everyday life

What you see is what you get

Seeing.  

Seeing this ordinary life of mine.

Seeing the sacred that’s strung in between the many, many mundane moments.

Seeing the holiness that exists inside those prosaic, everyday things.

This seeing has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time.  I searched my archives and found pages of posts that featured either photographs of or stories about my life’s small moments.  The “grout in between the tiles” of life, as I’ve called it.  Which is where all the magic resides, I’ve found.

In her essay titled Seeing, Annie Dillard said, what you see is what you get, imbuing those familiar words with a new layer of meaning.  Pay attention, and your life will be rich.

Lately my friend Aidan been writing about noticing the small moments in her life.  The messy, the in-between, the oft-overlooked experiences that, in fact, add up to life itself.  She’s one of many, many people who I know who are out there, noticing and stringing pearls onto the strings of their days, one at a time.  What they – and I – are building is a masterpiece.

This blog began as a catalog of these small moments.  I wanted to remember all the things I knew I would forget in those first exhausting, chaotic years of Grace and Whit’s lives.  And as I kept blogging, and kept noticing, I realized that the practice of writing about the divinity in my days had actually changed the way I existed in the world.

Now I can’t stop noticing.  Every day I trip over pieces of beauty, unexpected, unanticipated, often unimagined.  This is really what Instagram is, for me now: a gathering of the tiny, sparkling shards that glitter in my days.  I would love if you would find me there!

One thing I know for sure, as I barrel towards my 40th birthday, is that these things, these details that I notice and observe, these moments that pierce me: they are my life.  With that in mind, here are some things I have noticed lately:

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Watching Grace and Whit ascend a rock wall with grace and grit.

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Last week was one non-stop, breathtaking, outrageous sunset after another.

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Grace’s fifth grade class is participating in NaNoWriMo.  In the afternoons she likes to sit on the floor of my office and write while I work.  I can’t wait to read her novel.

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Whit doesn’t make his bed, but every single morning, without fail, he lines these three (Beloved, Bear, and Beloved’s Brother) up against his pillow.  I like to go in there during my work day and every single time this sight brings tears to my eyes.

What are you noticing right now?

 

 

Adventures big and small

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It is important to me to share adventures with Grace and Whit.  That’s among the things I want most for them.  I want them to have big adventures, and to see the world.  I also want them to have small adventures.  We did the trapeze a few years ago and learned to fly.  We have volunteered at soup kitchens, had picnics in local parks, and danced on a beach off-season.

This past weekend’s adventure was went rock climbing at Brooklyn Boulders in Somerville.  We tried top-roping, self-belaying, and bouldering.  I was struck by how fearless Grace and Whit were.  Whit struggled on one wall, and what impressed me most was his tenacity; he would not give up.  I kept yelling up that he could come down if he wanted and he finally hollered down that I should stop saying that because he wasn’t coming down until he made it to the top.

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Grace was a natural.  She scaled the wall so quickly and with such ease that our (wonderful) instructor asked me if she’d climbed before.  Um, at a birthday party, maybe once?  She loved it and I could see that climbing took advantage of her natural balance, flexibility, and courage.  It was great to see.

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The scariest experience of the day was coming down from the self-belay wall.  To do that, you had to lean back and trust that the belay rope would catch your weight.  Matt and Whit did that with little drama.  Grace and I hesitated longer.  When she finally made what is effectively a trust fall, she came down gracefully.  I bounced off the wall with significantly less elegance but made it down in one piece.

We had an absolutely marvelous morning.  I loved seeing Grace and Whit be brave, and push themselves, and, literally, climb to the sky.  It felt like exercise, and adventure, and a wonderfully non-competitive, collaborative family experience.

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Brooklyn Boulders is an impressive facility.  There are 25,000 square feet of climbing wall, as well as workspaces, exercise rooms, and free wi-fi.  The spirit of camaraderie that defines the climbing community is tangible in the airy space with soaring ceilings.  I am often dismayed by how negatively competition in kids’ sports (and lives in general) can manifest, and climbing seems like a powerful antidote to that.

A day pass to Brooklyn Boulders includes access to several yoga classes, the weight rooms, and all the climbing walls.  You could sit in one of a few different work spaces, watching the climbing or working with access to wi-fi.  Every single person we met there was, without exception, friendly and warm and didn’t make us feel like the awkward middle-aged people who didn’t know how to put on their harnesses we are.

We’ll definitely be going back.  Whit wants to do his birthday party there, and Grace is considering climbing on a weekly basis.

For full disclosure, Brooklyn Boulders provided us with a family belay session free of charge.  All opinions here, however, are my own, and the extravagantly positive opinion I have of the facility and staff is completely genuine.

You project what you are

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It is a fact that you project what you are. – Norman Vincent Peale

My father’s influence on me is enormous.  I can’t really convey the degree to which his example echoes through my life, though I have tried.  At least once a day, I think of something he said or did or believed or showed me when I was a child.  One thing he said often was that maturity is the ability to see how we are perceived by others.

I think this is true.  And I am sure I am not there yet.  Over and over again, I run into the brick wall of what others perceive and I am often startled by how far it is from reality.  There was the woman on the shuttle, all those years ago (four now!), whose voice still rings in my head.  Hard and self-assured, she called me.  Neither of which I have felt, ever, for even a single moment of my life.

Then there was my disconcerting and uncomfortable experience at BlogHer in 2010.  For some reason people have always projected things onto me.  Other peoples’ inaccurate impressions of and assumptions about me feel terrible.  These rattle around inside my sense of myself, small but granular, spiky, unavoidable.  My porous nature means that I’m extremely open to the input of others, and often I give too much credence to views that may not be based in any kind of fact (or, worse, not come with kind intentions).

There can be such a yawning gulf between what others perceive of us and what we actually intend, feel, and experience.  I’ve written of this lacuna often, a moat filled with monsters: assumption, stereotype, judgment.  Having been on the receiving end of snap judgments that are far from the truth has made me slower to jump to conclusions about others, and more inclined towards empathy.

But this quote by Norman Vincent Peale stopped me in my tracks.  Maybe what I radiate – the energy that has often caused others to perceive me as chilly or aloof – is what I am?  Is that possible?  Even considering that gives me a shiver.  But then I remember: those we know well may see an entirely different light radiating from us than do strangers.  That must matter.

Right?  How do you parse the difference – whether it is infinitessimal or gigantic – between reality and perception?  I have to grow confident in who I am without listening to what others think.  Right?  I thought this was the task I’d been engaged in for the last ten years or more.  I guess what I’m learning is that there is value in knowing what others pick up, and while it may or may not change the core truth of who we are, it is something that we are well served to understand.  Oh, wait.  Maybe this is the maturity that my father was talking about all along?

The thing I most want to do for my children

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We got home from our marvelous week in Vermont on a Saturday evening.  Everybody was exhausted and deflated.  The end August loomed, and the big summer things we’d been looking forward to were all behind us.  On Sunday, Matt had to go to work, so Grace, Whit, and I were left with an open day.  We did some errands in the morning, moving slowly, sinking back into regular life.  It was a glorious, outrageously perfect late-summer day.  I suggested a picnic in the park that is three blocks from us.

Grace and Whit responded with enthusiasm.  We packed turkey sandwiches, some goldfish, some tortilla chips and guacamole, and water.  They threw a frisbee for a while and I watched them in the almost-deserted park.  I could sense Grace’s month-old self snuggled in her blue Patagonia fleece one-piece, asleep in my arms as we took our first Christmas card as a family on the rise over to my right.  I could see both of their four year old bodies running in their first soccer games on chilly fall Saturday mornings, smiling as I remembered how often the parental cheering consisted “Wrong way!  Other goal!”  I could hear their pealing laughter as they made snowmen in the enormous, untouched drifts of snow in last winter’s blizzard.

After a bit they came to sit next to me on our towel.  We ate our sandwiches in the shade and in silence, and after a few minutes Whit sighed, “Oh, this is nice.”

“It really is, isn’t it?”

I’m not sure how, but we started talking about facing fears.  We talked about fears we had surmounted, and what we were still afraid of.  We all shared stories.  It was a rare half hour of perfect peace and happy equanimity.  After we finished our lunch we sat for a bit longer, noticing things in the fenced-off city garden plots next to us.  Grace tilted her head back to watch an airplane streak across the sky, pointing up at it, mouth open.  Then we packed up our trash and our towel and headed for home.

I am rarely prouder of my children than when they enjoy small moments like this.  I honestly think this might be (one of) the key(s) to happiness: finding joy in the most mundane things.  It’s also an outright goal of mine as a parent, trying to make the ordinary special, trying to shape a memory out of a regular old day (even knowing as I do that we can’t always control which moments coalesce into the pearls strung on life’s chain).  The day after the picnic, I left my desk an hour early to take the children to our beloved fairy stream, where we worked in companionable quiet for a long time building cairns.  It was spontaneous, it was something we do all the time, but despite that – or maybe because of it – it was an exceptional experience.

How can I protect Grace and Whit’s propensity for joy and their orientation towards wonder?  How can I keep them from becoming jaded in a world that leans towards cynicism so early, so quickly, and so finally?  How can I help them continue to find the white lines of exhaust from an airplane across a hydrangea blue sky or the quiet stacking of small rocks at a bubbling fairy stream things worthy of their time, their attention, and, sometimes, their awe?

I don’t know, but I am pretty sure this is the thing I most want to do for my children.

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Summer 2013

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Spring is the only season that I experience without an undercurrent of sorrow, because there is so much that lies ahead, but it is in summer that I feel I most fully live.  In June, July, and August, life is swollen with family moments, studded with the rituals that have come to mean so much to my children, and lit with bursts of fireworks both real and figurative.  For the last few years I’ve reflected on the summer that was: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

In late August, I kept hearing Sophocles’ words, over and over again in my head: one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.  And that is true of this most marvelous, rich, joyful season, too: it is really after Labor Day that I can really see how extravagantly wonderful our summer was.

This summer went by faster than ever.  Oh, what a cliche this is.  And yet it is so true.

In June, for the fourth year, Grace, Whit and I marked the end of the school year with a trip to Storyland.  Their mild agreement that perhaps they were getting too old for Storyland turned by the end of the day into stringent pleading to promise we could come back.  They love our tradition and so do I.

The weekend at the end of June that we spent with Hilary and her family was so humid that my computer shut itself down.  But it was wonderful nonetheless: swinging on swings over a big muddy puddle of rainwater, my father blowing out candles surrounded by his found grandchildren, those children lined up on the edge of Brea as we sailed, four feet dangling towards the splashing water.

Our hydrangea bush exploded into glorious bloom.  Once again I was reminded of the metaphors that are all around us: by late July I had to cut hundreds of past-their-prime blooms in hopes that we might get another round of new flowers.

We spent the Fourth of July with Matt’s family in Vermont.  The children loved being with their cousins.  Later in July we went to Legoland for the fourth time.  This is an extravagant tradition, to be sure, and maybe a silly one, but I can’t express the pure joy that descends on all three of us the minute we walk out of the airport in California.  I have no doubt that the three days in July we spent at Legoland will be among my most cherished of this entire year.

Coming home was hard, but we had a short but sweet visit with Whit’s godmother, my dear friend Gloria, to look forward to.  She came through on her way from Maine to Beijing, we all remembered how fiercely we adore this friend of my heart that I’ve known for 23 years.

Grace and Whit both went to sleepaway camp.  For the first time in 10 1/2 years Matt and I were alone for 10 days.  Saying goodbye was hard, mostly because of the reflection that it forced on time’s heartbreakingly swift passage.  Then, in August we had two weeks alone with Whit.  I spent my birthday with one of my oldest and dearest friends, at the place where we met and where our daughters how flourish.  It was marvelous.

We spent a week by Lake Champlain as a family, for the fifth year in a row, and it was pure magic.  Grace and Whit love it there, and Matt and I do too.  We swam and ran and water skiied and laughed.  The vacation, just like the end of August time that holds it, was tinged by end-of-summer pathos.

I read All That Is and A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, The Engagements by Courtney Sullivan, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, Early Decision by Lacy Crawford, Ready for Air by Kate Hopper, Looking for Palestine by Najla Said, & Sons by David Gilbert.  I spent long hours revisiting some of my favorite poetry books.

Grace and I were deep in Harry Potter 7 while Whit and I were on 4.  They both remain entranced by Harry’s world.  Grace and I read Little Women at the same time in August: she marked the pages she read before bed and then left the book for me, and I’d read the same passage.  The next day we talked about it.  We read A Wrinkle In Time (my favorite book from childhood) the same way last year.

We managed to fit some of our favorite rituals into the last week of the summer.  We went to the beach for an end-of-summer day, we swam at Walden Pond, we visited the tower nearby and built stone cairns near the fairy stream.  We spent Labor Day in town for a change, because Grace had a soccer tournament.  It was calm, mellow, and surprisingly wonderful.

There was plenty of yelling and exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed by all kind of small things.  And I’ve already forgotten those moments, as the summer slides into memory, crystalline, shimmering.  And how I miss it, already.