musings

There is room for all of us

One afternoon last week Grace was telling me about a conversation she had with a friend about being competitive.  They were discussing the pros and cons of that trait, and, Grace said, she told her friend, “Well, my mother is not competitive at all.”  I was equally taken aback, I think, by the fact that she had noticed that and that she’d offered it in a conversation with a friend.

This is true.  It’s also surprising to a lot of people.  But it’s absolutely true.  I’ve written before about my disinclination towards competition when it comes to sports and games.  And that remains true of me; I’m a total nightmare to play tennis or a board game with, since I just can’t get myself worked up about winning.

But what’s on my mind lately is competitiveness more generally.  We have all encountered people whose view of the world is predicated on an assumption that their success is linked to our failure.  The world that these people live in is a zero-sum one, in which there is a set amount of success; if we do well, that lessens their chances to do so.  So they have to be dismayed at our success, much as they try to hide it, because they fret it endangers their own.

I simply do not believe this.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me, as I get older, how firmly I believe that there is room for all of us.  Room for all of our success.  When a friend does well, that doesn’t mean I’m less likely to; in fact it enlarges the universe, and in no way detracts from me.  Success is not a zero-sum game.  It is the opposite.  I cannot adequately describe how deeply, and how fiercely, I believe this.

There is only one truly limited quantity in this life, one truly zero-sum thing, and that is our time.  I have written before about my belief that how we spend our time reflects what we value, shared my personal experience that drastically narrowing my life led to a startling, unexpected expansion.

That is simply not the case, in my opinion, with success.  This view allows me to entirely genuinely celebrate the accomplishments of friends and compatriots.  I do not feel lessened by their success.  I truly, honestly, do not.  There is room for all of us to blaze brightly, to shake the universe, to make our mark, to move people.

Once again, my ten year old daughter saw me better than I saw myself:  My mother is really not competitive.  And I’m not.

Discomfort and Discipline

I don’t like discomfort.  None of us do, do we?  I’ve recognized and written about my inclination to stop something before I actually have to.  This is as true of pigeon pose in yoga as it is of a writing a difficult paragraph.  I think it has something to do with fear that pain is coming next, and the preemptive conclusion that I cannot do it.   My strong instinct – and, I’d aver, a pretty universal one – is to stop doing whatever it is that’s causing the discomfort.  In fact, in some ways, I think actual pain is preferable to discomfort.  Don’t you?

Leo of Zen Habits wrote last month that if you can “master discomfort, you can master the universe.”  He’s not kidding.  His practical discussion of how to learn to live with discomfort is as compelling and his enumeration of the enormous benefits of this is convincing.  I agree with him.

Is there any difference between living with discomfort and having discipline?  Aren’t these two ways of saying the same thing?  I suspect they might be.  As Leo says, it’s discomfort that keeps us from eating healthily, exercising regularly, and people who do these things are often said to have discipline.

I am often told I am disciplined.  It’s true I get up in the pitch dark and run outside early in the morning, and I go to bed at 10pm almost every night and I hardly drink wine anymore because it interferes with my sleep.  I know, I know: try to contain your awe at my thrilling life.  But it’s funny, I don’t think of myself as disciplined.  The truth is that none of these things are uncomfortable for me.  Well, maybe that’s not strictly true: I can’t remember a single time that I’ve heard the alarm at 5:30 and leapt out of bed gleefully.  But I also can’t remember a single time I haven’t been glad I went.

Discomfort, and the correlated discipline to live with it, must, like the rest of human existence, be absolutely individual.  So, while others lack the discipline to fit exercise into their day, I lack the discipline to truly commit when things get hard.  Next time I am in pigeon, and my hip is aching, and I feel a surge of boredom and desire to leave, I will try to remember: be here now.  The discomfort won’t kill me.  I will remember Leo’s assertion that living with discomfort is the road to living a fuller, richer life.  I believe that is true.  But, like all things, translating it from my brain to my body and heart is no simple thing.

What do you think about discomfort?  And are you a disciplined person?  In what ways?

The clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.

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An old post about snow that seems utterly apt after this weekend of snow and then, today, blindingly clear blue skies.

I have been thinking for days about writing a post about snow, and, lo and behold, it’s snowing again!  It’s so great with the universe comes through like that.  Of course, it’s been snowing almost non-stop since December 26th, so possibly it’s a coincidence.  When I look out my office window, whose four panes frame so many hours of my gazing out at the world, it looks like I live in a snow globe.

People always write about the “muffled” quality of snow, about its quiet, the silence it lends to the world.  For me this is absolutely true when it’s snowing.  There is an outside-of-real-life feeling when the sky is mottled with moving white snowflakes.   Maybe it’s a vestige of childhood snow days, maybe it’s the way movement in the outside world is slowed down to a crawl.  Something just floats over me, a gossamer cape of wonder, a reminder to breathe and watch.  The snow globe is a good place to live, insulated from the real world, the rough jolts of life somehow less jarring, muted.

And yet when it’s no longer snowing, but the world is covered with snow, I don’t find it muffled at all.  It’s the opposite: I find it sharp, its clarity in such high definition that sometimes it hurts.  Pam Houston’s words always come to mind: “When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky.”  There’s something wide-awake, hyper-saturated and, as she says, precise, about life with clear skies overhead and snow underfoot.  Emerging from my swaddled time in the snowglobe, everything seems purified, clarified, washed clear by the white everywhere.

Today I knelt on the floor by my office window and watched the flakes fall.  This afternoon they were huge, big clumps of snowflakes dropping out of the pale steel-gray sky.  Watching them, I remembered the passage in Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about how “each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”  I looked up into the sky, straining to see as far as I could.  I thought of another time that I instinctively knelt, when, just like today, “…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.”

Another thing about snow: it is practically impossible (at least for a hack like me) to take pictures that capture the falling snow.  Hello, metaphor.  You just have to watch.  Pay attention.  Inscribe it on the vellum of memory.  What you see is what you get.

Originally written January 19, 2011, during another season of snow.

A love letter to LEGO

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I love LEGO.  I always have.  This, above, is our old train table, which years ago was requisitioned to be a LEGO table.  As you can see, Grace’s half seems to be winning, but what you can’t see is the four large bins of LEGO pieces, all full, stacked to the side.  One of the drawers under the table is also full of LEGO pieces.

I show this mess only to demonstrate my family’s passionate commitment to LEGO.  I have no idea how many pieces we have, but I do know that a couple of years ago Matt decided we ought to sort them by color.  This effort, with fully four of us working, took a whole weekend.

That was a coupe of years ago.  Suffice it to say there are more now.  Even Grace has gotten into the swing of things, with a strong interest in LEGO Friends (the plethora above mostly came through birthday and Christmas presents this past year).  While I am generally opposed to the “girl versions” of ANY toy, I like that she’s playing with LEGO at all, so I’ll let it slide.

Several years ago I observed (and wrote) that watching a small child work on a LEGO kit is an excellent metaphor for parenting in general: you watch them do it wrong, and you have to sit on your hands and not jump in to correct them, even though you know the pain and undoing-and-redoing that lies ahead for them (and you).  These days, Whit flies through the kits on his own, and presents us with huge ships and rockets and vehicles he has made on his own.

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For example, here.  This picture provides another shot of the LEGO table, and also a punch in the gut gasp when I see him without his front teeth.  Though Whit loves an elaborate LEGO kit, he also spends at least as much time making things up, building ships and spacecraft that he designs in his own head.  Personally I think this imaginative, free-form play is probably even more valuable than learning how to follow the technical manuals.

Our passion for LEGO is also evidenced in our the three visits we’ve paid to Legoland.  Something about Legoland is sheer magic for the children and for me.

And then there’s just that it’s such a wonderful company.  This story here, about the letter a boy wrote to LEGO after he lost a minifig, and their totally awesome response, brought me to tears.

And finally, there’s the reason for this love letter.  My father-in-law sent Whit a large LEGO for his birthday.  FedEx showed that it had been delivered, but nothing had shown up at our house.  I called LEGO, distraught.  I explained that my son was a huge LEGO fan, that he was turning 8, and that he was desperate for the Excavator.  I think we can all agree that LEGO was in no way at fault here; they had shipped according to when they promised, and according to all records, the box had been delivered.  Yet the man on the other end of the line told me he would re-send another Excavator, and he would do so with expedited delivery, with no additional charge to us to to Whit’s grandfather, just to make sure that my eight-year-old had the set he so longed for to open on his big day.

I just wanted to publicly demonstrate and declare that my family has always been, and will always be, unshakably and immensely devoted to LEGO as a product, a concept, and a company.

 

What I know now. It’s nifty.

I don’t make new year’s resolutions.  I never have.  While I’ve chosen words the last two years (2011: trust, and 2012: light) I’m still waiting for a word to reveal itself for 2013.  It may not.  One afternoon in early December, while I was driving with the children, I told them about my words of the year for the last couple of years.  When Grace asked what my 2013 word was, I said I didn’t know yet, explained that I waited for the word to come to me.  “What do you think I should choose?”  I glanced in the rearview.

“Maybe hope, smile, love, or peace?” Grace listed off the four words she’d recently featured in her room.  I nodded.

“How about nifty?” Whit asked.  Grace giggled, and so did I.

Those excellent ideas notwithstanding, nothing has risen to the surface yet.  Maybe a word will.  But here we go, forging ahead into another year.  What a privilege this is, this day, this blank slate, this new beginning.  I don’t know yet what to say about this new year into which we sail.  But I do have some reflections on 2012, some things that I know now are absolutely true, some new and others things that I seem to need to keep re-learning over and over again.

  • I cannot change other people.  Much as I rail against this truth, much as I wish it was different, I simply can’t.
  • I will never, ever get tired of Phillip Phillips’ song Home.
  • It is almost never about me.  Words and actions that slight and hurt are almost always about something going on in the life and mind of the other person.
  • Sometimes it is about me, however. And my intuition about this is extremely accurate.  I have to learn to let go of wanting everyone to like me.  They won’t.
  • Having blood taken on day 3 of a juice fast is not a good idea.
  • The sky still can, and regularly does, bring me to my knees and to tears.  One evening right after the Solstice, while running at dusk, I had to stop and watch the sky in its pink and gray majesty, convinced I could see all of the grand pageant of life animate in those clouds, lit from beneath by a light whose source we can’t see but in which we must believe.
  • Crossing to Safety might be the most beautiful novel ever written.
  • My favorite time of day is early morning. Some of my happiest moments are running under a setting moon as day breaks.
  • The truest friends are those who are there beside you when things go poorly and when things go well.  Some fall off in each instance, not just when things are hard.  Neither of these are reasons for a true friend to abandon you.

Sincerely, honestly, I wish you the happiest of new years.  I can’t express how grateful I am that you’re here, reading.  I mean that.  May 2013 be calm and bright, full of joy, peace, and wonder.

What do you know now, as this new year dawns?