musings

Eight ways to be (more) here and (more) happy

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I absolutely love Aidan’s post from last week, 13 ways to be (more) here and (more) happy.  We are moving into the third month of The Here Year, and the truth is we’re still figuring out exactly how best to convey what it is we are exploring and learning.  Aidan and I are both people who struggle with presence and who juggle a lot of balls, but we also have in common our fierce, genuine desire to be here now.  We talk in the macro about this endeavor a lot, both to each other and on our blogs.  What we are also trying to do is make our efforts more concrete and more granular, and Aidan’s wonderful post does that.

I found her list of 13 things thought-provoking and wanted to respond with my own thoughts about specific things that make me both more present and more happy (inextricably correlated as those things are for me).  I think it’s notable that Aidan’s list is 13 and mine is 8 and both of those are ragged and imperfect numbers.  Not the well-rounded 10 that you might want for a polished article or piece.  But I feel like that detail is emblematic of The Here Year in general: we’re figuring it out as we go, and it’s certainly not shiny or perfect, but it’s genuine.

1. Forgive yourself.  Aidan touches on this and I too believe it’s at the core of being happier and more present.  We can’t all be present and engaged in our lives every minute of every day.  At least, I can’t.  But I can be there more, and I already recognize big strides on my part in that direction.  The goal, in my opinion, isn’t perfect, constant, unwavering presence.  It is more moments when I feel the wave of this is my life and I am really living it sweep over me.  More of those.  Aidan describes the way that golden moments can “sustain us” in less-golden times, too, and I thought of Wordsworth and one of the lines I most often hear inside my head: in this moment there is life and food for future years.  Yes.

2. Pay attention and record.  This is intextricably linked to the above, for me.  What I want, what I’m after, is more of those moments swollen with awareness, when I know that I’m as deep into my actual, real, ordinary life as I can possibly be.  When I’m noticing the smell of laundry outside my front door because the dryer is on or recognizing the faint budding of the bare branches on my tree outside my window.  When I’m in one of those moments, I just want to be in it: feeling, smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting, all senses engaged.  Sometimes I’ll lift my phone and take a picture, and after I often want to write down the details of what I experienced.  I’m always grateful that I captured these moments because they are, after all, our lives.  Instagram has become a place that I chronicle these moments, these pearls strung together on a string that make up my life.

3. Go outside.  I go for a walk almost every day.  Some of these are very short, often alone, for example to the drycleaner or to the library.  Some of them are more ambling, notice-things walks with my children.  What I know is I always come back from a walk calmed, centered, and reminded of what matters.  When I’m walking I look up and I look down, I admire the blue or gray of the sky, or the rain spitting from it, and I am aware of what’s under my feet, and I think: ah.  This is the world that I live in.  And there’s huge, huge value to that.  Always.  I have recently been trying to weed through old photos, and in going through my iPhoto archives it is clear I take a lot of photographs of the sky.  Witness, above: last week at the end of a baseball game.

4. Say no.  I really believe that there is only one zero-sum resource in this life: time.  We need to be careful and deliberate about where we spend our time.  I’ve written a lot about how I’ve consciously chosen to reduce outside commitments in order to focus on the things that I know mean the most to me.  I think everyone should do the work of figuring out what those priorities are.  You can use then use that understanding to make choices about how to spend your time.  The map of a week or a month of your time shows what you value.  Do you like what you see?

5. Get enough sleep.  For me, this is 8 hours a night.  I get up early, so I have to go to bed early.  It all comes back to that zero sum thing.  We each get 24 hours a day.  How do you want to spend them?  It’s not an exaggeration to say that sleep is the bedrock of health for me, and I need to make it a priority.  Period.

6. What do you love?  Do that.  We have to be in touch with what it is we truly love in order to pursue more of it.  And it may not be what we really think.  I wish I loved sparkly, glamorous things.  But what I really, honestly love is reading to my kids and tucking them in and getting into bed with a book myself.  So I do more of that.  This seems connected to Gretchen Rubin‘s commandments: be Gretchen.  What do YOU want?  Then do that.

7. Calm down.  I’ve learned that the primary thief of presence, for me, is a swirl of anxiety and fear that gets me going into a reactive cycle.  I get emotional, I get triggered, I get going, and suddenly I am entirely out of my own body.  I need to remember that those reactions and emotions are the clouds.  I’m the sky.  I can watch them go by without letting them be me.  We all need ways to help ourselves return to our bodies, to our breath, to what’s right here.  I use calm.com an awful lot and love it.  I also use walks for this, and, sometimes, yoga. Let the thrill of situs slot gambling help you destress as you indulge in some leisurely entertainment.  Find what works for you.  Feel your own physical body in the world.  Remember that is what matters. If cannabis products help you relax and calm down, you may search for weed shops near me.

8. Get outside of yourself.  Aidan talks about supporting others.  I often think about the line from my favorite prayer, St. Francis of Assissi’s, where he says that it is in giving that we receive.  Remember: there is room for all of us.  I could not believe this more fiercely.  So give of yourself, in whatever way you can.  It may seem paradoxical, but by giving of ourselves – time, money, energy, things – we are reminded of the abundance in our own lives.

How do you help yourself be more here and more happy?  I’d love suggestions, tips, advice, wisdom, reactions!

 

The Here Year

I don’t have a tattoo.

But if I did, there’s no question what I would have.  It would be on the inside of my wrist, and it would be just three words:

Be here now.

Being present, being aware, and noticing my own life is arguably the central theme of this blog.  I want to be able to glimpse, worship, and be reassured by the design so vast that I know exists in this random-seeming and occasionally-painful world.  Years ago I ran a series called Present Tense, which was all about our attempts to be more present in our lives.  My friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley named the series, in fact.  It felt like a full-circle moment when she asked me to join her in her new project, The Here Year.

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Each month Aidan chooses a specific topic to explore through the lens of being here.  April was home, and May is parenthood.  I will be sharing my thoughts on each subject as the months roll on; beyond this, Aidan and I are still figuring out the particulars of what our collaboration will look like.  But I am just delighted about joining her in her Here Year.  Aidan and I met online five years ago and in the interim she’s become a very important real-world friend of mine.  It’s a privilege and an honor to have her in my life and I have enjoyed and learned tremendously from all of our interactions, whether on-line, on the phone, or in person.

Presence – what it really means and both the cost of not inhabiting it as well as the value of doing so – has been a preoccupation of mine for a long, long time.   A post I wrote four years ago, My Real Life Had Already Begun, remains one of my all-time favorites.  I have written at length – ad nauseum, even – about all the various techniques humans use to avoid really engaging with their lives.  Some of these are toxic and others on the surface look “healthy.”  For me, at least, the avoidance behavior was accomplishment: by focusing on the next brass ring I could avoid living here now.  It sounds so simple, really experiencing my own life.  But it wasn’t and it still isn’t.

Sometimes when I talk about being present people seem to think that I mean loving every single moment of every day, never being aggravated or having to do the laundry, never having kids fighting or needing to get up too early.  That’s not what I mean.  I mean literally being there for my life.  And let me be clear, there’s plenty I don’t like about it – there are tears and tantrums, regrets and exhaustion, and more kinds of messes than I can enumerate – but I do love it.  And I only really understood how much I loved my own life after I started noticing all of its facets.  And to do that I had to take my eyes off of the horizon, in order to see what was right in front of me.

What was I hiding from?  What are we all avoiding?  What comes up when we are present?  That’s different for each of us.  For me it’s impatience, and frustration, and surprising swells of sorrow, and, also, thankfully, a deep, abiding joy in the tiniest things.  Most of all, what I have to reckon with, every single day, is the unavoidable fact of life’s transience.  No matter what I do, I can’t stop time.  That is the black hole around which my life swirls, and everything I do is tinged with its color.

I’ve made enormous changes to the way I live in the world in the last several years.  Many of those changes have been in support of being more present to and in my own life, but I know that this effort is a long-term endeavor.  I’m so looking forward to joining Aidan as she explores specific aspects of presence.  I can’t way to be a part of her Here Year.

To celebrate this new collaboration, Aidan and I are hosting a Twitter party today, Wednesday May 14, from 4-5pm ET.  Please join us!  The hashtag is #TheHereYear and we’ll be talking about presence, parenthood, and life, and anything else that comes up!

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What I wonder and what I have

While working motherhood, in all of its mess, trade-offs, and joy, is a topic that fascinates me, I have not written a lot here about my own professional life.  That’s interesting, when I think about it, since it’s something I’ve written about a lot elsewhere.  I wrote A Foot in Two Worlds for the Princeton Alumni Weekly and reflected on my work and personal choices for Poets & Quants.

It was with great interest, therefore, that I read KJ Dell’Antonia’s post on Motherlode, In Hindsight, is Stay-at-Home Parenting Something You’d Recommend.  Her assertion that those who are happiest, as working mothers, are those who have made flexibility a priority, really struck a chord with me.  There’s no question this has been my strategy: flexibility above all else.  And I’ve aimed for it with laser focus since I was very young.  I took a job in consulting out of college because I figured it left the maximum number of doors open.  I went to get an MBA as soon as possible, and coming out of business school I took a job in large part for the flexible road it put me on.  I’ve made choices since then that have continued to support that goal.

The thing is, I’ve felt ambivalent about this priority for the last couple of years.  Lean In made me doubt myself, though I very much enjoyed it.  And even before reading that book I have pondered, sometimes in private and sometimes aloud, what would have happened to me professionally if I hadn’t taken the flexible road at the age of 25, but instead really “gone for it” career-wise despite the questions marks that might have thrown up regarding a future of balancing home and work.

We all have what-might-have-beens, don’t we?  I actually think that every single person who is human lives in the shadow of them.

Though I definitely think about these professional what-ifs, I have concluded that I can live with them.

What I wonder about is a bigger career, perhaps one in the industry I always loved (retail), perhaps in another city.

What I have is flexibility.  I work a lot of hours every week – more in this job than in any other – but much of the time (not always) I have a lot of control over my time.  I work largely from home so I can be around to answer homework questions and to be at school plays a lot of the time.  There are definitely still times – a lot of them – when I feel overwhelmed by the demands on me and like I simply do not have space in my head for the running list of responsibilities.  Working from home has its downsides, of course, and I do sometimes wish I had a place to go that was just “mine” and where I was simply at work.  But on the whole, I would choose this, I realize over and over again.  I would choose this small office with the ringing phone which happens to be down the hall from Whit’s bedroom, this folding laundry while on conference calls, this being able to rush to pick-up if necessary, this endless list of to-dos that gets crossed off and then, magically, like mushrooms, repopulates the next day.

People often tell me I am lucky to have the professional set up that I have.  And I’ll be honest: without fail, that irritates me.  I feel tremendously fortunate, that is true, and yes, many things have broken my way.  But I also designed this life in my head from the very beginning, and made a great deal of choices to set it up this way.  To conclude that I landed in this career out of luck seems to dismiss the very real and concrete moves I made, and hard work I put in, to make it so.  I paid my dues as early as I could and I earned my credibility the only way I know how, through hard work.  I made choices that meant not making others, and I have regrets as does anyone else.

But I have flexibility. And I have a career I care about, that contributes meaningfully to my family’s income, and for better or for worse, my children are growing up with a working mother.  Most of the time I feel whole-heartedly, without reservation, happy about this.  It was affirming to read KJ say that it was flexibility that most correlated with satisfaction for other working parents.  That’s true for me.

 

Lightness visible

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“Mummy!” Whit spluttered as he came up, blowing water out of his mouth, his snorkel mask askew.  “Look!” He indicated below where he was treading water.  Simultaneously we ducked under.  I looked over and watched him gazing at the school of fish swarming along the bottom of the ocean.  The wonder was palpable in his eyes.

When I broke the surface I saw Matt and Grace floating on the surface a few feet off to my left.  We were in the Galapagos Islands. The clear, turquoise water was even more extraordinary than I had imagined.  We had just spent 20 minutes only feet away from four baby sea lions who tumbled over each other and themselves in the shallow water at the rocky shore of an island.  Grace had watched them, marveling at how close they were, gasping and exclaiming out loud over and over.  Finally they had swum away and so had we.

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My favorite part of this beautiful afternoon was the way the sunlight slanted through the water.  The tangible beams reminded me of the way you could see light coming through the windows of one of the big lecture halls at college, somehow solid, real, floating with dust motes and years and years of memories.  This light was similarly visible, and I watched Grace, Whit, and Matt kick their way through the slanting skeins.  The bubbles that our kicking created sparkled like tiny diamonds in the water.

I hung back, watching my family swim.  Sometimes, though rarely, I am aware even as I live a moment that it will be one that swells and takes on shape and solidity in memory, something I return to, a touchstone of a season in time.  I have come to think of this sensation as the closest thing I know to grace. It came over me then, in the empty Galapagos ocean. (note: this is different, though related to, the sensation that I’m living, alongside my children, a Life Lesson, like in the hockey rink)

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Grace looked like a long, lean mermaid as, her courage growing, she dove down below the surface, the silvery fish parting as she neared.  Whit’s seersucker swim trunks ballooned around his pale legs as he bicycled in the water.  I kept my head down, watching them swim, the only sound my own breathing through the snorkel.  Suddenly William Styron’s seminal, powerful book, Darkness Visible, came to mind and I thought: this is lightness visible.  In every sense of the word.  The light streaking through the water, the silver fish glinting as they glided over the ocean floor, the glittering bubbles, my children learning something new in a place so far from home I’d described it before we left as the dark side of the moon.

I kept watching, head down, my own breathing loud in my ears, for another long while.  And then we all swam back to the dinghy, climbed in, and headed home to the boat for the evening.

Photo credit: William Rice

Commensurate to our capacity for wonder

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I’m still processing all the marvelous experiences that we had in the Galapagos last week.  It is going to take me more than one post to capture everything about the trip, what we saw, what we learned, what we remember.  The thing that struck me most of all, however, is clear already: the sky.  The sunsets and sunrises, both of which I watched each day, were outrageously glorious.  We had a full moon while we were at sea.  At night, because we were so close to the Equator, we could see the Southern Cross and the big dipper in the sky at the same time (something Matt and I last did while on Kilimanjaro).

Galapsblog2Related to how much I loved the sky was the emptiness.  Over and over again we could not see anyone in any direction from the boat.  We felt like the only people in the world.  One morning, after traveling overnight to Genovesa Island, we walked along the ridge of an island formed by a volcano.  As we walked carefully over black lava rocks, the view was breathtaking.  I could not stop thinking of the last lines of Gatsby:

… face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. 

Oh, yes.  This was commensurate to my capacity for wonder.  This island, so far from home, out in the Pacific Ocean, no land visible in any direction, was nothing short of magical.  I exhaled slowly, trying to capture everything about the moment and preserve it, remember the fullness of time, the glory of the physical place we were, the bigness of the emotion swelling in my chest.

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I looked up to watch the birds wheeling in the sublimely blue sky.  I saw my children in front of me, tall, lanky, growing before my eyes, shedding the skins of early childhood and moving towards adolescence.  I watched the ocean lapping at this former volcano, traced the various shades of heartbreaking blue out toward the horizon.  There is no way to capture it all, this life: I can only grope around the edges of experience, fumbling clumsily as I try to express what it is to be in this world.  To watch.  To witness.

There’s no question that in the Galapagos all four of us felt wonder.

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None of us will ever forget this trip.  The animals, the sky, the time together, the reminder that this world is enormous and can still take our breath away.