Category Archives: j’epiphanies

Our Wild, Precious Lives

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 36 Comments

I’ve had a number of sad reminders recently about how sweet, fragile, and fleeting life is. We only get this one shot at it. It matters how we spend our time…

Last month, after weeks of going full tilt to finish my book, expand the love project, write my freelance stuff, collaborate with some wonderful, creative people on a number of very cool projects, I hit a wall. I was utterly depleted, and for a week, I couldn’t even look at my to-do list. The stress I felt about tackling any of my projects was actually greater than the stress of not checking items off my list.

I cannot emphasize enough how unlike me that is. Something was definitely wrong.

I took some time to regroup. For a week, I wandered. I unplugged for big portions of each day. I met with friends and didn’t worry about what I wasn’t getting done. I read whatever I wanted to and (except for things with deadlines) I wrote whatever I wanted to too. I meandered, and fiddled, and explored my curiosities. I prioritized myself with this question: what feels good to do right now?

It was one of the weirdest, best weeks ever.

When I returned to my regular life in progress, I felt different.  I wrote my to-do list in colored pencils. Alongside the meetings and tasks and notes and chores, each day I wrote things like “sing… loudly” and “play” and “surprise yourself” and “tell a long and gloriously terrible joke.” Every time I checked the lists, these things, written in big loopy letters (or crooked, or sideways) caught my eye. Made me smile. I wanted to check them off just as much as I wanted to check off “confirm Friday’s mtg” or “compile interview notes.”

Last Friday, I invited you all to do something over the weekend that you’d never done before. I thought of it because, on vacation last week, I did a bunch of things I’ve never done before, and doing them made me giddy, made me feel expansive and present and alive… just like doing the odd things on my to-do list made me feel.

Here’s a list of the things I did on vacation that I’ve never done before…

  1. I spent most of a week wandering by myself, asking locals where I should go, and then punching their answers into my GPS without hesitation.
  2. I waited out the rain under the shelter of a tree on top of a hill in Patrick’s Point. The tree kept me so dry I could write in my notebook. The rain beyond my tree’s limbs was soft and steady, as were the ocean waves rolling onto the shore.
  3. Bundled against a cold wind, I laid down on a dune and watched clouds float overhead.
  4. I ate lunch on a stone wall overlooking a rocky shore.
  5. I read a book in the middle of a forest.
  6. I was the first, and for a while, one of only two people on the dance floor in a crowded bar (and still, I surrendered to the music).
  7. I rode a luggage cart through a lobby, up an elevator, and into my third floor room.
  8. I hiked the prettiest forest trail I’ve ever been on, 10 miles, till it opened up to the sea.

I guess my point is this: don’t forget to live. We all have so much to do, so many dreams to achieve, so many milestones to pass. Don’t forget all the magical, beautiful, messy, spaces in between. Fill them with care… and wild abandon. And love, of course.

And now, I have to ask, did you do something last weekend that you’ve never done before? Will you today? Tomorrow? What crazy thing can you add to your to-do list right now?

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Her Best Life

Posted on December 6, 2010 | 20 Comments

I read this post over at Scoutie Girl all about how to deal effectively with criticism. It’s smart, helpful. You should read it. But there were two sentences in particular that struck me. In discussing fear of failure, Tara Gentile wrote that if our wildest dreams succeeded, we would revel in those successes and plan for our next ones.

“But,” she says, “creative people fail. A lot.”

I read that, and it was like the sun breaking through a cloud bank for me. It was the beginning of an epiphany, one of those very cool, very rare, soul-shaking sort of realizations that usually only happen when you sell everything you own and travel to a foreign country with little more than the clothes on your back.

Creative people fail. A lot. They fail because they are willing to try things. Scary, inadvisable, evolutionary, unconventional things. New things. Creative people spend a lot of time as beginners. Over and over again. They take risks, stretch themselves, reach for something more, leap.

For a long time I’ve been struggling under the weight of my mistakes. I’ve made some big ones, and I’ve spent a lot of time feeling guilty and lost and self-conscious because of them.

What I realize now is that I’ve been focused on the wrong thing. It’s not about the mistakes I’ve made (and learned from), it’s about my willingness to make them in the first place.

Creative people fail. A lot. Sometimes spectacularly. I suspect the potential for colossal screw ups is directly proportional to the amount of time one spends leaping into unfamiliar territory. Creative people do that a lot too – leap into unfamiliar territory. Because they know that’s where all the real learning takes place, the real challenges, excitement, passion, joys, successes. They fail because they’re willing to fail, even though it sucks and it hurts and sometimes it’s devastating. They know, eventually, it becomes the next jumping off place, as long as they’re willing to jump.

You can only get somewhere new by going somewhere new – in your head, in your heart, in the world. Instead of punishing myself for my missteps, I’ve decided to start loving the girl who seems so willing, always, to step off the beaten path, convinced, despite the more-than-occasional floundering, that that’s where her best life is.

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Fearless

Posted on November 17, 2010 | 26 Comments

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.  ~ Ambrose Redmoon

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be fearless. Not the dictionary definition, but the one my life has written for me, on my heart, in my soul.

It’s not about the things you might think. It’s not about being certain, or having confidence in myself, or being strong or surefooted or righteous. All of that would be great, but what I aspire to doesn’t require any of it. It requires that I do the things that scare me.

I once said that to a friend and she said, “I’ve had enough fear in my life. I don’t need to do the things that scare me. I need to do the things that make me happy.” I get that. For her, the things that make her happy and the things that scare her are not the same.

For me, they very often are.

A professor once asked me what kind of writer I wanted to be. She said that I was clever, and I could make money as a writer being clever if that’s what I wanted. “But every now and then, you go beyond clever,” she said, “and you grab hold of something honest and real. And sometimes, right before you get scared and back away, you write a little magic.”

She said a lot of other things too, not all of it easy to hear. It was a tough love speech, after which, I didn’t write for six months. When I finally started writing again, I wrote stories that were earnest and awkward and not at all clever. They weren’t good either, but they were brave. I had decided what kind of writer I wanted to be, and those stories were the beginning.

Now I’m at that place again, only it’s not just about writing.

If I had a life professor, this is the part where she’d ask me what kind of person I want to be. She’d tell me that I’m nice enough and funny enough, and I can have a pretty good life being nice and funny.” But every now and then you go beyond nice and funny,” she’d say. “You leap when you can’t see your landing, give your heart when you fear it might get broken, write words that scare you and then show them to people who might reject you. You risk, and, lo and behold, you land. You love. You tell your story and are understood… You live a little magic.”

She might say other things too, not all of it easy to hear, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have a life professor. I just have me, standing at a crossroads again, not without fear but making the judgment that something else, in fact a whole damn world of something elses – honesty, passion, adventure, truth, forgiveness, flight, love, magic – THAT life is more important than fear.

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Complicated Us

Posted on October 13, 2010 | 35 Comments
You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. – Libba Bray

The trouble with getting to know another human being is that we’re so damn tricky. We have this way of smiling when we’re sad, joking when we’re hurt, pretending things don’t matter when they do. We keep secrets and sometimes when we do talk, it’s the words we don’t say that are the most important. We don’t want to hurt each other – or, we do -  but either way, we wear masks because both impulses require a certain amount of hiding our truest selves.

It’s worrisome, all we don’t know about the people in our lives. It’s shocking when someone acts “out of character” and then suddenly we realize we don’t really know for sure if it is out of character. How could we? We know our co-worker, our neighbor, our favorite blogger, our doctor, teacher, barista, lawyer, accountant a little bit. We know the person we see, and forget it’s not the whole. In most cases it’s not even close, but our brains are crazy good at filling in the gaps.

I’ve been surprised a lot over the last year or so. Surprised and hurt and confused when people didn’t turn out to be who I thought they were. Every time it happens, it makes me nervous. I think, “Hey, if I got that guy wrong, who else might I be completely wrong about?”

And then I read this on Hannah Brencher’s wonderful blog, As Simple As That.

Agape means that we love a person for what they are. Every person has an infinite mystery within themselves. Agape means that we never confine the person to what we know of them.  To love anyone is to hope in them always.

I read that and it made me realize that what I love most about us humans is how maddeningly complicated we are. I love how we go right when everyone (including, sometimes, our own common sense) tells us to go left. I love how imperfect we are, how we laugh and cry at inopportune moments, how we talk when we should shut up, and are silent when we should speak up. I love that we’re sweet and exasperating and funny and flawed, arrogant and self-conscious, fierce and shy.

It is silly to think we could ever really know each other. For some of us, it’s an accomplishment just getting a handle on ourselves. And that’s okay. I’ll stop worrying about what I don’t know. I’ll learn to love the mystery. I’ll take you on faith and hope you take me on faith too, and I’ll remember that it’s easier to stay precariously balanced if I open up my arms.

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Space

Posted on October 6, 2010 | 32 Comments

Ever since reading  Danielle LaPorte’s piece Possibilities & The Divine Law of The Ugly Chair, I’ve become fascinated and totally enamored with the idea of creating space. This line has stayed with me, rolling around my head, nudging my heart, inciting my soul: “Possibility requires space to unfold.”

So I’m clearing space and making sure the things I keep are full of awesome.

This week, I started working on my kitchen. We have a lot of cabinets in our kitchen and they are stuffed with crap. We have things we’ve never used (a McDonald’s McFlurry Machine, for example), stuff we’ve used only once (two fondue sets) and stuff I might use if I only knew what it was. We have a mind-boggling number of plastic food containers. The only thing we have more of are plastic food container lids. That none of the tops fits the bottoms is one of the great mysteries of my life.

So, I’m going through the cabinets one by one, putting things into piles to donate, recycle, repurpose or trash. I’m getting rid of cookbooks that don’t have vegetarian recipes and cans of food that I think might have come with the house. I found a jar of pickle relish in the refrigerator that I used to make potato salad on the 4th of July… two years ago.

It feels good, all this space-making, and I’m noticing something weird (and wonderful). As I sift through all my physical crap, I find myself sifting through the emotional stuff too.

Recently, a friend in transition told me that he thinks it’s important to move forward and not be pulled backward into something which is already over. He said it just when I needed to hear it, just as I was heading into the kitchen to tackle another cabinet. I thought of his words as I sat on the kitchen floor, my hands in the cabinet, my mind somewhere else entirely, tripping over past hurts, puzzling over questions I have no answers to. They were working independently – my hands and my head – but in the end they were busy doing the same (amazingly freeing, transformative) thing:

Letting go.

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Hesitate…

Posted on September 12, 2010 | 34 Comments

I’ve been holding that word in my head for a while. Hesitate…

In July, I met a woman. She was beautiful. And so was her backyard which was where we were standing when I felt this amazing connection. We’d walked a narrow path  that wound through trees and flowers and alongside a fish pond. Occasionally, the path opened up onto little clearings like secret hiding places: a vegetable garden with long wooden planters, a lovely seating area, a bocce ball court, a putting green.

We were standing in one of these clearings, talking, drinking wine, and within minutes of having met her, she and I were engaged in a conversation I can’t really imagine having with anyone else. It was about attraction, about the people who instantly draw us to them, and not because of some outward thing but because of what we can so clearly see shining out from inside them.

She described this sort of inner light, and then paused to ask if I knew what she meant. I said, “yes.” (I didn’t say, “I’m staring at what you mean.” ) She nodded. She looked past me and smiled and said, “So you race forward because you think this light, this glow of the soul, is just exactly what you want your life to be filled with, and then sometime later, you realize the person you saw doesn’t really exist. It might even have been real, the light. Maybe you did see potential, but the person herself (or himself) isn’t ready to realize it. Whatever the reason, you understand suddenly that you got it wrong, but it’s too late because there you are, having rushed headlong into a relationship.”

I stared at her as I imagine an open book would stare at its reader if an open book could stare. She touched my arm and said, “I think people like you and me, we have to learn… to hesitate.”

We were interrupted then, the impromptu garden tour ended, and we left soon after, but that conversation has stayed with me ever since. It was such a curious and amazing moment for me, a connection as absolute as it was fleeting. And the word she’d used – hesitate - resonated with me in ways I couldn’t even begin to articulate.

I’ve written about it lots of times since then, trying to get at exactly what it means to me. Because the truth is I haven’t wanted to hesitate. Over the past year and a half, after way too long in hesitation mode, I started leaping – out of the boat, off the shore, trusting the net – pick your metaphor. I’ve come to believe that I’d rather be getting loved and bruised and battered in the thick of life than be safe and untouched on the outskirts.

So why did the word hesitate resonate so strongly? Why did it feel so much like an answer to a question I hadn’t even figured out how to ask?

Then I saw this article on NPR, “5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn’t.” It’s all about how parents become unreasonably fearful that horrible tragedies will befall their children – terrible, unlikely things like kidnappings and school snipers. At the end of the article, the author of a book titled The Paranoid Parents’ Guide is asked for a prescription for worried parents. Her answer? Helmets and seatbelts. According to her research, making kids wear protective gear and buckle up in the car reduces their chances of death by 90 percent and their chances of serious injury by 78 percent.

I love that. I love that the best way to protect our children does not involve putting up barriers between them and life, it involves properly outfitting them so they can rush right in. It got me wondering about what would be the equivalent advice to grown ups. Of course we should wear helmets and seatbelts, but what of our tender hearts, our fragile egos, our sometimes precarious sense of self?

My father, whenever he says goodbye, adds this: Look both ways. He says it all the time. On the phone, at the door, before he goes upstairs to bed. “Goodnight,” he says, “look both ways.” It’s an adorable quirk (from a man not know for his adorable quirks), but until now I’ve never thought about what it really means. It doesn’t mean, don’t cross the street, after all. Like helmets and seatbelts, it’s a safety precaution. It’s designed not to hold you still, but to get you where you need to be, safely.

It means… hesitate.

And so now I think I finally understand what the beautiful woman was trying to tell me. It’s not a choice between motion and inertia, connection and isolation, love and loneliness. It’s a chance to breathe. To look around. To think for a second (or a day or a week or as long as it takes) about the best next place to step.

… Or leap, as the case may be.

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Oh yeah… prioritization

Posted on August 19, 2010 | 23 Comments

My friend came to dinner last night.

I love when he comes over. This is how it usually works. I text that I miss him and then he texts, “Okay. I’ll be there Wednesday.”

On Wednesday, he calls to ask if I have cumin, or whipping cream, or chickpeas, or lobster. I say something like, “Lobster? Who the hell has lobster on hand?”

He says, “You’re right. How about gouda. Do you have gouda?”

At the appointed time on Wednesday evening, my friend arrives, armed with wine, obscure ingredients (that I think he invents himself), and big,  daring culinary ideas. Cooking dinner is, of course, an event – a noisy, messy, delicious bit of magic. It may be the only time I truly love my kitchen. (I wash and chop and measure as directed. Chad and my friend improvise, perform, goof off, create.) The results are always amazing.

After dinner we sit around and talk about grapes and space and fears, and which of us would be most likely to get naked at a nude beach. I laugh a lot. I feel incredibly fortunate. I feel loved and connected, and I wish my life had more of these moments.

And then I remember…  it can.

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Inhale, exhale, repeat.

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 17 Comments

Eckhart Tolle has been whispering in my ear. Which leads me to a digression. (Yep, I’m off track before I’ve even gotten started. Be afraid.)

My friend loaned me CDs of Eckhart Tolle reading his book The New Earth. I’ve been loading them on my phone and then listening when I take Lexi for her walks. My phone, like every electronic device I own, delights in messing with me, so it plays all the tracks out of order, occasionally throwing in ring tones and voice recordings just to keep me guessing.

Not to point a finger or anything, but if I don’t seem very enlightened to you, my Motorola dumb phone is not entirely blameless.

Okay, so yesterday Eckhart Tolle said this: “Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space.” He’s not the first breath advocate to whisper in my ear, but yesterday I understood, as never before, just how possible it is to breathe your way through a difficult moment. (By “you,” I, of course, mean “me.” And by “difficult,” I mean “wild-eyed, crazy, irrationally panic-filled.”)

Here’s how I know.

On day one of our scuba dive training, we donned our tanks and experienced for the first time the awesomeness of breathing underwater. It was cool, but also unnerving. Even as I was doing it, my brain was insisting that it could not be done, and it was in the midst of this cognitive dissonance that the instructor took us to the deep end and told us we needed to breathe on the pool floor without our masks for at least one minute.

“We’ll all go down, you’ll take off your masks, and I’ll tap your head when you’ve gone long enough,” he said.

So, along with everyone else, I went down. Almost immediately, I felt uneasy, but when I took off my mask, my discomfort turned to panic. Without a mask,  the bubbles from my regulator bounced crazily against my face. They were loud and wild, and the pool, with my eyes closed, seemed vast and silent. I felt something akin to claustrophobia, a desperate desire to escape. My brain, which had never bought into the whole breathing underwater thing in the first place was screaming at me. “Go up! This is crazy! You need real air!”

But just before I bolted to the surface, another voice (probably my lungs) assured me that I was, in fact, breathing. White knuckling my mask, I focused on that, the mechanics of my breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Deep, slow. I noticed how I floated a little when my lungs were full, and I sunk as they emptied. I felt the rhythm of my breath, the expansion of my chest, the not-too-scary-totally-predictable rush of bubbles against my unmasked face.

I was just getting into it when the instructor tapped my head. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I’d gone from being totally freaked out and ready to abort, to being calm, focused, absolutely in the moment.

Which brings me back to Eckhart Tolle and his advice to breathe with awareness. Truthfully, I can’t really see myself becoming Echart Tolle-esque. I’ll never be that calm, never speak in such soothing tones, never live my life in a continual state of surrender to, and acceptance of, the essential “is” in every moment.

I’ll never be Eckhart Tolle. But maybe… I can breathe like him.

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Consolation Prize

Posted on August 9, 2010 | 32 Comments

So, this was to be the weekend of my dive certification…I did not dive.

On Sunday evening, I shared my frustration online with a friend and she said to me, “Sorry about the dive. Dealing with disappointment wasn’t the desired lesson, huh?! xo”

It made me laugh, but it also struck a chord. By way of explanation, here’s how my weekend unfolded.

On Thursday, the doctor said (sweetly and with regret), “Your eustachian tube is dysfunctional. You won’t dive on Saturday.” When I looked despondent, he softened his delivery without changing the conclusion.

On Friday, we drove to the dive shop to pick up our gear (mine too) and then on to Monterey. I spent the four plus hours of the trip trying to clear my ear. Each time I tried, I could hear – reverberating through my skull – much crackling and gurgling. My ear grew sore and achy, but it never unplugged. I told myself this was progress.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept trying to clear my ear. I visualized the diving skills we’d be asked to perform under the sea. I breathed. In the morning, though nothing had changed, I got up at the crack of dawn, put on my bathing suit and my superhero lycra, loaded my scuba gear alongside Chad’s and The Boy’s. At the dive site, I told the  instructor I’d give it a try and abort the dive if I couldn’t clear.

He was nice. He didn’t say I couldn’t dive. He said a bunch of other stuff about the importance of being able to clear your ears, about listening to my doctor, about how the class would be disrupted if I tried to dive and couldn’t. In the end, I stood on shore as the class waddled clumsily into the ocean without me, and I struggled under the weight of crushing disappointment – the kind usually reserved for children who have not yet developed a sense of perspective.

I could try to explain why I was so affected, but instead I’ll just say this. Somewhere along the way, this adventure became about something far more important to me than just dive certification.

I watched the divers go on without me and I accepted, finally, that I wasn’t going to be part of it. Except, I didn’t really. Inside, I railed at the injustice, cursed my dysfunctional ear, wondered if somehow I’d brought this on myself as a way of getting out of facing my fear. I bounced like a pinball between anger, sadness, self-doubt, frustration. That’s how I spent my weekend. No matter where I was on the outside – at the dive sites, wandering about Cannery Row, climbing rocky cliffs, taking pictures, getting some work done in a pretty cafe – on the inside, I was weathering a storm.

It wasn’t until we were driving home (Chad and The Boy fully certified) that I felt myself accept the reality. I did not get certified and, like it or not, that means I will have to dive later, by  myself, without Chad and The Boy to help me through my fear. That’s the reality, and being pissed off and feeling cheated doesn’t change it. It was only then, surrendering to the facts as they were, that I felt myself take the first mental step toward moving beyond it. By the time we got home, I had a plan, and today the plan is in action.

Which brings me back to my friend’s comment about learning to accept disappointment. She was right. Compared to learning how to face and overcome my fears, learning to accept disappointment is a crappy little lesson. It’s not shiny or impressive. It doesn’t make me feel like a superhero, doesn’t spur me on to the next big adventure. It’s the runt of personal lessons, let’s face it… but it is the one I needed to learn this weekend.

So, now, onward! A more sparkly post on Wednesday, I promise.

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This might hurt

Posted on July 26, 2010 | 25 Comments

There’s this place I keep coming to. It is familiar, even though it always looks different. It is scary and new, even though I’ve been here many times before.

It is the intensely uncomfortable moment before I get hurt.

Usually, this is how it works. I reveal myself – on blog, in a conversation, in a powerful moment of stunning connection – and in the space that follows, I panic. I am painfully aware of my vulnerability, and I am afraid I will be hurt.

In a way, these moments are all in my head since the thing that will hurt me – rejection, misunderstanding, ridicule, judgment – hasn’t actually happened, and in fact may not happen at all. The future is funny like that. Still, I’m like a deer picking up a hunter’s scent on the breeze. I’m tense, hypersensitive, ready to bolt. Occasionally (when cutting loose isn’t an option), I armor up, but the one thing I don’t do is stay right there, in that uncomfortable moment, armed with nothing but the authentic me I’ve shared.

I believe that to experience true intimacy, you must be willing to be truly vulnerable. I believe it, but I’m not good at it. I suspect maybe most of us aren’t. Once you’ve been hurt, once your heart has been broken, your confidence rocked, your innermost self held up to the light and totally misunderstood, you learn the value of calculation, of hesitance. You lean how to lead with your head instead of your heart. Self-preservation is a valuable tool… I believe that too.

And yet…

As I strive to be more present and honest and bold in my writing and in my life, I find myself in those moments – those scary, uncomfortable, this-might-really-hurt kind of moments – more and more often. It’s inevitable, I think. Out of the cave, I keep meeting creative, intelligent, talented people who are every bit as curious and way more fearless than I am. I am drawn to them, to their startling honesty, their fierce love, their rebel-rousing ways.

And so I’m trying to change MY ways. When I feel like cutting loose, I’m trying to stay put, trying to give the uncomfortable moment time to play itself out. I have a feeling I will wind up more bruised as a result, but also more dazzled, more touched by humanity, more connected, more loved, more alive.

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