Living my Best Life

I don't know how to live my best life. You know that, right? No experts here! If that's what you're looking for, move along; there is nothing to see. Just like everyone else, I'm struggling with this idea. Practicing self-care without spinning off into hedonism. Learning discipline without trailing off into asceticism. Observing one's own process without becoming a narcissist. This is work.

Right now, I have some not-huge-but-definitely-there questions I need to answer, in the fairly near future. As in, a few days ago would have been good. They have to do with work load and my ability to manage my time -and my apparent inability to create more time out of thin air, in spite of my clear need and worthiness ;) And, we might as well be honest, my own need to do a good job at everything is also involved.

For the past year, I have kept myself wildly busy. I did this on purpose. On the one hand, I put off my own dreams for too long. I don't have time to delay them any longer; being tired isn't a good enough excuse. And, I was very afraid that if I allowed myself very much (any) unstructured time, I would sit home and brood. Bitterness isn't really in my nature, but self-pity can be. So, keep moving-no brooding. That was my thinking.

That strategy worked, in a sense. I have made important strides. I feel better. Most of the time, I am grateful to be living alone and having this opportunity to be self-determining. Gradually, though, it has become easier (less difficult, anyway)to let some things go. I am no longer working at the yarn shop on Saturdays. I don't need the money (although I will sorely miss the discount on yarn!) and I do need the Saturdays. My thinking was that I had let some things go in the service of others. Yet, I see now that I was still leading with fear. Little wonder, I suppose, given my recent experiences. Yet, I think it's time to do something else.

I have this picture of my perfect life. It involves work for social justice (from which I am almost completely separate these days); thinking, writing, and teaching; a varied and festive social life with my friends and family; a welcoming, calm home; rock-climbing, biking, and yoga; creativity (which mostly means knitting and writing); cooking, baking, reading for fun, travel... It's a picture I acknowledge to be unattainable. It's a world where the clothes are never wrinkled, my haircut isn't two weeks overdue, and all work is accomplished easily in its appointed time. Yes, I see the problem. I am simultaneously unable to live up to this fantasy and unwilling to let it go.

People advise me to do less -lower my standards. It's perfectly valid, but I don't think it's the answer for me. Until I find the right balance, I'm going to entertain the possibility that I am also living my best life when I doubt, when I am exhausted, when I just flat-out don't feel like working this hard anymore. I can't will those feelings away. But I can try to hold the dream as a gentle thing in front of me, and try to love myself into it.

The pace may not change, but its frantic nature might. Or, love will have a gentler pace than fear. We'll see.

We can not dedicate...we can not consecrate....

It's the anniversary of the Gettysburg address. If you go here: Gettysburg drafts, you can see drafts of the address.

I have nothing terribly insightful to add to the conversation about the Gettysburg address. I can tell you that I went to Gettysburg for the first time as an adult, with my sister who lives near there. Two Southern girls walking around in Gettysburg -if there are ghosts anywhere, there are ghosts there. I'm quite sure of it. It is a place of powerful sadness, and Lincoln tried -I think- to rhetorically ease the pain. I can't imagine that he succeeded, but the appeal to our better nature can't be a waste of time.

Lift a glass with me this evening and, perhaps, reflect on visionary leadership, your best self, and Lincoln's damn fine writing.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Boys Have Cooties

Oh, relax. I'm not casting aspersions on almost 50% of the population. I'm referring to the stage in life when boys and girls each think that the other one has cooties. It's a silly game -not at all new or rare, in a cultural sense. Children learn it from each other, and it serves the cultural and developmental purpose of fostering same-sex communities among children when sexuality (whatever its adult orientation) ought to be delightfully latent. Those cooties clear right up when the time is right ;)

So, here I am at my age, and boys apparently have cooties again. I have had precisely three "dates" in the last two years. Each was a hurdle of monumental proportions for me -and two of the men I know well and really love, in a different sort of way. I thought of a million excuses why I shouldn't go. I considered pretending to be sick. Then I practically WAS sick.

This is not going well, dear ones. I never struggled with trust before, and now my distrust of grown-up, intimate relationships is like a wall of bricks around me. Actually, that's not quite the right metaphor, because this brick wall has a weight that I must carry around. In some ways it makes me angry. Math-Rat just handed me these bricks and said, metaphorically, "Here, carry these for a while. I'm going to go play." And he did, and I've still got the darn bricks.

Here's my thinking. I only see three possibilities here. There may be more, but I only see three. One is that I work out my trust issues myself, but within the community of women where I usually find myself. It would be sort of a "red tent" approach to this healing thing. Men are out there, certainly. A few extraordinary men are even my friends -and brothers are always exempt from the cootie thing, so there's that, too. Maybe if I think that boys have cooties again and work on my own developmental issues, however long it takes, I (we) can resolve this.

The second possibility is that there's a guy out there who is willing to help me dismantle this brick wall, piece by piece. That is a LOT to ask of a person who can not be certain that it will even be worth the trouble (which is the definition of commitment, I suppose. One can't know how it will turn out and yet ponies up anyway.) It will be a long process. And I know me -I will run that person a not-so-merry chase. Seriously, what are the odds such a person even exists?

Third, I just sit tight. Choosing not to work on these trust issues hurts no one else, and I'm not sure it even hurts me. I have learned that lonely alone is way better than lonely together, which is what I was for years in my marriage. I'm doing fine right here. Perhaps there is no need to push myself to dismantle this brick wall, which might well be protecting me. Maybe it will just fall down when the time is right. It could even fall down from natural causes and still there would be no intimate relationship, right? That would be a kind of decision from a more powerful place.

I'm me. I would like to be a better me. So I push myself to confront things, fix things, move forward...blah, blah, blah. I make charts and lists and plans. You've heard me blather on in that vein forever. I want to chuck these bricks. (Hurling them vaguely toward the Math Department comes to mind, but that's only funny for a second.) But for now, I'm pretending like boys have cooties. I just think it's going to work better that way.

The Big Red Book

I don't know why I am so intent on seeing this book, but I am.

Maybe it's that old University of Chicago great books thing. Maybe I'm just a nosy old biddy. For whatever reason, though, I am considering a trip to New York to see Carl Jung's "secret" book, which he unimaginatively called Liber Novus. (If he had written one after this, would it have been the New New Book -or the Really I mean it this time New Book?) But when I first came across Jung's work in college, I felt like I had come home. Archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation, integration....I became an 18-year-old groupie of a slightly mystical, spectacularly imperfect, psychiatrist from Switzerland. Leave the Back Street Boys to someone else; I was waiting at a different kind of stage door.

OK, I get it. Not everyone gets this excited about ideas -particularly someone else's ideas. And I've mellowed, anyway, to say nothing of having discovered the thinking of other scholars of the mind. I've even had an idea or two of my own, thank you very much.

But this book.... seriously, I want to see it. In it, Jung chronicled and created illuminated illustrations about his dreams, hallucinations, and encounters with the collective unconscious. He worried that he might be having psychotic episodes. His heirs apparently concurred; they have kept this book unavailable since Jung's death in the early 60s. Yet, through these dreams, he came to the theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes as tools for working toward a healthy emotional life. He famously was unwilling to let anything or anyone go from his life until he had figured out why they were there in the first place. What had they come to teach him?

So, he purposely confronted (and occasionally induced) his own hallucinations in order to learn from them. I can't quite imagine having a rich enough interior life that visions would come to me. I think they would spot infertile soil and go bother someone else ;) And yet, what they teach me is that we're not meant to simply explore the depths of our own psyches. That's necessary but insufficient, as the logicians would say. Rather, there is something "out there" that's bigger than we are, and we are meant to explore that, too. Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.

Of course, reading about someone else's journey is not quite the same thing as having undertaken it oneself. Everyone has her own work to do in this regard, and insofar as I've even started it, I can report that it's not always fun. (It might have been easier if I had fallen for the Back Street Boys, now that I think about it.) But I'm going to New York anyway, to indulge my hero-worship just a tad but also to acknowledge the intellectual and spiritual curiosity as well as the courage of a mind that shaped mine.

A Bruised Ego

Settle in, boys and girls, for a story.

Once upon a time, I was physically fit and strong and thin. I never thought I was thin, but that's another story for another day. I also practiced yoga for years and years -starting before some of you were even a twinkle in your Mama's eye. I learned some silly things and some unimaginably important things while spending time on my mat. I learned how to put my foot behind my head (that goes in the "silly thing" category, in case you were wondering) and how to be a more loving person. I learned how to twist myself up into a pretzel and how to confront some of the pretzel-y knots in my own psyche.

And I thought I learned about ego. Bearing in mind that none of these important life lessons is learned and then is over and done-with, I thought I had confronted this one. (Who's that snorting in derision? I hear you!) Seriously, I kind of thought that my ego issues went the other way -that I had been with a man I thought to be strong, but really just needed constant ego massage. His strategy for getting that reinforcement was to make other people feel small. Even more clever, he was good at getting the people around him to admit they were small before he even asked. So I thought my task was to find ego-strength where I had assumed there was none.

Alas, it is more complicated than that. Yesterday I went to a 3-hour yoga workshop. I have started to re-claim my yoga practice, but it is nowhere nearly as consistent or disciplined as it has been in years gone by. So I knew I was walking into this workshop under-prepared. In my home practice, I am learning to be gentle with myself when I can't (yet) do poses that, a long time ago, were easy. In class yesterday, I realized that there was still quite a bit of ego attached to being good at yoga.

Sigh. Just when you think you're making progress, the universe points out a spectacular area of blindness. And now that you're no longer blind to it, you're obliged to work on it. Damn it. (Oh sorry, young ones.... I mean.... gosh, universe, thanks for this opportunity to become a better person.)

I looked around at all the strong, lean yoga bodies and was unhappy with the size, shape, and fitness of my own body. I couldn't really see other people's postures to compare, but I felt worried and unhappy that I had to so intensely modify my own postures. I could compare my today-postures with my years-ago postures, and I didn't like the trajectory. My self-talk was screaming "I used to be good at this. I want you all to know that I used to be good at this. I know the Sanskrit names for postures. I know alignment principles. I have mat-cred (the yoga equivalent of street-cred, I suppose)".

Wow, who is that arrogant/desperate pain in the ass and would she please shut up?

So, today is all about ibuprofen for the muscles and the spirit. On some level, I'm hobbling around a little bruised. On the other hand, being worked just a smidge beyond your comfort level is how you make progress. As long as I extend compassion to myself as well as other people, this will probably work. I can only start where I am, right? So, I'm reframing all of this to put it into the "hurts so good" category. I'm almost convinced.

And the Winner Is....

Seriously.... my favorite Sesame Street clip of all times....

Check out the girl with the pony tail!

Yip Yip Martians Meet the Telephone

I still say "get the earth book" when people or events perplex me. Alas, it works about as well for me as it did for the Yip Yip Martians.



I am getting such a kick out of revisiting these memories.

Me, Claudius

More Sesame Street memories. I remember laughing until I cried when this came on, and my then-small children (who of course had not yet encountered I, Claudius) wondering quite explicitly if Mom had really, finally, this time lost her mind. But they would obligingly call me into the living room to see this clip when it was repeated.




They later took out the line "Monsterpiece Theater, home of classy drama." I thought it was hilarious, but I suppose it really did have to go. There's no sense teaching kids intellectual classism. And later Alistair Cookie stopped eating his pipe at the end of clips. Again, it probably needed to go, but Cookie Monster would have eaten his pipe, don't you think? There's only so much class Cookie could provide ;)