Poetry Thursday: The Truth Fairy

You would like
for that life-changing job offer,
that surprise legacy
from a long-lost relative
or never-known billionaire angel,
that exquisitely crafted apology
emanating waves of old love and new understanding
to wash up on the shores of your inbox
one morning
as you settle in
with that first kickass mug
of hot coffee.

You would. Who wouldn't?

We are human
and the truth of us
is as much about looking
for speedier shortcuts
and easier escape hatches
and handier scapegoats
and better numbing devices
as it is
that we fuck up
again and again
and again,
despite our double-pinky swears,
despite our excellent intentions,
despite our hundred-thousand-million
aborted attempts
at overcoming our obvious
weaknesses.

I do the best I can
which ain't much of much
most days,
but still is my best:
to walk slowly
to pay attention
to write
to work
to slow the fuck down
and choose the second
or third
or eighty-seventh impulse
whenever
and wherever
humanly possible.

Watch me fail and fail,
each time more gloriously
than the last
if I am lucky.

If I am doing
it right...

xxx
c

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

Lemonade, a.k.a. "Cosmo"

So, last week? Was on the difficult side.

I'd barely recovered from the previous weekend's festivities, which, while absolutely festive, were on the taxing side for a squirrely introvert like yours truly, when I got slammed by several waves of unexpected drama. I'm okay, but exhausted. And really, that's all the record warrants right now. As I've said before, while it may seem like I share e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g here, I'm really very selective in what I choose to share. Because online weblogular stuff can veer very quickly into oversharing. And that is a kind of drama which, as we all know too well by now, exists forever.

Here's the thing I've learned about trials, though: as vexing as they can be, there is always, always a creamy nougat center of opportunity nestled somewhere inside. Sometimes it takes a while to figure it out; other times, like this one, you get lucky, and find it right away.

For me, the gifts were several. First, I was bowled over by the support that poured forth from friends, both real-life and Internet varieties. (Those of you who emailed me personally, and you know who you are, thank you again. It meant the world to me.) I'm not sure that I deserve such great people around me, but I'll take 'em, and I promise to do my best at getting worthy-er.

Second, there was the reminder that even in the depths of sadness, there is grace and lightness and even fart-joke levels of joy. When you can sit with a friend who is mourning the passing of her 17-years-long feline companion (who saw her through some shit, boy howdy) and not only get each other through it, but get each other laughing? That's love.

Third, there is always, always art. The restorative power of art is amazing, and by "art," I mean making stuff: writing, baking, sewing, painting, building birdhouses. Whatever. Making stuff is such a tonic, as is time spent in collaboration with other people making stuff. My classes at w o r d s p a c e, my new writers' group, even Success Team, my mastermind-esque group, where we all support each other's efforts at making some crazy art of some kind while we try to keep our heads from exploding, even that helps. It all helps. We help each other, and huzzah for that.

Finally, truth, like medicine, can come in unpleasant packages. One of the things that really stuck in my craw recently was an accusation of my selfishness. And it stuck precisely because it's true. Never mind that my wiring warrants some of it, or that the the ways I was often indulged growing up fed it. It's true. And no matter how much room one needs, nor how crucial it is to get down with it, it's also important to reach out. And it's been...a while. A long while. An embarrassingly long while, if I think back to when I consistently gave back anything other than money.

So I did something I've been intending to do for months now, since I discussed the idea with my first-shrink-slash-astrologer: I volunteered at a local animal shelter. Nothing big: just some dog walking, for now. But it gets those dogs some exercise outside of their daily trip to the yard, and it gets me some badly-needed doggy action. A search on MetaFilter turned up this outstanding no-kill shelter in the West Valley. I visited this weekend and really liked the vibe and the policies. (I'm a big one for policies.) They're grateful for whatever volunteer help they can get, and let people jump right in. It's a perfect low-pressure way for me to re-engage with giving. And then I went and bought some goddamn party shoes so I won't look like a putz when I stand up at my sister's wedding.

Life gets hard at times, and frequently, from out of nowhere. Yes, I have drawn an easy hand, as far as that goes; I know it, and in my lucid moments (which are still many), I recall it quickly, if not instantaneously. One of the gifts of age-plus-awakeness is some sense of proportion.

But pain is pain, and when you're hit with it, it can be really hard to instantly be grateful you're not in any one of a thousand, million spots much tighter than the one you find yourself in. If your impulse is to rage and lash out, all I can say is try to do it to walls and inanimate objects. People bruise, even if you can't see them doing it, and venom unleashed makes no one feel much better for long.

If, on the other hand, your impulse is to turn inward, something those of us a particular end of the co-dependent spectrum seem to take to like ducks to water, try to gently, and just for a little, if you can, turn outward. And I do mean a little. I was doing a lot of holding doors open and letting people cut in front of me in traffic before I even hauled my sorry ass out to Puppyville.

One step at a time. Because there is love on the other side, but the only way to it is through it...

xxx
c

Photo is of Cosmo, the Wonder Dog, who is delightful and sweet and would very much like you to come adopt him into a good home or hey, just take him for a walk!

• Here's Cosmo, the Wonder Dog's profile. Woof! (UPDATE 7/14/10: Cosmo has been placed! But there are still plenty of other great L.A. doggies available.)
  
• Here's Pet Adoption Fund, the largest no-kill shelter in Southern California. They're doing the Lord's work, and have loads of great dogs and cats who would love to come home with you.

Poetry Thursday: Ridonkulous

Call me a clown or a loser, a cheat or a louse, a hack or a snob or a "poet" (in quotes).

Call me crazy! (You're on safe ground, there, as it runs in the family). Call me clueless or craven, bobble-headed/bow-legged chickenshit-selfish-shortsighted (three times fast).

Call me the doormat of true genius, pretender to the nearest available throne, World's Weakest Brownnose or the Leading Asshole in the State.

I won't stop you. I won't even pause to correct you.

You can call me nothing I haven't labeled myself years before, and with far more venom and bite, quietly at first, hoping no one would notice, out loud later on, when I learned the value of getting there first.

After all, let's be honest: there are more things wrong with me than there are sticks to shake at them, than there is tea in China, than there are fleas on a dead horse. More things than I can hope to correct in a thousand lifetimes, and as far as I know, I just have the one.

And yet, here I am, imperfect, ungainly, exuberant, beloved, ridiculous, sublime, occasionally loathed, absolutely breathing and utterly human.

Every day is a gift to the clown who knows it. Every busted, hateful, glorious, broken-down day is one more chance to turn dross into gold, to let go of a lump of awful or maybe if you're really lucky and patient and strong, to sque-e-e-eze it into something brilliant you can actually see through.

And so I awaken and shake off the night, apply my greasepaint don my red nose, pull on my bloomers and Bozo shoes and do the work I am here to do.

xxx c

Magnificent drawing of yours truly, the clown, © Wally Torta, gentleman and scholar.

Truth, transparency, and when to keep your trap shut

I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I just got back from a Fabulous Palm Springs Weekend.

Sunshine. Reading. Lounging poolside with cocktails. There was a lanai involved, and a great deal of very delicious food. (Lesson learned: when choosing one's friends, it doesn't hurt to include "excellent cook" along with "kind," "fun," "goofy," and "generous" in the list of desired traits.) With the exception of a brief side trip to view a beautifully restored property in a sea of mid-Century splendor (seriously, it was like you'd died and floated to Wexler heaven on a Tiki cloud by SHAG), I spent my time shuttling between an overstuffed sofa on the aforementioned lanai and my little linoleum-tiled monk's cell, with occasional dips in the pool to cool off. (You have heard of these pool toys called "noodles"? They are the best pool toys ever. You kids. You got all the good stuff.)

Anyway, our time was mainly spent on the light and fluffy, as is appropriate for a bachelorette weekend. But as Sunday wound down, I found myself in the pool with the bride-to-be and her oldest friend, talking poetry. Which is weird, because (a), poetry?; and (b), me, discussing it?

I was sharing with them my ongoing ambivalence and wonder over the weird turn this site took a year or so ago when, fried to a crisp, with a deadline looming and no strength to wrassle one of my wordy damned essays to the ground, I wrote a "poem." I'd written a few of these "poems" before, but in an even jokier, joshier way, as part of an odd meme from the Mesozoic Age of blogging someone somewhere dubbed "Poetry Thursday," and that I cribbed from my blogging friend Neil Kramer. But the next week, and the week after that, and the weeks after that, I found myself again turning to this new-to-me condensed form, "short writing," I thought of it as being, but "poetry" I called it. In quotes. Always in quotes.

I was sharing with the bride-to-be and her friend all my fears around writing these things I was calling poems (but only in quotes!), how I felt like a fraud, how strange it felt to have people responding to them at all, much less in a way that indicated they were resonating with them. I was not a poet; I had barely studied it in school, and had dabbled even less. In other words (oh, pun! oh, punny-pun-pun!), I was wildly unqualified to write real poetry. So I didn't: I just tried to tell the truth, only shorter. Sometimes it worked better than others, but it always worked on that level, as the truth-only-shorter. There is time to get better at poetry, and to learn other things about how to make it better, and to deepen my practice. If I'd waited until I was good at it, I'd be waiting a long time, and we wouldn't have gotten to enjoy some of my weirder forays into the land of verse. It all works out, this imperfectly working at stuff, when you approach it with a sense of humor and honesty and a certain (but not too much of a) sense of earnestness.

What does not work, at least for me, is letting it all hang out, maybe ever, but at least not until I have made some sense of it. I have a long-brewing post I've been hacking away at about the right time to release a post into the world. It varies, depending on the subject matter and parties involved and a whole lot of other things, but the three rules I have for putting something out there (or not) are that:

1. the something cannot compromise the privacy or safety of myself or another party
2. the something must have been rolled around in my head long enough to make some sense of it
3. the something must carry with it some kind of appeal to someone outside the borders of me

These are the rules that have me using nicknames and obscuring details. These rules are why I can sometimes be detailing things almost as they happen, like a self-dev color commentator, and other times not talking about things for five and ten or more years after the fact. I'm not telling anyone else that they should adhere to these rules or rules like them: they're just what work for me, to maintain the solitude and distance I need to do the work I want to do.

I'd like to think I'm not lying here, even by omission, but I suppose that we're always lying a little bit, here and there, showing our good side or even cherrypicking parts of our bad sides to put on display. One really astute complaint I heard recently about Facebook is how people use it as a big, electronic megaphone from which to bellow LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL NO REALLY IT IS NO REALLY LOOK AT IT LOOK AT IT while they madly flip levers from behind the curtain. No one is the Great and Powerful Oz, and most of us are as naked as that famous emporer, if you look hard enough. (Especially with x-ray specs.)

The truth is, I'm dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff right now on a couple of fronts, and it wears on me. Less when I'm rested and taking care of myself, but even then, it will peep through the cracks now and then; even, say, on a Fabulous Palm Springs Weekend. But after almost 50 years of living, I know I don't need to give vent to every little thing right there, or here, for that matter. There is time-and-place appropriateness, just as there is age-appropriateness. And I know to take breaks: to do my Nei Kung, to read quietly, to slip off to the bathroom and take a quick shower. The bride-to-be is understanding of me, as well: there's a reason I scored the tiny, hipster monk's cell.

Poetry, in quotes for the moment, but hopefully, not forever, is part of how I tell my truth right now, as are essays, newsletters, columns, Facebook updates, Tumblr posts, tweets, email and, lately, goofy little videos. Are the poems less truthful for dealing with menopause and envy rather than heartbreak? Will they be more truthful when I write about heartbreak one or two or twenty years from now, if, you know, there is still electricity and the Internet and we are not living in caves, and if (big "if") I can make some larger sense of it?

When our mother died, and again when our father did, my sisters and I gathered and wept, as you might expect. But more often than you might expect if you've yet to live through these kinds of losses, hard up against the tears was laughter, sly and delicious or hearty and cathartic. It is shocking sometimes, even as you're living through it, how often laughter and tears seem to bleed into one another. Or maybe not. As we learned in Method acting class, core truth is emotion, period, and most of the time, all of it is there together, swirling around in a big, messy pool of human goo.

So we cry until we laugh, or laugh until we cry. We write "poetry", in quotes at first, and eventually, maybe on its own. We tuck things away in our pockets to look at later, when we have the strength. And we share what we can of what we know.

xxx
c

Photo of a house in Palm Springs, CA, although not of the house where we stayed.

Poetry Thursday: Ode to a disappearing period

When I think
of how I cursed
my Curse
all of those times
over all of those years
when it showed up
unexpectedly
or overstayed what relieved welcome
I managed to muster
or made its presence
a little too known
in the lower-back department,
I shake my head
at my youthful not-knowing.

The expense!
The hassle!
The blooming red shame
in light-colored shorts
thanks to ill-fitting underpants
or on someone else's mattress
in the morning
after an evening
or tick-tick-tocking
as it wicked across the inner seam
of my jeans
as I raced it home
again.

Now
as my visitor's visits
become infrequent,
erratic,
and the pain of waiting
stretches out for-ev-er
in between,

Now,
pre-menstrual more
than it seems I was ever menstrual,
my breasts swollen,
my lower back pounding,
my waist disappearing
faster than fried chicken
at a Fourth of July picnic,
the top button of
my fat jeans straining
to rein in my matron's gut
which itself,
I could swear,
is silently crying, "Elastic...elastic...",

Now
as I count down the back nine, 
hearing the laughs
of those just teeing off
in the distance
and the curses
of those
carving up divots
a few holes behind me,
it is all I can do
to not cluck
and shake my head
at the unknowing foolishness
that floats on the breezes
around me.

Just as well,
I think in my more lucid moments,
when one of these last few periods
finally starts
and the crying and rage
out of nowhere
subside for a bit.
Just as well,
I think, noticing the sun
starting to slip the tiniest bit lower in the sky.

Just a swell
Just as swell
Just as well...

xxx
c

What accountability does and doesn't do

In a way, all the things we do to help us get things done are tricks: Carving up our schedules in this way or that. Eating our biggest frogs first.

Even accountability is a trick of sorts. If you take on an exercise buddy or join a mastermind group or self-help organization like AA or Weight Watchers, you're hoping that the specter of peer pressure will keep you on the straight and narrow where your stated intentions are concerned. (And if you're hiring a coach or therapist, in addition some part of you is probably hoping that the pain of spending money will be motivating.)

Of course, we're usually drawn to whatever outside resources we end up choosing because we think they'll have tools and processes that will make our task easier, whether it's learning how to speak or how to avoid lousy relationships. No one wants a dummy partner. But most of  the efficacy seems to come from establishing a set of mutual expectations for improvement, and then not wanting to bail on the contract. Why is that?

After struggling with all kinds of change for most of my life and finally, FINALLY, getting a handle on a small portion of it at the ripe age of almost-50, I now believe that the real "magic" of accountability itself lies within me, not outside of me. As I said to my friend Dave Seah in our little Google Wave Experiment, there are no real consequences to not following through on anything I say I'm going to do with any of my accountability setups. No one will make me walk the plank. With the exception of one weird bet with my first-shrink-slash-astrologer (and another, even weirder one with my mother), I don't ever lay cash on the line, so there's not even that to lose. While ultimately, my shrink might "fire" me or my friends stop hanging out with me if I set up a really bad pattern of reneging on my word, 99% of the time, no one gives a crap whether I do or do not go through with x, except for their concern as my friends that I stay aligned with my own intentions. And the reason I'm reasonably sure of this is because I love my friends, warts and all; unless they started regularly and egregiously and personally letting me down, or hurting themselves, to the point where my intervention was useless, I can't imagine throwing them over because they couldn't quit smoking again.

So how and why does accountability work, really? What's really going on? Here are some possibilities:

Wherever two or more are gathered in His name

I'm not religious, but there is a sort of freaky hoodoo-something that happens in community, when the purpose of community is for the betterment of anyone in it. Chris Wells, who created the Obie-winning artists' "church"/show/gathering, The Secret City, and who has begun teaching the Big Artist Workshop in New York and Los Angeles, said it in our final class last Saturday: "Everything is better in community." (This, after being struck by something extraordinary that came about as a result of a group exercise.)

And it is better in community. I sometimes hate that it is, because I'm an introvert and, as my friend Gretchen Rubin likes to say, most of the time I'd rather just stay at home by myself and read a book all day. But as she also says, she almost always feels better when she rallies and does go to the party, the event, the meetup, the whatever. Part of it is action, of course, but another part is action with other people. We're these weird, self-contained fragments but we get the Big Juice from proximity to other fragments.

Darkness made light, the invisible made visible

It is really hard to see myself. Really, really, really hard. The beautiful parts and the not-so-beautiful ones.

In company, though, all kinds of things start surfacing, because the people around us serve as mirrors for ourselves, good and bad. I started having massive breakthroughs in self-understanding when I moved past plain annoyance with an acquaintance and allowed myself to consider what in me she was reflecting. People everywhere can serve as mirrors, of course, but when you choose a challenging accountability partner or two, you get improvement on steroids.

In any kind of accountability relationship, though, even one without doppelgangers, a great benefit comes from just dragging my trolls out from under the bridge, or at least getting the gang to train their high beams on them. And professional or not, anyone you're in an accountability relationship with is bringing a different perspective to your problem, and a much more objective one. That is illuminating, and illumination disperses shadow and darkness.

More on that tomorrow. For now, I would be very interested to hear about other people's experiences with accountability, specifically, how you think the "hoodoo" works on you.

xxx
c

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

Poetry Thursday: Screw or be screwed

The jackass who takes up two spaces in the shopping center lot that's already charging too much per hour.

The neighbor's air conditioner running at full blast every goddamn night during a blistering heat wave of 68 goddamn degrees while an ocean bleeds oil unmolested.

My seeming inability to ever fully grasp how many minutes are actually in an hour and how many hours in a day and to even consider giving up a reasonable number of them to maintaining the physical plant.

A million petty grievances ready to be converted to the gold of Practice once I get my head screwed on halfway straight.

It's the first half that's always the hardest.

If you can make it to the second half, though it is a thing which requires herculean efforts at stopping and breathing not to mention slowing down, you sometimes find yourself with, if not a lesson to hold near and dear to your heart, at least something like a halfway decent stab at a poem.

xxx c

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

What noticing does

I was sick for most of last week, just a cold, but it reduced my energy and capacity for doing things pretty significantly. And this on a week I had a couple of significant things to accomplish.

First, there was the class I took, called "The Big Artist Workshop." On Tuesday night for three hours, and again on Saturday for six hours, Chris Wells, the instructor, led us through a series of exercises and discussions that required a great deal of energy and focus. They were wonderful days full of juicy revelations and fantastic tools, but draining ones, too. And in between, my contract with myself stated that I was to complete three tasks, one of which was to write up another story for (here goes) a book I have been long procrastinating about.

I'm happy to say that, sickness and all, I got through it, got my work done, and got a great deal out of the workshop itself. But by Sunday, I was knackered. Worse, I was up at 6am and knackered. Why my body should pick the time it's most tired to not sleep is beyond me. There it was, though.

So I popped in a DVD, the first disc of a 2008 BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit, and settled in with a cup of tea to watch. And then I popped in another. And another, and another, until I had spent the best part of the day watching it in its entirety¹: 14 episodes, 452 minutes.

What was fascinating to me (other than Little Dorrit, whose plot and particulars I was unfamiliar with, and which completely engrossed me) was noticing how I felt as each episode, each disc, came to an end. I was anxious, partly to know what came next, for Dickens was king of the cliffhanger, but equally because of the weird feelings of guilt and desire that started bubbling up inside of me: Was it okay to watch another episode? Wasn't I horribly indulgent to even think about it? Shouldn't I be doing something else, something more useful, or physical?

Again, I had been sick for the better part of a week. I had, nonetheless, worked diligently on Friday, carefully husbanding my resources so that I'd be able to again work diligently on Saturday. I was now smack dab in the middle of a holiday weekend with no other obligations than to show up as a guest at a couple of parties. And I felt anxiety about not-doing.

Which I, drum roll, please, noticed. As in, noticed but (mostly) did not judge. This is a critical thing about noticing, I think, if I'm to get any real use out of it. I have to fully commit to the noticing of whatever I'm feeling in that moment, and the next, and the next, all the way down to the core of the onion, or until it really and truly feels like neutrality of emotion that I'm noticing. Then something else happens, of course, and the cycle repeats itself.

In the past, I had to be slowed or stopped by external forces. It took getting booted from the Groundlings for me to notice what a dreadful vessel for the truth I was turning myself into; it took getting decimated by the Crohn's onset for me to see what the truth really was. If this noticing seems tedious (and embarrassing, both because I'm so bad at it and the things I'm noticing are not particularly noble and fine), it is also far, far gentler on me than having the universe kick me in the head to wake me up.

I was not a regular noter of things, and now I am starting. I was definitely not a regular noticer of things, and now I am starting.

It does not make me wiser or better. It definitely doesn't make me happier, yet, anyway. But it makes me feel, once I move through the anxiety, a little less anxious. It makes me feel a little more secure in myself, a little more grounded.

It makes me think that for now, and for as long as "now" lasts, I am best served not by doing, or at least, not by doing at the expense of noticing. Do, notice. Do, notice.

I guess this is what all you meditators have been talking about all this time. You may have yourselves something there...

xxx
c

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

¹I did watch a couple of episodes the night before. After I finished the last episode of Season 3 of Dexter. What can I say?

On "off"

Thanks to a few systems I've got in place right now, the ongoing Google Wave with Dave project and Hiro's class in keeping your sorry ass from getting sucked into the internet, I've been paying a lot more attention to where I place my attention.

This gets painful in spots, mainly because of my inability to stop just short of judging. On the other hand, it's helped me to notice that noticing alone is useful, whereas judging is not, so there you go: 49 years in and one very long trek around the barn, Colleen finally arrives at the usefulness of meditation she's heard tell of.

For those of us who have difficulty with modulation, "off" is both a tantalizing and terrifying setting. "Off" is restful in that deep, dark way, conking out cold after a long day/week/month of whatever. It is also the antithesis of getting stuff done: the only thing you get done on "off" is nothing.

Only...that's not quite true. Take sleep, for instance. (You might as well; I certainly don't.) In addition to all of the battery-recharging and physiological fortifying that happens while we're sleeping, there are crazy brain things happening, too, quite a lot of them. There is a whole lot of something going on during that nothingness, just of a much quieter, less obvious nature. Because, well, you're asleep.

In the same way, I've started to notice amazing changes both to my body and my outlook since I began practicing Nei Kung just five or so months ago. On the physical side, my posture has improved, my quads are turning into bands of steel and baby most definitely has back she hasn't had since her 20s. I am in better shape than I've been since I was hitting the gym five days a week and paying a trainer to do it with me for three of them, yet all I do now is basically stand in my apartment holding various poses for a half-hour daily.¹

The mental shifts are happening just as slowly, or maybe quickly, although they are even more subtle. That I'm even willing to contemplate mere contemplation, much less do it, is extraordinary. Things still bother me, sure, but neither as much, nor for as long. I am hardly what I'd call a non-selfish bundle of compassionate energy, but I move much more quickly from "me" thinking (taking offense, being hurt, etc) to "other" thinking (giving the benefit of the doubt, or just noticing the "me" that is always in the way). I feel the beginnings of what I can only guess is something like grounding. I've even slowed down to the point where I can handle a short, Chinese-style meditation that my teacher shared with me. And, surprise, surprise, that shit works. So well, I may even try it more often.²

"Off" is not really "off," I'm discovering, but the flip side of "on." There is never nothing; like the white tadpole in the yin-yang taijitu I keep on on my wall, it is an opposing force, quiet and yielding, but no less a force than the other. Not only is "on" not "better" (caution: Western patriarchial cultural bias at work!), in one way, it's just there to make "off" be off. "On" does not exist without "off," and vice versa.

These are all pretty obvious "discoveries." (And I've already used far, far too many quotation marks to cordon things off in one essay.) But this is what is demanded of me if I will make the next discoveries to move myself to the next place, wherever the hell that may be. Because for those of you keeping score, yes, I'm finishing up Month #5 of Self-Imposed Hiatus on top of Year #2 (or #3, depending on how you count it) of figuring out what I want to do with my life. You think you're frustrated? HA.

This year, I am learning about "off." This past weekend, I took two full days of "off." I haven't done that since April of 2009, if you count a cross-country road trip while you're nursing an incipient Crohn's flare "off" (which I did, because I am batshit-crazy), and who-knows-how-long before then. But this weekend, at around 7pm, I just switched my setting to "off": drove up to Ojai, hung out with my friend, Jodi, and her dog, and all of their friends, and did exactly nothing.³

Like all things, this takes practice. One can make it a practice, which I intend to: one day per week, in the "off" position. Will I succeed every week? Doubtful. Possible. Who knows?

But "off," I am on...

xxx
c

Image by snflwrgddss23 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

¹I even get to watch streaming Netflix while I do it. People are blown away when I tell them this, as most Westerners' chief exposure to the non-fighting martial arts is via the moronic b.s. montage ads for prescription medications featuring groups of people in floaty clothes doing graceful tai chi moves as a unit. Which is fine, if that floats yer boat, but entirely unnecessary. Nei Kung is the original "and you can do it all in just 30 minutes a day, while watching television!" exercise. The Chinese are an eminently practical people.

²Lest I inaccurately paint the picture of myself as an even somewhat enlightened being, know that there was a ridiculously obsessive and angry-making episode involving a kitchen faucet last week. That lasted two days. And is still not resolved.

³Of course, I was doing something all the time. Just a different something, and not particularly startling or noble: we ate quite a bit, and drank, caffeine and alcohol, and even nerded out with buddy computer tutorials. But I read almost a whole book, which I can't wait to tell you about, and dawdled and talked and generally had a grand old time.

Poetry Thursday: The damn bathroom

It's disgusting
in there.

So disgusting
I get in and get out,
and have my deflector shields up
the whole time.

So disgusting
I occupy
the smallest amount of space possible
in this smallest place imaginable
and fuzz out the fuzz
and the dirt
and the crud
and the rest of the unmentionable detritus
from even the corners
of my peripheral vision.

So disgusting
I cannot see
how disgusting it is
until company is coming
and I see it through their eyes
and am moved to give
the most convenient surfaces
a quick flick of the sponge
and light a few votives
in the vain hope that their eyesight
is good enough
to do their business
by candlelight.

On this one day, though,
it is not the bathroom
that is disgusting,
it is me.

And I am so disgusting
I can take neither of us
one minute longer,
and attack us both
in a frenzy of Comet
and old kitchen sponges
and elbow grease.

It is disgusting.
And hateful.
And bo-ring.

And it goes on and on
until it kind of
gets interesting.

And it goes on a little further
until it
and I
are not only not disgusting
but actually inspiring.

A crumbling old
mid-century wreck,
patched over in the broken spots,
most definitely the worse for wear,
as far from modern
and sleek
and elegant
as you can imagine,
inspiring.

And the bathroom
ain't bad
either.

xxx
c

This poem was inspired by my friend Gretchen Rubin's 6 tips on dealing with boredom, specifically, #2, which outlined Diane Arbus's method.

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

What's making the most difference now?

Sometimes I stumble on something that works so well at what it's supposed to do, it affects me in an entirely different way than I thought it would.

My mandoline, for example.

I had heard about these magical tools that produced razor-thin slices of food for years before finally deciding, on a whim, to buy one. I can't remember where I came across it, trolling an aisle at Marshall's, most likely, an activity that occasionally turns up amazing, life-changing things for under $100 like a copper-sandwiched All-Clad or a bra that fits. The mandoline was well under $100, under 1/10th of that, as I recall, and an alluring, ruby-red color to boot. I bought it immediately and, after getting it home, just as immediately stuck it in a drawer where for the next 8, 10, 15 months or so, its chief purpose was to annoy me whenever I went in search of a knife or a corkscrew and instead, the stupid thing turned itself sideways and jammed the damned drawer shut.

Stubbornness, hope and two cucumbers saved it from the Goodwill pile. I am trying to stay SCD-legal, and for me, that means finding ways to make ordinary, good-for-me stuff seem more delicious and alluring than, well, the usual delicious and alluring stuff that is poison for me. I looked at the cukes, thought of the mandoline, and somehow, the right synapse fired. Five minutes and several janky moves later, I finally had the rhythm down, and a neat stack of paper-thin cucumber that seemed, well, delicious and alluring.

It can be a mandoline, then, that helps me move forward: a way of slicing the same thing just a little bit more finely. Or it can be writing down my annual goals every morning, every goddamn morning, so that they are there in front of me, quietly reminding me of what it is I really want.

It can be making the bed in the morning while the kettle is on, and reading 40 pages of a book with a cup of tea before I wake up my computer from its night's sleep. It can be creating little check-boxes next to each to-do item of the day; it can be recasting that to-do list as a "will-do" list, and whittling the number of items down each day until it really is.

It can be just deciding to notice, and foregoing, for now, the judging that generally follows.

It can be so many things, big or small. Mostly, for me, though, it is so many things, all small. A thousand-hundred tiny things, one after the other, one by one. Small. Smaller. Smaller still. When your default settings are "full-bore" and "off," it is hard to see what you need to and, much, much more importantly, to feel what is happening to you. With these million-thousand tiny things come the same number of opportunities, and even a white tornado like me can grab one out of a million-thousand.

Besides, this is how change works: a little bit at a time, then all at once.

Not all of the things work. As many, more, even, far more I abandon as quickly as I pick them up. That's okay. There is always another small thing to try: keeping a sink clean, spending just 10 minutes at something, adding a habit, removing a piece of clutter.

What makes the most difference to me now is not one particular thing, but the transforming power of any one thing...

xxx
c

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

Bad habits live in the dark, Part 2

A follow-up post stimulated by a comment on last week's, Bad habits live in the dark.

This is a week of observing.

By which I mean this week, I am turning my attention to what is going on in a given moment, any moment, but particularly (when I can slow myself down enough to catch them) ones where I feel out of the ordinary.

This round of consciousness-raising started with a (gentle) exhortation from Hiro, as part of her wonderful (because of who she is), maddening (because of where I'm at) class on curing Internet Hangover. During our first session, this past Wednesday, we were given some tools for handling some of the intense demands this always-on, always-open portal of energy can make on the unprepared soul.

Even more importantly (to me, anyway), we were instructed to pay attention as we wandered hither and yon to how we were feeling and where we were feeling it. Did a certain site make us feel anxious? Angry? Sad? Excited? Where was the anxiety located: chest? Head? Stomach? Loins?¹ In other words, most of what we're doing at these beginning stages is learning to shine some light on what's happening so we can see it.

Part of what's maddening about this for speed addicts like me is having to slow down to do all this. There's a "Yes, yes, I know" aspect to all of this change business. I know I'm spending too much time in email and on Facebook and trolling my Google Reader for new items. I know I need to get off the Internet and get on with my work. I know I'm stuck. NOW, PLEASE TO BE GIVING ME THE ANSWER PLEASE.

The thing is, there's knowing and there's knowing.

The first knowing is head knowing; people who are good parsers are really good at head knowing. We are also sometimes a bit, shall we say, divorced from the feeling part of knowing, at least, from the feeling that triggers the impulse to reach for more of our soma of choice. Whatever reptilian part of us that is screaming for the safety of more "news," more wine, more candy, more sex, more Battlestar Galactica does that through the vaguest and most inarticulate of asks: "MORE. WANT. NOW." Slowing down to feel the tender hurt and pain is the last thing that lizard is interested in.

When I first started acting, really acting, not the fun but not particularly real horsing around I did in sketch comedy up until then, I cried for two years. A slight exaggeration, but only just very. The Method class I took was an excruciating daily exfoliation of my soul. Hell, it was soul-rolfing. Not what I would characterize as fun or even, most of the time, non-awful. But the results, when one of us was willing to do it, were extraordinary. You would watch in amazement as some perfectly good simulacrum of experience metamorphosed into a holy, super-real transport to another world, via Chekhov and skill, yes, but mainly via the fearlessness of one or two brave souls willing to let go.

In the same way, when I had my breakthroughs in therapy and my hospital bed epiphany, there was a monumental falling-away.² But if I look at them carefully, each was preceded by an excruciating pain point, or, more precisely, a series of them, where I really and truly stared at what was blank in the face. The breakthroughs were awesome, and by that, I mean wonderful, magic and transporting. The moments of examination before? Uh, not so much.

Part of the reason they were so horrible is because of so much ignoring along the way. I was very Scarlett O'Hara about most of my minor annoyances, there was always a day when I would deal with them, but it was always another one. In the meantime, on the shelf or out the window or just brushed away like a pesky mosquito they go. When I look back at myself way back when, or last month, or yesterday, most of the time, I wasn't even conscious of the brushing-away. It becomes reflexive; you don't even have to think about it.

And here we are, back at it, not thinking. Or if thinking, only doing it in that super-spiffy, hyper-efficient, Type-A way: "Oh, yeah, that; it's probably bad. Let's get to that sometime, hey?"

In the comments of the first part of this post, The GirlPie brings up the notion of becoming a good liar. She talks about it in the context of integrity, saying that having a Specter of Wayne would do her no good because she has gotten so proficient at bypassing the truth. I do not know The GirlPie well, but I know her enough to suspect that she has integrity to spare, and that she's equally blessed in the proficiency department. For whatever reasons, a Jewish-Catholic, I'm doubly burdened by guilt, I am a terrible out-loud liar, so that route to bypassing integrity is generally unavailable to me. I am, however, wildly skilled at lying to myself, or rather, at speeding past the truth, ergo I totally get where The GirlPie is coming from.

So here is what I have to say about accountability and integrity and using these magnificent beasts to wrangle the less magnificent (but no less mighty) ones to the ground: sloooooow down. For now, don't even go there, just notice.

Note the feeling you're having, as soon as you can catch it, because that's all you can do, as you eat candy bar #1 or #5 or #25. Just note, at first. Note. Observe, like a scientist. Scientists don't judge, in the lab, anyway; they just note. If you are up for it, maybe write it down privately. Do this as often as you need to until you get bored with it. You will, eventually. Bored or disgusted, and then intrigued. What if I try this next? you might ask at this point. You might. Maybe. And then, when you do, you can find the Specter of Wayne that works for you. Might be a shrink. Might be the courageous decision to speak honestly to the shrink you already have. Might be a 12-step meeting.

For me, for now, The Specter of Wayne works. But let us be clear on this: it works in exactly two areas I've spent enough time looking at and noting and getting bored and disgusted with, and no more.³ There are other areas I have not yet begun to note. Or to become disgusted with. Or hit bottom with, or whatever your notion of "Enough!" is.

My other habits, in their time. Your habits, in yours.

Sharing what we can about grappling with them, or supporting each other in the pursuit of excellence?

That, all the time...

xxx
c

¹And before you make any assumptions about Hiro's fan base being into the pr0n sitez, know that feelings can manifest themselves in craaazy areas. It's a chakra thing, apparently, and those lower chakras are all about basic survival needs, safety included.

²And the one in the hospital? Let's just say if I could bottle that shit, the world would be a very different place.

³You'll note (haha) that I've discussed the SCD illegals cheat that Wayne is helping me with but not the other. That's because it's private. I may or may not ever discuss it here. Doesn't matter. I discuss here what I've got enough distance from to talk about in a way that might be useful to someone besides myself, and what does not affect my privacy or the privacy of others. You don't have to be public about everything. You don't have to be public about much of anything, when you get right down to it.

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

Poetry Thursday: Hustle

It takes over
when you want something,
like a sleeper Cylon switch
tripped on some remote mother ship:

one day
you're sitting on the couch
eating Fritos
watching the Wheel;
the next
you're an unstoppable force
in a series of headlong collisions
with a never-ending stream
of immovable objects.

God help you.

You can
of course
avoid this
if you like.

The racing of your heart
and the ringing in your ears
and the rumble in your belly--
they all go away
eventually
or at least
you can pretend they do.

But a word of advice
if you would not awaken:

Stay away from New York in the spring
and Paris in the fall
and Rome, anytime.

Stay away from the suburbs of Dallas
and the swamps off the Gulf
and the hills of Kentucky
and anywhere else
there are people
or buildings
or neither
or both.

Quit going to plays
and museums
and ballparks
and beaches,
especially the ones next to oceans,
and absolutely stop watching anything played
at a professional
or amateur level.

You should also probably forget
about thinking and writing,
and dreaming (day or night),
and give up yoga and running
and fighting and screwing
and even being celibate for any length of time.

This one particular French cookie
I read about?
Kind of spongy? Shaped like a shell?
Avoid it like the plague.

Speaking of reading,
give that up entirely,
along with talking
or listening
or even eating anything
besides maybe Fritos
and something to dip them in
while you watch the Wheel.

Oh. And if you ever decide
to play hooky
from your hateful day job,
and skip out on a client dinner
for a falafel sandwich on your own,
do yourself a favor:
stay out of this one particular
cinema in Westwood.

I'm pretty sure
that firetrap
they call "Theater 2"
is a Cylon base
riddled with
hidden switches.
Because 25 years later,
I still cannot remember the movie I saw
but I know that I haven't slept
a wink since.

xxx
c

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

Mastering the art of surrender

While searching for a particular Merlin sound bite on scaring yourself into stuff that I wanted to grab for my most recent newsletter¹, I stumbled on this transcription of a different equally wonderful interview that Colin Marshall did with him.

There is such incredibly rich goodness in it, great, smart things we all know about how important it is to hoe your own row and be clear on what it is you want, but that we forget (again) until we're reminded by someone whose cleverness is tinged with just the right amount of earnestness (or is it the other way around?). But the thing that got to me today was the part about how this quest is, at times (and for great long stretches of time), a lonely and expensive slog:

People who are like, "I wanted to be a doctor since I was five" or, "I always wanted to be a lawyer." I have a lot of friends who became lawyers and hated it. There's no reason to think that your own career in the arts or personal publishing is any different. Make sure it's what you want to do. Make sure that you really have a lot to say about something, and that you have a giant amount of tolerance for, first of all, making no money , for it actually costing money for a while. If you want to do this stuff right, you're going to have to hire lawyers and stuff. And it's costly. It seems free because you can get a free blogger account, but ask anybody who's trying to make this scale, and it takes dough.² [italics mine]

I have no mouths to feed and incredibly low overhead (for Los Angeles, anyway). Between my own nervous squirreling away during the fat times and smart investments and even smarter not-investments and a bit of a legacy from my dad's passing and, yes, the occasional gig I take even though I'm technically not for hire these days, I am good. Nay, better than good, I am in the most luxurious position I could be without being kept by someone or having what my friend Peter calls "Mailbox Money," that stuff that makes working actors do a whoopee jig every time it shows up. And still, I am terrified about money most of the time.

Lately, I've run into an unusual number of people who are on the prowl for their Next Big Thing. I smiled knowingly at one person who's currently suffering through Year One and had a moment of internal nervous recognition upon hearing another bemoan his rounding up on Year Three.

How long can it take to find your Next Big Thing? As long as it takes. Or whatever the answer is to that other one about one hand clapping.

What has been helping me through the crazy of late are the eminently sensible words of my first-shrink-slash-astrologer spoke to me recently: "Master the art of surrender."

It is a message she's served up to me many times over the years, in and outside of readings. Because I have a very particular, one might even say "controlling", idea of how things should go and what I need. And who's to say it's all true? Am I such a genius that at 22, I foresaw future happiness in a life without children, without corporate prestige, without a primary relationship, and in a city every elder I ever respected had nothing but scorn for? No. Not even close. I didn't even know I liked dogs for another 25 years, that's how much I knew.

This, or something better. Hold a good thought, definitely have goals and intentions, but stay open to the awesome. Master the art of surrender. Live in the goddamn moment for a change, and for the best kind of change.

Because really, what do you know? And when did you know it for sure?

So I work on my tolerance for chaos and ambiguity. I see myself getting mad, but I sit in it a little less each time, and frankly, that I'm even noticing I'm angry is a gargantuan improvement. I have good days and I have bad days. But these days, even the bad days I'm starting to recognize as good days, because they are DAYS, baby.

They are DAYS...

xxx
c

¹Subscribing is strictly optional, but if you like it here, you might want to subscribe to stuff I write about there. It's a little more polished and a little more obviously useful. You can see for yourself by visiting the archives. Which, I'll apologize for up front, are loading insanely slowly. The only downside of my move to Thesis.

²And then, when you thought it couldn't get any worse, there is this:

It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of self-awareness to be open to the fact that you may become popular about something that you didn't want to become popular about. At a certain point, you don't get to pick that anymore.

Christ on a bike. What is the one thing more terrifying than working at something you're making virtually no money at? The prospect of all that work paying off in a way you don't even want. Finding that either you've propped the ladder up the wrong wall or someone moved it to another one while you were climbing. Yeesh!

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

Bad habits live in the dark

While I have been chugging away at certain goals, book-reading and Nei Kung-doing, especially, I've been lagging embarrassingly behind on others.

One of the most embarrassing failures has been my inability to resume my dedication to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. For a regimen that not only turned my health around seven years ago but also managed to get me down to a negligible amount of medication, I'm amazingly dismissive of it. I'm not just talking the occasional cheat: there are oceans of Rolos between me and my former healthy self; vast chasms you could fill with Pizza Hut Thin-and-Crispy Veggie-Lovers Supreme. I would think nothing of driving through the Jack-in-the-Box window for their revoltingly delicious, deliciously revolting 2-for-99¢ tacos, of tossing a bag of Jelly Bellies, or M&Ms, or Marshmallow Peeps, in season, into my basket on the way out of Vons or the Rite-Aid.

Literally. I would not think. This has made transgressions surprisingly friction-free, but has gotten me further and further from feeling like it's possible to be on SCD at all.¹ And you know, I can't count on there being prednisone and other immunosuppressants after the apocalypse, so it behooves me to get off the junk well in advance and give my poor intestines a chance to sturdy up.

Fortunately, I seem to have stumbled on a solution that costs nothing, is easy to implement and that, thus far, has stopped all fast-food cheats dead in their tracks: the Specter of Wayne.

Wayne is a good friend and an even more exacting external conscience. A fellow ACoA with bigger balls than I, he simply has no tolerance for moral ambiguity. Like the SCD, you either are or are not with Wayne; he won't argue with your choices unless you want him to, but there is no lipsticking of the pig with Wayne. It is broccoli, and he says the hell with it.

Which is how, after he gently brought up a very embarrassing lapse in, uh, judgment I was making over and over again, we ended up with the brilliant fix of me contacting him before succumbing. I could succumb after that, but I had to let him know first. If you are an addict or someone who loves one, you may recognize this as sponsor-like behavior, which it is, with one significant exception: it would not be Wayne's job to talk me out of my indiscretion, just to bear witness to the possibility of it.

Well. The genius of this was immediately evident. I am ruled by shame and fear (yeah, yeah, I know); Wayne is an inflexible arbiter of right and wrong. There was no fucking way I was going to cave if it meant letting Wayne know. The mere idea of it was enough to stop me when I was on the brink. Hence, the Spector of Wayne!

At last week's Success Team, my little weekly gathering of like-minded self-improvers, I reported that the Specter of Wayne had worked so well in curing me of my previous bad habit that I wanted to apply it to another: the getting of me back onto SCD. We would go slowly, just junk/fast-food, for starters, and fuzzy borders, at that. I went to a wine-tasting event on Friday night with the full intention of enjoying whatever delicious illegals they laid out next to the Malbec and sangria. Hell, even the sangria was illegal. But these were fine-quality baked goods and chocolates, not thank-you-drive-through abominations.

Eventually, I will banish even those, of this I am sure. Partly because with each thing I say "no" to, I grow a little stronger and more confident. I live a little more in the light of truth, and believe a little more deeply in the power of focusing on that which is best for me.

But I also retain a healthy respect for the Specter of Wayne. Whatever it takes to get there from here...

xxx
c

¹The SCD is a binary proposition: you're either on it 100% or you're not on it. And, in my experience and that of many thousands who have gone before me, one requires fanatical adherence for a while before one can feel safe letting illegals creep in here and there. If ever.

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

Poetry Thursday: Los Angeles, dammit

You could be sad
somewhere else, maybe,
but here?
Surrounded by darkened mountains
dotted with the fairy lights
of a thousand houses on stilts?
Flying through the night
on doo-wop and dinosaur bones,
windows down,
spring-into-early-summer air
whipping your pigtails
into whirligig frenzy?
Here? In this temporarily
frozen slice of endless possibility
tinged with pleasure?

Not here.

You come for a stretch, I know,
a season of pilots,
a trip down to Disneyland
and back up to Yosemite,
a trek to the beach
to watch the freaks,
a spin up to the aeries,
or down into the valleys,
to gawk at the stars.

And
if you never find
yourself behind the wheel
at night,
rolling down the 405,
up the 2,
around the curve
that gives you a 360 view
of crappy Los Angeles,
whipping it into
a froth of wonder
so goddamn majestic
your heart could break
if it didn't swell properly,
if you never do that,
well, then, friend,
back to the East,
or the Lakes,
or whatever Great-White-North
baked-desert-rock
Old-World-wise
side of the planet
you may return.

But if you would
wish yourself back,
stay off that freeway
after hours,
when the magic is strong
and the sirens' song, true,
or L.A.
will make you her bitch.

xxx
c

Image by jondoeforty1 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Connecting to and communicating with passion (my talk at TEDxTacoma)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnALY0ZW1s4&w=480&h=385]

Apparently, the only thing that terrifies me more than giving a talk at TEDxTacoma about passion-based communicating is watching myself give a talk about it.

Still, I felt is was important to put on my Big-Girl Pants and watch it. The whole thing, slightly less than 18 minutes, because I got a little nervous and forgot some stuff.

My objective (as possible) critique? Not as horrible as I'd thought it would be, even good in places! I think the main points come across, and I think there's valuable information in there for anyone starting out on the road to putting out the word about what moves them. I forget sometimes, but it really is confounding, having all that energy and no funnel to put it through; the discipline of acting has a lot of valuable information for building your funnel and practicing the use of it.

Also? MY MOUTH WAS SO DRY. I'd forgotten until I watched this again, but I was sort of freaking out on stage because I could feel my mouth drying, drying, drying up. That's what all that weird, old-people-tongue-moving stuff is about: trying to keep my lips from sticking to my teeth. I know: disgusting. But there it is. A technical reality of speaking, especially early in the morning after you have had not enough water and too much caffeine. Gonna have to work on that.

Finally, the sound is iffy in places. I'm talking into a headset mic, but the audio seems to be coming from the ambient me, not the mic'ed me. And we're in a chapel, so it gets a little boom-y and I come off (much to my embarrassment) a little preachy. Maybe that's a function of the chapel's acoustics, but I think there's a bit of me to blame, too, in that. So. You know. Working on that, too.

It's a process, right?

xxx
c

Video of me speaking at TEDxTacoma shot by my new pal, and dead ringer for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, only the goofy, fun version, Kyle Sleeper, one of the fine students of the amazing Michelle Jones at Puget Sound University University of Puget Sound who helped get this shindig birthed. You can watch all the videos of the talks from TEDxTacoma on YouTube, including my fave "talk" of the day, the performance of the a capella group, Garden Level. Love them boyses who raise their voices, yes, I do!

Thanks, Michelle! Thanks, Kyle and all you crazy kidz! Thanks, UPS! Thanks, TEDxTacoma!

Poetry Thursday: Right here, right now

And now
that time has passed
and this one is here

And this
and this

So? How did it go?

Did you live every minute?
Or did you let a few skitter past
on small wheels of worry
without squeezing out
the last, juicy bits?

What about this quiet hour?
This hazy afternoon?
This sinkful of dishes,
this quick pee,
this run to the mailbox,
this trip to the 7-11
for eggs
and M&Ms?

Did you live those, too?
Did you live every bit of them?

Some day,
if we are very, very lucky,
we will look back
from rockers on porches,
from benches on seasides,
from beds on wheels,
from our own two rickety feet
at those nothing moments
with such wistfulness
and fury
it would stop those young people
scooting around on their thought-cycles
dead in their tracks.

Never wish a moment
past the next one.

Never a better place to be
than this very one.

Never a guarantee
of any other one

after this one...

xxx
c

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

The upside of love, the downside of focused practice

If you put to me the question of how TEDxTacoma went, I would easily and enthusiastically reply with a resounding, "FANTASTICALLY!"

Putting aside how seamless the whole travel experience was (a subject worth exploring in a future post), as well as how much I always enjoy being in the Pacific Northwest (and how my delicate moods affect my enjoyment of things is another thing worth exploring, in more than a post), it was like being on a steady drip of love and inspiration, two things I am always willing to mainline.

The students at Puget Sound University ("PSU" in their parlance) who coordinated, produced and participated in the event, swept me off my feet. I'd forgotten how uplifting it is to spend time around great bunches of young people, period, but I'd perhaps never experienced as an adult what it's like to be around a group of smart, loving, enthusiastic and focused young people like this: so much energy funneled into changing the world for the better, it's positively overwhelming in every sense of the phrase. BIG fun.

And Michelle Jones, the professor who went to TEDIndia last November and brought back with her the fire to create a TEDx conference here, this April, yes, less than four months later, as schools break for the holidays, is my new, real-life hero. Like the best heroes, she shrugs off the title, she's too busy doing stuff to piffle about with nonsense like that. But she's no humorless zealot, either: every moment around Professor Jones¹ is illuminating because, I think, she is pure light; I believe her when she says (which she did, after much getting to know her and prodding) that every single day of her life is as filled with joy and energy as that day we all spent basking in talks, songs, dances and conversations about passion. (Albeit, you know, slightly less epic in scale.)

If, on the other hand, you ask me how I did, I would say, fine.

The room was (mostly) with me, the feedback was good, and my opening talk did what I think it was slotted, and designed, to do: start the day off with a bang. If there is one thing I am rarely accused of, it is of being low-energy. I pulled out all the stops for my 18-minute talk on "connecting to and communicating with passion," and let the energy flow. I managed to use my talk as a real-time demo of my thesis, which is that when offering oneself up as a conduit for passion, one's job is to spend the bulk of one's time preparing, then get the hell out of the way. At some point, the videos of all the talks will be uploaded to the YouTube channel, and we'll see if it comes across in recorded form. But right there, right then? It worked. That part, anyway.

What could have been better? The list is, if not endless, significant in length. The stories could have been tighter. The transitions could have been smoother. I was Gene Kelly, in other words, when what I am aiming for in all my work is to be Fred Astaire: I made it look sweaty, not easy; the seams were showing.

It's an odd thing, how one behaves towards oneself once one has committed to achieving a certain level of mastery. I find myself dreading the debriefings because of the inevitable well-meaning (and very useful, in their time and place) Mister Rogers' like reactions to my self-critiques: "You did great, I'm sure!" and "Don't beat yourself up like that!" and "You need to really acknowledge what you've accomplished!" Make no mistake: I know what I've accomplished. I gave up a career I could explain to people, that paid me well, that had prestige and significance in the mainstream world. Then I gave up another one. I gave up hours and hours (and hours and hours) to focused practice. Even more to unfocused wandering, which for me, was far more difficult. I know what I have sacrificed to get here, and I know exactly how good I am. And for a variety of reasons, most of which were within my control, all of which are terrifically clear and obvious in hindsight, I gave a B-/C+ performance on Saturday. Not compared to the other speakers; compared to what I am dead sure my capabilities were going in.²

And this is how we grow: not by celebrating every single solitary thing we do as a work of genius, but by honoring each effort by building on it to do the next thing. Is it okay to pause and enjoy our lovely victories now and then? Yes. Of course. Why not? Is it okay to applaud effort, and acknowledge that we are in there fighting, grappling with the Ugly, doing the work, even if the results are sometimes inelegant? Sure. Here and there, anyway.

I did my job as best I could given the circumstances. More importantly, I know more about what I need to do more of (and less of) next time.

Most importantly of all, though, the joy of the day was not dimmed by my non 9.9 performance. I acknowledged the blow I inflicted on my own ego and kept it in its place.

That may not be a critical component to becoming the consummate professional, but it's integral to becoming a compassionate human being...

xxx
c

¹Which she never, ever refers to herself as, by the way, this capable young lady with multiple advanced degrees. I just went through all of our correspondence around the event and not once, NOT ONCE, was there an auto-sig with a string of alphabet soup after her name. Nor an exhortation to save the goddamn planet by thinking before printing out an email. And she's moving into a tiny house, not rearranging deck chairs in the Container Store like the rest of us plastic-"recycling", email-sig-planet-saving poseurs.

²I did also, of course, compare myself to the other speakers as well on wide range of specific (to me) metrics, this is one huge way I've learned what works for me with my own public speaking. But it would serve nothing to share my analysis here, so I won't. I will say that I was profoundly moved by all of the talks in one way or another, and that never happens. Never. Not even at Ignite. This TED was truly an amazing experience.

A non-spectacular shot of the fantastically fun a cappella group, Garden Level, singing at TEDxTacoma, used under a Creative Commons license.