Eight hours
of sleep
Thirty minutes
of exercise
Sixty-four ounces
of water
One goal:
Put
your
own
oxygen
mask
on
first
or prepare for a long, hard, rocky, uphill road
of diminishing returns.
Taking care of yourself
can be a bitch
but it does not make you one.
That is reserved
for those who take from others
what is not given.
You first, ma'am:
no matter what shape
the fixing
takes.
xxx
c
I have a friend whom I guess the kids would characterize as a kind of frenemy: thrown together by circumstance, stuck together of necessity, we are close in some ways but wary in others, always doing this delicate dance of extending ourselves while keeping an eye on the exits, or using our powers of incision while endeavoring not to cut each other too deeply.
Like most cases where I have a strong and somewhat negative reaction to someone, I suspect it is because we are more alike than either of us cares to admit: there are plenty of flat-out buzzkills I couldn't care less about because I feel no common ground; their shit isn't my shit, ergo I have no personal investment, because hey, when you get right down to it, it's all about us.
I had been having the hardest time putting my finger on it, though. We are unaligned in so many ways it's ridiculous, from our personal style (girly-chic vs. whatever mine is) to our modes of expression (sailor-colorful vs. whatever hers is).
On the other hand, on paper, we have quite a bit in common: love of the arts, wide range of creative expression, a fairly sharp mind. I'll even grant her a sense of humor, although of a much, much different variety.
As for our shared "challenges," after some painful reflection I've noted that we're both neurotic, controlling and highly insecure. I mean, I get all that, it's outrageously, neon-sign-obvious to me, although I question whether the similarity is even a blip on the edges of her consciousness. So you could say it's blazingly obvious, too, why she would push my buttons: seeing my most loathed behaviors come to whiny, annoying life in her would of course set me off, right? Who'd want to be like her, I mean, me, right?
Only that wasn't quite it. Trust me, I've noted my own, shameful behaviors in far more dark and/or lost souls than this woman, who really is more annoying than anything else, and really only annoying to me, not anyone else. This is my thing; I'm sticking my Dymo label on it.
Finally, while I was playing around in the Google Wave with Daveâ„¢, he held up the mirror that allowed me to see it clearly for the first time: she is me, inside out. She is fine with our flaws, while I'm still afraid or ashamed to truly hold them in my hands and own them in my heart. Or she seems that way, maybe she has no idea, and maybe that is her own path, coming in her way to that realization.
My path is to carry this with me, this uncomfortable burden of truth, until I can toss it about so lightly, I can toss it, period. And, no guarantee, of course, but maybe once I do, I will have a hand free to extend in true friendship...
xxx
c
Image by Clearly Ambiguous via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
One of the more fascinating things about deciding to grant myself MORE ROOM this year, taking these few months off to catch up with the mountain of obligations I'd overcommitted to, taking time in the day to read and to practice Nei Kung and to write in the Google Wave with Daveâ„¢, taking the time while traveling to wander instead of cramming each trip with wall-to-wall everything, has been seeing what arises in the spaces that I've managed to create and not immediately fill up with some other "doing."
Note, please, that I said "fascinating," not "wonderful" or "cool" or "awesome," (although I could possibly use that last in the more traditional, non-surfer-co-opted sense). Because quite often what floats into that space is not "pretty!" or "love!" or even "what?", but some kind of slam. And far too often, the object of my scrutiny, adjudication and swift-and-merciless punishment is my own self-battered self. Which is not to say it would be better to find the rest of the world wanting instead; I've just been around long enough to know that shitty outward behavior tends to originate with shitty inward stuff.
So. What to do?
I'm already observing, which is great, because I'm of firm belief that nothing can change until you have some idea that there's something you need to change in the first place, and that requires a certain amount of looking around.
I'm also already in talk therapy (which is probably how all this conscious observing started, come to think of it). I've got a few flavors of ongoing accountability support set up, as well, Success Team and the aforementioned Wave project and my semi-not-regular ladies' meetup, where repeat sabotage cannot help but be brought to light.
I'm really, really not ready for meditation: seeding three big new habits of reading, Nei Kung-ing and SCD-ing are all I can handle.
Ditto for toting around some kind of "judgment journal" to note my slams on the fly, like one would pennies spent or calories consumed.
The answer came on a fishing expedition for a fresh moka pot gasket, a supply of which I keep on hand in the silverware drawer. After stabbing my fingers on various implements I've thrown in over time (note to self: declutter silverware drawer), I came across the complaint bracelet my friend Mary Ellen had given me a couple of years back.
Self, I asked, what is judging yourself if not a kind of complaining?
Whereupon I stuck that sucker on my wrist with a solemn vow to transfer it from one to the other with each noting of the negative. I did it, too, for a full week(ish). After which I took off that damned purple nuisance and hurled it back in the drawer with some excellent excuse or other, too loose on the wrist, too ugly with my outfit, and tried to forget about it.
But this morning, after a few rounds with my inner Judge Judy before breakfast left me feeling sad and weary, I pulled out the bracelet again and quietly slipped it on my wrist. Wasn't gonna tell anyone, much less the blog world at large; was gonna make up some crazy thing about orphans in West Africa or widows in Afghanistan if anyone in real life asked.
Then I realized that not only is there no shame in working to relieve myself of a burden I am weary of carrying with me, there may be help available in the getting-rid-of if I'm really and truly game.
I will catch myself where I can. And if you see me out and about, sneaking a little one-two punch to my own jaw while I'm not looking, perhaps you will catch me where I cannot catch myself.
Gently, of course, and without judgment...
xxx
c
On slightly dry white,
it conjures up
foreign lunchrooms
and sour lunchboxes
and the clamped-shut feeling
of a stomach that can't do its job
for worry of a new place.
Crusts cut off and insides
lightly lined with butter
it brings back Gramma
and days of being well-cared for
Rough-hewn
from the Honeybaked bone,
wrapped in romaine,
dipped in mustard,
inhaled over the sink,
of being a grownup
for the first time ever:
not well, perhaps,
or elegantly,
but old enough finally
to deny yourself
something good now
against the hope
of something better
down the road.
What for you is my lunch
for me is a portal,
a trip back
to a simpler life
that may or may not
have existed.
What for me is a stab at meaning,
and a clumsy one at that,
put down quickly like packaged ham
on commercial rye,
for you, I hope,
is a thread to worry
(or not)
as you please
toward the root of your own
sweet and sour
and slightly salty past.
At least,
that is how
I present it.
xxx
c
Image by stevendepolo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
As one of my 10 goals in 2010+ is "Get back on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet 100%," I probably should have spent Fat Tuesday whooping it up with all of the sugar, rice, wheat, chocolate, potatoes and etcetera (lots and lots of "etcetera" on the SCD) I won't be able to eat anymore.
Instead, I holed up in a favorite coffee shop with a green tea and, while I waited for my friend from Portland to show up for our visit, I set about breaking out this monstrous, slippery to-do into smaller, hopefully more manageable tasks.
Some goals lend themselves to chunks. As I've mentioned before, my breakthrough moment with "Read a book a week" came when Julien Smith shared his own chunking solution: read 40pp per day. It's obvious in hindsight, but when you're panicking at the thought of how to do something you've never done before (or haven't done since your early 20s), looking at books as roughly 280pp units and then doing some quick division ain't the first solution you try applying.
My new Nei Kung practice shakes out the same way: "Practice Nei Kung every morning" has a built-in chunking mechanism; it's expressed as a chunk. (The morning part I'm facilitating by tying it to a morning routine, which is another pro-tip Julien puts forth in his excellent post. I swear, I'll keep linking to it, so you might as well go read it now.)
Compared to reading and Nei Kung, "Get on SCD 100%" is a slippery mollusk. While being on "100%" is both a clear metric and in keeping with SCD tenets*, it doesn't help me "be" on SCD day to day. I like to-dos; to-dos make for a regular and orderly life.
So I sat down and brainstormed a number of activities I can do to help support my transition back to and then my staying on the SCD. They include:
Some of the items are daily things I can check off, and very small. Just because you've committed to a big annual goal doesn't mean every ding-dong day has to involve pushing a c*cksucking boulder up a motherf*cking hill. Some days, you just want to look at your running list and check the fridge, freezer or pantry for supplies. Other days you might only have the gumption to spend five minutes surfing epicurious for Paleo recipes you can convert, or even email a chef-y friend for suggestions on how to fabricate legal substitutes for some craved food.**
And there's no law that says you can't find to-dos that kill two goals with one stone. I'm also looking to make more plans with friends this year; who says one of them can't be "Go with so-and-so to farmers' market on Sunday"? Not me. I wouldn't say that.
One final note: to get myself started with the list, I asked myself a couple of "how and why" questions: how does the diet work for me, and why do I want to be on it?
When I initially got on, the answers were clear and obvious: to not die; to get out and stay out of the hospital. As I've moved further away from peril (praise the sweet baby jesus), it's become more difficult to come up with pressing reasons. To get off of meds? Yeah, a worthy goal; these immunosuppressants are hell on your liver, long-term. For me, the reasons are now tied to other things, like having the energy to really apply myself to my other big goals. I do NOT want another repeat of last December, when I viewed my previous year's list of goals and saw six or seven out of ten unaccomplished.
Therefore, since I know that in the moment those BIG goals aren't necessarily enough to keep me on the straight and narrow, I needed to look at some tactical stuff, too: what daily to-dos can I put in place to remove friction? To make it easy to say "no" to Mr. Delicious French fry, or at least, easier?
For me, it's about not letting myself get hungry and not letting myself feel deprived. So some of my to-dos can become:
Kidding on that last one, sort of. Truthfully, "Watch Ignite video" would make a really great to-do for a given day, since it is both a graphic reminder of what I went through to get here (and what I never want to go back to, ever), and a motivator to stay on track with one of my other goals, which is to do more speeches that I feel really make a difference.***
But that is another goal story for another day...
xxx
c
*At least initially, being on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet calls what our beloved Elaine called "fanatical adherence": the smallest cheat nulls the effect, since what you're striving for is a removal of all opportunistic, "bad" bacteria in the gut, and the slightest trace of something juicy will keep the bastards alive. Once you're on and symptom-free for two years, you can consider an indulgence here and there. Although as I seem to be an abstainer rather than a moderator when it comes to things like French fries or Italian bread with a gnarly crust and chewy tooth, I'm just off of it, period.
**I've been dreaming of those greasy sesame sticks you buy by the pound at Trader Joe's, and my friend Wayne said, "Oh, I love figuring out stuff like that." So there you go. Make someone else's day into the bargain.
***And who said you can't kill two goals with one story? Not me. Never me!
Image by Muffet via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
There's nothing like exiting your comfort zone for discovering more aspects of your character you're either ashamed of or annoyed by.
Last week's startling revelation and accompanying, out-loud mea culpa regarding my self-loathing seems to have unlocked some secret chamber of my darkest heart, from which has tumbled (or, in some cases, oozed) all kinds of earthly delights: My bottomless well of impatience! My race to judgment! My predilection for check-out assistants #1, 2 & 3 (Internet, TV-on-Internet and booze, respectively)!
There are a hundred, thousand ways I choose to brutalize myself. What's fascinating is when I choose to stop brutalizing myself with them, either one at a time or in one giant cudgel of Acme©-sized weight and volume, and just look at them: Well, now, those are certainly a lot of things. Yes, they are!
This is a new practice for me, what I've taken to calling the not-doing. I'm a fix-it kinda gal, so when leaks spring, I like to grab my toolbox and go go go, or, better yet, head to the Home Depot and find me some newer, shinier tools.*
Even talking about the not-doing is difficult. I guess by nature, the not-doing would prefer that you, you know, not do. Sit. Maybe observe. But mostly, sit. It is, after all, not-doing, and it would like its season, too, turn turn turn.
But since there is no point to writing (for me) unless I'm going to be at least one of the three big things I'm always squawking about (useful, supportive and/or entertaining, if you don't feel like clicking any of those links), and since writing is one of the things I not only allow myself during the not-doing but that the not-doing actually demands, I'm moved to share what I've observed and understood well enough thus far to be able to somewhat illuminate; if it doesn't work for you, so be it, it will serve as a record for myself once I've moved on to a different part of this endless motherf*cking journey I'm on.
Sorry for that brief message from Captain Obvious, but the whole discussion needs to be grounded in this, if only to prevent any wonderful souls who are good with the not-doing or who have extensive experience in the not-doing to urge well-intentioned-but-not-useful-right-now help upon us. If do-ers could meditate, we would be not-doers, or at least, we would have a passport to not-doing, where we could visit other not-doers and have not-tea and not-cakes as we shared not-stories about all the not-doing we were doing. Er, not-doing. You get it, right?
There are myriad wonderful modalities for do-ers, and even for advanced not-doers. Meditation, for example, I hear is excellent. It makes me itch. I've personally had good luck with shiatsu, some yoga (until the Yoga People namastéd me right out of the studio), the relaxation exercise used in Method acting, hot baths, walking, naps, hypnotherapy and, lately, Nei Kung. Reading helps, too.
Here's the thing about not-doing: you're always doing something. Always! Surprise: not-doing is a zen koan, and the zen joke is on you! Even meditation is doing something until you're doing it to the point where you're just being.
It is not racing to a thing, frantic. (No spiritual Home Depot for you, Little Miss Do-er!)
It is sitting there, in your damned mess, and saying, "Hey! Look! Mess! How unbelievably awful/uncomfortable/unusual/(your-reaction-here) it is to sit in it and DO NOTHING."
Then and only then do you do something. Which generally looks like going about your day, truth be told.
But the first doing of the not-doing for doers is, apparently, observation. A doing, to be sure, but not one we're used to.
This may seem confusing at first: how can not-doing involve writing? Isn't writing a big, fat Doing?
It is; this is. This kind of writing: writing to illuminate outwardly, is a big-time Fatty McFat Fat Doing. It is the one Doing I'm allowing myself during this planned three-month (so far) hiatus, other than a very, very minute amount of teaching.**
Rest assured that for every long-ass essay or article you read here***, there are thousands upon thousands of words being spewed, vomited, hurled or otherwise shed, either privately, in various .txt files and notebooks, or semi-privately, via communications with trusted friends and paid associates. Some weeks, I think Dave Seah and I may crash Google's servers all by ourselves with our "little" Wave experiment.
The cleaning I do because, like walking, it is a rote activity that occupies my body without overtaxing it, gets me off my ass and away from the keyboard and, like a lot of mindless, repetitive physical activity, helps free up thoughts.
Also, unlike walking, you can do it in bad weather and at night, plus it offers the amazing side benefit of de-crud-ifying the house.
Your mileage may seriously vary here, but I am one of those people who likes naming things. Or rather, it's one of those childhood Habits of Awesomeness I found myself picking up again when I hit my 40s. I find that naming things makes me care for them more, which I guess makes me kind of a label whore. Oh, well. All I know is that when I remind myself to call my car "Betty," I drive more carefully, which is exactly why I named a 2,000 lb. hunk of metal and fiberglass after my beloved paternal grandmother.
My friend Pam Slim has a wonderful tool she uses called her High Council of Jedi Knights, a panel of people you select as a kind of inspirational/motivational backboard to bounce things off of. (I finally created one this year as part of my Best Year Yet goal-setting process, although I've dubbed it my High Council of Goal-Crushing Awesomeness because it's my panel and because, you'll remember, I like naming things.)
Somehow, my lab partner and friend Dave Seah and I got into the naming thing with our Google Wave Experiment, too. We've set themes for each week based on what we'd like to focus on; you can see the list so far at this excellent post Dave wrote about what the Experiment has taught him about continuity, something he was interested in focusing on with the project.
Like getting over those first three days of not-smoking or that first horrible decade post-breakup, it not only gets easier the more you give into not-doing, it actually becomes rather enjoyable. The best thing I can liken itself to is conducting a comprehensive, in-depth study on yourself, where you're student, teacher and lab rat.
The second-best thing I can liken it to is taking a vacation, which is a loaded thing for me: I've never really been big on vacations as most people seem to define them, either full of recreation or full of nothing. I have come to enjoy and appreciate the idea of vacation as change, removing oneself from one's routine, and that's more of the approach I'm looking at this not-doing as. I am usually a do-er; for now, I am mostly a not-doer. It feels strange and awkward. It feels tense, sometimes, and relaxing or invigorating at others. In the way that some people use travel, changing their context to see themselves more clearly, I am using not-travel. I am seeing and experiencing and learning new things by changing my context.
Is it always enjoyable? Of course not! Neither is travel. But I am starting to sense a shift of some kind.
I'm not willing to name it just yet, but that, too, will come with time. And maybe a little more regular not-doing...
xxx
c
*Nowhere is the desire to manage from the outside in stronger or more laughable than my endless attempts to Improve Productivity: with the money and time-as-money I've blown on shareware, books and blog-scouring, we could provide water to at least one small desert nation, freeing up massive amounts of well-meaning but let's face it, pretty annoying bandwidth on the social media circuit.
**Hey, you cheat by stealing an occasional Oreoâ„¢ or drag off a cigarette, I'll cheat by stealing an occasional chance to talk about stuff I love with people who want to learn about it.)
***Or via my newsletter, which, according to open and click-through rates, not to mention actual feedback, has been kinda kicking some ass lately. My mess is your gain! You should, therefore, consider subscribing, if you have not yet.
Image by Reverend Barry K. via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
When you are low
, and you will be,
just as sure as you
may not be now,
it is good to have
a few necessities in stock
to keep the beasts
at bay.
Like your day at Point Dume,
and that wall of wind pushing back
as you sung the first three lines
of fifty pop songs
against it
while your heart screamed,
my ocean!
Or sinking into the air-cooled comfort
of first show at the Grove
and tucking your chilled toes
up under your tush
as you prepared
to disappear
for two delicious hours
Or the heat of the tarpaper tiles
on the low-slanted roof
as you baked between classes
beside your traveling companion,
passing salted Ruffles
and a half-quart tub of sour cream
back and forth
against the prospect
of imminent minor discomfort.
The trick
if there is one
is to recall specifics
with the precision
of an ichthyologist
aligning individual scales:
the feel of leaning in
the nap of new velour
the slope of the incline
And if you can't,
make it up
But precisely
God is in the details
even if you are the god
who put them there
and it is through these million
man-made pinholes
that you will reconnect
with the All-That-Is
and find the love
that eludes you now.
xxx
c
Image by opusbloo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
So far, and 48+ years is pretty far, I've not been able to sit still long enough to meditate.
I've read about, listened to and met actual benefactors of its benefits, but if you sit me down for more than five minutes at a time without something to do (besides the not-doing of meditation), I start itching all over.
I get that I'm not alone in this; I also get that one of the points to having a practice is practicing, which eventually leads to getting better at it. But I can't, or won't let myself, get over that hump.
Similarly, while I'm equally aware of the benefits of regular, old physical exercise, I've had real problems creating a routine around it. My genius plan of renting a mailbox a little over a mile from my apartment worked for a while, until it didn't. (Did you know you can also drive your car both ways in about half the time? I know!) Besides, while walking clears the mind and even provides a bit of cardio work, provided you do it briskly enough, it doesn't do a whole lot in the way of enhancing flexibility or building strength.
Enter Nei Kung, an internal form of qigong, which itself is a type of slow and precise moving meditation that gets the chi, or energy, flowing. According to my instructor, Jim Borrelli, Nei Kung is way more obscure, at least, compared to other kinds of qigong, and was developed to give martial artists extra reservoirs of strength to use in fighting. I'm disinclined to fight, but who wouldn't want extra strength, especially when it came bundled with better energy, focus, flexibility, and peace of mind come. The obscure part, on the other hand, was obvious: you see qigong or tai chi being practiced on grassy mountaintops in every other montage commercial promoting wellness or yogurt, but who the hell has heard of Nei Kung?
I have now, obviously, and have been doing it regularly, almost every day, which is unheard of for me, for nine weeks now. I know this because every week, I cut a big, fat check for the privilege of one-on-one training, which, unless you're in New York City and can score some kind of class situation with Master C.K. Chu (who taught my teacher, who is one of the smallest handful of people Chu has so deputized), or maybe if you're plugged into some arcane Chinese martial arts circuit, it ain't gonna happen. Believe me, I'm frugal enough to self-identify as outright cheap, and there's no way I'd pay for this if it wasn't necessary. Or worth it.
So far, it is, and that's been true since Day One. My Internet friend, Alan, had a similar experience with Nei Kung: maybe we both have Nei Kung-friendly bodies*; maybe we were both martial artists in a former, Chinese life. Whatever the cause, each of us seems to have taken to it like a duck to water, and for my part, I can tell you it's a relief: after beating myself up over not liking running, cycling, weight training or yoga, to do something I'm good at that makes me feel good is an extraordinary gift, especially 48+ years into the game. (Which reminds me, hate all games, too.)
My commitment is to practice Nei Kung for 25 minutes every morning, session dates excepted (I get a mammoth dose of it then). For the winter, I've shifted my practice to sit between reading and breakfast, since the half-hour or so of reading gives the heater a chance to kick in. Exceptions will most likely be made to accommodate travel and the insane bloody heat that seizes the E-Z-Bake Ovenâ„¢ around August.
As far as the outside chi goes, Item #4 is to feng shui the place bagua by bagua, starting with the Skills & Knowledge sector. As author Karen Rauch Carter (wisely) says in her book and my feng shui bible, no matter what you're looking for, money, health, success, you'll have a hell of an easier time of it if you buff out the gray matter.
But more on that later...
xxx
c
*Mine is compact and slight, with short legs and a long torso; I can't speak for Alan's.
Image by Diana Bella via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
After numerous setbacks, some regular-usuals that I now know to plan for (hello, holidays!), some spontaneous combustibles that required urgent but unscheduled attention, I wrapped up my goal planning for 2010.
Yes, five weeks or roughly 10% of the way into the year I'm supposed to be living, I'm done planning for it.*
It is an easy, easy slide into self-loathing, just taking in that last sentence. It feels like a sentence, when I start to take it in fully: this is your life, loser, and no one to blame but yourself for it. Little Miss Overachiever. Little Miss Fancypants, with your ridiculous notions of time and how many things you can fill it with, or, if you want to dip into that bucket o' truth you claim such fondness for, how much shit you can cram into it.
So, you see how I talk to myself when you're not around?** Not nice. Not even helpful. But this is the voice that runs through my head most of the time, or one of them, and it is this voice, or rather, what this voice is doing to me, that I'm choosing to address this year.
Because two very interesting and highly unusual things happened this year during the penultimate phase of goal-planning. They're embarrassing enough that I'd ordinarily leave them out, but illuminating enough, at least, I hope they are, that they're staying in.
For those of you unfamiliar with the values-centered goal-planning system outlined in Jinny Ditzler's Your Best Year Yet, it starts with an inventory and ends with a map, with a whole lot of excavation, grading and other survey-ish/cartographic folderol in between. The inventory is a look back at the previous year's happenings, divided into accomplishments and disappointments, the better to get a handle on what's working (so you can feel good about yourself!) and what's not, so you can beat yourself with a cudgel crafted from your own sodden, misshapen failures. Kidding! Only, well, there's a reason Ditzler has you list your accomplishments first. It can be mighty dispiriting to look at that list of disappointments. She is fairly adamant that accomplishments be viewed with pride and the disappointments taken as learning, but right there, that's suspect to self-loathers: wherefore such inequities of discernment? That's just bad science, lady!
Interestingly enough, in the five years I've been doing Best Year Yet, I've never once had a problem coming up with staggeringly long lists of accomplishments that even the meanest stranger would affirm as such, while my list of disappointments has been proportionately far smaller. Of course, they're big honkers, those disappointments, stuff like "only completed 4 out of 10 goals from last year"; worse, they tend to recur. This may not be a big deal when you're 20 or even 30, but when you're staring 50 in the droopy, gray-haired sac, you start to worry. Time is, as they say, at a premium. How much more of it can you count on? How much more can you waste on an outright-destructive or even "benign" insalubrious habit? Is there even such a thing after 45? (I'm really asking: is there?)
My own goal-planning process ground to a depressing halt in December not only because the year had worn me down and the holidays weren't going to let up, but because when I finished up my list of disappointments, I noted that 11 of them, that's 11 out of 18, were recurring. And big ones, too, like "didn't write book...again," where "again" meant "for the third year in a row." After completing those two lists, I went on to answer the next couple of questions, but really, I knew I was fucked. The only way around this problem was through it, and that was going to require a lot more time than the week I had set aside. And resources, too, in the form of outside help.
Which brings us to the penultimate session I mentioned about 40 minutes ago in this piece.
Up until this year, I've mostly done my BYY plan alone. I ran last year's by my business coach, but only the final plan, and only the business-related aspects of it***. While it makes me cringe with shame now, I realize that I was doing a lot of obfuscating and tap dancing, more plainly called "hiding" when one is not given to obfuscating and tap dancing. If I was going to change my pattern, someone else was going to have to be given root access to the plan, to help keep me honest about what was going on. One of my friends from Success Team (my weekly mastermind-like group) agreed that it might be helpful from an unsticking perspective to collaborate, so we scheduled a work session for this past weekend.
I was prepared for almost anything. A lot of stuff bubbles up during the BYY excavation and mapping process, and for me, that inevitably brings a lot of crying and pain, especially around the Dreaded Chapter Four, where you look at your limiting paradigms. (Trust me, unless you're Jesus, you've got at least one.)
What I was not prepared for was bursting into tears when I looked at my list of accomplishments, which is just what I did when it was my time to go over them. I'd thought, "Oh, I'll just read the topline from this embarrassingly long list to save us time." Instead, something told me to read it in its entirety, all 47 items, and when I the last one, I collapsed in a heap of sobs: all of this stuff I'd accomplished, and still I felt like shit? What would it take? What would ever be enough? If accomplishing all of these 47 remarkable things, and my friend assured me that individually, many were remarkable, but taken together, they were REMARKABLE, if doing all that did not fill the black hole inside me and make me feel loved or safe or worthwhile, what would?
The answer, that nothing would, that no external thing would ever be enough, stared back at me, plain as you like. Hence, sobbing. A lot of it. Fortunately, I have loving and patient friends. Who somehow, when I am feeling like it's anything but possible, can assure me in a way that I actually can hear and almost believe, that I am enough: that I might be lovable just because of who I am, and not because of any list of things I do.
It seems so simple, but trust me, it can take a long time to "get", even if you know it. Even if you've paid your shrink thousands of dollars and wept your way through boxes of her Kleenex to learn the same thing. Learning is not necessarily "getting"; if you're lucky, I think, you "get" it with enough time before you die to know some kind of peace. I felt one huge shift like this in the past 10 years, when I had my hospital bed epiphany. I had a second one this past weekend, looking at that long list and bursting into tears. I have a little more peace, but I'd also like to get a little more of this music out of me before I die, you know?
The other Very Interesting and Unusual Thing that happened revolved around money and happiness. It also involved a goodly amount of sobbing, and is involved (and possibly significant) enough to cover in depth another day.
For now, know this: next year when I sit down to do my Best Year Yet plan, I expect the list of accomplishments will be far shorter, while the list of disappointments will likely be about the same length as it's been in previous years, only with a much, much higher percentage of new things I'm disappointed about.
And that, my friends, is an accomplishment in and of itself...
xxx
c
*Hopefully. Because I finished the wrapping-up yesterday, late in the day, and am feeling rickety about it. Plus, you know, shit happens, Q.E.D.
**Obviously, you're very much around, as you're reading this. What I mean, which you probably already gathered, is this is the dim chatter that forms one layer of my soundtrack. This is the stuff that goes on that I generally don't write, or if I do, that I erase before publishing.
***Your Best Year Yet is a whole-life planning system, based on the idea that achieving balance is largely responsible for achieving happiness, and possibly for achieving goals themselves, at least in the "life well-lived" sense. Also, it's worth noting here that even my coach said my plan was probably overly ambitious. I made changes to it based on her feedback and those changes did work: the four out of ten goals were largely accomplished because of those tweaks.
Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.
Image by jurvetson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. For maximum enjoyment, view in original, huge size.
Ain't no trick
to writing
nor magic
in doing it well.
Writing is you
and your chair
and your brain
and your heart
gathering together
for as many moments as you can string together
of work.
Writing is nouns
and verbs
and adjectives
and adverbs,
in that order,
ordered
and then reordered
over and over
and over
again.
Writing is taking
the stories you see
and the truths you hear
all around you
all the time
and letting them sift
through the filter
you have created for them.
Keep that filter clean
and in good working order:
Change it as necessary.
Air it out in between uses.
Protect it at all costs.
Now go
and catch stories
and write them down
or talk them through
or act them out.
Do not be fooled
into thinking
there is only one way to tell a story:
There is only
the best way
and only you,
trying again and again,
can tease it apart
and put it back
together
in a way
that makes sense
and sets hearts
to beating.
Okay: I lied.
Here is
the one trick
to writing
that will take you magically
from where you are now
to the heights
of where you can go:
Do it over and over
and over and over
every day
for as many
as you have left.
Go!
xxx
c
Image by Mike Baird via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Now that it's safely behind me, I can confess that I was not looking forward to my trip to Washington, D.C., last week.
I made my plans a few months ago, when I was still excited about the prospect of working at speaking, working at consulting, working at this thing I've been working at for the past couple of years, helping people wrap their heads around social media, for want of a better descriptor. I jumped at any chance to speak, and even more quickly if the trip included travel. And to D.C.? A place I hadn't seen since my eighth grade class trip...from Chicago...on a bus?
Yes, I would very much like to do this job.
Only there were some problems. I was aware of them from the get-go, just like I'm aware of all kinds of other warning signs I choose to fuzz out or otherwise overlook: the diminishing sense of return I got from consulting; the dimming enthusiasm I felt for various self-promotional endeavors; the increasing intake of alcohol on school nights.
Worse, there were the spikes of enthusiasm for things which pointed in the opposite direction, like increasingly non-marketing-oriented blog posts and newsletters. Or the odd, one-off personal-coach-y coaching session I was talked into (and secretly loved, and told no one about). Or my bright and shining moment of pure truth and beauty on the stage of the Bagdad in Portland. talking about poop and love.
So week after week, I found myself not re-working the presentation, but working some damned fine excuses. Exhaustion was a good one, as was my being ridiculously overcommitted, as was every procrastinator's favorite trump card, the holiday season. And then finally, in the new year, which I'd cleared out in anticipation of needing to close some loops, my personal life went into a tailspin and, well, you gotta deal with that.
I boarded that excellent airliner to D.C. with no small amount of dread, sweating out that first half-day in town. And then I made a decision: I might go down, but I'd give it my all before I did. Because if nothing else, there were people who had stuck their necks out to bring me in for this talk, even though it wasn't strictly inside my proven area of expertise. I went to bed Wednesday night thinking, "You will come up with the framework that ties this together, and you will tie it together the best that you can."
An interesting thing happens to me when I really and truly give myself over to an idea: it starts taking shape. To be fair, I'd had the talk in the back of my head for weeks; I knew where things didn't line up. And I'd had a couple of in-depth conversations with the organizers, so I knew what kind of help the attendees were going to be there looking for. Still, I went to bed with nothing and woke up, at 2am, with an idea. And because I had no pen and paper by the bed, I made myself feel my way to my friend Jared's office where my laptop lay sleeping, pulled up a text file and spewed out everything that had bubbled up. And then all day Thursday and most of the day Friday and very early in the morning Saturday, I did not sightsee or lounge about or cocktail it up with my peeps: I worked.
And lo, it worked. Ten or 12 or 15 hours of me and PowerPoint, me and Photoshop, me and Firefox later, it came together and helped connect the dots for people the way I'd hoped it would (and, from the sound of it, the way the organizers had, which was only slightly less important to me).
I learned a great deal this past week about work: both how I like to handle it and how I end up handling it when I don't handle it as I'd like. I'm both thrilled that I'm at a place where I know my stuff well enough to pull things together swiftly, and aggravated at my entrenched habits of procrastination. It's something I really want to look at this coming year (starting tomorrow! on Groundhog Day!).
I also learned that sometimes, as I did when I signed on to help Cliff Atkinson with the first L.A. Presentation Camp, sometimes you have to let that crazy, impulsive side of you jump out and say "YES!" even when the prudent side of you might not. That is stretching of the good type: you, taking what you do to the next level. After which you're free to enjoy the clean air and fine views on this new plateau, or take your snapshot for posterity and head back down the hill (or to another hill entirely).
The world will never want for cocksucking boulders to push or motherfucking hills to push them up. That is what the world is made of: cocksucking boulders and motherfucking hills.
May you put your shoulder to the right ones this year; may you enjoy the view at the top, and everything in between...
xxx
c
Image by hotfield via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
An old acting teacher
used to say,
"The root of the thing
is never the thing itself."
Easy enough to understand
on its surface
with its hints
about what lies beneath,
undulating
or roiling
or pulsing
or cringing,
depending on gender
and other matters
of context.
Harder to remember
in the moment
when the roiling
is on the surface
covering up
the weeping
or vice
versa.
Sometimes I think
pain is just
a sticky note for feelings,
"Remember this
along with the milk
and the life plans
and all that other pokey
you fell into believing
is the Thing Itself.
And don't forget it next time,
asshole."
We could remember love
just as readily
just not
as easily.
I promise you this:
from the moment
I woke up
on that hospital bed
I have moved toward the love
and only the love
because in the end,
there is nothing else
worth moving for.
A heart may break
in places you cannot see
behind screens devised
for a thousand types
of modesty
But what pours out
is always love
no matter how hard
the heart may seem.
xxx
c
Image by kelsey_lovefusionphoto via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,†where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.
My Nei Kung instructor and I have been talking a lot about the process of change, one of my favorite topics.
And to be clear, when I say "favorite," I mean something I spend a great deal of time thinking about, not necessarily something that I enjoy engaging in. I hear the change junkies talk about how all-fire fantastic it is, and remain skeptical, unless by "fantastic," they mean "other worldly and outsize," in which case I'm in 100% agreement.
Anyway.
I was late to the idea that the most efficient way of eliminating a bad habit is by replacing it with a good one, or at the very least tying it to a positive, values-based motivator. Why? I'm an idiot! Okay, I'm not an idiot, or at least, not completely. But my tendency toward impatience made me move sometimes rather more quickly than I might have prudently, and to act like an idiot. That test in the eighth grade that's 479 questions long, and whose first command, read all the way through to the end of the test before starting to answer the individual questions, is critical to the successful completion of the test? I failed that test. Leap first, look later. I'm the world's best im-patient.
Reading and working through Your Best Year Yet several years ago helped start the shift. It's so dense and chewy, you can't skip steps, so I didn't. It took me a full week-ish to slog through it, but by the end, I had a much better handle on myself, and my first taste of what life felt like when you took time to actually look at it.*
Working through the Great Hypnotherapy Project with my friend, Greg, gave me my next taste of swapping out bad for good as methodology rather than just brutalizing the bad out of yourself. The type of hypno that Greg practices involves coming up with lots of positive replacements for the habit you want to let go; before we did the session to help get me back on my Crohn's diet, we spent a long time going over the requirements of the diet, what was allowed and of that, what I liked best, and where I was getting stuck. While I was listening to the tape regularly, I felt almost no cravings for the stuff that was disallowed.
Jim, my Nei Kung instructor, who is also a licensed therapeutic hypnotherapist, confirmed that the replacement of "bad" with "good" is a straighter route than just dumping the bad. Trying to stop something is much, much harder than replacing it with something else. I think it has something to do with, to paraphrase Marshall Rosenberg in his a-ma-zing book, Nonviolent Communication**, us bucking at having choices removed, even when it's in our best interest and it's us doing the removing.
So I'm looking at framing all of my goals as additive (per Greg and Jim), as well as awesome (per Naomi, who oughta know because boy, is she ever!) Full and final list (fingers and toes crossed) next week, in time for Groundhog's Day, but here's what we've got so far:
I have a few other ideas I'm still working on, some of which will probably remain private, but others that I may be able to share once I survey the full schmear. "Music" is still floating around, and I'd like to do something that has me caring for my friendships a little more consistently than I have in the past. Never know when you'll need those darned things.
I'm still looking for additive ways to switch up some of my more destructive habits, especially procrastination and web surfery. I have a feeling that the way-in is connecting more deeply to the things I do want to do, which is going to mean yet more of this messy and painful opening-up-and-letting-go stuff.
I am, however, very open to suggestions right now...
xxx
c
*Other than the five months I spent recovering from my Crohn's onset, but that was less a choice than something thrust upon me.
**In a year of outstanding books, this is the current front-runner. I cannot thank Havi Brooks enough for tipping me over into finally reading it. (THANK YOU, HAVI.) Look for a review soon, but feel free to buy it immediately. If you have to talk to anyone, yourself included, it will make the experience better and might just save your bacon. Oh, and I've already read/loved the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen book (thank you, my shrink), so I'm guessing that third one on the page is killer, too.
Image by skippyjon via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, "December in January," where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.
I realize that logically, there must be as many people who excel at true blue-sky thinking as there are people who can only function within very narrow constraints, although I imagine it's terrifying to run across either.*
Like most people who enjoy thinking of themselves as Very Special Snowflakes, I really fall in the vast, lumpen middle: yes, I'm creative (so are you, whether you like it or not) and no, I don't do too well when that creativity is not applied to certain tasks.
On the other hand, I flourish within constraints! There are few things I enjoy more than figuring out how to maximize in a box**, whether it's moving furniture and doodads around a living space to get my feng shui'd (thank you, Karen Rauch Carter) or bending Robert's Rules of Order right up to the breaking point (a.k.a., how a nutjob-wacko-freak learned to love Toastmasters.) Rules and processes can be very soothing to the scrambled, easily stimulated brain; for the afflicted, the quickest route to making one's world a little bigger is often to make it a little smaller.
The catch, of course, is getting the mix of free-swim to drills just right, or in the ballpark. I tend towards all or nothing thinking, which is most likely rooted in some early training (and which doubtless saved my ass on more than one occasion), but which, as an adult with true autonomy, is now more of an artifact than a useful modus operandi. To paraphrase a former acting teacher , if the choices are "all" and "nothing," the answer will most often be "nothing."***
I've written a lot about the structures I've adopted to wrangle my chaos into some kind of order so I won't go over them again here, other than to say they range from simple things like calendaring writing time to multiple sources of accountability (because I yam a slippery devil!) to simply throwing out tons of crap. As I move forward, I'm looking to employ more strategies like these to free up mental and physical energy for what's feeling more and more like an intense period of creative work around the corner. Here's what I'm looking at doing:
When I first started blogging, I wrote about whatever struck my fancy, and mimicked whomever I was enamored of. Go back and enjoy the schizo qualities of communicatrix, circa late 2004: it will make you feel oh-so-much better about your own chances for success! I can't tell you the relief I feel these days knowing that Poetry Thursday is right around the corner, or that I have a Referral Friday feature to fall back on. I may never lock myself into a rigid floorplan, but like Gretchen, Havi, Chris and any number of friends who do this regularly, I finally see the value in some kind of publishing "schedule." They're just smarter, since they saw it way before I did (even though they all started blogging after I did, which doesn't make me feel any better about my stubborn face, but there it is.)
This is the term Dave Seah, my partner in the Google Wave with Dave™ project, came up with when I said I was considering an adult version of Garanimals to help streamline my wardrobe. For years, I've resisted uniforms of any kind, probably because of the eight years (1967 - 1975!) that I chafed in one. My favorite dressing style has been "costumes," by which I mean dressing for the day's physical and/or emotional needs, not "gardener" or "slutty nurse." It was fun for a long, long time because it fed my needs for change and expression, and also my love of rag-picking (i.e., thrift/sale shopping). These days I have plenty of room to express myself via writing and speaking and performing and no end of material, I want to allocate more resources toward the creation of art than the fabrication of frame. Frames are important, L.A. Eyeworks built an iconic ad campaign around this simple, brilliant idea a couple of decades ago, and I'm expending a goodly portion of thought about suitable ones for my needs. More on that as I have it.
There are only so many hours in a day, and I'm finally accepting that I need to spend a certain number of them on stuff like eating, sleeping and relaxing if I want to have the life I say I want to have. I've already dramatically pulled back on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, I rarely talk on the phone and I try to restrict commenting on other blogs to conversations where I can really add value or situations where it's appropriate to show appreciation. (There should always be time to be nice, but I'm going to have to learn to be pithier about it.) I'm hoping that creating some structure around the types of things I write about here on the blog will allow me to continue writing here as often as I do (and maintain the newsletter and actors' column), but I'm (reluctantly) open to the idea that I may need to cut back if I want to write books, too. And yes, I want to write books, and yes, one of them is a collection of poetry. God help us all.
Other things I'm thinking about are:
I'm still in a very open place about all of these things right now, weighing ideas, possibilities and (nice, informed, positively-phrased) suggestions. My multiple nodes of collaboration have also shown me how much stuff there is to me that I can't see: you are in a position to hold a (kind, helpful, positively-angled) mirror up to me, or pluck a stray hair from my jacket, that I cannot.
I'm specifically curious (yes, again) as to why you read the blog, assuming you read it with any regularity. I threw this question out a couple of years ago and received so many generous, helpful answers it was deeply moving. In the interest of giving something back as I did then, I'll donate a dollar to the relief efforts going on in Haiti for each reply (up to $500.), via comments or email, that offers some thought, feedback, illumination or idea to move me forward on any of the six areas above.
These could be anything from exercises for "writing shorter" (without adding more work) to great hacks for streamlining process to the best post you read in 2009 about x. It might be better if you shared stuff that's really helped you rather than guessing at what might help me; experiences related honestly and kindly (and with humor, if one can muster it) are my preferred method of learning. I love biography; I consider "self-help" a necessary evil when there's not a readily available biography illuminating the topic. But hey, as long as you comment with good intentions, I say "yay!" and Haiti gets another of my rapidly dwindling pool of dollars.
Thank you for providing this tremendous outlet for growth and change, for helping me feel less greedy about it by allowing me to kick in some (more) dough for a worthy cause, and for helping me take it to the next level.
Whatever the hell that is...
xxx c
*For me, spending time with fully unbridled creative thinkers is exhilarating and exhausting; doing the same with people who have nothing but rules is, well, okay, usually just exhausting, but kind of fascinating, too, like observing an alien species.
**The Chief Atheist has a great phrase for this exercise as applied to excursions which he calls "going to the Museum": anytime you have to go somewhere you might otherwise find tedious, off-putting or overwhelming, go as an anthropologist collecting data. Guaranteed to turn even the most moribund gathering into a series of excellent adventures, and helps keep you from jumping out of your skin during the occasional stumble down rabbit holes into alien worlds.
***Eight years later, I note there's no small irony in my having left his tutelage after being presented with exactly those two choices.
Image by Daquella manera via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
You have likely forgotten
how wrenching
that last change you made
truly was
But it was
I have forgotten
a lifetime of changes
I chose for myself
and a second one
of those that were chosen for me.
Each time I woke up
was as jarring as the first
like an alarm you never get used to
or falling off a bicycle
the ground rushing up to greet you
and your unsuspecting elbows
with concrete reality.
Why choose change, then
when that bitch
has brought me nothing
but broken bones
and bandages
and recovery periods as painful as the pain itself?
Because
I have seen what happens
when you hit the snooze button
too many times
I sat at her table
and saw her weep
stoic, Swedish tears
for choices not made
that were no longer hers to make
I sat by his bed
and witnessed him clawing at the air
with what strength he had left:
one last call
one last meeting
one last stab at being
the kind of alive he called living
I sat from a distance
and watched her die
slowly, by degree,
clutching her choices to her chest
to the very end.
My road here
has been paved
with the choices I made
but the wilderness beyond
has been illuminated
by the ones they did not.
Which is why I must
turn off here,
where the pavement stops
and only crazy people
venture forth.
Call me crazy
if you must
wish me luck
if you can
travel alongside
if you will...
xxx
c
Image by Mads Boedker via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,†where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.
My friend, Naomi, wrote a post about making unstupid goals whose central thesis has been ringing in my head for the week since I read it:
A goal is something you want to hit.
I'm paraphrasing, as is my wont, but I think it's a fair translation of Naomi's philosophy and so let's work with my version, and do some of that unpacking we spoke of yesterday:
As Naomi admits, there are also things you should do to keep a roof over your kid's head and yourself out of the emergency room. I'll add that there are things you might seriously want to think about doing because you will end up alone and despised without them. These are not goals, they're responsibilities. They fall under the rubric of being a grownup, and to be a grownup, you put on your Big-Girl Pants and TCB.
Jinny Ditzler, author of my beloved and cursed Your Best Year Yet, agrees that goals should be motivating. As she says, when you're done with the process, the long and often arduous process, of corralling your data and drawing your goals from it, you should look down at that list of 10 things and want to do cartwheels. (I'm paraphrasing again, of course, but I think Jinny would approve.) You should be so fired up about these things that you can't wait to get started. Doesn't mean they won't be every bit as hard to accomplish as the responsibilities are sometimes to bear (or the #@$!( process itself is to get through), but they should be challenging in the good way.
I'd say I didn't know how I missed that these last two years that I've been carving out my goals, but I do: I ignored the obvious. I'm really good at ignoring the obvious, as it turns out; I can do it for two years (and change) and still look like a high-functioning, can-do dynamo of...something-or-other. Like anyone else, I get invested in outcome, attached to comfort and all of a sudden, another two years have gone by and I'm still in the same place.
I am still not 100% sure what My Best Groundhog Year Yet is going to look like exactly. I have a lot of time in airports and on planes and in hotel rooms over the next couple of weeks to think about it. There's a really good chance that certain things on my dining room table are going to make it onto the final list, though, because I am really excited about them.
I'm excited about reading 52 books. I am loving reading, period, I'd forgotten how much I missed an uninterrupted half-hour or hour daily to read. And while some days I get anxious before picking up my book, thinking about all the things I have to do, and how late I just slept in, and how I could really use that half-hour or hour to do some of them, thus far I've been able to gently (for the most part) set that anxiety to the side and just read. (It helps that I'm reading really good books so far!)
I'm excited about continuing to study Nei Kung. It's only been six weeks so far, but already, I'm so much better at it than any other physical activity I've tried. I wanted to be a runner and a bicyclist and a yogini, but I'm just not built for them. Apparently, I'm built like a Chinese martial arts enthusiast. Go figger.
I'm (still) excited about writing on my blog. So you can either rejoice or curse, but I'm not going anywhere. I may change the way I approach the blog, most likely, I will have to, if I want to write anything else, but write, I will.
Other things are more up in the air right now. I have several project ideas starting to shape up; they'll have to finish baking before I can decide which ones I want to roll with. I also have several concepts I've been mulling over, trying to suss out what their corresponding real-world actions are. Is the answer to "piano?" really "piano!" or is is some other manifestation of "music." I tried and abandoned the 10-minutes-of-guitar-per-day experiment just two months into '09; while part of me wants to JUST TRY IT AGAIN, another part of me feels that I'm really responding to the cheesy symmetry of 10 in '10. Once an adhole, always an adhole.
I am curious to hear how other people handle the Exciting Goal vs. Big-Girl-Pants Obligation divide. Which is in each column for you, and how many of each? And how are you carving them up? Part of the reason the 52 books/year jumped to the head of the line was because of Julien's genius-simple 40pp/day rule. Are there others of these I'm missing?
Whaddya got for me?
xxx
c
Image by ewiemann via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February. I was born in September of 1961, which means that I started the first grade at the tail end of eligibility, back in 1967, which means that while I won't be turning 50 for another year and a half, I'll be watching many, many friends do it between now and September of 2011.
While I stopped taking numbers quite so seriously somewhere around 41, when my intestines decided to go south for the winter (they still vacation there from time to time), 50 is so round and so firm and so halfway-to-100 that it's hard not to sit up and take notice of it. Maybe we feel that way about every rounded-to-ten number (I'll let you know when and if I do hit 100), but the only way I can describe thinking about 50 is that it has a way of thinking right back at you. It's objectively impressive in a way that we in our rule-obsessed culture have subjectively made 18 and 21. It's just there. FIFTY. FIFTY. FIFTY.*
I am taking careful note of what my ever-so-slightly-elders are doing during these 18 or so months rolling up to my own, personal Main Event, because that's what most of us humans do, I think: we look to each other for cues. Thankfully, I've chosen well enough that my friends aren't doing idiotic, bucket-list things like shooting themselves out of cannons or idiotic, Masters-of-the-Universe-type stuff like scheduling face lifts or destination luaus. No, mostly they're hitching up their big-boy pants and getting down to business. My friend, Kevin, took a wide view of his life via an interesting collaborative project involving the most meaningful people from his life. Other friends are putting the finishing touches on their families (because who wants to be 60 chasing babies, even if it's medically possible) or making appointments with the hypnotherapist about that little smoking thing (so hot when you're 20, so not when you're 50).
Most of them, of us, are looking at how we want to spend our time on the back nine, and where.
Will we be healthy? Nature and circumstance leave us less and less margin for error, so we step it up a bit, but not in that insane, hell-or-high-water way of our youth. We drop a bad habit, or better yet, quietly replace it with a good one, and keep our fingers crossed, just in case. I cannot work the hours I used to, nor eat the things I did, nor drink the way I did, so I make minor adjustments, then more, then more. To an outsider, my new life may look like nothing much; for me, it is nothing short of revolutionary, this sleeping for eight hours, or reading for one, or almost holding still for half of one.
This, then, is what goal-setting looks like now: not the crazy, brash, bold and hopeful lists of youth, but deep and ruthlessly non-sexy shifts: read more. Sleep more. Eat better. Slow down.
Halfway through this December-in-January I've conjured up for myself, with "MORE ROOM" as my mantra, I have let go of an astonishing amount of stuff. More than you know, or that anyone will know, and maybe that's as it should be. The point is no more to die with the fewest toys than the most, and the point is definitely not to advertise it on a bumper sticker. The point seems to be, what do I need to really and truly live every day of my life?
Halfway through December-in-January, things are still messier and dirtier than I'd hoped they'd be at the beginning of it. You will notice that this is not a post filled with items, as was last Monday's; this is a painstaking and slightly painful admission that while I have been working assiduously at certain things, mostly, the removal of extraneous ones, and the processing of attendant grief, I don't have a big, shiny plan yet. Halfway through the month. Yet.
Instead, there is a growing field of index cards on my dining room table. The cards say things like "Read 52 books" and "Practice Nei Kung 30 min/daily." They also say things like "PIANO?" (underlined) and "DRAWING?" (not); they are messy and sprawling and not ready for personal commitment, much less public consumption. Believe me, I wish we were locked and loaded, but we're not. Change is messy, and frequently painful.**
My Nei Kung instructor, who has much finer motor control and strength and all the other things that practicing a martial art for 20 years will give you, plus the probable advantage of not being in the midst of painful change, gave me a great image at last week's session: "When one door closes, another one opens, but it's hell in the hallway." This is a thing, according to Google, but was new to me.
Halfway home, things may or may not be comfortable. But pretending they are anything other than what they are is even more foolish than it might be a quarter or a third of the way through.
xxx
c
Image by qfamily via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
*And if you ladies aren't impressed enough by FIFTY, there's always The Change ready to lend a hand. That is, if you haven't had things changed for you by nature or surgery already. Change happens around your ovaries and your middle and your brain and everything else your hormones have a hand in, which is just about everything. Those hormones, they are nature's overachievers, boy howdy.
**I will say that real change, while painful and messy, also makes you feel very, very alive. Not good, but alive.
I. (The part not for the faint of heart.)
I dreamed of demons
in the night
Not the green, horned kind
but the ones that plague me
while I walk, awake,
and still asleep.
Old, dead relatives
gathering in a too-costly
too-luxurious
too-dark hotel,
all surfaces lined with plush fabrics
to dampen the sounds
that happened within.
One grandmother
sat resolute in her room
refusing to move,
no matter what
while the other
crawled the carpeted floors
on hands and knees,
searching for something
she had lost
while she wasn't paying attention.
My mother
scavenged free fruit
from the complimentary tray
in my well-appointed room,
because she was starving
in her poorish, noisy one.
(They're always that way
near the elevators,
even in the good places.)
And my father
paid for it all
but was not there
at all.
Finally, as my sister watched
from the velvet banquette
in the mirrored nook
of my sumptuous room,
I squeezed a hidden zit,
a "sneaker" zit,
tucked in at the top
of the nasolabial fold,
releasing a stream of pus
and blood
and hardened oils
so profound
it exceeded my capacity for disgust,
invoking only wonder
at my body's capacity
to harbor the unnecessary
so excessively.
Truly,
it was magnificent,
although my sister
could have been a little faster
with the Kleenex
if you ask me.
II. (The part that is nicer.)
There are angels around you
that float in and amongst the demons
and are there, at your side,
24/7,
for the asking.
Would you like to know
the secret code
that calls them to you?
Me, too.
So far,
it seems to sound
very much like walking up to a demon
and saying, "Hello, there,
my name is Colleen,
and I think it is time
we finally met."
xxx
c
Image by scragz via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.
Of all the things I've learned about creating meaningful goals, ones that I'm passionate about and that will prove the most useful to me in achieving life goals, by far the most important has been the year-in-review exercise.
Reading Jinny Ditzler's excellent book on values-centered goal planning, Your Best Year Yet, finally turned me around on the benefits of looking backwards to go forward. It seems so obvious in hindsight (ha!) that to plan for the future without surveying the past is at best wasteful and at worst, downright foolhardy: how can I know where I'm going if I don't know where I am, and why would I give up any intelligence that helped get me here?
I'll tell you why, it hurts like crazy. Or does for me, anyway. I'm sure there are reasonable and balanced souls out there who could look objectively and even kindly on their successes and failures of the past 12 months, but for a competitive, perfectionist workaholic, it's a day-long (minimum) exercise in high-level masochism. All the inevitable broken promises, brought on by overambition, hubris and a plain, old faulty lens. Autistic people can't parse social situations properly; I can't see time. Cannot cannot cannot, no matter how hard I try. And remember, I'm a perfectionist Virgo, so not only is there trying, there is assisted trying, paid and free, as well as all kinds of experiments in different ways of trying. Oh, the trying! It's a trial, I tell you.
The trying, the effortful, effortful trying, was a huge factor in my settling on EASE as a watchword or modus operandi. Or rather, the realization that I work my ass off for and at pretty much everything made it an obvious choice to say "yes" to once it bubbled up to the surface.
But whence the bubbling, right? Because that's what you're here for and really, as Dan put it in his scarily incisive comment of last week, this is what I've chosen to do here for the past few years, sort of unofficially, as well as what I did with intention from the outset with the Great Year-Long Experiment in Marketing, a.k.a. The Virgo Guide: to carefully and honestly look at the process, and as best I can, to set up metrics so I can see how well things work and where I'm really spending my time.
As best as I can tell, these are the activities that laid the groundwork for making the radical (for me) shift of "December in January" (i.e., choosing to delay my 12-month planning by one month), and the three-month sabbatical from for-hire work in the new year (to be reviewed and renegotiated at the end of March):
The above are what I'd characterize as the "positives" that fueled this decision. There were also some negatives, and they're important, too:
There were other indicators that I was drifting into the red zone: alcohol usage creep; laziness/anxiety-fueled poor eating habits; increased nail and cuticle biting; poor sleep; off-the-charts web surfing and viewing of comfort films. I know way too much about the habits of a certain fameball and the people who watch her, and if my copy of Play Misty for Me was an LP, it would be worn smooth. Thank whomever I gave up cable, at least.
Modesty prohibits me making an exhaustive list of what I'd consider to be my successes of the past year, but I did list them, and if I may be immodest for just the one minute, I produced a crapload of work last year, and made many, many breakthroughs. I'm most pleased with the quantity, and quality, of the writing I committed to; that it was the one goal I actually followed through on is rather telling. I fell one post short of my goal of 260, and did not miss a month of my acting column or newsletter, nor a week of posting at the Virgo Guide.
You'd think I'd look at all this and come up with the simple answer to just write my ass off, and to hell with the rest. Alas, the sum total of money I made from writing last year wouldn't keep me in expenses for more than a month. My savings, while ample enough for now, can't fund this experiment indefinitely, so I'll have to figure out how to make money writing, or to make money doing something else with a low mental load so I can reserve strength for writing. The ideal scenario workwise seems to be Gladwellian: a 90/10 or 95/5 ratio of writing to speaking, and always on what interests me. I don't need nearly the cash our boy Malcolm makes, but I need that ratio.
Is it realistic? Not in year one, and maybe never. At least I have a picture in my head of what the best future looks like, and a start with some role models...
xxx c
Image by rick via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
You can change your hair
you can change your clothes
You can even change
a lightbulb
with or without the help
of one voyeur
two economists
or three Episcopalians
But you cannot make change
any more than you can
will the sun
into rising
or yell a rose
into blooming
Change happens
when it happens
and not a second sooner
But
(and I did say "but")
You can
turn the right rows
and seed the right beds
and water
and weed
and otherwise tend
as needed
every day of every season
every month of every year
for the rest of your life
And if you start now,
if you change right now,
you may not have flowers
or novels
or bridges
or babies
tomorrow
but you will have the joy
that being a handmaiden
brings with it
for every second
of every minute
of every hour
of the rest of your days
And the world might well
enjoy the fruits of your garden
until the end of days
themselves.
xxx
c
Image by dumbledad via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.