The Here Year

The Here Year: Gratitude

I was thrilled when Aidan chose Gratitude as the December Here Year theme.  As I just wrote last month, while I love the explosion of gratitude-related posting and Facebooking and general conversation around Thanksgiving, I actually would love to spread the awareness of our good fortune out throughout the year.  It’s one of the things I care most deeply about as a person and as a parent.

For me, gratitude is inherently intertwined with paying attention.  By listening to, watching, and observing the details of my own life, I automatically put myself in a thankful mood.  I notice things to be grateful for in every corner.  The adage that gratitude turns what we have into enough comes often to mind.  Trite, yes, maybe, but also profoundly true.

I used to share posts regularly with photos and short snippets of things I’d noticed, that I wanted to mark, celebrate, and honor.  I realize Instagram has become the place I do that, most days.  What I hadn’t really put together before now was that those posts – this blog itself, in fact – and now, Instagram, are my way of saying thank you.  By making sure I noticed my own life, I was cultivating gratitude for it.

So, with a deep bow to an instinct that was powerful before it was clearly articulate-able, I want to return to that.  A few shimmering moments in my ordinary life lately that I noticed and for which I am deeply thankful.

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Almost-full moon rising, 4pm. Picked Grace up from hockey practice, watched her as she tossed her hockey bag in the trunk and then slid into the front seat. Before my eyes my little girl has become a graceful young woman. I gasped at the startling beauty of a flock of birds flying overhead and then drove home, towards this rising moon, more beautiful somehow for its almost-full imperfection, the jagged bottom corner. Oh, this life.

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One evening last month, when Grace was on a multi-day field trip for school and Matt was traveling for work, Whit and I curled up on the couch and did some DEAR (Drop Everything And Read).  It was one of my favorite hours of November.

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I had the most delightful, warm coffee with Rebecca Pacheco, whose blog, Omgal, I have long loved.  She graciously gave me an advance copy of her book which I cannot WAIT to read.  She also affirmed for me that the online world can indeed be a source of real, genuine, deep relationships.  I don’t know Rebecca that well (yet) but look forward to spending more time with her and feel hugely grateful to have connected with her.  And stay tuned for a review of Do Your Om Thing: Bending Yoga Tradition to Fit Your Modern Life, which I already know I’m going to love.

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Grace opening a birthday gift from my dear, beloved Brettne.  There’s something about the sight of my daughter holding two books I so passionately loved as a girl myself (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird), sent to her from a friend who means a tremendous amount to me and whose love of books is even deeper than my own that brought tears to my eyes.

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One of my favorite traditions is our annual visit to a local farm to buy our Christmas tree.  We went yesterday morning.  The truth is, there was some (“some”) tension and grouchiness before we went (on my part) and it wasn’t the smoothest visit.  There was some pouting (perhaps also by me) and some short voices to each other (to put it mildly).  But still, I’m thankful that we went all together, that we picked the beautiful tree that’s in our living room now, and even that we got this picture, which makes me laugh because it really conveys the perfectly imperfect nature of everyday life.

The Here Year: Wellness

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Halloween night, 5:30pm.  October blazed out, shining like shook foil, reminding me of the glory that is all around us.

The months are turning faster than I can catch my breath.  That’s always been true, and it’s a cliche for a reason.  I’m thrilled to continue down the Here Year road with Aidan, and this month’s topic is wellness.

I have finally begun to figure out what I need to do to take care of my body and my spirit.  Of course, I often fail at doing these things.  But at least I know what I need to do. And if I’ve learned anything in these 40 years of mine, it’s that I’m going to keep failing.  We all are.  In fact, what I aspire to now is to keep beginning again.

There is a short list of non-negotiables when it comes to health and happiness.  When I fail to prioritize these things I almost always get into trouble.  I need 8 hours of sleep a night, I need quiet time to write and to read and to be still, I need to feel safe and taken care of by the small handful of true native speakers in my life, I need to exercise, and I need to eat mostly healthily most of the time.  These things, which are, at the end of the day, all choices, help me feel calm and happy.  They help me to love my life.

In order to make sleep, down time, reading and writing, and exercise a true priority I have had to cut back on many other things.  Because I work full-time, write as much as I can, and, most importantly, want to be my children’s primary caretaker, I don’t have much other time.  I don’t do very many things socially, I don’t watch very much TV, I almost never go to movies, my husband and I don’t have very many date nights.  For me, it’s more important to read Harry Potter to Grace and to Whit, to be the one who packs their lunches, and to read and write and go to bed early in the evenings, and to get up at dawn to run.

There are many ways I strive to cultivate stillness in my life.  Believe me, this is not my natural state of being (one childhood nickname I had was “Lindsey Mead, she’s on speed” because I spoke and moved so fast).  I have been a sporadic meditator for several years, but these days I do five minutes most days.  Five minutes.  It’s manageable, I promise.  Sometimes I do guided meditations on calm.com and sometimes I just breathe in and out.  What I know for sure is the practice is in the beginning again.  I have to tug my monkey brain back to quiet over and over again, probably 25 times, in 5 minutes.  But I keep at it.  Five minutes.  I promise, you can do it.  I notice the sky, every day, and take photos (and often share them on instagram).  Writing here, a practice so ingrained as to be an inalienable part of my life now, reminds me to be aware of the details of my own life.

My best, truest friends remain essential and close.  I don’t see them as much as I want, but they know who they are, and I value their support and love and presence more than I can possibly articulate.

Exercise is important to me.  25 years of running have had an impact on my joints and I can’t run as much as I used to.  I think a marathon is out of the question now, unfortunately (though, as Whit likes to point out, I have run a marathon, just in two halves, 3 years apart!).  I have been doing yoga on and off for 15 years and I find that it is an increasingly important part of my life.  The hamster run of my brain is slowed and quieted by exercise, and it helps me sleep better.

Food?  As I get older, I grow increasingly aware that what I eat is hugely important.  I like Michael Pollan’s simple, powerful line: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.  Amen.  I have come to love – and crave – green juice, and I drink it most mornings.  I don’t, however, love smoothies.  But grapefruit, kale, ginger, through the juicer?  YUM.  We eat a lot of vegetables around here.  I often view it as a challenge: how many different fruits and vegetables can I eat today? But I also love sugar and try as I might, I haven’t successfully given that up.  I am going with the 80/20 rule on this one.  Mostly plants.  Not too much.  That I can do.

It’s not rocket science, is it?  In fact, as I write this, I’m a little bit ashamed that it has taken me almost 40 years to feel so clear on what I need to do to take care of myself and to love my life.  Sleep.  Down time.  Reading and writing.  Exercise.  Vegetables.  Lots of time with my children.  And, of course, a commitment to begin again.

I wrote parts of this post early this year, in a blog tour run by Katie den Ouden, whose example and work I can’t say enough wonderful things about.  Katie represents and models a life of self-care and gentleness, something I aspire mightily to and fail at often

Eight Ways to Be and Have a Friend

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This month on the Here Year has focused on friendship.  My friends and those I love the most have been firmly on my mind all month.  The thing is I’ve struggled with what to say that is new, to be honest.  I believe that true, honest, deep friendship is one of the most essential parts of a full and contented life.  I believe that certain fertile moments in our lives lend themselves particularly to making friends.  I believe that a person’s closest friends can tell you an awful lot about them and that who we truly love shows us a lot about who we are.

I have always loved my friends, and am truly blessed with wonderful people who are close to me.  Sometimes I hear from readers, though, that it all seems easy and smooth.  That’s far from the truth.  I’m not always a picnic to be close to, that I know.  I’m over-sensitive and take things personally, I react quickly and sometimes strongly, and generally I’m a pain in the ass.  I assure you: nothing in this life of mine is always easy or perennially smooth.  Please know that.  Part of why I feel so strongly about friendship is that I’ve learned, often through heartache, to value and defend those relationships that matter the most to me.

Aidan has often blogged on the Here Year themes with lists, which are a mix of reflection and action suggestion.  I love this format.

So, a few thoughts on ways to be, and have, a friend:

1. Remain Open.  I think the key to those particularly fecund friendship-making periods in our lives is that they are moments of real vulnerability.  When we let down our guard and reveal who we really are, that invites others in.

2. Be Loyal. Remember the other person’s feelings.  Include them. Consider how they will feel about something.

3. Be Trustworthy.  More than once people have been shocked to hear that I knew something about someone else and never said anything.  I’m always surprised by this shock.  To me, “don’t tell anyone” means don’t tell anyone.  Period.

4. Keep in Touch. It’s simple and doesn’t take very much time at all.  Just a quick “I’m thinking about you” means the world.  Email and text have made this so much easier.  Remember and mark birthdays (paper card is ideal, or an email or text, or, if it comes to that, a FB message) but the random “you’re on my mind” message or “I saw this and it made me think of you” can mean even more, in my opinion.

5. Say How You Feel.  I don’t think we tell the people we really love and value that enough.  Just say it.  To be maudlin, we never know when we’ll get the chance again.  Text it if you don’t want to say it out loud.  I can’t tell you how much I cherish the expressions of warmth, gratitude, and appreciation I’ve received from others.

6. Defend Each Other. That quote about what the silence of our friends hurting more than the words of our enemies comes to mind.  Oh, yes.  I’m watching this now with Grace, in 6th grade.  Sometimes we have to stick up for those we love, even if it means going against the easy current.  Do it.

7. Listen. Friendship is made of attention.  I believe this entirely.  I am still learning to listen without jumping in with suggestions, observations, reactions.  Just listen.  Pay attention.  Don’t be distracted.

8. Show Up. There are certain things you just show up for: weddings, funerals, christenings, big birthdays.  I regret missing some of these in the lives of some of those I love most, though I can honestly say the decision has never been a casual one.  Still.  Show up if you at all can.  It always means so incredibly much to me when others make the effort.

What are your thoughts on the most important things to remember about friendship?

Friendship, attention, and history

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The mountain lake that we hiked to on Saturday morning

This month, Aidan has chosen Friendship as the topic of our Here Year.  The topic is near to my heart and the timing is perfect.  I just returned from my annual reunion with my dearest friends from college.  It was a marvelous, sunny weekend of laughter (a lot) and tears (a few) that reminded me yet again why these women are so essential to me.

I’ve written a lot about friendship, and I cherish my female friends.  As I get older I am more and more convinced of the importance of female friendships to our lives.  The women who live nearest to my heart come from a variety of places and times in my life, but this group of college friends are the single largest and most stable locus of identification for me.  They are my anchor and the first people I call with news, good or bad.  They are the women who hold my stories.  They are some of the few people in the world who know both who I am now and who I was then.  They were my bridesmaids and are the godmothers of my children, and we have attended graduations, weddings, and funerals together.

These are the friends whose lives have now been beating alongside mine for more than half my life.  They are the friends who know the specific part of Middlemarch that I missed because I was skimming a little too aggressively, what the trapezal is, all the lines to Jennifer Lopez’s performance in The Wedding Planner, the best roast chicken recipe, and how to work a 1970s-era one-piece ski suit.  The memories run incredibly deep.  We know the titles of each others’ theses and what we called our grandparents and why a DTR is  important and how we celebrated our 21st birthdays.

For me, this was the best reunion weekend yet.  All but one of us (those who were there) is now 40.  We are all mothers and wives.  We have a great deal in common, most of all the 4 years we spent on the same college campus in the mid 90s.  But our lives are also very different.  We run the gamut, professionally, personally, and geographically.  Somehow, as our flight from those years in New Jersey lengthens, and our paths diverge, we also feel closer than ever.  These women define where I came from and help me know where I am.  Something about this past weekend was simply magic.  Maybe as we hit our 40s we are settling into our skin.  Maybe it was the mountain air and spectacularly beautiful weather.  Maybe it was the triple cream brie and French Sancerre.  Probably it was a combination of all of these things.

I suspect part of it had to do with my – and, I think, everyone’s – increasing ability to be here.  For many years I’ve known that attention is love, and this weekend was a reminder of how true that is.

Friendship is made of attention. 

We listened to each other and in turn we felt heard (I can only speak for myself, but my strong sense is this feeling was common in the group).  I’m always amazed by how swiftly we slip back into comfortable patterns and by how easy it is to be around each other, because so much of our history is known and doesn’t need to be explained. .  This weekend was no different.  There is no way I can capture this strong, loving, dazzling group of women nor how fortunate and privileged I feel to be in their presence.  I simply love them.  That is all.  And I hope they always know that.

I wrote about this weekend, and these friends, in 2010, 2012, and 2013.

 

Time, and a map of what matters

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This September has offered simply spectacular sunsets

September is almost over.  The world spins on.  Aidan and I are coming to the end of this month of the Here Year, whose theme has been time.  Time is perhaps the central preoccupation of my life.  How quickly it moves, how evanescent it is, the confounding nature of memory, the inexorable, unavoidable forward movement of our days: these are the themes around which my thinking and feeling and and writing and living circles.

I hear certain quotes and passages and lines from poems in my head all the time.  I’ve written about that ad nauseum.  It’s hard to say which I think about the most often, but it might be Annie Dillard’s famous sentence:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

I literally could not believe this more fiercely.  Yes, time is a zero sum game.  It is the only one this life actually has.  That’s bracing and often difficult to accept.  At least for me.  But I also have some good news: you can choose what to do with the time you have.  YES, I know: there are many things we HAVE to do that we might not choose.  Work is a big one.  I know.  I work full time.  There are many things I love about my job but it definitely contributes to the fact that on a near-daily basis I wish I had more time for my family, for my writing, for sleep, for myself.

When I look at a map of a week I see a lot of hours dedicated to work, and you might challenge my assertion here, saying “is that something you really value?” The answer would be yes.  I value contributing to my family economically, I like my work and colleagues, and it’s important to me to show Grace and Whit that I have something I enjoy doing to which my training and education contributed.  And the other hours?  They are mine.  Are there things I have to do in there?  Yes. Do I spend more time driving to and from practices than I want?  Sure.  But that reflects a value that I want to do that with Grace and Whit.  Do I spend more time doing laundry and packing lunches than I want?  Sure.  But that is a way for me to stay intimately involved in the details of my family’s life, and for me, that’s worth it.

How I spend my time tells me what I value.

Anne Lamott says that “it is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day,” and this is true, too.  How do we spend this wealth?  Let’s be deliberate and thoughtful about that.  Honestly, that is all I want.

Every hour of our life is a choice, a trade-off between competing priorities and desires.  We are all given the same number of hours in a day.  What do you prioritize?  What do you care about?  Where are you spending your time?In the last several years my own life has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  It has narrowed because I have substantially cut down on external (non-job and non-family) commitments.   I say no much more often than I say yes.  And even beyond commitments about my physical presence, I’ve withdrawn in a real way: for example, I spend much less time on the phone catching up with friends.But even in this narrowing my life has startled me with an unforseen richness.  It’s like I stepped into a dense forest but then I looked up to see an enormous expanse of the sky.  Somehow, in my turning inward, I have learned to see the glittering expanse of my own life.  Maybe it is not having the other distractions.  Maybe it is that is training my gaze I have opened my heart.  I am not sure.I spend my time with my family, I spend my time writing, I spend my time reading, I spend my time with a small number of people I entirely trust and wholly love.  I run at 5:30 in the morning because that’s the only time when the trade-off isn’t too steep for me.  It is very rare for me to have dinner, drinks, or lunch with a friend one-on-one.  The same is true for Matt and me with other couples.  On the other hand there are many evenings where I sit and read to the kids while they are in the tub, when I get into bed at 8:15pm with a book, and there are a great many days full of work.

Let’s all decide to no longer hide behind the excuse that we “don’t have time.”  The truer response would be “I don’t care enough to really protect the time.”  This may be harsh, but I think it’s also true.  Let’s take ownership of our choices rather than bemoaning their results.  Do you want time to meditate?  Time to go to yoga?  Time to spend reading with your children?  Well, something else has to go.  As I keep saying, time is zero-sum.

Think long and hard about how you spend your precious hours, the only currency in this life that I personally think is actually worth anything.  A lot of these decisions are made instinctively, without deliberate thought or analysis.  But that’s how life is, isn’t it?  We know what we care most deeply about, and we run towards it, chins ducked.  We protect fiercely time for those things and people and events we truly value.  And those things, people, events we never seem to have time for?  Well, that tell us something important too.

We each populate our hours differently, and our days, weeks, months, and years, are maps of what matters to us.  Look closely at yours.  Do you like what you see?

Parts of this post were written several years ago. Every word is still true.