A friend is someone who brings out the best in you.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.
—Mother Teresa

Two weeks ago in How Do You See Life?, we talked about the pitfalls of seeing the world as a dog-eat-dog place, where we constantly have to be in the top of our form to compete and survive. I never fell into that trap because I didn’t measure myself against other people, but until my early thirties I had excessively high standards for myself. I still remember the day my attitude changed. I was on my way to work, waiting for a shuttle from the parking lot, when it suddenly dawned on me… I was accepting and understanding about other people’s foibles, but was always critical of my own. How arrogant! How stupid! The fact is, I thrive on love and appreciation and was foolishly depriving myself.

So as soon as I got to work I went into the bathroom, looked myself in the mirror and promised myself that no matter what happened, I would be there for myself. I would be a supportive friend rather than a critic. I’ve kept that promise ever since. I’m much more like the duck above, admiring himself in the mirror than I am the hostile dog. Sounds a bit silly? Maybe, maybe not. It is lighthearted. “Yea, Jean!” is my favorite saying when I’m facing challenges. As I’ve said, that’s the attitude that energizes and inspires me. It brings out the best in me. It seems to me it would be more silly not to do it.

What About You?
How serious or lighthearted is your view of life? How do you bring out the best in yourself?

 
Square Peg Guy has awarded me the Kreativ Blogger Award. Thank you! The conditions of the award are that I have to tell six things that make me happy, and I have to pass the award on to six other bloggers. Finding at least six of each is easy.
 

Six Things That Make Me Happy
Just off the top of my head I’ll say

1. Family and Friends
2. Looking at photos of family and friends, especially photos of my daughter’s wedding last May.
    
   
    
   I wrote about this over at Cheerful Monk: What’s Your Favorite Photo. It was a three-day family reunion as well as a wedding.
 
3. 
    
   Being a member of the local Friends of the Shelter and helping to find homes for the animals there. In particular, I make short weekly videos of the animals for our local public access TV station.
4. Blogging. I’m a letter-writer at heart, and most of my off-line friends aren’t. So blogging has been a godsend to me. I like face-to-face and telephone interactions, too, but there’s something special about having the time to think about a topic before one communicates. Before blogging I wrote regularly in a journal, essentially writing letters to myself. It’s more fun sharing.
5. Flickr. I can spend hours looking for photos for my posts. And I’ve just started sharing some of my own photos there. I plan to add more…it seems only fair.
6. Learning new things and finding a way to share them with others. For example, learning to make videos and DVDs, learning the mechanics of blogging, etc. I’m happiest when I have a reasonable amount of challenge in my life.

Nine Favorite Bloggers
I know, it was supposed to be six, but nine is a better number for me, and this is about creativity, right?

1. rummuser
2. Evan at Wellbeing and Health
3. Evelyn at Attraction Mind Map
4. Lance at The Jungle of Life
5. Maya at Think Maya
6. Jody at Josephine Carr Writes
7. Lori at Space Age Sage
8. Mike at Exit 78
9. B. Wilde at The B. Wilde Column

What About You?
What makes you happy? What are some of your favorite blogs?

Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens, keep learning and growing. Find what you love to do and find a way to share it with others.
—Cheerful Monk

I recently read a post about how this is a highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world and we can’t let up. We can’t hope to compete unless we’re the best in our field. The post reminded me of two things:

1. This picture of a dog so competitive that he sees other dogs, even his own reflection in a window, as a threat. It’s a great way to close down our minds and keep us in the stressful, fight-or-flight mode.
2. Lily Tomlin’s quote: “The trouble with the rat race is even if you win you’re still a rat.”

As I’ve mentioned before, that way of looking at the world just isn’t my style. The post in question was a guest post on someone else’s blog, and the author’s own blog is about slowing down and living more consciously. For some reason I gave some strong advice in my comment (which I usually try not to do):

Your article sounds like desperation to me. Lighten up, get in touch with your deepest values, find a way to make a contribution to the world. Stop thinking in terms of competition. My latest post is Following the Path…Step By Step. I think it’s a much saner way of living.

He thanked me for the reminder and says he’s a “recovering achievement junkie” and sometimes gets diverted. He wisely adds, “…this happens to the best of us.” Good for him! Cultural influences are strong, and if we’re not careful we’re bombarded by messages telling us we’re not good enough the way we are… we need to do more, be more, have more. One of the beauties of blogging is we can connect with kindred spirits, other people who have no desire to win the rat race. We can talk about what we really want in life, something a lot better than being just a rat frantically running on a treadmill.

What About You?
How do you see the world? Does your view motivate you out of fear? Does it make you feel helpless? Does it empower you?

 
Our lives are frittered away in details. Simplify. Simplify.
—Henry David Thoreau
 
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality….
—Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth

I’ve always had a lot of inner drive, but I’ve never been achievement oriented…except when I was a kid, when I wanted to do well in school. I hear a lot these days about how hectic life can be as we try to juggle all the demands makes of us. I’ve never had that problem as an adult. I’ve always agreed with Thoreau: “Simplify. Simplify.”

Some people seem to think that would mean accepting an impoverished life. On the contrary. It means having the time and attention to appreciate what we have, to be able to do what’s truly important to us. (See Living Every, Every Minute.) For me it sometimes meant doing things that society doesn’t admire, like taking ten years out to raise a child…doing some volunteering, working together (including my husband) on family projects and just “hanging out” and enjoying my daughter while she was still young.

At other times it meant doing things that are more officially exciting and honored by our culture…see Building a Solid Foundation and Making Hay While the Sun Shines. What worked for me was to enjoy each period of my life as it came and not try to do everything at once.

I learned about the joy of simplifying when I was in grammar school. My sister and I were taking dancing lessons, and sometime in early December we had a recital. I don’t remember much about it, except that because it was so close to Christmas the organizers treated us by allowing us to go through a line with a long table full of toys. We could choose anything we wanted. My sister and I chose carefully and each decided we wanted one of the balls. As we were leaving we saw other kids with armloads of goodies…it turns out we didn’t have to choose just one thing, we could have had as much as our arms could have carried. At first we felt foolish and wanted to go back and try again, but then we decided that’s not what we really wanted. We really wished the rule had been what we had assumed, that we could each pick only one thing. If we had a huge pile of toys then none of them would have been special.

No, I’ve never been tempted by the idea that the more we do and the more we have the happier we will be. As I’ve said, I do have an inner drive, so when my husband and I got back from our 15 months in Europe and traveling around the world (again see Building a Solid Foundation) it was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do next. The usual advice of envisioning your ideal future and setting goals to achieve it didn’t work for me. I just wanted to live deeply and find work that I loved to do. I wanted to enjoy the process of living, and that was something I couldn’t envision. I finally realized it wasn’t something I could see, it was something I had to feel. Maybe I couldn’t see around the next corner, but I could tell when I was on the right path. I still remember where I was standing when I realized that. It was another life-changing moment. I suddenly had an inner gyroscope…I was free to explore without worrying about becoming lost.

I don’t always consciously know where I’m going, but my inner path is there and I can tune into it. The important thing is taking this approach means there is no rush, there is no frustration about not moving fast enough to meet external goals. All I have to do is follow the path, one step at a time.

The Life Balance Project
This post was written as part of Stacey Weckstein’s Life Balance Project. Balance, in terms of juggling priorities, is seldom a problem for me now. If I find myself having conflicting priorities, I step back and simplify my life so I can focus on what’s most important. It goes back to the Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People:

2. They realize that the quality of our lives depends on how we focus our energy and our attention. They try to align their thoughts and actions with their values. They know how to motivate themselves to take action.

I don’t know if this approach would work for everyone. I enjoy working and don’t have trouble motivating myself, assuming it’s something I want to do. And because we’ve kept our lives simple and have always lived beneath our means, my husband and I have a lot of financial freedom. It works for us.

What About You?
Is your life in balance? Are you trying to do too much? Do you need more challenges? Do you have an inner path that you’re tuned into? What works for you?

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
—Lao-tzu

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

Last week’s post, What I Learned From Losing Loved Ones, was a heavy piece, and my husband’s brother has recently been diagnosed with cancer. He’s dealing with chemotherapy as well as the after effects of an invasive (5 hours in surgery) biopsy. I can’t do much for him and his family except to let them know that they’re in our thoughts and prayers, but I can work on my own equanimity and courage.

As I mentioned last week, the thing that works best for me is connecting with other people, with life as a whole. And this doesn’t have to be anything big. It can be as simple as sharing pictures and/or being understanding when dealing with insurance matters.

Goddard Is Back!
Goddard, the dog in the photos, is the first thing that comes to mind. Tom, one of our local Animal Control officers, sent an e-mail to the volunteers in Friends of the Shelter. It was entitled Goddard is back! He reminded us that Goddard often has issues with other dogs, so be careful when we take him out. Goddard was adopted last year and was doing fine in his new home, but he’s a victim of the housing bubble…his owners had to give up their home and move into an apartment.

After Tom sent the e-mail, he received a slew of responses saying how affectionate Goddard is and how much the volunteers love working with him. So I found these three pictures I took last year and shared them. It was a simple gesture, but looking at the photos again warmed my heart, and the father of the girls in the pictures hadn’t seen them before. He wanted to add them to his collection. Of course.

Dealing With Insurance
Keeping track of health insurance matters is often a bit of a challenge, because it can take months for the paperwork to come back, and it’s often incorrect. Even the representatives don’t always understand the system. Sometimes a phone call will clear up the matter, sometimes it won’t. I had a case this past week where the representative said absolute hogwash. There was no way his story made sense. And that was all right.

I’ve finally learned to be patient and to remember my interaction with a fellow human being is more important than straightening things out in one phone call. One question that helps is “How can I connect with sacredness in this moment?” I cheerfully admit, it’s an off-beat approach, but it works for me. So in cases like this I thank the person for his time, then I make another phone call later to get more information. I keep trying until I find someone who understands what has happened and how things should work.

It took me a long time to view dealing with red tape as an opportunity to make this world a slightly more loving place. And doing my small part, no matter how modest, to do just that is the best way for me to handle stress and mourning.

What About You?

What are your greatest sources of stress? What are your greatest resources? What works for you?

They know how to mourn the inevitable losses in their lives.
—The Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People.

I cheerfully admit, I’m hopelessly sentimental. Buddhist non-attachment doesn’t come naturally to me…I even mourn when a favorite article of clothing wears out. So when Robert Hruzek asked us to talk about a time when we’ve been shaken by a stressful situation, I thought of the time about 13 years ago when my best friend, my uncle and my mother died within 7 weeks of one another. In fact, their deaths were the least of it. The process of dying was the hardest part.

A Very Rough Autumn

Mary, whom I’ve written about in a previous post, and my mother both died of cancer.

Mary
Mary had ovarian cancer and had been fighting it for several years. She didn’t suffer much pain, but by the fall of 1994 it was clear she was losing the battle. The doctors had removed her small intestine to prolong her life, so she could no longer eat food…she was nourished by intravenous feeding. She had family to care for her, so all I could do was to phone her a few times a week. That was hard, because she was understandably depressed and there was no way to cheer her up. All I could do was to tell her a few things that might interest her and let her know I cared. I know she appreciated the calls, but it was hard to know what to say with so little response from her.

The thing that really helped me during this time was my daughter wanting a special sweater. I hadn’t knit in years, but when she had showed me a picture of the style she liked I offered to knit her one. When she came to visit at Christmas we bought some red wool yarn and a basic pattern for me to modify and I went at it. It was just the therapy I needed because

• the very act of knitting is soothing,
• it was challenging to figure out how to modify the pattern to match the picture, and
• I was doing it for someone I loved.

That last part was crucial.

My Mom
In the meantime, my mother, who had a great tolerance for pain, suddenly was having severe problems with her upper back. X-rays indicated it was degeneration of the spine, so the doctors sent her to a chiropractor. It didn’t do any good, and the pain killers messed up the rest of her body, so she lived without them…sleeping in a recliner in the living room because it was torture to lie down. I couldn’t do anything about the pain, but phone calls helped some.

February/March—Passing Away

I worked hard on my daughter’s sweater and aimed for her to have it for Valentine’s Day. I mailed it off February 2nd, and that evening received a phone call saying that Mary had passed away. That Saturday my mother phoned to say she was going to the emergency room but first wanted to tell me what to put in her obituary. She also reminded me I had promised to give the eulogy at her funeral.

In fact, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her and sent her home with some pills. I won’t even go there! A week later she went back and they finally did a chest x-ray. She had terminal lung cancer and the pain had been from fluid in her lungs pressing against nerves in her back. (A useful piece of information…x-rays of the spine don’t tell anything about back pain. Some of the worst looking backs have no pain, and some of the better looking ones can have severe pain.)

When she was released from the hospital Marvin, the love of her life, and I decided we wanted her to be able to go back to her own home. With the help of some hospice care he and I could take care of her. It was only for a little over a month total, and after the first week Marvin said he could handle it by himself for a while. I could go home and he would tell me when he needed more help. We kept in close contact by phone, talking several times a day. It was actually a cheerful, loving time… Mom and I had a long history of good telephone conversations, and these seemed just like a continuation of what we had always been doing. She and Marvin were making last minute arrangements (she from her bed), rewriting the will, etc., and seemed to think of me as the emotionally stable Rock of Gibraltar. In fact, I was spending most of my time lying in bed knitting and trying to get my stomach to accept some food. The phone calls were as therapeutic for me as they were for them.

It was during this time that my uncle, my mother’s brother, died of a heart attack sitting in his chair watching TV. He had been having trouble with congestive heart problems, so it wasn’t a big surprise. He had been visiting her regularly, so it didn’t seem sad…somehow it seemed fitting that he passed on about the same time. And he passed away painlessly, a blessing to us all.

One day my mom was telling me everything that was going on about his funeral when she started running out of breath. The thing that sicks in my mind was she was so cheerful. When she had to stop she said, “I could talk all day. I do truly love you!” That is, without a doubt, one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me.

That period couldn’t last forever, of course. Soon enough Marvin phoned to say he needed help and I flew back. When I arrived at the house and walked into Mom’s bedroom she reminded me of a little kid. She was surprised to see me. Her face lit up and she said, “Oh, you came back!”

Of course I came back. There was nowhere in the world I would rather have been at that moment and during the next few weeks as she gradually lost awareness and slipped away.

What I Learned

Even though the next few weeks were physically and emotionally exhausting, I felt privileged to be there and to help. The details don’t matter.

It took me over six months to get back to eating without effort, and my stomach still seizes up as I write this. But it’s a small price to pay for caring. This wasn’t a new lesson for me, but it reinforces what I figured out years ago, that if I cut myself off from emotional pain I’m also cutting myself off from life’s deepest joys. That would not be a good bargain.

This experience was also a great illustration of a little-known aspect of stress-management. So much is written about fight or flight. But what works for me, like many other women, is tend and befriend. I didn’t want to fight or run, I wanted to connect, to help. I’ll be forever grateful that I had a chance to do that.

What About You?
Have you ever had a period of great stress in your life? How did you handle it? What helped?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how when we’re stuck in a rut, we have to get out of our “comfort zone”. That doesn’t describe what happens to me. When I’m “stuck in a rut” I’m not comfortable at all. Words like bored, restless, frustrated and depressed would be more accurate. I feel most fully alive when I have the right amount of challenge in my life. It might be scary, but it feels right as long as the new experiences are balanced by relaxation and feeding my soul.

I usually think in terms of the optimizing challenge graph:
 

This curve is useful when I choose my challenges…I try to pick something big enough to be exciting but not such a stretch that it’s overwhelming. But there’s also something to be said for the Yin-Yang concept of complementarity, illustrated in the first picture above. It explicitly honors the periods of rest and reflection that our fast-paced, achievement-oriented culture tends to regard as a waste of time.

It’s hard not to be swayed by this attitude at times and start to feel I should be “doing more”. That’s why I appreciated B. Wilde’s recent post about his Grandpa Dwayne:

Grandpa didn’t believe that his self-worth was tied to being an overachiever. When driving his truck he looked at his surroundings and enjoyed the ride. When he passed the waterfalls in the Uintah Mountains he always stopped to take a look. And when he set out to accomplish a task, he liked to plan for trouble. But he never went about frantically trying to accomplish a list of self-imposed urgent tasks that, when completed, measured his value as a person. Fortunately, I learned this lesson from him before he passed away two years ago.

Thanks, Bryan, for reminding me to keep my priorities straight…to remember that life is about ebb and flow, not just the constant striving for more. So, I’ll continue to enjoy my quiet times and comfort zones, and not be thrown by our out-of-balance culture.

What about you? Is your life in balance? Do you appreciate your comfort zones as much as the excitement of challenge and achievement? Please share with us.

Like gazillions of other Americans, my emotional buttons were pushed by Bush’s plan to spend $700 billion to buy up bad debts…with absolutely no protection for us taxpayers. My husband and I have always lived within our means…we resent being asked to pay for the gambling excesses of others.

That’s all I’m going to say about what triggered me…giving into ranting would be throwing away my personal power. So I’ve been keeping myself informed about what’s been going on and what the proposed solutions are, and I’ve written and phoned my representatives in Washington. Apparently enough other people have made their views known, so the proposed bailout plan has been modified.

That’s the only constructive thing I could think of to deal with triggering event, so the next step was to free myself of the anger. I wanted to get on with my life. Using my StressEraser wasn’t enough…there was way too much energy there…so I decided to try tapping, a technique I learned about last May. I haven’t been stressed enough to use it until now…this was a perfect chance to see if it worked.

To start with I followed this demonstration by Aila. I also read The Tapping Cure, a book I had bought. The book isn’t necessary, but I like to read stories of how a technique works and to see how I can fine tune it for myself. I also like the fact that the author is a pragmatist…she thought the underlying theory of the process sounded like mumbo jumbo, but she became a true believer in the technique because it works so well. Anyway, she was right, it did stop my buttons from getting pushed when I think about the current mess. I can now keep up-to-date about what’s happening with the financial crisis without being tossed around by anger and fear. And I now have another powerful technique for my toolbox.

What about you? Is anything pushing your emotional buttons right now? If so, what techniques are you using? How well are they working? Have you tried anything new lately?

The above picture was taken years ago, on a trip to see some European particle accelerators…I’m the gal in the navy skirt. I haven’t thought about that for a long time, but was recently reminded when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN made the news. Some people were worried that turning the machine on would create microscopic black holes that would destroy the earth.

I haven’t wasted any time worrying about that, but I was interested in what I remembered about CERN. I went there twice, and I remember how great is was to get back to Europe…some scenery in particular sticks in my mind…and I remember some of my interactions with people, but the details about the various machines are long gone. I do remember that the first trip taught me a lifelong lesson. It was a great trip, but by the time it was finished I was feeling completely overwhelmed and inadequate…there was so much about accelerators that I didn’t know. I told my boss that one thing was certain, I needed to learn a lot more physics. His answer was life-changing. He bet me that it wouldn’t do any good. I couldn’t possibly learn it all, there was just too much. He was internationally known in the field, and he felt over his head at times, too. His situation was worse because he had a reputation to protect…he had to pretend that he was always on top of things.

I could learn from that. His comment made me look at what I really wanted…to have an interesting job that used my talents, one where I liked the people and was respected. In fact, I already had that, that’s why I was sent on the trip. And there I was letting my ego stress me out because I didn’t know everything. How stupid was that? Clearly my first priority was to stop taking myself so seriously and to enjoy the process. I could do that, and I did. I also learned some more physics, which I’ve forgotten by now. But I never did forget the lesson that trip taught me…I’ve integrated it into my life. That’s partly where I developed my basic philosophy:

Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens keep learning and growing. Find what you love to do and find a way to share it with others.

Which of your experiences have affected your basic philosophy? Have you ever let your ego rob you of the adventure of life?

We lived in a small town/semi-rural area when I grew up and I was fairly isolated from other kids except for school. The first picture was of me in seventh grade…one of my happiest years of late childhood. I had a close friend, Mary, who was interested in the same things I was, and I was always excited to get to school.

What a difference a year makes. One morning in eighth grade I went up to her in the school yard, happy to see her, and she cut me dead. She made it clear she never wanted to talk to me again and wouldn’t say why. I figured it was because I was such a mess…I mean my body was changing, I had gained a lot of weight, and I hated that part of life. Yeah, yeah, it would have helped a lot if I had combed my hair….

Anyway, it still hurts to think about it. I knew the standard reaction…”If you don’t like me, then I don’t like you, so there. If you’re going to be mean to me, I can be mean to you too.” That didn’t work for me. I was hurt and I still liked her. I wasn’t going to deny it. So I made other friends, and I didn’t push myself on Mary but didn’t avoid her either. I was in that horrible self-conscious stage, but I forced myself to be kind and polite whenever we saw one another. It was hard at first, but like anything else, it got easier with practice.

That went on for two years. Then in high school, in tenth grade, she started thawing out and we became best friends again, a friendship that lasted until she died of cancer a few years ago. One night in 11th grade we had gone to a meeting and she drove me home. She told me why she had done it…it was because her mother had died when she was in sixth grade and her father was an Italian immigrant. He was 50 years old when she was born, and he spoke little English. They had nothing in common so she felt lonely and alienated. She was jealous that I had loving parents, and she had hated me more when I was so nice to her.

Talk about life-long lessons… I cried, of course, when I got home…what a stupid waste…but I learned two valuable lessons from the experience:

1. Don’t take other people’s reactions personally. It hurts to be rejected, but we’re all acting out of our own needs. If it’s not a good match, it’s not a good match. Of course, if combing your hair and keeping your body healthy is an issue then by all means do it, for your own sake if nothing else.
 
2. Get your ego out of the way…get in touch with your deepest values and try to live them. Life is too short to be petty. Life will still hurt at times, but if you handle situations well you can make the pain worthwhile.

That’s when I first started learning the traits of stress-hardy, resilient people. That list comes from hard-earned experience, and the traits were an integral part of my life before I tried to articulate them. They work for me.

What about you? Have you ever been rejected? What did you learn from the experience?