Art, life and the Happiness Dip

Launch is great. Synthesis is superb.

In between the two, however, is most often an ocean of hell, a vast, tedious chasm between the happiness of just being and the happiness of informed being.

That's way denser than the fluffity-fluff I usually throw out here, so let me back up a moment and tell a story. Two stories, actually.

The first is a story of my happiness. It's something that, despite what a certain tag on this blog might have you believe, I don't think about much these days, although I'm still curious about the mechanics of happiness as I do my work, since so many of the people I align with seem to find themselves in various stages of getting to happy.

Anyway. That story.

When I was a baby, I was a happy baby. Not a touchy baby or a gooey, juicy, hug-me-up baby, but, if eyewitness reports are to be trusted, a shiny, happy baby who was interested in most things and delighted with a large subset of these. Additionally, putting aside my status as Only Grandchild, I was, if these same reports are to be believed, Fun to Be Around, a quality that most of the people I've polled say I was able to maintain throughout my childhood. So fine: a happy child.

If you asked me to pinpoint the time that I stopped feeling happy, I peg it at around age 10. I peg it thusly as I have a memory, not to be completely trusted, as I have a not-completely-trustworthy memory, of standing in my maternal grandparents' backyard, feeling what I now recognize as creeping blues wrap its arms around me. I'm sure there were other moments leading up to it, but the realization of that moment was that the party was officially over, with no notification of when or assurance that it would someday start again.

Thus, I spent the next 30 or so years chasing happiness, or a clue, or whatever I was making it out to be at the time. A feeling of wholeness, I guess, and of being centrally me but able to connect with...what? The other side? "Happiness"? At one point, I named it "Big Colleen," imagining some kind of eternal, omniscient, wiser me who was also the face of the universe. (I know, I know, but these things are slippery-hard to describe, dammit.) There was this feeling that maybe, if I learned the right path or the right key combination or the secret handshake, I could get either back to myself or forward to myself, whichever way it worked. Meanwhile, there was a lot of the psychic equivalent of being out in the rain and cold with insufficient protection, and inchoate longing, and other piece-of-shit states of being.

If you have read other bits of my story, you know I had my real-life equivalent of that moment in the cartoon (or was it Gilligan's Island?) when the coconut fell on my head and I woke up, as if from a dream, to happiness. I've yet to fully explore that epiphany, but I've taken stabs at explaining it in a play I wrote several years back, and have hinted at it an essay here on the blog. Since I'm obviously not going to get at it here, either, it was basically like this: there was a pre-Hospital Epiphany me and a post-Hospital Epiphany me, and the post-me was as astonished that I'd ever felt bad about anything as the pre-me was that something like this could really, truly happen.

The other story is about my trajectory as an actor.

I've written bits here and there about my odd-10 years in the acting profession (including an acting-related epiphany that I was clueless to act upon, but was interesting, nonetheless), and have not shied away from discussing how very, very bad I was for some time. Because I was. For years, even as I felt this obsessive need to pursue acting and become better at it, I was pretty miserable while practicing most aspects of it.

What I haven't discussed is that I was good when I started. Really good, apparently. Couldn't-go-wrong good, where I was an effortless conduit for Real Human Emotion. I believe the teacher's first words upon seeing me onstage the first time were "well, we've got us a live one," but I couldn't say for sure because I was so live, so full of passion and as-yet-unexpressed longing, I could hear almost nothing. I was just Real Energy, up there in front of people. This lasted for perhaps six months, at which point I'd started to accumulate some real, if shaky, technique, and the whole thing fell apart. The whole experience can be summed up in cartoon form as that moment when whichever Warner Brothers character finally realized he'd run past the cliff on sheer fury and energy, and, looking first downward to confirm, then audience-ward for the gag, plummeted to the earth below.

Seth Godin talks about The Dip in business: that long, slow slog between getting an idea and getting it to the place where it works like crazy, where it takes off into the stratosphere, where it becomes that unstoppable rocket to the moon you'd half-envisioned, half-just-hoped it would be at the beginning of the curve.

I think there's a dip in life, a big dip, the king-daddy of all dips. If you were looking at it from a Hegelian perspective, it would be the antithesis phase, where every last bit of every idea put forth in the thesis phase got challenged. What I like to call the Sucks Ass phase. Because here you are, happy and carefree and connected, when all of a sudden, and generally, for a long, long time, things start seriously sucking out of nowhere, and everything you thought was true and possible becomes unclear and maddeningly out of reach.

What I finally realized was happening in those years, for me, it's important to interject, was that the carefree awesomeness of childhood finally got burdened with the icky structuredness of adulthood, or rather, training for adulthood. I went from having my own ideas and minimal external pressure to do or be anything to having my own ideas squished and squashed and sometimes pushed aside as I learned all of the Very Important Things that were necessary to ensure I was able to be a capable adult.

Or, in the parlance of acting, I learned technique.

There's nothing wrong with technique. Skills and knowledge are wonderful tools, both, but mastery of them is a bewildering and not particularly intuitive process. There is a lot of Fucking Up, and dropping your tools on your foot, and breaking things with your tools, and breaking your tools on things. Worst of all, at some point in the process, I think we get so into process that we become process, instead of realizing that process is there to be our servant. That we and process are there to serve some greater good. Like an actor must learn to master technique, whatever technique, so she can reliably and artfully channel the emotions needed to tell a story, we must learn to master these tools so we can bring our humanity to bear in useful ways, instead of just HULK SMASHing our way through life.

I confess that I got back on this tear after reading my friend Gretchen's post the other day about whether artists are unhappier than their non-artist counterparts. I have no data and an uncharacteristic lack of opinion on it, other than "the tortured ones, probably." I think that unhappier people are people in that chasm, or dip, where they're still figuring out how things work. I think that happier people are ones who have either figured it out or, mean and elitist though this may sound, never thought much about anything in the first place. I've maintained for a while that a good indicator of intelligence is knowing that one isn't, really: you have to be a certain level of smart to have any idea of all the things you can't possibly know; people who are very, very certain that they know best scare the crap out of me.

Not much point for a long and winding post, except maybe this: if you're struggling with something, the way is through it.

And if you're through it, try doing a little analysis of the stages you went through. It's not going to speed things up for the guy right behind you, but it might make the tedium more tolerable...

xxx
c

Image by i does tze rue-bot via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm the kind of person who

Yesterday, via various miracles of modern technology and brave union brethren having fought for what's theirs, The BF done got a bum knee fixed up good as new (we hope) in less than seven hours, including schlep time to and fro.

While we were allowed a bit of canoodling time pre- and post-procedure (of a chaste nature, them curtains is flimsy), primarily we were on our own, him, blasted out of his skull on the good meds; me, making do with provisions from the local Starbucks acquired on foot.

Having been through many, many outpatient procedures of a colonoscopic nature thanks to my frayed internal jump rope, we brought things with which to entertain ourselves during our waking hours: he, a sole issue of Harper's; I, Quentin Crisp's autobiography, a self-help book, my current fatty spiral notebook (one should always have something sensational, etc.) and an iPhone. (Because really, if checking your email, Twitter and Facebook streams every five minutes isn't entertaining, what is?)

We brought them because we knew there would be down time. We brought them because we knew we would not have each other to talk to for seven hours. We brought them because we are the kind of people who bring stuff to read when we're going anywhere: the airplane, the surgical center, the toilet. God forbid we have a spare moment available and nothing good to fill it with.

As it turned out, I spent very little time with Quentin or Martha and a whole lot of time with Dolores. Dolores was there to accompany her friend of 35+ years who was finally having the cataract surgery Dolores had been begging her to have for ages now. She herself is very fit, save some miscellanea that comes with aging. (And she has had some of her miscellanea examined by the same guy who examines mine, Dr. Graham Woolf!) Dolores is 73 years old, lives about 10 miles due south of me and sings in several choirs (including a thing called a "bereavement choir," which she turned to on the recommendation of a fellow parishioner when she was "mad at God" for taking three of her five sisters from her in the space of 18 months).

Furthermore, Dolores grew up near Jacksonville, FL. She graduated from the last all-black high school in the state of Florida, a high school which had an over 90% rate of sending students on to college, where she was headed toward the end of this week for her 55th high school reunion. Husband #3 (she divorced #1 and buried #2) is not coming with her, as he's infirm, but Dolores seems not to mind much; in fact, Dolores seems like the kind of person who makes friends wherever she goes.

Dolores does, not me. I'm the kind of person who brings a stack of reading material because I'm the kind of person who is painfully shy around strangers, hopelessly introverted and most definitely does not make friends wherever she goes.

Only, it seems, I am not.

Somewhere along the line, I started talking to people. I started smiling, I guess, and asking questions. Offering chairs, runs to the Starbucks for muffins, information about my own I'm-the-kind-of-person-who self. I'm not entirely sure why except that somewhere, somehow, I started getting interested in people's stories, and people's energy, and seeing which kind of stories matched up with which kind of energy. Maybe it was a result of all those acting classes and shows and script writing, where one is forced to plumb the depths of one's soul to find where it overlaps with someone else's. Maybe it's latent Journalist's Disease kicking in, I am, after all, the granddaughter of a newspaperman.

I probably won't have a grasp of the wherefore for a long time. Hardly matters. Because what I finally realized yesterday is that I'm not the kind of person who I used to be, and moreover that it would probably behoove me to stop thinking of myself as "the kind of person who" anything. In my teens and 20s and even my 30s, it felt awesome to stick stakes in the ground, to say "I am for this" and "I like that" and carve out my identity. And it felt equally awkward to have that Person I Was change, to feel vaguely embarrassed about my earlier, over-the-top love of Aubrey Beardsley or Bachman Turner Overdrive or circus peanuts. I was the kind of person who likes circus peanuts? What the hell kind of loser was that?

We set so many unnecessary traps for ourselves, I think. And yes, I think other traps may be necessary, the shame in acting badly trap, or the guilt for not taking care of ourselves trap. At least until those habits are flipped over to their sweet side, those traps serve some kind of purpose. Pegging ourselves as this or that is perhaps understandable in our preteen and teen years, perhaps into our twenties. It's more of a trying-things-on activity then. But I've seen so many people stiffen into some grotesque version of something they should have tried on and discarded years ago, I'm not so much for the I'm the Kind of Person Who game any more. I still have ideas and preferences and loyalties, of course, but I'm far more interested in the Strong Opinions, Loosely Held game nowadays.

It is scarier to be fluid, for sure.

But it is far, far more fun in the waiting rooms of the world...

xxx
c

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

Quiet, please

One of the chief changes between Colleen of the Past and Colleen of the Present is a dramatic reduction in the Noise Tolerance Threshold.*

I'm not sure what this is about, exactly. The younger me spent copious amounts of alone time, but definitely liked commotion: city noise, constant soundtrack of AM commercial pop radio, thrum created by hordes of people, anywhere. I grappled with loneliness far more back then, so maybe the hubbub helped with that. Most definitely, it did: when I'm feeling blue, I still find myself slipping an old movie into the SuperDrive to keep me company on the few lonely nights I have.

If I had children, I'd definitely understand where the need for quiet comes from. The little bit of time I spend around other people's kids I generally find enjoyable, provided the kids aren't intolerable rat bastards, but I'm always, always depleted afterward, craving the quiet of total lockdown. (God help the parents of extroverts who are themselves introverts: that's a pretty fair example of hell, I imagine.) But I have no kids around me 24/7, nor, now that I'm spending more time at My Country House than the Fabulous Divorcée Pad, do I have the kinds of ambient noise issues I had living in an area of dramatically increased population density (which is one of the biggest, as-yet-unnamed psyche killers this recession has brought about, I'm convinced. We went from a relative paradise of mainly solo-apartment dwellers to a post-collegiate-in-NYC-levels of bodies per unit. And from the sound of things, the same bidness is going on to the north and south of us, as well.)

It may be the sharp uptick in reading and writing that's happened over the past six months. When my life was more of a balance between my writing life and my dwindling designer life, there was room for all kinds of sound. I worked better and more efficiently at sketching and composing visually with music, albeit mostly from my "lyric-free" playlists, music without words, or at the very least, without words in my native tongue. The right kind of sound engaged just enough of my monkey brain so that I could be non-self-critical (or less so) during the conception phase; it also did something kind of magical in the composition and execution phases, but that was more like throwing on some great tunes to pump you up when you're running or cleaning house. That kind of sound, I get.

What I've tiptoed around without examining too closely is the possibility that as my brain ages, it needs more space to focus. I'm already noticing the disk spinning longer when I try to access certain data like names, although to be fair, that was never something I was especially good at, and I suspect that this skill in all of us has been somewhat diminished by our increasing reliance on the Great External Brain, a.k.a. the Internet. (If you have hard data on causality, lay it on me; I'm sure it'll be temporarily depressing, but in the long run, I'd rather know my brain can get back in shape at the gym than that I have 5 years to squeeze out what's left of it before I resign myself to a life of gardening and airport novels.)

Finally, there is the hope that this is temporary, some kind of phase. In the throes of a Crohn's flare, when all available resources are being directed toward a damaged organ, there's not a lot of spare blood available for brain bathing. You get fuzzy; you get sleepy. It becomes hard to focus for long periods of time, and your thoughts aren't as sharp as they are when your gut is in the pink. I may yet cave, but I'm doing my best to pull out of this flare without meds, and that means getting down with the short windows and mad prioritizing and quirky conditions, lots of sleep, lots of rest, lots of quiet, my body is demanding. I'm not complaining (much), both because there's little point (no higher court to take this one to) and because I'm hanging on to the hope that as my body bounces back, my brainpower will, too.

That's a slender thread of hope at 48, but it's my thread, and I'm clinging to it...

xxx
c

*Except where watching Hulu-is-my-TVâ„¢ is concerned, anyway; there, the sound is creeping up to the ear-splitting levels I remember at my grandparents', in their declining years with their declining ears.

Image by ★ SUPA SUSHY © ★ via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Painters, marketers and the twain meeting

I am not exactly an expert on destuckification, that's Havi's purview (she even has a packet!), but I've been stuck in enough ruts to have learned a thing or two about getting out of them.

More to the point, I am a goddamned patented, triple-certified, Lifetime Achievement Award-winner of grappling with change, largely because, like most things we become intimately familiar with, I suck eggs at it.

Which is why I am delighted when anything comes together in such a way as to let me see the bastard from ever-so-slightly a different angle. Or two angles, or maybe two lenses that, when focused properly, bring a microscopic part of the bastard into sharp focus.

A few days ago, one of my favorite writer-thinkers on or off the web, Seth Godin, posted a little sumpin'-sumpin' about the bastard. It's about the rut part of change, or the one of the states you find yourself in when change not only seems like the only answer, but only the remotest of possibilities. Only as Seth points out, it's not. You can, hold on for tricky footwork, switch ruts!

Okay, so you're not really hauling yourself out of a rut by climbing into another. Although I suppose you're welcome to turn it into another rut, if you're a glutton for punishment. No, Seth's radical suggestion is that you hop out of your rut by changing everything, and there are some pretty "everything" suggestions he floats out there like deleting your entire website and starting from scratch, or moving to Thailand.

But there are some equally non-seemingly-"everything" items on the list, too. Starting a blog? Listening to live music? Buying art? These are "everything"?

They are, though, when you are lodged comfily (or not) in your rut. When you're prone with grief, weeping into a pillow, exhausted by your own emotion, getting off the bed is "everything." Getting off the bed and walking to the bathroom to wash your face? Holy crap, that's "everything" with a cherry on top. Getting off the bed, washing your face in the bathroom and going to the kitchen to make a tin of soup? Good night, Irene, it's a revolution!

Robert Genn, the fine artist who writes the fantabulous newsletter I'm always after you all to sign up for, puts the rut equation slightly differently: the not-moving is sterility, the moving is fertility, and getting from one to the other is as simple (not easy! although sometimes!) as changing up your media or mixing up your speed, slow for the fasties, fast for the slowies.

Yesterday, I had a real-length walk in the morning. (Don't worry, I took it slow.) Afterward, I had a cup of coffee. (Okay, maybe not as noble a change, but I needed to try it to see if I'd fall apart, because I was a-skeert I would. I didn't.) I did some writing, and, per a friend's gentle admonition, did not worry about the writing I could not do. I gave myself permission to go to bed early, and to make this short. (Attention new readers! This post length is short for this blog! You've been warned...)

Everything is a rut (that's the bad news); "everything" is a way out of it (that's the good news). You don't have to work on all your ruts at once. You don't even have to work on any of them at all, in fact, but I hope you will. We all have lonely roads to walk, but when we're all walking them, o, how we'll learn as we all cross paths...

xxx
c

How many Crohn's flares does it take to change a communicatrix?

If you've been following along on Twitter and Facebook, you already know that last week represented a physical nadir for me.

Not the Nadir, but the worst flare I've had in almost three years, since I went off the diet. (That would be the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, also known as the Diet That Saved My Life, or at the very least, kept me from getting a new asshole and/or a colostomy bag.)

Ah, free will! You are such a delicious, pernicious devil, aren't you? You step in to help me vanquish cigarettes in one fell swoop (and a jet trail of methane). You help me out of a job I hated, a marriage that wasn't working, a lawsuit no one was going to win. You help me build a mid-life acting career out of nothing but hope, sweat and yellow highlighter, you get me into therapy, you get me out of depression. In what I call your finest move to date,  you even pull me up from the depths of illness, and then, defying all logic, you impel me to gorge myself on the very stuff that will kick my ass back to the curb.

Seriously: what up with that? Would it not have been easier to just...oh, I don't know...help me STAY WELL than to, with additional infusions of will (and rest, and enough steroids to power a major league sports franchise for three seasons), pull me back out of it?

Ah, well. I take comfort in the fact that there have been three years between flares, and even more comfort that somehow, while I am unquestionably a Delicate Fucking Flower, I have healing superpowers. The Youngster commented on it once, a hint of envy and longing in his voice, and it was the first time I sat up and took note of what I'd never thought of as good fortune.

Before then, I'd concentrated on how much I hated getting sick or injured, not how marvelously well I tended to heal. Not that anyone wants to be ill, of course (although I suppose there must be someone, somewhere, who does, this being a mighty wacky world and all), but you know, if you've got to take your share, how great to know that it won't be for that long, all things considered.

I'm too old and too battle-worn to say "Never again!"; I was too old and too battle-worn even to say it two years ago, when I also fell off the wagon and bounced behind it with my face in a bagful of Kaiser rolls for a good stretch. Something did happen this week which hasn't happened before, though: I couldn't write, and I couldn't write because I was too exhausted, and that just about killed me.

I remember reading an interview with the actor Robert Downey, Jr. a little while ago where he talked about how he finally found his way back to the straight and narrow. It wasn't God or family or anything so noble as these that set him straight: it was the sudden understanding that there was something he really, really wanted to do (act well in shitty movies, apparently), and he didn't want anything else getting in the way.

I've reached the point where I can see how my health, or lack thereof, could stop me from doing what I want to do, which is to write, which for now mainly means writing here. Doesn't matter. The blog is my shitty movie, but I'm going to act the hell out of it. And that means no more cookies on the craft service table.

In the days and weeks to come, I'm going to take a cold, hard look at the goals I drew up for myself in 2009, and see where "Take Care of Self" fits in. Which, I suspect, it doesn't much at all right now. And then I will look at what must stay, and what can go, and start hacking away. As my buddy Merlin Mann says in the fine quote framing his fine treatise on the subject, "You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you're either lying or crazy."

I've been lying. And I've seen crazy. And I'd like to think I'm done with both.

It's time to focus on how well I get well, not how sick I am now. It's time to measure carefully the time I have left, not bemoan what's been spent. It's time to get to work, even if the work is, annoyingly and paradoxically, rest.

It is time to address this business of writing once and for all, and to treat it as a business, with all the regularity, accountability and support a business requires. Maybe that means writing less here and more elsewhere. Maybe that means getting a mailcart job (although that the mighty and magnificent Sage Cohen has managed to write copy for others without losing herself gives me some hope for that road again).

Once again, it's time to change. Then again, try pointing to a time when it isn't; my 48-year-old, post-Crohn's, post-dysplasia, post-married, thrice-post-careered, peri-menopausal self would have quite a bit to discuss on the nature of change with my disease-free, virginal, premenstual schoolgirl self. It was ever thus.

I am beginning to believe that the difference between change happening to one and being at the helm of change is focus and attention. (Okay, that's two things, since when has this blog ever been about literal accuracy? Or proofreading, for that matter?) And, looping back to the many observations I've been having lately about followers of the fat man and the benefits of (OHJESUSNODON'TSAYITDON'TDON'TDON'T) meditation (CHRIST!), all signs are pointing towards it as something I kinda-maybe-sorta-oughta-definitely address soon.

Fine. First, yoga; then, the hard stuff. Where, you understand, "yoga" might just mean "yoga on the Wii." Just so we understand each other.

None of this is remotely sexy. And the only part that appeals is the thought that I might get to string together more hours and more days of feeling like I finally did today, only perhaps better, and with bowel movements. (What? Like this blog has ever been about good taste, either?)

I leave you now to contemplate your navel, or the mystery of the Universe, or the grocery list. And I am officially soliciting advice, god help me, on good, local-to-L.A./East Side yoga studios. Someone who'd teach like Havi, in the non-namaste-b.s. way: a Havi here, not there, who still teaches regularly (or really, really irregularly, my preference.) And don't even talk to me about that Bikram. Not gonna happen.

More soon, as I know it. As soon as tomorrow, or as later as...not tomorrow. And if you would, one final request: some part of your functioning body or brain, whatever it may be? Be thankful for it just a wee bit.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think they might talk to each other or something...

xxx
c

The Road, Part 2: Noble truth number 2

I have said it before and I will reiterate for clarity (and possible trolls): I am no buddhist. I am not even, like The Sweet BF, one of the half-assed variety. But the more I read of it (which is still precious little, okay, trolls?) and the more of life I see and experience, the more I think old Gautama might have been onto something.

Take one of the (four, four, count 'em, four!) foundational principles of Buddhism, Noble Truth the Second: "Suffering is Attachment," which, for those of you who are even less familiar than I with the Truths, follows hard on the heels of "Life is Suffering."

Then think back on the loss of a beloved grandparent, or a romantic relationship that ended, or a job you were asked to leave before you were ready.

Or, to travel even further into the land of mundane minutae, that feeling you get after a bad cold call, or an audition that went less than spectacularly, or leaving a date that went south or a party that failed to meet your expectations.

What's that word I snuck in there? Why, "expectations," of course. Because in all of those smaller circumstances, you likely had some kind of expectation that things would go differently: that the call would land you a huge piece of business; the audition, a job; the date, a partner; the party, a rockin' good time, and perhaps a brief vacation from other feeling you were currently, wait for it, attached to.

It's a little harder to see what is attach-y about loving a person or even a position eminently worthy of love. And by "attach-y," I mean "wrong," right?

Not exactly.

Attachment isn't wrong; it just is. I'm guessing if the fat man were around today and you marched up to him and said, "Listen, Bub: my gramma rocked the universe and there is nothing wrong with my missing her and I intend to go on missing her and that's that," he'd shrug and say the Buddhist word for whatever. It's not his job to tell you what you're doing right or wrong, but to get his own shit straight enough that he can show you compassion, which took even his Bub-ness a mighty long time of wandering and wondering and trying-and-failing, if the stories are to be believed. (Oh, and what I love about Buddhism? They don't care if you believe the stories, either! Rawk!)

The BF and I listened to a lot of my favorite Joe Frank episodes on our recent trip, which meant we listened to a lot of Jack Kornfield's charming and wonderful lectures, as well. Really, if you like this blog and are interested in dipping your toes in the Buddhist waters, you could do a lot worse than the recorded lectures of Jack Kornfield (here are some you can hear for free!) and the lively books of "zen punk monk" Brad Warner (and he'd be fine if you bought them through those Amazon links or got 'em from the library, and so would I!). They are wonderfully soothing and stimulating at the same time, these shows, and they helped me find a bit of peace in the middle of my discomfort: an incipient Crohn's flare which I thought had mutated to garden-variety constipation but finally reared its ugly head as an incipient Crohn's flare WITH constipation. Which, for those of you who have never had the pleasure, feels like what I imagine the ninth month of pregnancy feels like, stupendous belly, aliens kicking around inside, waves of occasional blinding pain and nausea (sooo much fun in a car in the middle of the Mojave Desert!) and no matter what, that goddamned baby will not come out.

I've been in flares before and learned from them, and not learned from them. I've learned what I can get away with and what I can't, and then I've gone ahead and done all the stupid things (bread! M&Ms! coffee!) that put me there in the first place.

Today, though, as I was skimming through the Facebook, I stumbled on a heart-rending video from a dear friend who was alternately beating herself up and feeling awful about herself because she did something many of us do all the time and most of us do at least some of the time: overcommit. This beautiful lady with her gigantic, beautiful heart, who gives and gives and gives was suffering, and in the course of her piece, she wisely pegged her sad, sad feelings as those of powerlessness and smallness.

I crack myself with how slow I am to learn things, and with how I learn things, period.

Because I can do this again and again, overcommit, and feel dreadful about the consequences, and not even come CLOSE to identifying the root of my suffering as feelings of powerlessness and sorrow because, let's be honest, I am not 1/10th the nice of this great-hearted person, and learn nothing. And yet I saw her suffering and something clicked for me: I am attached to feeling well.

I am attached to the idea that I will always have limitless youth and energy and power to draw upon for getting done the outrageous list of things I must do. Under that, I am attached to the idea that I am in control, and that I have the ability to call my own shots as I see fit. And of course, under all that, I am highly, highly attached to the idea that I have limitless time. Which is sort of a laugh because the last time I looked, I was turning 10 and in four months, I'll turn 48.

What would happen if I let go of the idea that I must always be happy? Or well? Or successful or rich or right on down the line to the smallest of the small: if I let go of the idea that a favorite wool sweater would always be there for me, so that when it accidentally took a spin through the washer and dryer, I did nothing more than chuckle as I pulled out my new, doll-sized pullover?

What would happen if I never got another parking space or that Magic E-Mail or taste of McDonald's fries? Well, if it were the latter of the three, I might be more firmly on the road to some kind of wellness, since there ain't no kind of fries on my diet. But really, I think I might have some peace, which might free up some room, which might mean a bit more compassion and a bit less angst.

I would never, ever in a million years suggest that it's silly or wrong to feel lousy because you've overcommitted. I hope I always feel lousy when I do, because it's no fun for anyone.

But I hope even more that I can learn to examine the lousy and pull apart the feelings and actions that got me to it, so that (a) I don't have to feel lousy and (b) I can be more useful to people who are feeling that way.

What I hope the most right now, though, is that my friend, who is grace herself, finds some of the peace she has inadvertently given me.

Which may be the beginnings of compassion. Which, though it clearly shows my attachment to the feeling, would be awfully nice, I think...

xxx
c

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

The Road, Part One: Strong opinions, fervently held

The BF and I returned today from a long trip through the desert (and back through the desert). In the home stretch, we were listening to This American Life podcasts, including one very funny one called "This I Used to Believe," which was a gentle slam on the NPR series of a similar name, This I Believe, and which was far, far better than the oft-mawkish (and sometimes just bizarre) original. (Although I will go on record immediately and loudly as being pro-TIB or anything else that gets people thinking and writing thoughtfully about their lives.)

At one point in the show, Ira Glass gets interviewed by Jay Allison, the guy who led the team at This I Believe, and asked what, if anything, he believed in. (This is what happens when radio producers meet other radio producers, I guess.) It was asked in the context of why Glass had never contributed, something which Glass himself claimed to have wondered from time to time while listening to the show, and what Glass came up with I thought was rather interesting: although as a young man he had believed in a great deal, often with a fervor bordering on obnoxiousness, as he grew older, he didn't think he believed in anything, which is something that deeply resonated with me.

I, too, was a righteously indignant, bordering-on-obnoxious believer (although not a Believer) in my youth, by which I mean, "until I turned 41." There was no opportunity I'd pass over to stand up and tell people what I believed in (and, implicitly, what I was POSITIVE they should); after my umpteenth attempt at proselytizing disguised as "sketch comedy", a hilarious (not) piece about a former prostitute who'd given up the game running into her old pimp, where "prostitute" was "copywriter" and "game" was "advertising", a good-natured friend dubbed me "Soapbox Girl." Which, of course, I took umbrage at. Much of my old journaling is painful to look at not for the endless spooning over boys who quite clearly were not, in the parlance of today, that into me, but for the mind-blowing bloviating I indulged in.

Province of youth, I suppose (although there are an awful lot of old bloviators whose humility hormones never seemed to kick in). You get older, and if you don't spend all your waking hours watching stuff on TiVo, reading  crappy novels or going to MLM meetings, you get wiser, too. Or you don't, and maybe you end up an apoplectic old man in a Kingman, AZ, diner raging against The Gays for not letting that nice Miss California have her say (it's her say, right? it's just her opinion, and this is still America, right?) as your wife tries to reason you down off the ledge.

Honestly, who can blame us? It's not like we're raised with lots of "strong opinions, loosely held" teaching in this country (the U.S. of A., for those of you who aren't reg'lar readers). Come to think of it, I'm not sure who is: some of us grow up hearing a lot of lip service to things like "tolerance" and "to each his own," but there are an awful lot of qualifiers. Some things can't be tolerated, as it turns out, because they're an affront at least and an abomination at worst. Gay people, for example, should no more be allowed to marry than black people should be allowed to co-mingle with whites, or women allowed to own property. If you look at it really closely, the one thing you can really believe about holding tight to opinions is that it causes distress somewhere down the line, to someone or another.

I hate to say I believe in nothing, and I'm not even sure it's true. I believe that nothing is permanent, that everything changes. I'm ramping up to a belief in love over hate always, although let the wrong old man say the wrong thing at a diner in Kingman and, as the song sez, see how love flies out the door.

I do know that if I can't see in my heart to see past my own rage and feel compassion for that man, and to understand him and where he's coming from, I'm not ever going to be able to communicate with him. And if I can't be around certain people, what the hell kind of communicatrix am I, much less person?

For now, I say I know enough to know I don't know much. And I'm working on the beliefs thing.

Oh, and Ira? It turns out he does believe in one thing: that the car is the very best place to listen to the radio.

This, I believe...

xxx
c

Image by demi-brooke via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

How are you changing the world?

At one time or other
everyone wonders
whether she'll change the world
in some way
great
or small

But the truth is
you can't not
change the world
because everything you do
makes it different,
great
and small

You can change the world
by the way you answer a question
or the phone

You can change the world
by giving change
or time
or right-of-way
even if they're wrong
(especially if they're wrong)

By the way you listen
and the way you speak,

By the way you greet the dentist
or the tax man
or the President,
the one you voted for
and the one you didn't

You can change the world
by the way you eat
and spend
and save
or don't

By the way you pray
and the way you talk to the people who don't
or by the way you talk to the people who do pray
if you don't

You can change the world
by writing a book
or by reading one
or by passing one along

You can change the world
by the way you love
or the way you hate

You can even change the world
when you accept
that we are all wired
to do both
and still choose one
in the face of another

You can change the world
with everything you think
and feel
and do

And you do,
with everything,
small
and great.

xxx
c

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

Looking at an old thing a new way

While rumor has it there is a brain nestled somewhere behind them, one of the main things I provide those who hire me as a consultant is a new pair of eyeballs.

Same with editors. Same with interior designers. Same with coaches, shrinks, proofreaders (hoo boy, proofreaders!), trusted friends, non-trusted people who sit next to us on airplanes, stylists, headshot photographers, yoga teachers, bodyworkers, and feng shui consultants.

In fact, one of the exercises my favorite feng shui book in the world walks you through is Looking At Your Old Place with a New Pair of Eyeballs. (Not literally called that, but hey, I like literary symmetry and callbacks.) You're supposed to pretend you're a guest visiting your own home for the first time, or that you're you giving the nickel tour to a guest who's visiting your home for the first time, to see what you see. Because we humans are marvelous at adapting, which is useful when you find yourself in drastically reduced circumstances like a bison drought or post-war Vienna or seven stranded castaways here on Gilligan's Isle but is not so good when it comes to seeing your 47 years of accumulated crap, much less seeing what of it you can begin to release.

One reason I now realize I've been stuck so long in a particular place is that I was looking at it like Colleen of the Past, not Colleen of the Future or even Colleen of the Present.

Colleen of the Past likes things the way they are now, which is to say, the way things were then: this apartment, this circle of relationships, this job, this routine. Any changes are implemented slowly and are, for the most part, additive. Think closets that maybe get fuller instead of a wardrobe that occasionally gets thinned into usefulness. A thing is added and another thing, and everywhere-a-thing-thing, until yeah, you have a lot of clothes but you can't get at all of them and most of them look like whatever decade you turned 30 in. (I'm pretty sure that was a Marcia Wilke line: most people get new hairdos until they're 30, after which you can carbon-date them by it.) (I'm paraphrasing, of course.) (Oh, and to read up on Marcia, go to this page of marvelous writers and scroll in a downwardly direction.)

For me, some huge, usually uncomfortable thing has to come to bear before I will give a clear-eyed look to how useful a long-ago behavior or situation or what-have-you is suiting me today. Like a couple of leery-eyed misogynists from the Inland Empire checking out the rack or a shredded colon. And then I usually have to enlist outside help, a trusted friend, my shrink, a coach, to get a good, outside look at it. I've learned some tools that have helped me see some stuff in a new way. I harp on about Morning Pages (from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way), but hey, they work. As do good shrinks and honest, longtime friends.

In a pinch, run your shit past that stranger on a plane. Provided you're non-threatening (no one's going to poke a bear 30,000 feet up), you might get some pretty eye-opening perspectives.

But look. Look look look. With fresh eyes and an open mind.

And, you know, a notepad or somesuch...

xxx
c

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

If I can do it, anyone can

It's a strange thing, being in front of an audience instead of in it.

I'm not sure if my cohorts on last week's panel (or stages everywhere) agree, but I'll wager that no matter how much you know, it's rare that you feel you know enough to stand where Mrs. Kent or Professor Schwartz did, teaching the people facing you about what you know.

Parents must feel this way all the time, especially when their kids get old enough to start asking questions. I know enough to give reasonable explanations for various basic physical phenomena, but after that, I tend to fall back on reciting stuff from the latest issue of Modern Jackass. I blame the great gaps in my education, which were mainly self-created: there are a lot of classes I never paid attention in, and a lot of things I never bothered learning because either I wasn't interested or I figured I could ask someone else, later. Maybe in the back of my mind I was pretty sure I wouldn't be making any biological question machines; more likely, I just preferred not to think of anything at all.

My coach, Ilise, who helps me more than you all can know, and who, like my shrink is and my beloved paternal grandmother was, one of the more patient folks I've met in my life, says you only have to know more than the people you're helping. At first, I felt this was borderline, if not flagrant, fraudulence; the more I slog along, though, the more I realize that in my own fields of interest, communication, mostly, and propagation of ideas, I'll never know enough to know more than most of the people I'm with, unless I decide to limit my "speechifyin'," as The BF calls it, to classes of 7- and 8-year-olds. And even then, they're bound to be one up on me when it comes to some of the Crazy Things Kids Are Saying.

I bring up this appalling and shameful lack in me because, for whatever reason, I've had a few worrisome (but nice!) compliments lobbed in over the transom recently. People saying very nice things to me somehow vaguely at the expense of themselves, mostly along the lines of how much they like the way I say this or that (and thank you! I thank you, from the bottom of my heart!), but with a sort of wistful ache, as though I had used up the awesome or gotten an inside track on something or there was just no way they could do it, too, have things come out on paper (or screen) the way they floated around in their heads and hearts and dreams.

I say this next bit gently, but say it I must: Stuff! And nonsense!

Whatever your dream of perfect expression, I'm here to tell you that: (a), it does not exist; and (b), if you knuckle down and DO, what eventually comes out will make your dream beside the point.

Don't believe (a)? I grapple with Right Expression all the time. EVERY time. No, really: every single time I greet the blank page or sit down with an actual, live human bean, I think, "Nope! This isn't going to come out at all right." And somewhere in the middle (several times in the middle, usually), I think, "Nope! This is not at all it, not at all! I will not be able to connect in a meaningful way and express these ideas at all, nope, not at all!" Positively White Rabbit-like, I am. (For the record, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, and sometimes I actually know when I'm going to. That last happens so rarely, I could count it off on toes and fingers, and I've never worked with a lot of heavy machinery.)

As for (b), there's a reason I leave the archives to this site up in their entirety: I SUCKED. And everyone should know it, myself included. The only way to get from there to here is one goddamned step at a time, and brother, I've taken them all, even if not as publicly as Internet publishing has allowed. (What you can't see, the years and years of me toiling away like an asshole, trying to sound like Hemingway or Dorothy Parker or whomever I had a big writer-crush on at the moment, I've spared you thus far. But I'm gonna find it, and I'm gonna put it up, too.)

I will add one buzzkill caveat: just because you want to be the Greatest Writer in the World doesn't mean you can or will. You might not be wired for it. Or you might get however many days/months/years down the path and lose your taste for it, something that happened to me with acting. Which, for the record, I did all right at, but never with the ease of my early forays into writing. Like I said, wiring, plus all that other outliers stuff, circumstances, opportunity, logging hours. Although, to paraphrase my Secret BF, Malcolm, again, just because your early contexts weren't the most fertile for growing literary genius doesn't mean you can't become one.

What I do know is that everyone, E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, has a story, and a passion, and can be moving and affecting if she opens her arms and drops her drawers for it. On my trip, I read a wildly gripping story by a writer whose amateur status mattered not one whit. Arms opened, panties dropped. (More soon on that.)

It won't come to you, though: you need to meet it more than halfway. You need to hunker down and give it time and love and effort. If your Truth needs to come out with writing, you must write every day; if your Way In is something else, replace "writing" and "write" with the words that suit you. Just don't fart around. I farted around for years, which probably didn't hurt, but nothing really started happening until I started writing every day, with purpose and intent and a certain amount of gravity.

And finally, where the hell is it, exactly, that I've "gotten"? Who the hell am I? Famous? Wealthy? Weighted down with awards and accolades? No. I'm just someone who's finally fairly happy with myself, a medium-sized part of which is probably my way with words. Which just shows to go you I have a long way to go dealing with this attachment stuff.

If you're a writer, write. (And read.) If you're poet, po. (And also, read.) Alone in your garret, or out loud on the WordPress.

Blather. Rinse. Repeat...

xxx
c

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

Why we go back and look

I've always been a wee bit suspicious of people who got excited about reunions.

Oh, I've gone: once, to my 10th year high school reunion. And it was fine, in its way. Most of us had matured, but not so much that it wasn't still a little bit fun to see who'd done what (or hadn't). Then it was over, and I thought no more about reunions.

I especially did not give much thought to college reunions. It makes sense in one way: I knew so many people from graduating classes before and after mine, and there were plenty of people I didn't know from my own, so it seemed silly to show up somewhere there might or might not be a quorum of people I'd actually known during my four years at school.

In another way, though, it makes no sense at all. I'd always thought of college as, if not the best years of my life (I've always thought those were both "right now" and "yet to come"), then some really, really good ones. From the moment I showed up on campus, I felt like I was home, not home in the homey sense (I did get very homesick at times), but home as in coming into my own. I felt like I could be myself there, although I wasn't sure who the hell that was, exactly; having such freedom all of a sudden was like having an extra lung added, or just significant extra capacity for breathing, like I'd had new and more flexible diaphragm installed while I was sleeping.

Having the freedom was also terrifying. College marked my first experience of feeling well and truly unmoored, and that was not all sunshine and roses. I'd always had a streak of blue in me, but at school, it seemed to widen and deepen until it was a steep and jagged crevasse with god-knows-what at the bottom and no immediately obvious solutions for getting myself out. The randomness of my life pre-Cornell was dictated by other people: I had little control, but at least I could point to the people who did; now I seemed to be pulled this way and that with no warning and by utterly invisible forces. Small wonder that I was able to resist the siren call of Ithaca all these years.

When I was invited back to speak on a panel about social networking for the school's annual entrepreneurship event, though, it was harder to say "no." In fact, not only did I not say "no" or even "maybe", I said "YES!" immediately. This surprised and pleased me in equal parts. Great, thought I: I'm over it! I'm fine with the past. I have no demons. This will be, in the parlance of the modern day, awesome. And it will be spring (maybe): one of the two finest times in which to visit. (For the record the other is "anytime but February.")

As the day grew nearer, I started to get nervous. The nerves centered around silly things, like whether it would be too cold (it's been known to snow in April here) or what I'd do if my Crohn's suddenly flared up or whether I'd be able to fit into any of my nice clothes. By the time the day rolled around, I was talking excitement but feeling nausea, and I was finally starting to admit the seat of it.

Things would have changed, and substantially. I'd read about the changes, and seen pictures of some: new buildings, old buildings razed to build new buildings, wild expansion of the campus. I'd changed, too, and seeing a bunch of fresh-faced children going about the daily business of edumacating themselves was going to be irrefutable evidence of exactly how much closer I am to death. At one point on the 9+ hour trip here, there's more than one reason it's been 25 years, I did some quick math in my head and realized it had been more years since I'd been back than I'd had years when I was here. Handily.

Like most things, dread gave way to a mixture of excitement, curiosity and anticipation in the dwindling minutes before my arrival. And when I got off the plane and saw my friend, Joshua, there outside the security gates (yes, even at little Tompkins County airport), looking much as he had some 25 years ago, most of the last of the dread fell away. I peered out of the car window at darkened, changed Ithaca on the way back to his house, then at the university across the water, on the other hill, until just before I fell asleep. The next day, I had the cab take me to campus a bit early for the banquet dinner so I could walk around and drink it in a bit before I ducked into the brand new (to me) Statler to mix and mingle like the grownup I now am. (Or at least, the one most people take me to be: me, I still feel like I'm 12 years old most of the time.)

I sat on a low wall atop the slope that overlooks the town and Cayuga Lake, gazing out over the old stone buildings that were there long before me and the new brick ones that had replaced my old dorm. Everything was different; everything was the same. And I finally realized that the sadness I'd felt then was really longing, and that what I was longing for then, I'd actually managed to become: not famous or accomplished or wealthy or powerful, but myself, completely. I was unhappy, and now I wasn't.

And then I cried a little.

And then I went to dinner...

xxx
c

Image by p0psicle via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Everyone's got her basket

Everyone has her basket.

And in that basket are all the things a body gets in a lifetime:

The long legs the natural grace

The way with words or people or numbers or animals

The force field that makes money or love or ideas or children come to them first

The gene soup that makes eyes blue stomachs sturdy loins fruitful brains prodigious

Even the luck, the ponies the Kojak parking the pair of pants on sale or the person of their dreams available at the exact moment where need and want meet, even that is in the basket.

There will be days when you look down at your basket and marvel at the wonderful wonderful things inside

And there will be days when you cannot bring yourself to look at all or rather where the only place you can look is at the basket next to you and with longing.

But every day someone is looking at your basket with longing

Every day someone would trade baskets with yours sight unseen

I have been in all of those places and mostly I am grateful for the grace that forgave my foolishness

This is my basket to carry and uncover layer by layer day by day year by year

And sometimes story by story.

May your basket overflow with beautiful things of incomparable joy and wonder

And when it does not may you be visited by the same grace that sat down beside me to show me the beauty and the joy and the wonder I could not see

xxx c

Image by The Wandering Angel via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Taxing

I've made less last year than in any year of my life since I started working.

I made so much less that it's laughable. No, literally, my tax preparer, who has been tending to my taxes for some 10 years now, actually laughed last night as he showed me the columns with their neatly declining numbers from left to right. And the most hilarious part?

I laughed with him.

So did the guy who shares his office. We laughed and laughed until I didn't think we could laugh any more. And then I would make another crack about my long, slow slide into the poorhouse, or my astonishing way with a buck, or how glorious were these economic times in which we lived, and we would laugh some more.

Yeah, it was late and they'd been pulling 12 and 14 and 16-hour days for weeks now. Yeah, it was late and I've been working 7-day weeks of 10 and 12 and sometimes 14-hour days now. I know myself and these guys pretty well now, though, and at this point, I'd say we would have had ourselves almost as good a laugh at 10am, fully rested and freshly caffeinated. Stuff is just funny now that wasn't before. I mean, sure, it's scary, too, in a way, but in another way there's a crazy kind of freedom that comes from things moving this fast and changing this unpredictably. Like a veil has been torn to reveal the absolute chaotic hugeness of the universe...or maybe the curtain pulled back to reveal there's no Wizard of Oz at all, just a guy working a smoke machine with every last bit of energy, and frankly a bit relieved that the jig is up. It's tiring, keeping up appearances.

Taxing, even.

Rest assured that I am well taken care of. Yes, my adjusted gross income is laughably low, but I've planned for it rather than having it suddenly and horrifically visited upon me as so many people have recently. (If you are on the pre-jump side of change, consider this yet another vote for getting your nut low and and your cushion big while the getting is get-able.) All around me I see blessings and opportunities and punch lines.

On this day where so many of us raise our fists and curse the heavens (or the previous administration, or the previous-previous one, or whatever scapegoat of your choosing), may you find a little something to laugh about.

And if you can't? Feel free to laugh at me...

xxx
c

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

Them thar hills

For better or worse, I live in an area of steep hills, and have done for some time now.

Maybe it was all those years of growing up in the flatlands; maybe 18 years of staring out into nowhere and seeing the end of it from my bedroom window with no obstructions got to me, but I left my hometown for one of the hilliest places in North America, and left it a second time for another. (Okay, okay, it's no San Francisco. But compared to Chicago? Please.)

The dirty little secret of living in a hilly area like Los Angeles is that, with careful planning, much of the hilliness can be avoided (unlike Ithaca, where, well, you're hosed if you want to get anywhere.) You learn to take the gently sloping routes up to Sunset instead of La Cienega; you live in the flats, rather than the hills.

Over here to My Country House (aka The BF's), hills are a little harder to avoid, albeit with even more circuitous routes. While I've been walking Every Goddamned Morning with the dog for some time now, the route is blissfully flat most of the way. There's just one hilly bit slightly over halfway home that kicks my ass, but I can take it slowly, or just go around it: civic planning or good, old Ma Nature made the other side of that stretch of street much more old-lady-friendly.

Since we started folding The BF into our merry band, though, something interesting happened. At first, the something was just that it took longer. Some of us are early risers and others aren't, and while I'd never thought of myself as being in the former camp, having to roust 200 lbs. of sleepy boy out of bed taught me I'm definitely not in the latter.

Once we hit that steep patch, though, something weird happened: Boy Genes kicked in. Boy Genes are that thing that makes boys suddenly race each other on bikes or, as Paula Poundstone famously put it, jump up to smack an awning because it's there. Every day, we'd get to the steep patch and The BF, sleepy and lagging behind most of the way, would kick into high gear as if by magic and start wailing up that hill. Which made Arnie pull hard on the leash (he suffers from Have to Be First disease), so that I'd have to let him go, and the two of them would race up that hill, neck in neck (sort of), and wait it out for lazybones me to make the top, a-huffin' and a-puffin' like I was fixing to blow some pig's house down. Or collapse from an acute myocardial infarction.

You'd think this would get easier, since we were doing it every day. But it didn't. It was just hard and embarrassing every day. Every single goddamned day.

Until today, when it was a little easier.

Over the weekend, you see, we changed it up a little. I had an errand to run on Saturday and we had a party to go to on Sunday and, because we could, and because we knew we should, and (being honest here), on at least one of the days we may or may not have given ourselves a trip to the good coffee place as incentive, we did. Said errands involved walking up the super-steep hill that separates our cool area from the other cool area, so we did. Twice. Including the Mother of All Silver Lake Slopes, the south side of Micheltorena. I swear, it looks like a ski run made of asphalt. And it walks like one, halfway up, as it is kicking your weak ass, you wish you'd taken the chair lift. You do it, though, because you have committed to it, and also because what else are you going to do: walk back down once you're halfway up?

In my sloth of the past four-plus years, or rather, in my choice to push other cocksucking boulders up different motherfucking hills, I'd forgotten both the value and the payback of pushing myself a little beyond my comfort zone. You feel good and you feel better. Because you did something hard and you made it easier to do something hard the next time. Today, it was easier to walk up that little bit of hill. In fact, I was able to walk it as quickly as The BF and the dog, barely breaking a sweat.

I'm no dummy, well, not so much of one that I can't see where this is headed. If I want to stay fit, I will need to keep challenging myself. There is no "done" with this any more than there is with writing or thinking or growing. You can't grow in place; you need hills.

Cocksucking, motherfucking hills.

Coincidentally, I'm returning to the actual, physical hills of my college days this week, the first time I've done so in almost 25 years. Those hills kicked my ass when I showed up in town, a 17-year-old looking to do the next thing. It'll be interesting to interact with them 30 years later, and see how they kick my ass today.

On the other hand, I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how my head and heart do while I'm there. As I recall, they were pretty weak and formless 30 years ago, subject to a lot of random ass-kicking by whatever obstacle was place in their path. Them thar hills? I think I'll do alright on...

xxx
c

Photo © 2009 Vincent Travisano, taken during a visit with his son, who will be Cornell Engineering Class of 2014. Congratulations, Paul, and good luck with your hills!

What I love

I get stuck
as often as I am in flow.

Probably more often,
if I'm honest.

And I'm honest
as often as I hide from the truth
even though it's always sitting there,
waiting patiently.

I'm inspired and I'm not.
I'm happy and I'm not.
I'm creative and I'm not.

There are days when I think I make all the sense in the world
and the world disagrees
(rather vehemently, sometimes).

There are days when my brain is scrambled
and I open the release valve to ease the pressure
and people gaze upon the runny mess
like it was a work of genius.

Nobody may know anything
but I know this:
every minute of every day is a fresh chance
to be completely different
to start over
to change myself up completely

To leap in public
(or tell everyone about it)
or to leap in private
and tell no one.

Neither is better
Just different

But that's not what I love.

I love that at any moment
of any hour
of any day
in the middle of making no sense
or the middle of making perfect sense
I can reboot
switch it up
stop altogether
start anew

In any direction I choose
or with no direction at all
with
or without
acknowledgment or approval

I love the possibility
inherent in each and every moment
even when I don't love
the moments themselves.

I love that there is truth
nestled snugly under each lie
and a start
after each stop.

And mostly
I love that there is sense
waiting patiently in line
behind nonsense
even if nonsense
takes its damned, sweet time about it...

xxx
c

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

Where's that net again?

You can pick all the goals you want for a new year, ask me; I have, and then some, but your themes will find you.

Or, to put it another, more personal way, I can talk all I want about 2009 being the year of "Money is AWESOME!" or "Whoop it up wherever possible" or "Focus! Focus! Focus!" I can put those intentions in my head and on the front page of my notebook and refer to them frequently. I can have projects and actions that fall neatly and correctly under those variously labeled category headers.

But in action, when I actually do these things, a theme emerges. You'd hope that it emerges like gentle but powerful rays of the sun piercing through the blackness of the night sky, gradually casting the brilliant light of day by which one can find the coffeemaker, one's ass and other necessary items for getting things done.

What it actually looks more like is some mutant swamp creature out of a 1950s EC comic, slick with slime, one crusty bug-eye looking at you sideways like maybe it's hungry for people. Only you don't see it right away because (a), it's actually blocking the light you're used to and (b), your back is turned to it, anyway.

This is hardly a welcome harbinger of things to come (being eaten? being tortured and eaten? being slimed and tortured and eaten?), so of course, one's next (and very logical) reaction is that thing where you clap a hand to each ear and squinch your eyes closed and do a loud, "LALALALA-I-CAN'T-SEE-YOU!!!" kind of dealio. Great monster repellant, that.

Don't get me wrong: I do think, well, more and more, anyway...well, theoretically more and more..., that money is, indeed, AWESOME! And I've been whooping it up, if not wherever possible (because once I get that far, I'm pretty sure I'm moments away from kicking the bucket), then more often than before 2009. And, here and there, I've been focusing. (Really! I have! No, seriously, have you seen how many words I've written so far this year? I hope not, because it would mean you are NOT focusing.)

Slimy, the Human-Eating Critter, however, is suggesting a different theme for the year: LEAP. Or, LEAP, MOTHERFUCKER! Or even, WHAT PART OF "LEAP" DID YOU NOT UNDERSTAND, MOTHERFUCKER?!

And then he just looks hungry.

This leaping thing...it was not on the plan. No one has arrived with a net of any kind and I can't see the other side or the bottom anymore. But Slimy, he's not a big one for detente or diplomacy or even a brief time out. Slimy's more like LEAP OR BE LUNCH.

Here I go again, dammit...

xxx
c

Image cropped from a FANTASTIC photo by ClickFlashPhotos via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Please do click through to see the full magnificence.

Say it now or blurt it later

The hardest time to talk about something is when there's a lot at stake.

Like a friendship. Or a client-ship. Or a relationship of any kind. (Or, yes, a lot of money. Not sure about this, because I do not come from Big Money, but I suspect it's hard for them to talk about it, too. Most of the people I know who grew up with Big Money aren't big on talking about much of anything, much less money.)

Of course, life being the perverse sumbitch she is and the Universe having a mighty hearty sense of humor for an inanimate object or an interwoven collection of collectively-animated objects, the time when it's most important to talk about something is when there's a lot at stake.

Only you don't, because, you know, there's a lot at stake, so you hold tight and tell yourself you need to do a little testing with mission control and a little prep work with the editor and maybe call in some outside consultants to reality-check and drum up a strategy, and before you know it, you've got a full-scale storm a-brewin' instead of a little rumbling in a teapot or a Stage-IV melanoma instead of a freckle that looks "off."

Did I mention I'm going to the dentist today? And that I've had a number of dental-related issues over the past several months?As in what comes out of the mouth, so goes what happens inside it. Or somesuch.

It's good to be cognizant of the world outside our skins, and to understand that sometimes, the party of the second part is going through something that's not so much a party as a cruise around a circle of hell, and that maybe our Thing can wait.

On the other hand, we're all grappling with some goddamned thing or another all the time. And when we're not, well, things are so nice, you wouldn't want to go spoiling this Precious Moment, right?

Enh. Five-alarm, crisis situations aside, there's usually room to be made in a day to talk about most anything. Or, if you like, even on a spin around the fifth circle of hell, sometimes you can catch a breeze.

By all means, prep. I lived without an editor for a long time and it wasn't always a good thing. Now I live with one, and a conveniently placed override switch I installed a while back. It's finely calibrated to look for openings, and I'm more finely calibrated to understand how much ground can be covered in an hour, or a half-hour, or ten minutes. I'm also better at getting how to bring something up in a way I can be heard, and I'm like a fucking champion compared to my younger, assholier self when it comes to copping to my part in things. (Hint: cop up front. It's almost always better.)

For the worriers out there, nothing is wrong. This is just life, which is change, and me dealing with it. Like (maybe) an adult, for once. In a way that (maybe) I won't be embarrassed to tell my shrink about when I see her this week for our monthly meetup. (For the record, I'd probably do them more often if she didn't live so far away and the economy wasn't so wacky.)

I'll get through my changing. You'll get through yours. We'll all get through, one way or another.

I've just decided I want to be in the driver's seat more often.

Taking the wheel.

Saying it now...

xxx
c

Image by fisherman's daughter via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Starting is the hard part

A blog. A diet. An exercise program.

Learning a new language, or a new instrument, or a new behavior.

For some among us, getting out of bed.

Inertia is a bitch, and before the start of anything, there you are, soaking in it.

Right now, I'm letting inertia win the battle to get back on the SCD, to meditate, to exercise. On the other hand, I'm kicking that bitch's ass when it comes to blogging, networking and taking my morning constitutional. (I get some help on that last one. You try saying no to this face.)

She thought she had me with cold calling and guitar playing; one week off of each stretched into two, three and four. There were a multitude of reasons to let her take the wheel, of course. Taxes. A huge conference. Great project possibilities that came out of the huge conference.

Your guitar, it's not even strung! she whispered. And you don't know how to do it; you'll probably screw it up! Besides, you look so tired, Colleen. Let me drive. You close your eyes and rest. Just rest.

Starting is the hard part, but the thing that finally struck me over the weekend is that you're always starting, even when you're keeping something going. Yes, the time between starting gets shorter and shorter the more you stick with something, and that makes things feel easier. (It's not the getting better at something that makes it feel easier, you know, because when you get better, the hurdles just get higher.) But it's still starting. Every single day, you're starting your next level of exercise, or your next day of a diet regimen, or your next song/post/call/whatever.

With this logic tentatively in place, I asked inertia to step aside on Saturday. Politely. Just let me string the guitar. I know I'm slow. Just let me...I know I'm bad at it. Just...

And maybe one song. I'm not really practicing; I'm just fooling around. I'm just testing out the new strings.

Oh, look, I played around for 10 minutes.

I guess I started again.

And the next day? I'll start again. Or maybe inertia will.

Every day, each of us gets a chance. Even-steven. Could go either way.

The bitch, Inertia, kissing cousin to the Resistor, makes it feel like the odds are in her favor because she holds up an eternity of starts. Every day, you'll have to start this. Every single, hard, long, aching awful, unknown day.

But that's bullshit, I know now. I only have to start today. I'm not even going to fight that bitch anymore. I'm just going to try stepping around her.

To fool around a bit. Just this once, today.

Ready? Let's start...

xxx
c

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

Why people hate Oprah

A huge part of my growth as a human being has been about getting down with how staggeringly, mind-bendingly uncool I am.

If you're silently protesting, don't: I'm a dork, and I know it. I'm earnest, and I can't hide it. My tastes run the gamut from lowbrow to middlebrow, with a smattering of whackjob. I'm barely on the cutting edge and will never be on the bleeding edge, whatever that is.

For some reason, I was able to travel amongst and between various groups while I was growing up. I was never a cool kid, but I was allowed to hang out with them. In hindsight, I'm guessing it was the entertainment factor: I have never had much issue with playing the clown, and was Tony-the-Tiger-grrrrreat! at making other people look good without pulling the spotlight on myself. (Side benefit of being wired shy.)

Other than goofy, I wasn't too much of anything: not too pretty; not too ugly. Not too smart, not too dumb. I sucked at sports, but not as much as a few spectacularly athletically ungifted types, mostly because I busted ass and had decent eyesight until my senior year of high school (which also spared me the mortification of wearing glasses, which was a very good thing in the 1960s and 1970s.)

But the main, number one reason why I was generally well-liked and rarely disliked is that I never stood for anything. Whether that was because I was too scared or too selfish to do so is something I'll have to meditate on (which, let me tell you, makes me want to sit down and start meditating even more than I do already. Oh, yes.)

I had a secret fear for most of my life that the people from my completely non-overlapping groups of friends would meet up somehow, take one look at each other, another at me, and all leave in disgust. I recall stretches of unbelievable stress when I knew that, for some unavoidable reason or another, one part of my life was going to collide with another, at a play or a party or some other scenario where there would be no escape for me, and I'd make myself sick with stress anticipating it. How could I justify being friends with a dork to one of my cool friends, or, for that matter, vice versa? I was so used to gently (or not so gently) morphing myself into whomever it was easiest for my friends to be around, or whomever I thought it was, that the idea of just being myself was literally impossible: I had no idea what that looked like, and only the dimmest sense of how it felt.

The long, slow process of me shedding fear (and moving into the light and a million other clichés that are no less real for being clichés) started, as does most change, with me realizing I didn't particularly like where I was.

Then there was much asking of why, and a great deal of crying, and copious amounts of alone time. My wardrobe went through two complete changes; it's a good thing I shop second-hand.

The beginning of the end of the first part of the change was marked by a gargantuan (for me) "Breaking the Birthday Hex" celebration I threw for myself when I turned 43. All my friends were invited, most of them came, almost none of them mingled and everyone had a blast. (Today, of course, we have Facebook, where we can all see what each others' motley crew of friends look like if we're interested. Which, if my own experience is any indication, we're not.)

This blog, you might guess, has been Part Two of my long, slow process. It's been gratifying, but also a bit terrifying. The more you come out strongly for anything, the more it seems you will attract people who hate you for it. I'm nowhere near attracting the levels of venom I hear spewed about even the minorly internet-famous, still, it's happening more often now, and it's jarring whenever it does. I cannot imagine the kind of skin it takes to be Saint Oprah, whom all kinds of people seem to feel it their bounden duty to heave rocks at.

Me, I don't roll with everything Oprah Winfrey says (and I'm frankly baffled by this Eckhart Tolle thing, except possibly as a non-narcotic, nighttime sleeping aid) but yes, I do find her inspiring. Damn straight, I do. She's for books and for women and for personal growth, and I am for these, too. Maybe not always the exact same books; maybe I'd like the ladies to be turned on to ideas more than stuff, and some more radical notions at that. Maybe some of the personal growth stuff is a little too celeb-tinged for my taste. (Again: Eckart Tolle?) But HELL. Oprah Winfrey is a shining example of a strong woman bootstrapping herself, making choices, committing herself to them and moving forward. That lady stuck her flag in a particular hill a long time ago and I say, "Brava!"

For this, no doubt, I will have more scorn heaped upon me by someone, and you know what? That's okay, too! Not fun, but okay, so long as we stay away from the bodily harm threats (N.B.: so far, so good, thank christ.)

I no longer look for how someone is different and in what way I can change myself so that they like me, but for the ways in which we are the same, and what they're here to teach me. Or I try. My strong reaction to anything is something to examine. (After a bit of a cooling-down period. Remember, the end of this trajectory am I not at. Thank you, Yoda.)

Oprah is doing her thing. I am doing my thing. You, I hope, are doing your thing.

It would be nice if we could all start with that one area of overlap and wish each other well. But no matter what, I'm done converting. Hate on Oprah, or me, if you like. From now on, I'm taking it as a sign that I've finally stuck my flag on a hill where it can be seen...

xxx
c

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

Now, more than ever

Reach out
when you feel like folding in.

Spend a little
where it matters
rather than shutting your wallet
completely.

Lend a hand
even if it seems
like no one is lending you one.

Especially if it seems like no one is lending you one.

Take a break
from your non-stop work
and your worry

and maybe, the TV.

Move your body
when you feel like balling it up
in the corner.

Throw off the covers
when you'd rather pull them up
over your head.

Wear a hat if you never have; wear a crazy hat if you already do.

Ask for help
when you're afraid.

Try a new thing
when you're afraid.

Mix it up
when you're afraid.

Now, more than ever

Write short
if you usually write long.

Write verse
if you usually write prose.

Write
if you usually don't.

(No fooling.)

xxx
c

Photo by Marvin Joseph, Staff Photographer to The Washington Post, © 2006; via hortulus on Flickr.