Taking My Own Advice

I don't always say them out loud, but I have thoughts. Thoughts about what other people should do. I'm not proud of this fact, but it's true. 

"Why didn't that car turn left when it had that big opening?"

"If you had worn something with a bit more fabric in it, you wouldn't be shivering right now."

"That person should get a ticket for parking like that!"

Okay, these are not just thoughts. These are judgments. I've been working on being less judgmental, and I think I've made at least a little improvement over the years, but there it is. Judgmental thoughts continue to pop into my mind.

Sometimes--often, in fact--these judgments are about me, in which case they can usually be filed under WHAT WAS I THINKING? (That folder is so overstuffed that I can hardly get it back in the file drawer.)

I was probably thinking about what someone else should be doing.

Photo: HGTV

My husband gets up very early for work: often around 4:30am. I am NOT a morning person. If I'm up at 4:30, it's because I'm STILL up. So my sweet, considerate husband uses the little downstairs bathroom to get ready rather than the master bathroom, so as not to disturb me.

I rarely set foot in that bathroom, but last night I dropped off some bathroom tissue.

Let's just say that Bill's bathroom did not look like the pages of Homes Beautiful. (Neither do the other rooms in our house, but I'm personally responsible for some of those messes, which makes them entirely different.)

I had this thought: If Bill would just take an extra 10 minutes every so often to tend to this bathroom, it wouldn't look like this.

Later, I was brushing my teeth upstairs in "my" bathroom--the larger, nicer bathroom with better light and more counter space, which Bill has graciously given over to me, for the most part.

It's fair to say my bathroom did not belong in Homes Beautiful either.

Here's a fun fact about my bathroom: There is a small bag of drawer pulls sitting in a corner on the floor that has been there for at least two years. 

TWO. YEARS.

I bought them probably 10 years ago to replace the existing pulls on those drawers and cabinets. A grand total of five to replace, if I'm not mistaken. They sat in my closet until a couple of years ago, when I decided to put them someplace more obvious, so I would see and change them.

Even if I had trouble finding the right size screwdriver and insisted on carefully cleaning each cabinet door before replacing the hardware, that's maybe a 30 minute project that I've been procrastinating about since roughly 2005.

And...

Truth be told, that little bag sitting in the corner is not the only thing standing between my bathroom and the pages of Homes Beautiful.

If I would just take an extra 10 minutes every so often to tend to this bathroom, it wouldn't look like this.

The same thing could be said for my office.

If only I would follow my own advice. 

If only I would focus on doing what I can, rather than on what I think others should do.

What piece of your own advice would improve your life, if you actually followed it?

The Soundtracks of Our Lives

I awoke this morning to the sound of Elaine Stritch belting out, "Here’s to the Ladies Who Lunch” from the Broadway show, Company. She wasn’t in my bedroom, of course. Nor was her voice coming from the radio or iPod. The sound was playing quite clearly in my head. I have no idea why.

 

This sort of occurrence is not unusual for me, especially when I'm not waking to an alarm. Sometimes, like this morning, a specific performance comes to mind. Other times it’s a particular piece of music, but not a specified rendition. Not all selections are high-minded. For example, the Purina Cat Chow jingle from their 70s television commercials makes periodic appearances. 

Music has accompanied me through life as far back as I can remember. If I pause during the day to consider what’s playing in my head, it might be anything from a magnificent symphony to whatever Muzak was playing on my last trip to the supermarket.

I was relieved to learn the term “earworm" a while back, not because I like it (I don’t) but because if society had come up with a label for this phenomenon, it meant I wasn’t the only one experiencing it. I wonder sometimes if pervasive involuntary musical imagery like mine is a musician thing or perhaps a indication of an auditory learner. Do visual artists awaken with particular colors or paintings in their awareness? 

I miss the days when I could call my dad with some obscure piece of chamber music in my ear that I couldn’t place. I could sing a theme fragment to him over the phone for instant identification. (Occasionally, he would go on to gently point out that I was singing it in the wrong key.) 

My mom once revealed to me that dad’s entrance exam to the Eastman School of Music, where he earned his Master’s Degree, included a listening portion in which excerpts were played of pieces that were not widely known. Candidates were not expected to name the pieces, but were asked to place each example in the correct musical period (baroque, classic, romantic, etc.) and suggest a possible composer of the work, based on its musical characteristics. My father, legend has it, identified each piece correctly, down to the Opus number. I can scarcely fathom the elaborate concerts which must have played in his mind on a daily basis.

My own internal performances tend to be less noteworthy. It’s as though someone installed a personal version of Pandora software in my brain. I don’t consciously control the selections or sequence, but they are clearly influenced by my history, and a “thumbs down” from me does not guarantee that we will immediately move on to something I like better. Often, ads or other interruptions are jarringly louder than my music.

 

I have been known to whine about not being able to turn off this music, especially when the soundtrack is cloying or just plain annoying, but there are far worse things to have on a loop in your mind. Imagine the terrifying internal sounds that might awaken a war veteran with PTSD or a young person whose PTSD is from the war within her own home.

Of course, not everything floating around in my mind is music. I re-live arguments, complete with some of the things I wish I had said in place of what I actually said. I also rehearse future conversations, including many that never play out in person. I ponder questions and worry about the state of our world, fully aware that worrying doesn’t help.

I wonder if there are ways to consciously influence our personal soundtracks? (Who knows, that may be the basis of my own Master’s thesis one day.) I have found that a regular meditation practice seems to lower the volume and level of chaos in my mind to something I can more easily deal with and helps me focus.

I’d love to hear from others about your personal soundtracks. Do inventors or entrepreneurs have so many new ideas flying through their heads that there is little room for music? I know that some composers hear their own music before they write it down. Do architects and designers “see” things in their minds much of the time?

Do the voices of parents, ancestors, or other authorities ever offer you internal guidance or instruction? (If so, do you find this helpful or troublesome?) Do you ever hear your own voice - speaking, singing, laughing, crying? Do you hear new songs? ...or old refrains?  I invite you to share something of your personal soundtrack in the comments.

Police Brutality and Violence in Our Communities

 

I’m going to venture into territory I’ve never written about publicly. I haven’t gone there because I haven’t known what to say. I have no tidy solution to offer. I'm not qualified or in any way equipped to fully address such an enormous and complex issue. I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of something like this in one little blog post. There are many others who can and have and will say it better, but I am writing because I can no longer keep silent on this topic.

I have written about the practice of mindfulness—a kind of paying attention. If one is committed to paying attention, there comes a point when you simply cannot ignore what is in front of you, no matter how uncomfortable it is. I have watched (admittedly from a considerable distance) over and over, as people—usually young men, often in African American communities--have been subjected to completely unacceptable treatment by law enforcement officers.

I don’t just mean someone put on handcuffs a little too tight. I’m talking about brutal beatings. Men shot in the back and killed. A man who died in a police choke hold while his final cries of “I can’t breathe!” were interpreted as resisting arrest. Most recently, a man’s spine was severed while in police custody. The list is far longer than this. Unless you live under a rock, you have seen the stories. Unfathomably, in many cases the response to incriminating video of police brutality has been to outlaw the video.

What finally makes it to our television screens is only the tip of the iceberg. Imagine the number of cases that are not captured on video and never make it to the national news. What do you think the impact of such relentless abuse of power would be on a community over time?

Yes, I know. We’d rather not imagine it. No one enjoys thinking about any of this. We’d rather assume they must be rare and isolated events. Those “bad apples” you hear about. Besides, the odds of that happening in our own front yard are remote, right? Maybe. Especially if you are white and live in a relatively affluent area. But maybe not as remote as you think. In any case, how can we justify looking the other way? How can we not speak up about it?

Many years ago, my own (white, middle class) family had a wake-up call. An eye-opening experience in our own friendly well-educated neighborhood abruptly put police brutality on our personal radar screen for the very first time, in a way my family could not ignore. Until that day, I could assume--on at least some level--that most people who were treated badly by the police were probably “asking for it” in some way.

After all, I was raised on Dragnet and Adam-12, where police were always scrupulously polite and followed policy to the letter. Sure, I knew they were only TV shows and that reality wasn’t so neat and clean, but I still believed that dealing with the police would come closer to a TV experience than the nightmare it turned out to be, in which an incriminating videotaped violent police interrogation mysteriously disappeared before it could be used in court.

My Facebook feed provides an interesting, if unscientific, snapshot of societal reaction to stories like the most recent news in Baltimore. Of course, there are people posting news stories and a wide range of commentary. Social media is how many of us get a significant portion of our news these days. There are friends who live in or near Baltimore working to help clean up the mess and who despair not only over the violence that threatens their community, but over the media and public reaction to it and the way it so often misses the deeper underlying issues by dismissing violent protests as simply foolish, crazy, or “thuggish” behavior. There are clergy organizing peaceful protests and pointing to the thousands of peaceful protesters in Baltimore who were not widely featured in the news. There are even people who complain bitterly that they have to even see such unpleasantness in their news feeds. How do you suppose that compares to the unpleasantness of seeing your friend murdered in the streets by policemen or your business destroyed in riots?

It is unspeakably tragic that violent protests do far more violence to the already afflicted communities in which they occur than to the subject of those protests. One thing that made the non-violent civil rights movement led by Dr. King and others in the 60s so powerful was how their leaders understood the way violence reaches even beyond the already considerable damage to property and personal injury within the community. It also destroys the fabric and reputations of those communities in a way that makes it easier for those at a distance to dismiss them as problem areas where police may be justified in acting in a military rather than law-enforcement capacity. It further reinforces racial stereotypes. And it gives everyone an excuse to take our eyes off the ball and NOT address the systemic issues that underlie the whole mess - the cancer that has been eating away at these communities for far too long, weakening community immune systems to the point that triggering their inflammatory defenses ends up doing even more harm.

It’s easy to condemn breaking windows, looting, or setting a car or pharmacy ablaze. It’s easy to shame people who are behaving violently and yet minimize the context of that violence. It’s not easy to figure out what to tell the children at school in those neighborhoods the next day (or whenever they are allowed to return to school) about what is going on in their communities—children who learn at an early age that there is no safe place they can go and no one they can trust—especially the police. Unless the cycle is interrupted, many of these very children will grow up to be men and women who experience mistreatment firsthand and whom the justice system will again fail miserably. Some percentage of them will not handle that impossible situation well. We need a better strategy than commiserating on social media about what horrible "thugs" we think they are.

How to channel anger and frustration into constructive expression? How to deal with legitimate fear? How to communicate with people who seem to be our polar opposites yet with whom we must share this planet? How to deal with a badly biased or corrupt system? These questions at least begin to touch on the heart of the issue--the source of an infection which, unattended for too long, has brought forth an overzealous inflammatory response.

While I have no one-size-fits-all solution to propose, many of us could start by taking an unflinching and non-defensive look at the problem and then at least one small additional step in a useful direction. There are people who have been studying these issues and collecting data and real life stories for a long time. Read some of them—find more than a sound-byte of information to consider. Speak with (and actively listen to) people who have a different window into the situation than you do, especially if they are closer to it by virtue of their actual lived experience. Notice when you reflexively feel the impulse to defend, and examine that. It’s easy to spot in others but can be harder to face in ourselves, yet defensiveness or redirection (such as name calling) is not a path to understanding or truly improving any situation.

There’s a huge temptation to be an armchair quarterback and pontificate about what those people over there need to do or stop doing. A more useful question might be, What can I do to help? What conversations can I have or stop having (on social media or elsewhere)? Are there relevant facts I haven’t considered? Have I made assumptions without considering important information? What can I learn more about? How are these issues being addressed in our schools and how might I help with that? What legislation might I support or oppose or let others know about?

My own family encounter with law enforcement overreach years ago forced me to take another look at the previously distant and somewhat vague reports I had heard of police crossing the line. Much like childbirth horror stories, as soon as you have one yourself, a million others come out of the woodwork, and you realize just how real and disconcertingly common they are. Even when you allow for a little fisherman’s tale exaggeration, clearly there is more going on than you were previously tapped into.

It’s time to tap in, whether we think we have been personally affected or not. It’s time to get at the roots and not just the tops of the weeds. It’s time to recognize how our own assumptions or attitudes or inaction may be making matters worse--or at least not making them any better. It’s time to STOP letting our own discomfort or politics or anything else get in the way of addressing a completely unacceptable situation.

What small (or not-so-small) step can you take? Can you read a relevant article which you usually wouldn’t? …have a conversation or make a phone call you would typically avoid?  …listen where you might ordinarily tune out, dismiss, or become defensive? …volunteer in a school or community center? …check into legislation about (and the pros and cons of) body-worn cameras for police or citizens using cell phones to record events? …read some of Michelle Alexander’s work on the far-reaching and downright shocking affects mass incarceration is having on black communities in particular?

What ideas can you add to these? If this problem became a nation-wide priority for EVERYONE, approached with more than band-aids, we could absolutely put a stop to it.  ALL of our communities would be safer and better communities, as a result. But it’s not going to happen by itself. We have to stem the tide. If you have been sitting on the sidelines on this one (as I confess I sometimes have), it’s time to get in the game. Real human lives are at stake.

2015: Emerging

Last year was quite a roller coaster. The tragic grand finale was the loss of my father to heart failure, after 20 years of serious health problems. His funeral was December 27th. We had lost mom to cancer only 18 months prior. Having focused on the care of my parents for so long, ushering in a new year feels a bit like emerging from a cave after three years. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it or what to expect.

I had not planned to engage in popular new year preparations like making resolutions, poking fun at resolutions, setting intentions (so as to avoid calling them resolutions) or choosing a word for the coming year as a theme or focus. Still reeling from the past few especially difficult weeks, I felt ill-prepared to do any of those things and was hardly in the mood to sign up for some clever word-choosing app or Start Your New Year Right workshop or another of the tiresome offers flooding my email and heavily promoted on social media.

Quite by accident (or perhaps not at all by accident, depending on your feelings about such things...) I came upon a comment in a Facebook group in which a friend shared that she had selected the word "emerge" for 2015. Her chosen word met unexpected resonance within me. After a day or two of pondering, I decided to adopt it, as well. Word or no word, 2015 will necessarily be--in at least some ways--a year of emergence for me. I'm still feeling too sad at this point to describe myself as excited about that, but I am, at the very least, curious about how things will unfold.

I had been the one member of our family to miraculously avoid the colds and flu so many struggled with in November and December. By January, however, the weeks of worry and not sleeping enough had taken their toll on my immune system, and by the evening of January 1st, I was quite ill.

Not being able to keep food down for the first 48 hours of the new year is a bit like getting that first ding on your brand new car the same day you drive it off the lot. It's terribly distressing in the moment, but, once you get past it, there's almost a sense of relief that you've gone ahead and gotten it over with. The pressure for everything to remain perfect as long as possible has already been relieved.

Ironically, I had made a renewed commitment to self-care immediately after dad's death. I tried to take proper care of myself before dad died, for that matter, but when you are dealing with intense situations, as we were in dad's final months, there are limits to what is reasonable or even possible. There is no shortage of people telling you to take care of yourself, of course, but generally those reminders are unhelpful, at that point.

Rather than constantly weighing the deluge of advice from outside sources, I'm making an effort to better tune in to what my own body and spirit are telling me. In an effort to do just that, when I got sick on New Year's Day, I really tried to pay attention. Did I need water? Rest? Stillness? Activity? Music? Quiet? Darkness? Warmth?

Thankfully, I am feeling much better, now, but I want to continue to tune in to what is mostly likely to keep me on a path of health and wholeness, moving forward. A useful question for me to consider periodically has been, "What are the lessons in this?" I'm learning that asking myself in a compassionate rather than judgmental way yields far more useful information. So far, the answers apply to getting over a virus as well as to the process of grieving:

Go slowly.

Be gentle.

Deep breaths.

Plenty of water.

Be selective.

Small bites/portions/steps.

Rest often.

Take care.

Use as much (or as little) support as needed.

Keep listening.

When you have spent a long while deep inside a cave, and it's finally time to head back out into civilization, with its bright lights and changing weather conditions, surely the list above is worth being mindful of, as you emerge.