books

The Happy Hour Effect

I am delighted to be participating in a blog tour to celebrate the release of Kristen Brown’s book, The Happy Hour Effect: 12 Secrets to Minimize Stress and Maximize Life.  Kristen, an author, entrepreneur, certified health coach, mother, and widow, has written an practical guide to reducing stress and increasing joy.  Her book includes actionable steps, inspirational quotes, expert interviews, and anecdotes which together provide an appealing and specific approach to change our lives now.

We are hurtling headlong into a season that many find taxing and overwhelming.  Last year a dear friend asked me for advice on how to reduce what felt like immense mayhem and pressure around the holidays.  Though I have made changes in my own life to try to protect this season as one of peace and reflection, the truth is I was at a loss for what to say.  Thankfully Kristen has written a short piece with 10 instant holiday stress busters.  I am happy to share this pragmatic advice here.

10 Instant Holiday Stress Busters

The holiday season is upon us and with it comes gift-giving, entertaining, parties, kids’ events, travel and weather issues, emotional overload and many other stressors that can overload us. As a widow mom, entrepreneur, writer and speaker on all things work/life harmony and stress management-related, I have pulled together 10 of the most simple, effective ways to reduce the symptoms of holiday stress (or everyday stress). Each one takes just seconds to do and they have been scientifically-proven to help our bodies and minds function more effectively! In moments you will feel less anxiety and more balance with some nice health benefits as a bonus. Check out the list and try each one when holiday craziness overcomes you.

  1. Breathe deeply.
  2. Spend time with your kids.
  3. Do something nice for someone else.
  4. Sip green tea and grab a healthy snack.
  5. Take a walk or run.
  6. Take a nap.
  7. Play with your pet.
  8. Meditate.
  9. Hug someone.
  10.  Let it go and walk away.

Another tip that deserves its own mention is to put yourself in others’ shoes. Would you rather receive a gift card or a gift you don’t want no matter how thoughtful? Would you rather enjoy a laid back holiday party or a super-formal gathering? Do you prefer simple, traditional decorations or over-the-top glitz? Do you want your kids to value human connection and the spirit of the holidays or to learn self-indulgent materialism and over-the-top spending? Once you realize that your stress may be caused by over-complicating something that should be about peace, joy and love, you and your loved ones will be much happier and healthier too!

Kristen K. Brown is a bestselling and award-winning author, widow mom, speaker and founder of Happy Hour Effect. Check out her books “The Best Worst Thing” and “The Happy Hour Effect: 12 Secrets to Minimize Stress and Maximize Life” at www.HappyHourEffect.com.

Teach Your Children

I loved this book, and I’m happy to offer a giveaway copy of it.  I hope you will read my thoughts and then leave a comment – I will choose a winner on Sunday night.

As I read Madeline Levine’s Teach Your Children Well I kept hearing Sweet Honey in the Rock in my head.  Over and over again I heard them singing the famous Khalil Gibran words: “your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”  I gasped with surprise – and, well, with not-at-all surprise – when Levine quoted the first line of this famous passage towards the end of her book.

More than once Levine’s thoughtful, articulate book moved me to tears.  Tears because I often feel overwhelmed by the task of mothering Grace and Whit in this world, because I feel dismayed at the immense pressures on them and at my role in these, because I want so desperately to do right by them.  I have never read a book about parenting that felt more resonant and more in tune with my essential beliefs about raising children than Teach Your Children Well.

Levine’s central theme is that raising our children to become well-adjusted adults in tune with what truly makes them happy is becoming harder and harder in a world whose definition of success grows ever narrower.  She discusses important aspects of childhood whose precipitous decline has dramatic impact on the well-being of our children: outdoor play, unstructured time, being allowed to fail, the opportunity to try a wide range of activities and sports.  All of these are focuses of mine, things I fight to protect in Grace and Whit’s lives, and more often than I wish places I feel judged and out of sync with the world around me.

The book’s points that I found most moving and also most unnerving were about resilience.  I agree fiercely that resilient children are most likely to grow into content and robustly mature adults.  But I also recognize that resilience is no great strength of mine.  This dissonance strikes fear deep in my mothering self: how can I help my children develop a trait I myself don’t have?

“If there’s a heartbeat to this book, it’s about the value of self-reflection,” Levine writes in her book’s concluding chapter.  I nodded as I read this and tears sprang to my eyes, because this single sentence deeply confirms a long-standing belief of mine.  That belief is that we can probably distill the central task of parenting – and of life – into this: learning to listen.  To ourselves, to our children, to the world around us.

Teach Your Children Well discusses these three kinds of listening and reflection.  Levine challenged me to think long and hard about what I value most, as an individual and a family.  Her chapter called Editing the Script reminds us that we have the power to make choices about what kind of parents we want to be (we are not, for example, destined to be the parents we had).

Levine also posits that witnessing our children in all their manifold and multicolored facets is a difficult but possible act as well as one with enormous power. She says many children feel talked “to” by their parents, and reminds us that “you do not build your connection to your child through verbiage.”  You do that through listening, and through hearing.  This is how you understand their internal landscape, how you build empathy, and how you allow your child to feel known.  This profound empathic connection with our children puts us in a position to help protect our children from the deafening clamor of a society so focused on achievement that it threatens to obscure their ability to hear their own internal voice

Finally, Levine urges her reader – and all parents – to think long and hard about the assumptions that are deeply embedded in our society and to be proactive about changing the established norms that we do not believe serve our families.  This needs to be more than just reflection, she asserts: “We are at a tipping point.  Either we will continue to show a lack of courage, or we will become proactive and decide that our children deserve a reasonable childhood, schools focused on the joy of learning, empathic parents, and protection from the excesses of a culture defined by materialism.”  All parents need to both reflect on the environment in which their children are growing up and, in many cases, act to change it.

I believe all parents, and all people interested in the well-being of our young people, should read Teach Your Children Well.  I am delighted to offer a giveaway copy of this wonderful and important book.  Please comment here and I will draw a winner early next week.

Harper Collins provided me with a review copy of Teach Your Children Well.

Questions and answers

A couple of people who commented on my Six Year post asked about what I am reading, both in terms of books and blogs.

Books is the easier answer.  I am currently reading Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine.  I recently ready Amy Sohn’s Motherland and re-read Operating Instructions by the incomparable Anne Lamott.  Next up is Lee Woodruff’s Those We Love Most.  After that, my list includes Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, Molly Ringwald’s When it Happens to You, Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home, and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club.

Blogs.  I read a lot of blogs.  There are some I read in full every single time they write something, others that I tend to skim.  It’s hard to pick my favorites, and even trying to list the ones I read makes me nervous because I know I’ll forget someone.  Some of my favorite blogs are dormant right now, so I don’t list them. But here is a partial list of people whose blogs read most devotedly: Katrina Kenison, Jena Strong, Amanda Magee, Denise Ullem, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, Pamela Hunt Cloyd, Meredith Winn.  There are so many more!  There are over 100 blogs in my Google Reader, and I check that several times a day.

I read blogs in other categories, too.  I read several style blogs religiously, a handful of cooking blogs, and a couple of hilarious commentary-on-celebrity blogs.  I read a lot of what Lisa Belkin shares on Parentry at the Huffington Post and many pieces on Literary Mama.

For years I joked that you could tell a lot about someone from the magazines they read.  After all, I have such a varied magazine list that a stranger on a plane once commented on it.  I think that the same is true of someone’s Google Reader.  What they value, what they love, what interests them: these are all apparent from what is contained in their Reader list.

If that’s so, I think my Google Reader selections demonstrate someone who cares passionately about excellent writing, who thinks often and hard about parenting, who likes clothes and fashion and Hollywood news, and wishes she cooked more often and more successfully than she currently does.

What do you read?  Books, blogs, magazines?  What do your selections say about you?

The Age of Miracles

The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, is one of the most beautiful and thought-provoking books I have read in a long, long time.  I read it on one of our flights to California this summer, and the story has echoed in my head ever since.  On one hand, it explores a scary what-if scenario and serves as a powerful reminder of the risks of not paying careful attention to the planet on which we live.  It is also, though, a call to realize that no matter what, everything is always changing.

The Age of Miracles is an elegy, as one of the blurbs on the back of the book said (elegy is one of my favorite words).  It is suffused with loss and haunted by both the memory of how things used to be and by the guilt that we failed to appreciate them.  The transition the book traces is dramatic, of course, but doesn’t it stand in, in a way, for the smaller but no less real changes we all face every day?  On every page, as the charming tween protagonist of the book describes the tectonic shifts occuring in her world, I thought about my life’s relatively tiny but relentless transitions.  It reminded me, over and over again, that even as I lean into a moment, smell the little boy smell of my sleeping son or admire the golden, maple syrup light of a July evening, it is gone.

The Age of Miracles made me think, more than anything, of all the ways we humans strive to impose structure on this chaotic, marvelous, seemingly random life of ours, of all the ways we seek to order and understand the universe’s terrifyingly fluidity.  Isn’t the 24 hour clock, after all, simply a framework imposed on time in order that we may feel some modicum of control over it?

In lucid, lovely language Walker points out how surely the universe is indifferent to these attempts at control.   The world spins on and on with a mute inexorability that is at once the most violent and the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.  The Age of Miracles plumbs the space between this violence and this beauty and left me, at least, moved and stunned.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

 

Don’t Miss This

I have been a huge Jena Strong fan for a very long time, and I was delighted when I heard that she was releasing a book of poems, Don’t Miss This.  I ordered it immediately.  I tried to read it slowly, savoring Jena’s characteristically gorgeous words which somehow manage to be both as intimate as the body and as universal as the cosmos at the same time.

Don’t Miss This is a memoir told in poems.  The memoir is broken into three parts: She Who Stays, Landmine, and What I’ll Miss, and traces Jena’s cataclysmic realization a couple of summers ago that shatters the life she knows into a million pieces.  Jena’s poems are some of those pieces, their sparkling blindingly brilliant and beautiful.

The concluding stanza of Desert Woman, in the book’s first section, is an achingly lovely assertion that where we came from has value, no matter how scorched it’s earth:

For this is what I know:
one day we will return to visit,
stronger and more humble still,
to honor this desert
of what we passed through,
of what moved through us.

I read these lines and shivered, thinking that they captured what the whole of what Don’t Miss This is: a benediction of what was, before a grenade went off and altered it forever.  Jena writes both from that before and also from now, looking back on it.

Landmine, the book’s central section, begins with land mine/blindside, a poem whose drumbeat cadence speaks of a truth coming finally, irrevocably to light.  Jena writes of her daughters: “you cannot protect them/by staying small/or living in fear” and later poignantly acknowledges that “the coming together/and the falling apart are the same.” This section is full of lines where beginnings and ends are conflated, and we feel Jena’s future pulling her forward like a horse at a gallop, straining against loyalties and the power of what she thought her life would be like.

I spent the day with this absence
unsure if I was coming or going
departing or arriving
losing the poem or remembering the poem
forgetting or remembering

In In the Absence of a Departure we see the way many strands of a life can be tangled in a single explosive moment.  All the poems in Landmine are animated by tremendous emotion and passion, an eruption of a long-buried truth, but they are also limned with the loss that is woven through the fabric of Jena’s new life.  As Landmine concludes, we sense a new peace ringing in Jena’s words.  Silver Moon ends with a simple statement that reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s formal feeling: “My heart, for all its aching/smiles quietly.”

In What I’ll Miss, the third section of the book, Jena’s voice takes on a new rhythm, hypnotic and reverent, as we watch her sink into her new life.  There are still moments of anger and despair, like in The Perfect Storm, but there is also glowing, radiant acceptance of what simply is.  Jena speaks lyrically of what I would describe as midlife’s central task: letting go of what we thought it was going to be so that we can embrace how it is.  When she speaks of holding a life whose contours are unfamiliar, I feel goosebumps of familiarity.

It is simple, really,
a slideshow, a retrospective
that bends and curves in shapes
we never expected to learn
but can come to love

These lines, in There is a Picture, resonate and stayed with me after I finished Don’t Miss This.  Jena’s gorgeous memoir, whose words fairly glimmer with truth, pain, and wonder is nothing so much as her writing her way to loving her life.  Her life as it is, even though it looks nothing like it did a few years ago and certainly not at all how she thought it would.  This life, this radiance, this heartbreak.  Don’t Miss This traces the flare of lightning in the sky of a life.  Jena’s poems show how that lightning reverberates and changes the very texture of the darkness it split open, and they celebrate and honor the new shape left in the wake of the storm.