearly all-things-sports.  I’m like the Private Benjamin of life, trudging around in circles wondering how other people motivate themselves to do so many tedious things when I just “want to go out to lunch”.  I once had a part time job in a candy store, where I literally wrapped hundreds and hundreds of boxes of chocolate, and guess what?  I STILL suck at wrapping presents.  Fine motor again.  I have many friends who are impossibly talented artists, or world-class musicians, or over-achieving academics…nope, nope and nope.  None of that is me.  I am telling you, there is a dazzling mediocrity here!

Now don’t think I am getting down on myself, because I promise you I am not.  I am just one of those people who believe that the Divine is an all-inclusive resort; in other words, either everything is divine, or nothing is.  I think there are plenty of things I am good at, without a doubt, and I enjoy my mastery of them to a fault almost.   But I also revel in my incompetence very nearly as much.  Let that sink in.  I find joy in sucking at things and calling myself out on it.  For example, as I mentioned, I am a ridiculously unskilled baker.  Lopsided cakes?  Check.  Formless cut-out cookies?  Check.  Dry breads?  Checkmate!  But you are not going to see some kind of “Chariots of Fire” slow-mo montage of me training to get better at this…you will instead see me waiting in line at the bakery.  And having a good laugh about it, too.  Because two of the things I excel at are prioritizing and having a sense of humor about most things, even my own shortcomings.  So here’s something else I am bad at:  banging my head against a wall.  Don’t see the point.

In the same way that I have learned to trust personal rejection—some people just aren’t my people—I have come to trust my mediocrity.  We don’t all need to be good at everything; that would just be silly!  Plain old sucking at some things is not only generally amusing, it also gives me the opportunity to ask for help.  And knowing how much I enjoy being helpful to people I care about, I figure I am doing my friends and family a solid when I raise the white flag of surrender.  Please help me can in truth be very empowering words, when used judiciously.  I’m pretty sure that this is why there is more than one of us, actually.  I love it when a friend acknowledges a strength of mine by asking for my help.  It qualifies as a top-ten life experience for me.  Having a skill that is both recognized and utilized by a grateful receiver is a radically badass event, at least as far as I am concerned.  And how could I return the favor if I wasn’t so damned mediocre at so many things?

Hey, I am not advocating an abdication of effort, don’t get me wrong.  But I am pulling for all of us to accept ourselves AS IS.  To embrace our weaknesses as well as our strengths can be a very powerful stance.  I saw an awesome sign in front of a church on my way home today…it said “Faith is simply a refusal to panic”.  How great is that?  Having true faith in ourselves is not a pie in the sky whitewash job.  It’s about a deep resonance with who we are and what we are capable of…and also about NOT PANICKING when we fall.  Instead of considering it a failure, it might even be possible to have a laugh in a “WOW!-Did-I-screw-that-up-or-what?” kind of way.  Because we all suck at something.  And that is totally okay.  Whenever I get excited about anything—a person, a book, a place—I take it as a sign that says “Walk this way”.  So I do, with good results.  On the other hand, when my disinterest is such that I cannot be bothered to really even focus long enough to gain competence?  I see a “Don’t Walk” sign.  And for me, it’s all good!  I have exuberance for both walking and not walking, if you get me.  I am righteous in my incompetence and you can be too!  Just be yourself, and enjoy every moment of it, okay?