Sweat the small stuff

Can you please not drive that way?
How many times in a day must I hear these complaints, unnecessary instructions or umpteen now-too-familiar descriptions of how you feel about sweets?

My voice stumbles over unexpected tears when I explain these annoyances and just like that, it is my mother's tone, the one my brother and I commiserate about when we hear it.

Is it really so hard for you to change? Can't you do this one little thing to make me happy? I hate the person I'm becoming with you.

After the words are spent and their anger quieted, their echoes splash back in my mind. Is it really so hard for me to change? I ask you to control the person you are, and yet I behave as though I have no choice in who I am, how I respond.

If you love

If you love something, set it free.

I've been hearing that cliche for more than 30 years. Last night -- for the first time -- I realized it applies just as much to loving oneself as it does to another. Imagine the possibilities, if only we could find enough self-love to set ourselves free -- of expectation, anxiety, insecurity, fear -- of all the things that hold us back. And from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

"When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness."

This joyful noise

On my mind today after an oddly hurtful exchange about how much my words are worth. Let me not forget why I write.   

A wise old gentleman retired and purchased a modest home near a junior high school. He spent the first few weeks of his retirement in peace and contentment.

Then a new school year began.

The very next afternoon three young boys, full of youthful, after-school enthusiasm, came down his street, beating merrily on every trash can they encountered. The crashing percussion continued day after day, until finally the wise old man decided it was time to take some action.

The next afternoon, he walked out to meet the young percussionists as they banged their way down the street.

Stopping them, he said, "You kids are a lot of fun. I like to see you express your exuberance like that. In fact, I used to do the same thing when I was your age. Will you do me a favor? I'll give you each a dollar if you'll promise to come around every day and do your thing."

The kids were elated and continued to do a bang-up job on the trashcans.

After a few days, the old-timer greeted the kids again, but this time he had a sad smile on his face. "This recession's really putting a big dent in my income," he told them. "From now on, I'll only be able to pay you 50 cents to beat on the cans."

The noisemakers were obviously displeased, but they accepted his offer and continued their afternoon ruckus.

A few days later, the wily retiree approached them again as they drummed their way down the street.

"Look," he said, "I haven't received my Social Security check yet, so I'm not going to be able to give you more than 25 cents. Will that be okay?"

"A freakin' quarter?" the drum leader exclaimed. "If you think we're going to waste our time, beating these cans around for a quarter, you're nuts! No way, dude. We quit!" And the old man enjoyed peace and serenity for the rest of his days.

The courage to read

My mother indulged me in the strangest ways. Through most of middle school, there were times when I'd skip a day of school -- claiming to be sick -- and instead go to the school where my mother taught. I'd hang out in the library all day and inhale stories. Some were familiar old ones, others were new. Looking back I wonder what the librarian made of it, how and why I was allowed to do this two or three times each year. No one censored my reading. I could borrow as much delicious fiction as I wanted; at my own school, students were only allowed one story and one textbook each week.

Stacks of books are still my comfort spots. In my twenties, big decisions -- college applications, graduate school woes, friend troubles -- always led me back to bookstores. Alone in the US, I'd drive to Barnes and Noble late in the evenings just to reconnect. Run my fingers over the spines, like touching the fingertips of old friends. Open a book, any book, and the familiarity of print was enough to comfort. I'd find the quietest row, lean back against the books and surround myself with stacks of stories. My makeshift fort of fiction was where I remembered how to be strong and safe and sure.

It's been years since I've been able to take a day off from the world just to read. A day when food appears, clothes are washed, chores can wait, and all that lies before me is the open road to a story world. It's gotten worse lately. Ask me my hobbies and reading tops the list. But ask what I've read lately, what I'm reading now, and the answers slip back to what I read months or a year or two ago.

In part, this is the narrowing that comes with age: there are fewer authors I will tolerate, less genres I'm likely to crack open. But it's made me worry. How could the people I was -- the child who ran to libraries for comfort, a woman who drove through snowstorms just to be with a bunch of books -- turn into someone who can't remember the last good thing she read?

Here's a secret: there's a book I'm halfway through that I love, the sort of love that makes me want to fall through the pages and live in this writer's mind forever. There's another one I just began that's brought wonder back to the world -- I will never look at the fingers on my own hand the same way again. But I haven't finished these. I don't even know where I put the first one. The other sits on my nightstand. Instead I'm racing through trashy romances, the kind with bad writing and pathetic characters that leave me feeling cheap afterward. Almost as if I'd rather indulge in one-night stands (and that's all it takes to get through these) than commit to an actual book.

And here's the real secret: I'm afraid to finish the good books. I'm scared to fall too deeply into story worlds, to lean too far back against their strength, simply because one problem that I struggled with isn't one I could solve or hide from by climbing into my story fort.

Reading -- the kind that leaves mind and heart sated for a while -- is I think an act of courage.
The stories I read gave me permission to be not just myself, but all of my selves. Introverted, confused, tall, plump -- whatever the adjective, there was always a story to tell me it would be okay. Books are doors into other worlds, but they were also a window into my own life. Crack one open, and I could climb back in and walk through my world on another road, one not accessible without the book-window. Allowing myself to simply read, to walk away through wardrobes, fly through a stranger's apricot tree, or hurtle through space with a robot for company, is an act of trust in the writer and myself. That if I take a day to lean into walls that turn into doors and be swept up in a story, tomorrow will be brighter -- there will be a different light, a new way through.

All readers have a book alter ego, I think. Mine was a headstrong girl who wanted to be a writer and blundered her way through life with little care for propriety. Her only real beauty was her hair. When mine started to fall out in clumps this year, I've wondered as I clean my pillowcase each morning: What would Jo do? (Yes, I turned to a fictional character from the last century for hair care advice). It took me months to remember the answer: She'd take a day off, settle into the garret with some apples, and read her worries away.

A little unstuck

For years I complained that he didn't understand. He didn't see my troubles or concerns, only called to share his own. I'm so tired of this, I told my mother. Why does he treat me like I have no feelings?

I tried, now and then, to shove my way out of the box of opinions I was stuck in. This relationship with hard sides of labels like stubborn, carefree, impetuous, incapable of understanding life's seriousness because I always get my way. This isn't me, I screamed from the inside. Look at this! Listen! Understand!

I've tried for years. Because it's hard to breathe in this space. Cuts and scars need air to heal, fears need to be let out not bounced back, and enabling all these things, I said, is an act of love.* If you don't see the broken-hurting-scared me, you don't love. Because how can you love without understanding?

I asked again today. Why don't you ask about my worries? "Because we've never talked about them," he said. "You were always good at what you do, the perfect student even in school." And so we returned to his stories, the struggles then and now.

Today, I finally heard what I'd missed all this while. Sure, it's a box. The air's stale in here, even a little cold and unfeeling. But somewhere inside, there's a perfect little version of my world where nothing bad ever happens and I always get what I want. And in this messy, scary, beautiful life, maybe I can learn to live with that.




*I still believe that's true. Maybe it's not the only.

Hear today

I stumbled across a blog post a few days ago, titled: "Everything doesn't happen for a reason."

It's a sentiment I'd have disagreed with in the past: Just because we can't see a reason doesn't mean one doesn't exist, right? A bit like this lovely Carl Sagan quote: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Some things happen for a reason, of course. Exams go well when you study hard, races are easier when you've trained for them, well-laid plans usually lead to events that run smoothly. But not everything adds up quite as simply, or perhaps there's some celestial math I haven't learnt yet.

Patterns are soothing. Like hope and lessons from the past, they're the promise of a better return, a brighter future, a more definite outcome. It's why we seek them out, I guess. And yet, every spiritual guide reminds us to stop expectation and past emotion to live in the moment. Perhaps abandoning dreams and memory are about making room to be present -- not letting go of tomorrow, but a choice, instead, to hear today.

(Time) out of time

I'd rather forget last year. I'd rather believe this new year wasn't. When crystal fragments carve 

blood-bright memories into mind's flesh, why count the passing of twelve months? 

This month last year I held a knife to my wrists on my kitchen floor.

And there was a day when the sun crept up through my skin as I sat on a fallen wall and looked over a once-lost city on a mountain. Lost things, even mundane bricks, are more precious when found again. Do not sit on the Inca walls, the sign says, though I imagine these walls have heard so many children sit and whisper of wishes and fun.  

There was another week - several others - when I cried until I laughed at the insanity of optimism. Months when I thought it would be easier, smarter, more productive to slip into darkness than cling to some imagined future light. The line between depression and madness seemed marked in hope. 

There was a week when I walked foreign streets and laughed with the man I fell in love with. 

There was work I loved, and people I loved doing it with. 

I dreamed of death, more than once. 

There were fractions of peace and joy that glitter sharp-edged in the mess. Soft cocoons of connection. 

When the year tipped over one into the next, a dream I'd held was lost forever.

I clutch them all close, these shards of time, and still they fly free of a calendar's confines. It was a year. This is another. 

Last year I let go of hope. I let go of demanding prayer. And when I let expectations of success go, I left behind also the interrogation of failure.

I couldn't tell you if the optimism died when I let go, or if I let go because it was already gone. Perhaps orphaned hope is found in other dreams, like imagined whispers in the dark. In a parallel world, perhaps a woman stands surefooted on the sun-warmed bedrock I abandoned. Perhaps it is more cherished in its rediscovery, like miracle stones from a different time. 

Perhaps time can heal, but not in the way the years click one into the other. The seam between one year and the next is only a second. But each is broken into far more permanent bits already. So I count time instead in these fragmented essays of emotion.  

One year ends, another begins. Life rips across the imagined lines of time. I let go of my own hopes last year And I felt the warmth of a city that was a lost people's last prayer. Everything lost is found again. Perhaps there will be other magics, other footholds, on the shores of a time yet to come.