Empty Nests

On today's walk I found some branches and leaves scattered on the ground after last night's rainstorm.  And on the rough gray sidewalk an empty bird's nest caught my eye.  It was only later I saw the connection:  after several lovely visits and stays from grown children throughout the spring and summer, the house is now quite empty, our cat commandeering the guest room bed as her personal divan, and fall is fast approaching.

I'm pretty sure birds are unsentimental about their nests once the chicks have flown (as I'm fervently hoping was the case for this nest).  Humans are a bit more complicated: proud of the courageous and independent flying they observe, and yet a little melancholy all the same.

It's small compensation to know we're now free to indulge in various 60-something eccentricities:  strolling down the hallway stark naked after a shower, cooking new recipes that bubble ominously on the stove and later sliding inedible experiments unceremoniously from plate to compost bucket, having long heart-to-heart conversations with the cat about appropriate timing between treats and what effort ought to be made to earn those treats, mildly cursing the iPad when a Scrabble opponent plays an obscure word, having a tad too lengthy a couples conversation about various bodily emissions, reading for hours while eating popcorn, gelato or cheese, watching movies inappropriate for our age, attempting to learn one-footed Yoga positions from a DVD and teetering over, and other activities left to the reader's imagination.

The fledglings' imaginations will fill in the blanks deliciously; or more likely we will rarely cross their minds.  If all else fails we'll serve as horrible examples.  Is the image of an empty nest sad?  It represents those happy fledglings taking flight to go build their own nests. Mother birds have no choice but to rejoice, and breathe in the freedom.  Care for another Cheezit?

Turning Point

New Year's Eve

Pearl Street Starbucks

A time comes when there are so many reasons to go that you know it's time; the center cannot hold, the balancing act can't continue.  You realize you're needed and wanted much more in a different universe.  I woke up this morning inventorying in my mind the removal and disposal of all the stuff in my office at work--perhaps the tide has turned?  What does one do with heavy glass recognition plaques marking one's 5, 15, 20 years at a company one must ultimately leave?  And what of all the books on leadership, Agile development, and more--would anyone else even want them?

I'll keep the six tiny carved laughing Buddhas; not so sure about the fountain with the stalk of bamboo growing in it.  How about the beautiful flowering cactus?  Yes.  I can surely keep it alive.

Many will envy me if I make this move and never guess how terrifying it is.  Shall I tell myself a different story?  It's not terrifying, but thrilling to imagine moving beyond this phase in my life to something new and potentially far more fulfilling.  

The sun obligingly shines through the Starbucks window and reflects a prism rainbow right across my journal page--purple-blue, then brilliant green fading to yellow, then orange and red.  A beautiful sign that taking care of myself and my family first is surely the right path, not selfish but wise beyond analysis, something that in the end I will not regret because of the new experiences I'll encounter on the next leg of the journey.  It is indeed a journey--not a final destination to save even more money so I'll finally, finally feel secure.  Nothing's secure anyway.  I have only to count already fallen friends and family to know that all is ephemeral, including the prism rainbow already fading from my page but marked by me while it was there in the moment as a sign, noticed before it was quickly gone, giving me a moment's joy.

To notice more--this is part of the journey; to be here now.  The unhappiness comes with fear of the future and regret about the past, but not from now.  Now contains joy and contentment and wonder.  Just remembering to breathe and be grateful for the oxygen can be such a relief.  Releaf?  And my current work becomes less important in a relative sense as my priorities change from more security and money to more time. 

Time to move on.

Martha Beck says:  "The way we do anything is the way we do everything."

The way I do things is to think, think, think.  This has left me with less ability right now to listen to myself (or others) and learn the heart's deepest desires.  But I'm hearing more and more clearly now.

Magically, the prism rainbow returns to illuminate my page!  A sign to be sure, if I‘m willing to tell myself that story. The colors are even more glorious than before and the joy returns.  Surely I'm on the right path.  I don't want to stop writing because I'm enjoying the rainbow so much.  I move the page so my hand doesn't block the light.

The message:  Do not allow yourself to block the beauty and happiness, for it is surely you alone who block them when they're right there!

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.  My way tends to include much cautious analysis.  I seek full assurance that everything will be okay and all my decisions will be the right ones.  In the last third of any life there is only one guarantee:  it will end.  All the rest is a crapshoot.  How do I want to spend the last third of my life?  What things no longer give me pleasure but are instead breaking my heart, and why do I still cling to them?

Martha Beck again:  "Everything I've ever taught boils down to this--I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this--if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it, and if something feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it.  Thank you, give me my $150."

Carpe Diem.  

Rooting Out Resentment

"Resentment is like swallowing poison and then waiting for the other person to die."

I've been thinking a lot about resentment and how it eats at at you relentlessly if you let it. It is a wicked bad waste of energy--like weeds in a garden that are best pulled out by the root.

Roots of Resentment:

1. Comparing your lot in life with others

2. Doing things for somebody else they could be doing for themselves

3. Imprisoning yourself by limiting your perceptions of what is possible

4. Refusing to accept what is

5. Dwelling in the past

Remedies for Resentment:

1. Being grateful for what you do have

2. Setting boundaries

3. Thinking outside the box, trying new things, keeping an open mind

4. Letting it be

5. Forgiving and letting go

Ah. That feels better.

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

One of the prime goals of parenting is to become utterly dispensable—to end up with kids who are independent and confident and who fearlessly question authority, including yours.  And an inevitable step on this path involves having your own kids realize your utter fallibility---the terrible truth that you are sometimes (may chance oftimes) dead wrong.

I’ve been thinking again (with love) about my own father, a strong personality and a man who did not easily admit error.  When he got an idea in his head it was almost impossible to change his thinking.  Even in my thirties I still avoided crossing him and put up with various eccentric and ill-advised behaviors from him rather than take that one giant step.

 

I’ve also been thinking about my ongoing battle with the voice in my head that relentlessly reminds me I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m an impostor, a failure, yada yada yada.  I recall the day when I proudly told my father I’d been promoted to director at work.  His initial reaction was undisguised disbelief.  He could not accept that I had managed to get this promotion or that I would be able to do the job without failing.

Now, many years later, it occurs to me that the voice in my head questioning the validity of every move I make is my father’s voice:  The Great and Powerful Oz.  And the terrible truth is that there was only a man behind the curtain, a man who was sometimes dead wrong himself, and man who was insecure in his own life and work, damaged by his own father’s disappointments and held back also by the culture of his time which had no room for the idea of a woman like me rising to such a role.

It’s a shock for a kid to finally admit that the parents are human.  Much as it was a shock for Dorothy and her companions to discover that the Wizard of Oz was not so great and powerful after all and they were going to have to find their own solutions to their various problems.  Here's hoping I applied some of what I learned to my own parenting role and to some decent degree restrained myself from excessive hovering, questioning, doubting and dominating.  I hope I’m doing a good job of letting my kids go, letting them rise to their individual occasions, allowing them to seize their autonomy and independence sooner rather than later.  We're not in Kansas anymore.

Been There, Shrunk That

At M’s recommendation I read an article in the NYT Sunday magazine called “My Life in Therapy” by Daphne Merkin, about one woman’s 40-year epic with psychotherapy—all her hopes for how it would fill the terrible holes in her psyche and finally give her the love and attention she never got enough of from parents and lovers. She describes a sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing sampling of a wide range of therapies from age 10, including classic Freudian psychoanalysis which I frankly have no earthly use for since I’ve always believed it was demeaning and disrespectful to women (and probably men as well) and seemed more likely to keep people stuck in the past focusing on the inevitable imperfections of their childhoods.

My own experiences with therapy have been numerous. I too was taken to see a woman who was probably a psychiatrist when I was around 10 years old and had suddenly decided I hated school when previously I had loved it. The root cause for this was that I was having difficulties with arithmetic, and this was the first time in my brief school career that I had found anything in the classroom remotely difficult. However, I didn’t talk about this during my session. Instead, I told the attentive white-haired lady about the recurring dream I was having in which I was arguing with a talking skull, and how I had eventually learned in the dream to wake myself up by pushing the skull away with my hand and uttering a “bad word.”

“What was this bad word?” asked the psychiatrist.

“I can’t say it out loud.”

“You can say anything in here.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she responded with surprise, since up to this point I had been a very good little girl in the session.

“Shut up was the bad word—we’re not allowed to say ‘shut up’ at our house.” And indeed we weren’t—it was literally considered an unacceptable word in our household.

Later in my 20s and 30s I struggled with shifting moods and depression, and a few severe cases of a broken heart along with a profound fear of failing at school and later at work. I drifted from one therapist to another with little or no progress in my estimation. It was only the year after my mother died, in 1999, that I was forced by a vicious darkness of the soul to do real work in therapy in order to survive that grief and the several more that followed. My therapist then told me that there was no way out but through…and introduced me to the cognitive behavioral therapy. And from that point, I did find a few good therapists who helped me make some progress; I also began reading a large number of books on my own, centered around letting go of rumination about past and worry about future and focusing on living more in the present. And also paying more attention to that blathering negative voice in my head and how to step outside its influence and talk back to it (even telling it to “shut up” on occasion).

Can therapy be an addiction? This is suggested in Merkin’s article and it likely can be, but for me it was more like a journey that simply took a long time and that in the end was productive. It just takes time and experience to finally wake up and see through the fog to notice what’s really going on and how much power you hold in the search for serenity.

Daphne concludes the article with: “Therapy gave me a place to say things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world—and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.” I agree—in other words, it helped me find my voice.

She also says therapy “provided a space for interior examination, an education in disillusioned realism that existed nowhere else in this cacophonous, frantic planet.” Agreed again—in other words, it helped me wake up.

What about your experiences with therapy good or bad?

Cardinals and Snow

As I gazed at my Starbuck’s latte and pondered what I would say in the Christmas letter this year, I noticed a phrase printed on the side of the cup: “We invite you to LISTEN to your DESIRES and to RENEW your HOPE. To see the world not as it is, but as it COULD be. Go ahead. WISH. It’s what makes the holidays the HOLIDAYS.”

This contrasts with the Buddhist philosophy to neither hope nor fear, to let go of longings and be mindful of the joys available in the present moment. Can one let go properly (the lesson I keep working to learn over and over again) and yet retain hope and optimism? It seems that in order to renew hope one must begin by paying attention to the present moment and being mindful of all there is to be grateful for, here and now. And there is an optimism perhaps in Max Ehrmann’s phrase from Desiderata: “no doubt life is unfolding as it should.”

If a therapist were consulted, she might say that the first part of the Starbuck’s exhortation, the part about listening to one’s desires, is a very good plan, especially for those who have a tendency to try to make sure everybody else has the oxygen mask in place during the plane emergency and end up almost passing out from oxygen deprivation themselves.

A meditation on one’s own desires seems selfish and not in keeping with the holiday season—unless perhaps you have lost hope and you need to find a way back to the vision in the shining child’s eyes, seeing a Christmas morning where all wishes come true. For the Christmas book this year, my book club chose “A Redbird Christmas” by Fanny Flagg (also the author of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café”). This is an unabashed fairy tale in which good people and a young child hope when it seems that all hope is lost, and end up with a Christmas miracle beyond their wildest imaginings involving redbirds and snow in the Deep South.

I have always associated red cardinals against a snowy background with Christmastime. I remember when I was around seven my mother wrapped a package especially for me and taped a red cardinal to it, carefully cut out from an old Christmas card. I don’t remember what was in the package, but I remember the love and thoughtfulness represented by the cardinal decoration. I also remember watching all the birds, including the cardinals, flock to feast on the sunflower seeds my Dad placed out on the upper deck bird feeder during the coldest, snowiest days of winter at our Sugar Lane house back in Southern Indiana. Those birds had reason to hope each year and also seized any opportunities in the present as well. So I will have my cake and eat it too, combining hope with mindfulness of the present. No doubt events are unfolding as they should.

So I wish that everybody who reads this has a great holiday. May all of you take a deep breath, be present, and renew your hope in the coming New Year.

B

Mark and I were talking yesterday about the tattered condition of Shannon’s passport, his only form of id since he lost his driver’s license years ago. Mark said the passport is “like B,” which made me laugh uproariously. B was Shannon’s baby blanket, a gift to him as a newborn. It started out snowy white, with pale green satin edging. But it became baby Shannon’s most reliable solace, accompanying him everywhere, held next to his cheek as he fell asleep each night. Leaving B behind was not done, ever. Triple checks were made to ensure B was securely on board when we took road trips or flew to Indiana to visit Granny and Grandpa. Over time, B became gray and tattered, losing its satin edging. And B dwindled in size, shrinking to the size of a handkerchief, then smaller still to the size of a passport (hah!) and finally to the size of a postage stamp, at which point we convinced Shannon to part with B so we could put it away in a treasure box for safekeeping since it could so easily end up lost. Letting go of B was like Shannon’s passport to eventual independence.