This is dark days, my friends.

Not an hour goes by where some cold chill of a fear doesn’t pass over my heart and threaten to bring me down. This election. This war. This economy, and what it’s doing to people. The never-ending, always-on stream of bad news and…well, what it’s not doing to people.

I read a good book over my 10 days away in Chicago by a crazy young hardcore punk zen monk. It gave me odd comfort, along with some perspective. Perspective, because things have always been crazy: they were crazy when Gautama Buddha set out on his quest; they’re crazy now.

Comfort, because one really persuasive answer, while not exactly easy, seems pretty straightforward: accept responsibility.

For yourself.

For the things under your control, that help shape the world—your anger, your fear, your not-niceness. Your living-in-smallness. (Oh, and by “you”? I totally mean “me.” So we’re clear.)

While a Twitter-friend assures me we’re not technically in a recession, the fact is almost beside the point: our fears, my fears, are telling us we are. And, as another new nerd-friend says, the answer lies in addressing the fears head on, and with grace and compassion. Be here now. Love thy neighbor…actively. Ground yourself in the truth of you.

I thought about all this stuff over and over these past several days. It was hard not to. Between the overwhelming generosity of all my friends, old and new—who lent me their homes and spare bedrooms, who took time out to meet with me, who bought me meals and drinks, who showered me with love—and the long, long walks I took all over my beautiful native city, one thing got hammered home time and time again: enjoy this moment, right now. This soft bed, this slice of pizza, this drizzle of rain, this “L” train that showed up at exactly the right time, this hug, this laugh.

I have a mission statement that I’ve had for a while, which I mentioned recently—”To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love.” But it is also nice to have a platform: some slightly more actionable ideals to root your ass in the here and now, and the way you’d like the next here-and-now to be. When I was Chief Nerd of my Nerdmasters club, my platform was thusly:

1. Have fun.
2. Leave things better than we found them.
3. Start and end the meetings on time.

I chose them because, for whatever reasons, we’d let these things slide during the administrations before mine, and…well, it kind of chapped my hide. But the exercise of addressing these things week after week—of plotting a path that would make the platform real—both helped me realize it and why things slip away to begin with: because we are focused on other things. My presidency was far from perfect, but dammit, we had fun, that room and the people in it were better off when we left each Thursday night, and we got to the bar in time to get the drinking underway at a reasonable hour. Plus we learned what needed to happen next time. What still needed to be worked on.

What projects lay before us.

For the next few months, I’m committing to my own platform. I want to honor (and, god willin’ and the creek don’t rise) wrap up my previous commitments. I want to revisit my Best Year Yet plan I so earnestly began in January. I have new projects, including one promise I made with a lovely lady in Chicago, that I intend to see through.

And beyond that, I am going to adopt and adapt my Nerdmasters platform from last year as my personal platform for the rest of this one:

1. I will have fun.
2. I will leave things—myself, my people, my projects—better than I found them.
3. And I will start and end my days on time. (Uh…after this one.)

I have some other ideas for how to tell Mr. Fear to take a hike which I’ll share as time goes on and I actually start putting them into practice. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what’s going on with you: what are you doing to grab your life by the horns, and what can the rest of us learn from it?

xxx
c

Image by tcd123usa via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, fear, life.

In case any of you were wondering, the main reason for my trip to Chicago was to attend this event.

Well, in case any of you were an IRS auditor from the future, anyway.

But here’s the reason I really made this trip: to see my people. My people whom I’ve known a lifetime, or half a lifetime, or a third of a lifetime. And my people whom I mostly or only know from our time together online—I came to see you, too.

It’s lonely out there, and tough, and these are strange times to be a human being on the planet. In fact, it’s so crazy out there right now, with so many people running around like characters out of a Lewis Carroll story, that it becomes all the more important to hunker down with one’s homies and get the truth via that mirror:

Yes, you’re okay.

Yes, you’re sane (or at least, crazy in the good way).

Yes, it’s kinda wild out there now.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get tone right over the internet. And the phone helps, but really, it’s a measure of last resort, and a far, far better tool once you already have some grounding in reality with the person. I’m here to do the bonding in person, because that’s what people who live in the third dimension do: they see, touch, hear and, depending on how close they are or how the spirit is moving them, taste and smell each other.

I can’t begin to describe how difficult my life has been these past several months without A PLAN. Because (a), historically, I’ve operated under one; and (b) when I’ve done, I’ve done well. Even if I hated what I was doing, I at least knew why I was doing it (money, ambition, fame) and what to do. Now, I’m down to a mission statement, and one of your spazzier ones at that: “To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love.”

Some business plan, huh?

I had a new (internet) friend write me recently to ask if maybe I was work-impaired. I guess I am, but not in the way (I think) he meant. I’ve got all the work I can handle right now, being me and figuring out how I make myself useful to the universe. It’s work I chose, and that meant I had to stop some other kinds of work—i.e., the paying kind—to do it. If my father was here, he’d tell me I was crazy like my mother, and then ask if I needed money.

For the record, I’m not and, for now, I don’t. I am trusting that if I work hard at what I know I can do—write stuff down, illuminate darkish corners, make people laugh a little—the rest will work itself out.

It is a leap of faith, the stopping. But the alternative—to go and go and go, and be stopped by whatever rock drops on my head in 10 or 20 or, if I’m lucky, another 47 years—is no longer an option.

I gotta be me. Nonstop, 24/7/365.

And now, off I go to meet a few new old friends…

xxx
c

Image by emdot via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21-Day Salutes™, Stop! Sucking!.

If I can get myself to do it, and the book will cooperate by being good, reading will stop me cold.

So far this trip, I’ve blazed through Steve Martin’s outstanding Born Standing Up, hit half each of John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing and Beth Lisick’s Helping Me Help Myself (both pretty good, in their wildly different categories), and spent a glorious afternoon browsing the quirky selection at the excellent Quimby’s. (I bought a couple of items to read on the way home, too, in case I don’t get an interesting seatmate this time around.)

If I can get myself to do it, I may give myself the gift of an afternoon with a book—and only a book—once before this trip is up.

It’s hard to do for some of us, because unless it’s assigned reading for a credit-bearing course, it feels so…optional. And if I’m not already exceptional in the ways I feel like I should be, how can I engage in the purely optional?

Of course, stopping is not optional. It’s the other half of going.

Just because something is easier to forget, doesn’t make it okay to forget it.

So…what’s on your stopping list?

xxx
c

Image by dhammza via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21-Day Salutes™, Stop! Sucking!.

I’m no garden-variety L.A. idjit.

Born and raised in Chicago, she of the fickle weather, I learned the value of layers early on. And, when traveling between October and July, of bringing an umbrella. But a hat?

Who the hell brings a hat four days before May? Even to Chicago? Especially when one has an especially large head that looks profoundly ridiculous in hats?

It was in the high 40s today—and that was the high. So I walked and I walked and I stopped in every damned store that was a likely bet, looking for something other than a sun bonnet. Something that would keep the heat in my head.

When I finally found one—in a running store, of all places, for $32—I was a mile from my destination. $32. For a hat that matches nothing I’m wearing on this trip, and that upon my return to Los Angeles will most likely linger in my “winter” shoebox until I give up and hand it off to my friend, Lily, who looks good in all hats, damn her.

$32. To look ugly until the the weather turns.

I snapped the purple “no complaining!” wristband my friend (and frequent commentributrix) Mary Ellen gave me at lunch once against my wrist. And smiled. And thought of my wonderful chats with Mary Ellen and Heidi, and the wonderful soup that I would heat up in my wonderful midweek bachelorette crash pad, on loan courtesy of my wonderful friend, The Overly Talented Account Guy. And then I gave them my credit card, snipped the tags from my brand new $32 hat, and set off for the last leg of my day’s journey at least partly dry and vastly warmer.

Stop complaining. Buy the damned hat. You’ll catch a cold if you don’t, anyway, and then where will you be?

Stop. Before something else does the stopping for you.

xxx
c

(I wrote this last night, the 28th, and hit “save” instead of “publish.” Did I mention somewhere the importance of getting enough rest? Yeah.)

Image by benncapon via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21-Day Salutes™, Stop! Sucking!.

I feel like I’ve come back to life in the past 48 hours, and not just because I’m finally well-rested for the first time in four days.

There is something about removing myself from the confines of my usual life—and the particularly tiny, triangulated footprint of computer/refrigerator/bathroom—that gets my juices flowing. I need structure, yes, and probably even more self-discipline, but I also need to get better at overcoming inertia (aka the tractor pull of my computer workstation), even when the inertia is productive.

I came pretty far to jog myself from a cranky daydream, but I’ve felt similar resuscitation taking a spin up to Ojai (especially when I can include a visit with my friend, Jodi) or even a walk around the block. I’m not sure what kind of reminder I can set in place to use when I sink back into productive torpor in L.A.—maybe the 1-2 combination of a hypnosis tape and the discipline to use it.

For now, I’m content at the restorative qualities my little trip is having on me.

Besides, I’m sure some of you friendlies will have some great hacks for jogging oneself out of torpor…right, friendlies?

xxx
c
Image by emmiegrn via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21-Day Salutes™, Stop! Sucking!.