Politics Unredeemed

Last night I saw the Frontline special: Boogie Man, the Story of Lee Atwater. It was aired 11/11 and if you have On Demand you can go back and see it.

Lee Atwater was the mastermind of dirty tricks used in the re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, but became a Republican star by 1988 when he engineered the Willie Horton ad and other outright lies about Michael Dukakis to get the first George Bush elected. After that coup, he was named head of the Republican National Committee during the first year of 41's White House tenure. From there he began early digging into the background and the subsequent smearing in 1989 of the young governor from Arkansas who would eventually beat GHWB in 1992. But Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990 and it killed him by 1991. He recanted on his death bed, confessing that what he did was wrong and it was also bad for the country.

What matters here is this: Atwater begat Rove and Rove begat Schmidt (McCain's mastermind the last three months of his ugly campaign). To this day they all regard Atwater as a genius at political maneuvering and bending the truth to achieve the only goal: winning. The interesting aspect watching this was seeing how those "tricks" were used in the 2008 campaign. And the best part is this: it didn't work this time.

When will they ever learn? Why were his proteges not listening to what he said during his last conscious days? Almost twenty years after Atwater's last big coup, the politics of hate and division (wedge issues) has failed. I hope and pray there are strong Republicans who will rebuild and reinvent their party based on principles , not dirty tricks.

Brave New World, Part 2

Last night I walked down to my local Bank of America ATM to deposit a check. This is one of those storefront 10 by 10 well-lit ATMs right out on a busy city street, hardly a dangerous place to transact with your money, but still anything can happen. I lived in New York city for twenty years, right through the "homeless" 80s. In those days, ATMs were dimly lit and beggars stood there and sometimes jumped you until Citibank put cops nearby.

Since the Obama victory, people are talking about a shift in how we see people of color: African Americans, Asians, Latinos, even Middle Easterners. When I inserted my card to enter the small space, already there at the two machines were six young men, all dark-skinned and no one over the age of (maybe) twenty. They spoke Spanish and they were somewhat fidgety.

My self-protective radar went up and I thought about what to do. I took the deposit envelope and when they finished I put in my check, but noticed they were standing nearby and not yet leaving, even though it seemed they had finished their own transactions. I decided to not take out any cash.

When I turned around one of them went back to the ATM with the others looking on. He had a wad of cash to deposit but was confused and awkward. finally he turned back to me and asked in Spanish how to do a "deposito". He didn't realize he needed the deposit envelope for the cash. He handed me 480 dollars and I sealed the envelope and went to the machine to watch and coach him through it. And it was a good thing. He kept hitting "cheques" instead of "ahorra". Anyway, he got it right, finally and thanked me. They, all six of them thanked me.

In five minutes of my life, fear turned to trust, to my natural ability to take care of others. This is a new day. Know hope.

Brave New World

I'm frankly baffled, out in the cold wondering what's up next. I thought of sitting down and making a list of all the things I'm not going to miss, but I couldn't imagine the shift in going from everything to nothing or at least to a very damn little. So here's the short list:

I can live without my Prius, but I do need a car for some of my out of the city assignments. A bike in winter in the Northeast doesn't do that well on the Mass Pike. I don't think they're allowed unless motorized.

I can live in a smaller home, but I do need a little privacy between my bedroom, kitchen and living room. I do need to eat and maybe having lots more time on my hands without a whole lot of work will allow me to cook long, slow meals the old fashioned way, avoiding all the waste of those pre-packaged things I buy at Costco and merely "prepare". This would be living green and saving the landfills.

Maybe we will ditch all of the two landlines we need for business and just pay for the two cell phones (or ditch the cell phones and go down to one land line). We need the line for business more than for personal use.

I could go on and on, but what about "my"Internet? How could I live without Comcast feeding my high speed? Would I become a cranky old Internet grouch?

Enough of this. I choose optimism. The alternative is just too bad for words.

Panic

No hopeful news out of the presses all over the world today. But that lack of a hopeful sign may be the hope we need. So far all the plans, from the bailout to the insinuation of taking over the healthy banks temporarily, have not rallied the stock market or assured economists and even some heads of world government, so maybe we'd better be patient until the right people formulate something clearly progressive for everyone to understand. If we can grasp something here, we can at least stave off panic.

What does panic do? It's the worst possible emotion. It's fear SQUARED. Remember that we have laws that protect people from panic in public spaces: you cannot scream FIRE in a movie theatre. I watched panic once in horror in a breathtaking scenario. I had just arrived in France and turned on a local TV feed only to witness live video from Belgium when a panic broke out after a soccer game and people were being trampled to death. And this was only a soccer game. It went from enthusiasm at winning the game to over-excitement, to the beginning of a stampede rush, and finally escalated to a panic to AVOID getting crushed to death, which resulted in hundreds more getting crushed to death.

What does a panic do to the American economy? It grinds everyone to a standstill. On September 11th, 12th and for at least a week afterwards in 2001, very few people spent much money. We were even wary of traveling outside, much less purchasing good and services. We were in a numb panic. Osama bin Laden won by stopping the wheels for a brief time. This time if we remain calm we can actually think our way through this, solve it one piece at a time and look at the whole--global climates, global trade, global cooperation. For my sanity, i know there are worse days ahead, but the ease with which we transition to better days (and certainly they won't look like the last five to ten years) can be productive and satisfying. Calm leadership, genuine and thoughtful is called for all across this land. Vote Obama.

Nothing to Fear

And you know the famous end of this sentence from FDR: there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

As a career coach speaking with a variety of talented but recently unemployed people around the country, I hear fear on the other end of the phone. I don't blame any of them. "What can I do to prepare for a new job if there isn't anyone willing to hire until this whole financial debacle is resolved"

Until is what the optimists say.

I think we're in for a major transformation in how we view money, credit and where money even comes from. We are globally dependent and we're watching world markets quiver and change every day. We're interdependent in far more ways than we could have dreamed of even a month ago. It's all too obvious; as goes the American economy, so goes at least Western Europe, if not much of Asia. (I haven't heard a word about China in all this, other than we will be borrowing from them to pay for the inevitable bailout).

What will the transformation look like? It will be something closer to the 1930s than most Republicans would like, but that's too bad. We need to shore up our infrastructure, improve education and other systems for the general public good. We can also pump money and jobs into the economy with large government funded programs. Putting people to work to improve the inner workings of this country boosts confidence and develops skill. Improving education promises a future. The free market will not die with this solution. It's time to bolster the confidence of the US citizens and from there to show the world once again our resiliency.

Locating yourself in a US financial disaster

I call this locating yourself, but I can only write about myself and hope you resonate. This week has been an education in financial terminology I've heard for years but am finally hearing explained. Frankly there's a part of me that lives back in the 1950s. People go to work, get a paycheck, put it in the bank and maybe set up a savings account. They may have a single credit card and use it sparingly, paying it off in full every month, and consult a sound family budget weekly.

Never mind that I don't live this way, but I do think this way. And there's the problem. I actually learned my lesson the hard way with credit cards and for the most part charge everything to a debit card, which is just cash in plastic.

But I currently have only one secure savings "instrument" and it amounts to less than a month's overhead. In short, I live by the sweat of my brow; I depend on my work to pay the monthly bills and I'm not earning enough to meet the monthly numbers. This means that for the first time ever I am doing such a drastic spending plan and debt consolidation that my lifestyle of the past thirty plus years is about to change beyond my wildest (and probably most fear-filled) dreams.

Honestly I do not know right now what life would look or feel like living exactly within my means. From here it looks like poverty living. It feels reductionist and small, without vision or hope, in a place of defeat, devoid of opportunity, within a cocoon of depression and lackluster energy.

Hmmmm. Is there another way of looking at this? Is there any tiny ray of light in such a dark picture that something creative and expansive and life enhancing could emerge? I don't know yet; I'll keep posting on this as I do not wish to resolve that which is in flux and cannot be tightly and neatly concluded before its time. I will say this: there is some measure of comfort in the big downslide. I am not the only edge person out there. There may be comfort in numbers and we may work this out together way better than alone.

Just A Job

We work not just for money, but for a large variety of psychic rewards. Nowhere is this more evident than with people who retire and make themselves busier than they ever were as "employed" members of society.

The ripple effect of work comes in the experience of community expressed in the terra firma of belonging. When we belong to a working community, we are part of a group, part of something larger than our small and vulnerable selves. We are, for better or worse, connected to a system of people organized to achieve a common goal. It is in this psychic circle that we find ourselves loyal to the others with whom and for whom we work.

In the world of work of thirty to forty years ago and way back through the evolving workforce of the 20th Century, people were hired into jobs for which they could expect to remain for some fairly large measure of time. Today, Manpower Inc is the largest non government employer in the US. This is primarily a temporary agency. A large number of people today work in contract positions, brought in to solve a problem, address a specific need, but with no added benefits other than their hourly wage or contractual financial limit.

And enter the thought: it's just a job.

Although it's wise to take a deep breath and fully accept that the caring, nurturing employer has long since left the stage, it helps to see what we've lost in this and how we cope with that innate lack of belonging to a group. In my case, I have just expanded to three "jobs" each of which has deep personal rewards emanating from use of my talents to contribute to the greater good and get paid in doing so.

But what's missing is a deep sense of loyalty to any of these entities. Not one of these "jobs" provides benefits. Not one of these jobs promises to be around a year from now (yes, for themselves, but not necessarily for me). Contracts are temporary and renewable, depending on the flow of business, none of which is in my control.

How do I, or for you dear reader, create that sense of belonging and not just show up, deliver, walk away as if it was someone else's responsibility to own the system and give back to it more than the minimum? In the old paradigm there was a pressure to devote a certain degree of thought and even emotion to the organization, or at least to its people. In the new paradigm, it's way easier to get to the divisive "every man for himself". No matter how nice the people you work for are, there is still no structural framework to act as your safety net.

I have no answer for this, just questions. It's just a job may be a way to keep from getting duped and dumped or it may be a way of driving a wedge into our own well-being at work. I hear those words as defensive.

Harder to write it than to read it

Every time I'm impelled to behave well by, in fact, adding material to my blog, I have to face the exact same demon: WORDS!

Think about it: words swirl through our minds all day long. We probably have the exact same thought fifty or more times a day. "I'm hungry; where's the bathroom; how am I going to pay for that; has the dog been walked; ohmygod, everything I need for tomorrow is in the cleaners!"

Most of our daily appetite for words are banal and mundane and most assuredly cliche. Even those of us who are pretty good with words (like writers) dry up when we're put under some pressure, especially when there is no paycheck on the table. Blog writing is especially hard. If we have no big following or we don't know who's reading because they don't comment, we're writing in a vacuum, looking into our own navels and saying what's on our minds (and remember the list of useless thinking I gave you above).

Yet I read the blogs like an addict. Some are punishingly biased and consequently not worth the time they take to even boot up. Others are open, nuanced and enlivening. I read Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish daily and David Kuo on Belief Net several times a month (and that's about how often he posts there). But suffice it to say, writing is hard work, not casual play. But if you have the gift of words, you are compelled to write now and then. Invitation: comment!

Authenticity and the 2008 election

It seems that the pundits who are worth listening to (the PBS dudes who talk to Charlie Rose at 11 PM after the children are asleep) think that the only quality any presidential candidate must exhibit to win the US presidency is the power to connect to the everyday person. This makes sense on its surface, but only if you believe the everyday person is actually a voter!

I wish I knew the average American. I don't. I'm too long in the Northeast to recognize the lunchpail Democrats in Ohio as the biggest voting bloc, the ones Obama HAS to connect to, or even women over 50 as so terribly significant (and that's a category where I fit).

I don't recognize the description of rich which Obama gave at the Saddleback forum as over 250K (McCain said over 5MM). I live in Boston and I can figure out how to live on under 100K and still feel rich. I lived on under 12K thirty years ago and I shared space in Manhattan with a roommate and went to museums and outdoor music fairs. I always had plenty of food to eat.

Average Americans are rich by any standards in world terms, but we don't (want to) know it. The statistical comparisons are staggering. If Obama doesn't raise taxes (or Mc Cain) we won't have an infrastructure to leave our children. Our children and grandchildren are paying for a social security they will never get to use. It's time for America to get authentic about how rich and poor we are. We live in an unfair, unequal society and we must sober up from the silly stuff of this election. I think we can handle straight talk. and I think the way to connect to the average American (whoever that is) is to appeal to our sense of fairness and inherent appreciation of truth in the face of shared sacrifice.

I await hearing the details of the Democratic platform. Will it resemble the way we live or will it pander to the imaginary lunchpail people? These are not selfish isolated folk. They are "can-do" and they will follow a real leader. Are we ready to actually elect someone good, or just settle for a loser we deserve?

Tough stuff

This is Tuesday's complaint department:

I have a part-time job where I have to maintain a sane and healthy working relationship with people who "supervise" my work (but can't read my attitude) from 1500 miles south of me. It's a virtual call center for career professionals and I attempt to make sense of a complex network of instructions that occasionally becomes unwieldy. My "boss", the woman who hired and trained me, has to manage 186 people remotely from her perch in North Carolina. She's busy ( she IS a Vice-President, after all), and she has more email than anyone ought to have (or so I hear). She announced on one of our multi-city teleconferences about two months ago that she doesn't get to all of her email. This means she doesn't answer inquiries, so don't bother to send any. As one who had already sent her unanswered email six weeks prior, I can attest to that!

So today I needed to find a document she had sent about two weeks ago and I emailed the head of the administrative staff to get the old info for me to make a meeting connection on August 25th. This admin lady couldn't help me, but asked how she could help me get to the source. So, I emailed the Source, the one who doesn't open her emails, and voila! MADAME picked up the phone and called me. And she was offended I was sending out email announcing she doesn't answer her email!! Well, with that phone call, I guess she showed me!

What's wrong here? It's that I called her on her bs with not answering email and she woke up! God forbid anyone should notice that if you announce on a teleconference that it might take you six weeks to hear back from her that you would seek to get her ear by going around her to anyone who could help you out!

I have a big problem with poseurs! Straight talk about relationships that have to be maintained long-distance is essential for s smooth working relationship. I was kind in apologizing for her misunderstanding that I might have sounded like I was complaining about her, but it's time to get the big picture: hire an admin to read your mail and respond or I'll call you next time!

Big Stuff

My book (and my blog) is nothing if not about building character, and not to be confused with backbone, stiff upper lip or any of the prep school idiosyncrasies.

We spend our lives in behaviors developed from character and we travel over and over again back to its monumental maintenance. Every once in awhile, we get the blessing of a really bad event, (did I say blessing?) or culmination of a series of events, habits or lifelong behaviors that hits us with a WHAMMY!

These are the times that try men's souls. And women's I might add.

I am in the midst of just such a life altering event. Predicament is more the word, for events happen and pass somewhat quickly; predicaments take time to unravel and finally straighten out. The details of my messy experience are not important here: you have one yourself; you will have one soon or you've had one in the not so distant past and you'd rather not discuss it, much less remember it.

The question is what happens on the journey through the mess? How do I behave? I'll give you one simple example. I had to call a lawyer to begin to take care of my predicament, and I was given a referral of someone from a friend who hadn't paid the gentleman when she used him four years ago. I was embarrassed to tell him I couldn't name my source, but I went ahead and told it straight. I wasn't free to tell him. I had rehearsed other nonsense, but told the simple truth.

The victories we find in life come from very small steps, even when we clean up very big mistakes. We die a thousand deaths as we stumble through our years, but we wake up and make a tiny dent in our integrity, one simple sentence at a time.

Chain baby pictures

The chains are far reaching in my email.

This morning I got a new one, a pithy invitation to be a better person, love my neighbor, forgive the people I'd like to see dead or maimed, speak up with courage, seize the day (carpe diem for you Latin lovers), forgive myself for everything (including how I will ignore the guilt-producing words to send this back to the one who sent it to me (like Santa Claus checking it twice).

I think we've totally lost it with the Internet email chains. Cute baby pictures (no African Americans among them, and one half-Asian child passed the litmus test) don't motivate me to be a better person. Most of my bad behavior is with my own husband (as opposed to yours). I wake up to my better angel when I remember that he doesn't put the lid down (you know what lid I refer to) because he was many years in the Navy and there were no girls around and we raised two sons and the "seat" was never put in the covered position. I was outnumbered.

When I let that go and move on, I'm a better person. No email chain will assuage my conscience of my everyday bad behaviors at home.

Chain Letters on the Net

I'm moved to address why chain letters trolling the internet are so difficult for me to pass along. I just received one from a dear friend whose way of life and way of thinking and giving of herself to the world I have long admired. But...I cannot pass along the Mother Theresa prayer she just sent that has the obligatory addendum to send it to eleven others including herself and see what happens in four days. There is an implied message of a miracle on the four day horizon.

I have never found out what would happen in four days. The three or four times out of the thirty or forty opportunities I've had in the past five years and have mostly rejected, I can't recall anything good or bad. But where I do feel bad now and have always felt is in breaking the chain. What four day miracles have I aborted for others, including the ones who have so naively sent their chain letters to me?

The question is this: Is NOT answering the call to passing along the prayer a deliberate F-U to faith, to the spirit of Mother Theresa, to the spiritual forces in the universe that make good things happen to good people (like me?). And the alternative: is not passing along the Mother Theresa prayer an omen of an ill-fated happening around the corner or of the current state of unrest in my life finding a permanent home and becoming a curse, an irreversible curse that will leave me in unrelenting doom?

What if something good happens to me in four days, something spectacularly good (I inherit $10 million from a relative I didn't know existed) What if something truly bad happens? (I will not give an example; I'm superstitious). Does any of this have anything to do with the Mother Theresa chain?

The fact is maybe I'm a latent existentialist: I've been pretending to be a person of faith, but I'm really just a spectator.

Last night I was with a group of friends discussing the nature of courage against the fear of failure. Unfortunately, all the examples of courageous heros from the last two centuries have been assassinated: Lincoln, Kennedy, King, Gandhi. I have the incredible hubris to think that if I courageously step out of my box, I'll be assassinated. And that's worth pondering. But Mother Theresa died of old age. Ooops, Maybe I can still retrieve that chain prayer and figure out which ten friends I would offend by sending it along.

I Don't Need Your Money

Wow! I said it.

As a career advisor, I hesitate coaching anyone into a maverick posture when they have a job offer at 20-40% less than their last paycheck, but they have the clock ticking against the three months severance from their last job and their mortgage and their child's college tuition payments are on the horizon for several more years.

BUT... It's OK to think that "I don't need this; I don't need to settle; I can keep going until I'm in a financial squeeze that compels me to take that much less".

The same is true for consulting fees. This happens when potential clients attempt to nickel and dime you. In my wedding celebrant business, I get calls from people who have seen my website and tell me they've read the range of fees for my services. On the website, I do not outline point for point where the charges break down, but if I start at the low of 250, it's strange to hear a groom tell me he's having a wedding with 100 guests at the most expensive hotel in this city and he wants to pay me no more than 150! There is nothing wrong with shopping price, but there's an image issue and a values issue here---this groom would not ask his hotel caterers to serve jello mold for dessert or ask his photographer to use discount disposables, to cut costs. It's just NOT DONE. He knows this.

I don't need his money, even though I had that weekend open this summer. At the same time, there are others who engage my services for 150. Who are they? These are people like a couple I married in May, who came to my house and in my meditation room said their vows. I gave them a keepsake copy of the standard script, took pictures for them, had fresh flowers at the front door and found small tokens to decorate the ceremony room to reflect their Latino nationality. My services were their biggest expense.

It all comes down to this: none of us needs anyone else's money, whether we're in plenty or in want. We need to earn a living and money shows up when we contribute to the greater good. So remember this, not as a defensive posture, but as an empowerment and a sign of inherent trust.

Long time away

In the blogosphere I've been out of touch a very long time. But issues of character don't rest.

It's no secret I have a small enterprise as a wedding officiant, which I participate in on many weekends from May through November. I have an initial meeting with prospective couples that takes about an hour, they and I sign a simple contract, and I proceed to develop a wedding script for their ceremony in the not distant future.

This coming October I have most of the month booked, but for Friday evening weddings. I recently interviewed a couple who are seeking an officiant for their Saturday wedding, which would mean two on that weekend. Sometimes couples decide right then and there to hire me, they make a deposit, and the entire process begins immediately. Other times, they walk away, contract in hand, and say they'll let me know. Most of the time when they walk away the deposit arrives within a week or so.

I have a friend who has a marketing background and she considers me timid in my marketing behavior. She suggested that I tell couples who hesitate that I have another couple who are considering the same date, so I need to have a quick decision. I said I can't do what she suggests. Why not?

Well, as I've always said in my work as a career counselor, never lie when the truth is sufficient. Never mind the laws of karma. This couple knows that I have most of October booked and they surely might have guessed that I'm not worried if they decide not to use my services. Given the premium of October availabilities for wedding officiants, the likelihood I will have that date booked by someone else is still high.

But the larger point is the issue of character and integrity and the high cost of "little white lies". Even if that suggestion might have helped "close" the interview with a booked and deposited date, what would it have done to me? My friend is not a scheming woman full of lies and deception; her suggestion is common among some in the career counseling field who suggest you tell a potential employer you have other offers on the table when you only have potential interest, but nothing solid.

The issue is this: little lies put you in the habit of fuzzy thinking, of easy compromise, of clever mind games. And, one little habit begets more. Sooner or later that little white lie will be repeated in another circumstance. It gets to be fun to get by with this creative way of living and eventually the lies get bigger and soon enough, you're in the business of self-deception.

My late friend Bob Clampitt, founder of The Children's Express newspaper, told me something thirty years ago I've never forgotten: do not believe, and thereby become a victim of, your own PR. The cost of the trick of indicating other business pressure to force a decision from a buyer sets one up to believe in an importance that isn't real. This sets character issues in motion that will only compound an already difficult world. Leave it alone. Trust the universe to supply you with what you need.
Character is the coin of the realm of having a life worth living. We ignore these small opportunities at our peril.

Words Matter

You all know we're into crazy silly season in the Democratic race for the nomination, and here we go with another major gaffe, this time from HRH (Her Royal Highness) HRC. She had to say the word assassination, referring back to RFK's run for the presidency into June of 1968 as a way of explaining why she wants to stay in the race until the last primary in June 2008.

I will refrain from my views on where this came from in her psyche, but I will say this: words matter. Words are powerful little utterances that have a way of revealing our thoughts, our intentions, and even our subconscious wishes. Given the immediacy of YouTube and the internet, people in public and the words they speak are scrutinized like never before. We have "God damn America"--..."Bitter and cling to their religion"..." hard working Americans, white Americans...". We have the macaca moment that brought down a senate candidacy.

So, how do we sharpen our ability to choose our words well, to say what we mean and speak with fairness, with caring intelligence and in a way that does not for a second diminish another human being? Saying something that reveals our own naivete is something that we can correct by trail and error, but saying things that diminish another can lose us friendships, collegiality, family bonds and business relationships that we may not be able to recover. We don't have the luxury of trial and error when it comes to speaking into relationship.

And that's the heart of it all. Everything we say and write has an original context of relationship. Even when we must be critical, there is a way of saying important words that leave the other person whole and able to hear us. This is where the work is.

Chaos and Order

Chaos and order are the ruling energies of the universe, the twin partners of progress. At our best we live in continuous chaos and we seek ongoing order. Chaos represents the daily ups and downs, new and unexpected events, emotional turnarounds and surprises that come our way hour after hour. Chaos is obvious if we suddenly find ourselves in a system wide traffic lights failure in a traffic jam during peak drive hours. Order is everywhere as well, but we seldom stop to notice. The same traffic jam has been thought through and there are stop signs and traffic lights that actually do work most of the time, yellow lines and crosswalks, all of which put order into our driving.

We have (controlled) chaos chopping onions and mixing the cheese into the macaroni, and order is restored when the dishes are done and dripping in the drainer. A higher order is achieved once the dishes are dried and put back in the cabinet, only to turn back to chaos for the next dinner's use.

There's a degree of chaos even writing a blog post. First, ideas circulate in the mind. Then inspiration dries up and a panic of chaotic proportions might set in. And then we start to write, go back and edit, and re-edit, and order arises into a (we hope) somewhat cohesive message.

The good news is that neither the chaos nor the order is permanent. We are asked to keep awake and on our toes to find and face the chaos and then do the same to find and utilize the order, only to surrender the brilliant solution to the next inevitable problem. The key words are impermanance and awake. The joy of life is in that awareness of being in the middle of both the chaos and the order. It's a dance, and need not be taken seriously.

Job Loss

The loss of one's job ranks high on the stress scale as fundamental to human well-being. My last post addressed this around the need to belong to something bigger than our own small world.

I have opportunities as a career counselor to engage with people who encounter the rough world of downsized businesses. Some see the "reduction in force" as a blessing; some react with resignation; and some are enraged. It is this third group I want to address here today.

All people have emotional responses to loss, and ordinarily we have or at least are encouraged, to take the time to deal with the pain of such losses. We have read of the extremes where someone who is laid off goes home for the shotgun and comes back to massacre his boss and/or his colleagues. This is rare, but the feelings of such rage and its subsequent revenge reside in most of us, but are transmuted into healthy action through the willingness to let the shock and loss go through a natural source of healing.

To mitigate against the negative residue infecting the next positive steps which must follow one into a healthy career transition, I recommend taking time off, disengaging completely from even thinking about work. I strongly suggest a mental health break. Just last week I did this for myself, not taking time away for job loss recovery, but giving myself a "yoga" break for having completed one large assignment and flowing right into another, very different and challenging new one.

It all comes down to this. Energy, rich and peaceful psychic energy, feeds a job campaign in highly positive ways. The angst we feel is lowered to a manageable level and the persona we project to others is more appealing. Jobs are won and lost not on the minutia in a resume but in the connection of people to people. Take time off, even if it's three days. The renewed energy you gain will be timeless.

Why Do We Work?

Maybe I just filter everything in one direction, but it seems like everywhere I go, people are talking about their job, their job search, their joys and struggles with volunteer work.

I have long believed that we don't work for money; we work to find out who we are and what makes the world work. Money is both a fuel and a reward for our work, but we actually work to become more fully human in whatever way or through whatever means we find.

I have a friend who is a nurse and who was recently laid off. She's in her 50s, has no children or grandchildren and is frantically bored. She is a gifted home decorator and a highly compassionate friend and daughter, so there is no end of "activity" to draw her attention. But she is anxious about her unemployment, albeit busy with these spare time demands. She wants to get back to a "job", one with all the potential stress, structure and protocols that come with her profession. She is financially quite comfortable, so money is not behind her anxiety. What does my friend get from a job she cannot get from other kinds of work?

Her profession has given her a trajectory of accomplishment that she can summon up and point to, one where she has learned by education and by trial and error how to exercise good judgment and take decisive action. Her profession has given her a mantle of identity, an understandable narrative to navigate the social sphere, a way to belong in the world. This belonging is at the heart of the anxiety for her and for many. She is no less useful or productive for the fine craft work she does in her home, nor for the necessary loving care she provides her elderly mother. But the narrative of belonging resides in her profession. Belonging and identity and self-esteem are all wrapped into the same paradigm. The anxiety cannot be casually switched off when we become unemployed, but having some compassion for the human need for belonging is helpful to give oneself a little patience with the process and to allow for the ongoing contribution everyone makes when we have newfound free time.

Cancer, Bats and Hunger

That was the subject of three out of four articles of the Boston Globe's Op-Ed page on Monday morning, April 28th.

They were all three connected; at least I could see it today. President Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 and pledged 100 million for research. We've since spent 79 billion and cancer is still with us. BUT we are getting somewhere. Score one for the American spirit.

Bats, on the other hand, are moving on to the endangered species list, particularly the Indiana bat. some of you may think bats are funny looking and even scary, but they serve a vital duty: we are expecting a higher than average insect population this summer and bats feast on insects. Look for damaged crops coming from the ecological imbalance.

Finally, we address hunger (actually "we" is James Carroll in the Boston Globe, one of my favorite columnists). Our good idea of turning biofuels into a way of energizing our fuel-dependency has depleted the farm fields worldwide away from growing wheat and corn for food consumption and into plowing those fields for feeding our autos. There are food riots in Haiti, Cairo, and even Senegal.

Where does all this leave us? For me it puts perspective on almost everything I do. If billions on research hasn't solved the cancer crisis, maybe prevention puts a dent in some of it. The death of bats by a "thousand tiny cuts" can be stemmed by legislation fighting against land clearing for timber (which feeds our over-dependence on paper). And then we come to hunger.

Next Sunday in Boston we have the Walk for Hunger. There were half a million hungry people officially registered in Massachusetts for 2007. I'm never hungry for long. I have my sneakers ready.

Ethics and the college student of the 21st C

I wrote recently how education is a spiritual pursuit, a way to uplift the spirit and inspire hope and creativity, to change the world.

Yesterday I went down to my university to pack up for the end of Spring Semester . I went through several hundred writing portfolios to toss those which were outdated for my obligatory storage. We are asked to keep student writing portfolios for one academic year. After that they can be tossed. I decided to take a few home, blank out their names and use snippets of their text to teach other students, both in a university setting as well as in business applications.

I actually kept about two dozen portfolios and gave each one a title for easy access.I put the industry or category titles in alphabetical order. what surprised me was the three titles starting with ethics. There were other portfolios I did not keep that dealt with the right and wrongs of things, subjects which might not be titled ethics, but certainly skewed in that direction. I mused on the way home how this is important to this generation. We boomers fought against the Viet Nam War.These millennials fight against an enemy as fierce as any on the American landscape. No wonder they're going for Barack Obama.

Education

I believe education is a spiritual pursuit. As a nod to all the blog reading I do, here's a good quote from William Ayers, the controversial ex-Weatherman you've been hearing about related to Barack Obama. I think the guy is smart:


"The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation. Act I is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the settled and the status quo. Act II is the fireworks, the moment of upheaval and dissonance, the experience of discovery and surprise, the energy of remodeling and refashioning.

Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a new way of seeing and being.

Act III, of course, will necessarily be recast in some future educational encounter as a new Act I.

This is the fundamental message of the teacher: You can change your life. Wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, the teacher invites you to build on all that you are, and to begin again. There is always something more to do, more to learn and know, more to experience and accomplish. You must change your life, and if you will, you can change your world.

This sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—is at the heart of all teaching; it constitutes the ineffable magic drawing us back to the classroom and into the school again and again. Education, no matter where or when it takes place, enables people to become more powerfully and self-consciously alive; it embraces as principle and overarching purpose the aspiration of people to become more fully human; it impels us toward further knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Education, at its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full measure of their humanity".

William Ayers website, April 2008

wishful thinking

And farewell to all that.I'm getting over the deliberate act of wishful thinking and it feels like a good fit to try on the robe of reality. I used to think that a regime change in the United States would salve our ills, but I've come to realize that this isn't so.

The current US fiscal crisis will be with us for quite awhile, as we have for too long depended on a single bubble (now it's housing and eight years ago it was the dot.com), and bubbles always burst, especially when we hold our breaths just long enough to hopefully get past an upswing with something to hold in our hands.

I have nothing to hold after this bubble, except to welcome my fellow Americans into my own reduced living condition. All the wishing for a better fortune has not made it happen, but at least I stopped worrying. It's actually time to start feeling good. Like Janis Joplin said in her song: "feelin' good's anther word for nothin' left to lose".

When all the dust settles we'll be different, but still fully human, and maybe even better people.

the content of your character

This was part of a line from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail. He actually said he longed for the day when his children and grandchildren would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

We have a great example of just this just now. We have a man of color running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he has revealed the content of his character. This is exactly what my resume book addresses. What on earth have you and I done, what do we stand for, what words of courage and imagination do we use every day to become more fully human, to edge just a tiny bit closer to the truth, to earn our "living" with the level of dignity we so long to deserve?

Since Senator Obama's brilliant and subtle speech, I have become more outspoken, more willing to say what can't be said for fear of offending, more willing to stand in my own truth and let it be that someone will get a nose out of joint. Thank you, Senator. This bloody battle with the Senator from New York might be worth it, if only a few people start to speak up about the hidden fever of racial tension we still experience in the US.

Race and America

If you read the blogs you can hear every kind of opinion imaginable about the Obama speech. Most open-minded people who actually saw and heard the speech in toto praise the speaker for bringing the subject up in such a context of clarity and fairness.

What I liked about the speech (I sat through it all) was the sheer eloquence and courage of explaining something most of us fear to discuss among mixed groups (mixed races). After all, the laws protect all minorities (except gays), so end of story. But there is still de facto racism in all areas of the country and it's high time this disparity is addressed.

I like having this conversation. I teach college writing in a major university in the Northeast, and I was given the chance to design a subject matter focused course. I chose to teach the writings of prominent black authors of the 20th century. Having spent my early years in the south prior to the civil rights movement, I grew up being conscious of race as a permeating issue right beneath the surface, all the new laws notwithstanding. But my teenage students don't resonate with racism until we get deeply into writing about their raw observations. What I see in them is an obvious generational divide. Some of my generation, the same as of their parents and grandparents, still harbors white resentment. Their generation (everyone up to about 35) has no harbor at all. They grew up with mixed races and many of them, at least superficially, see a benevolent racially mixed atmosphere everywhere they look. But when they look more deeply, they see what's still there: Your advantage is at my expense and creates my disadvantage.

This is the most telling aspect of the speech. Until we have the conversation that mutualizes our understanding, we will not become as a nation a true melting pot and appreciate that we are in this together. We have nothing to gain from emotional distancing.

Prayer and gaming the system

Sometimes I just don't want to pray. It boils down to wanting to keep myself responsible for living a life in right action and not leaning on a god to bail me out of my own "soup". I just don't want a rescue unless I deserve it, like I don't want my parents to get me out of trouble.

Perhaps the operative word is deserve. If we don't deserve good fortune, it seems that we'll find ways to avoid it. It's like having an attitude that acts as an invisible wall. But what if one has an attitude that is so undeserving that neither god nor man can enter and expand one's soul? That's not self-reliance: that's an upside down ego tanked in the detritus of low self-esteem. So then it comes down to this: if you're feeling blue, go ahead and ask for help: god is used to it. Maybe it's those moments of low self-esteem that are deliberately put there as a reminder to be humble and ask for help.

Mostly, I don't want to pray until it gets really bad; but maybe the god of my understanding is still there, still listening, even when times are good, even when I feel balanced and in sync, and maybe the prayers then are simple conversations, even gratitudes!!

Prayer, humility and faith

I often wonder why prayer has such a mixed ambiguity for me. On the one hand it seems that if I pray, I imagine "someone" very powerful "up there" making all the decisions, and I'm seeking perhaps an undeserved favor. Who am I to receive a special request just because I asked for it? What am I doing to earn this good fortune (or more commonly, this reversal of bad fortune)?

But I'm seeing now that prayer does include a degree of humility. We can't see the One to whom we are praying: we must believe that there is a Force out there who is all-seeing and all-knowing, and who holds a larger context for our destiny, which has to be a good one, in spite of the immediate evidence.

I am speaking here of prayer outside of a specific religious setting, the kind of prayer available to all of us. And this issue of humility is exactly the point of prayer. To even begin to surrender the idea that we don't have a clue, or at least the right answer to any number of life's dilemmas, begs for humility. And it is in this act of humility that we find a faith that must be created and then clung to as a means to make it through, to take the steps necessary to find the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Life offers each of us a series of hard choices: it takes humility to move away from rationality and into a place of faith in our own integrity, our own willingness to listen to that deep inner voice, the one which reflects the answer to our prayers. Humility is the bridge between prayer and faith, and strengthens with practice. I pray today for the humility to keep praying. Faith is not fantasy: it is the beginning of right action, the only stepping stone to creating a life well-lived.

Character as the measure of a good day

I have my routines. Get the house in order early in the morning; eat healthy and try to make it three meals by the end of the day; do my most concentrated business work early in the day, and don't leave my desk till the job is (mostly) done. Think ahead to meeting notices and get the emails out before noon a week ahead. Get to the gym before dinner.

But there's one measure of effectiveness that's always in the background: take on the difficult conversation and get it out of your conscience' way so that everything else is just a check mark on your to do list. Tonight, after a long day of good hard work, I was ready to bolt for my nightly workout. My husband wanted to talk. I knew I had to listen and I had some things I wanted to tell him, but I didn't know how to start it up. I was lucky. He started in and I listened and moved closer to some difficult, truthful points slowly, but nonetheless fully.

Without having planned it directly, or worried about how I would do it, I had the difficult conversation tonight that would open my evening up to a sense of peace and completion, one that I would not have had otherwise. And this is the way I now must live my life. If I achieve all my goals but still have a nagging conscience, a sense of words not spoken, issues left in limbo, half-truths holding together hidden secrets, and all of this keeping love and forgiveness in the dark, then I have nothing much to say about the value of my life. It's the courage to follow this path to personal freedom that marks the measure of our character. For one small conversation, this was a good day. All the rest is just routine.

Pinning our success on our children's

It takes a few years to get there, but with some repeated effort over time, jealousy toward other people's children can disappear.

When I was a young mother, my friends and I were quite competitive, without ever admitting to be so. If one child in our circle was reading at age five, there was an anxiety that one of us might have a little genius on her hands. Would my child be a reader soon? By middle school there were those children who were becoming well-rounded: playing in Little League, acting in the school play and winning at least third place in the junior high science fair. And if that kid was good looking, without acne, temperatures rose again. How would my child keep up? When the college acceptances came along, there were those who went to the Ivies and those who went to state schools and even a few who didn't go to college at all.

And then they left home and did the remainder of their growing up on their own. Our anxiety settled down. Our job was done and whatever configuration of young adult was before us, there was nothing left to do. What's different now is that each of our children has succeeded in his or her own way. Everyone caught up to reading and none of the Little Leaguer's (boys and girls) ever became a star athlete. The happiness for each child's success resembles the happiness we have for our own success: our children did not increase our own self-esteem as we had hoped they would. Their successes and failures belong to them, as those same aspects of normal life belong to us.

Integrity and Unreasonableness

How do these two words relate? They come together at the intersection of honoring one's word. It is unreasonable to keep one's word.

Integrity is to make whole, to bring together disparate parts; it is considered a quality of being honest.

Now most of us never would describe ourselves as dishonest people, for that implies a pattern of lying or subterfuge. But we in fact break our word far more often than we even notice. And we have a plethora of excuses to explain away just why we couldn't possibly stick with what we said we were going to do.

There's something about reasonableness that appeals to us as acceptable, especially when it's our own reasonableness and not someone else's, on whose solemn word we depend. After all, if we have the reasons why we couldn't deliver as we said, we can escape blame and keep the flame alive, the next expectation, the promise of a better day, a second, third, or fourth chance to deliver. Mostly we grow blind to our own excuses and listen to our own reasonable explanation for our difficulties.

Unreasonableness, just at the level of keeping our word, can be uncomfortable, even dangerous. We can make promises but in the moment of action, these can look overwhelming.

I once promised my best friend to put myself on the line with my husband over an issue central to my own integrity. It came down to his agreeing to withdraw a business plan that was so against my own needs and honor that I was willing to put my marriage itself on the line. I knew I did not wish to proffer an empty threat, but in the moment of confrontation I had to take a deep breath and take a stand. I did, for the first time ever knowing I would follow through on my threat, and he withdrew the plan. The danger for me was that his decision in another direction could have ended our marriage. But in that moment I was made whole. I learned what it was to keep my word, or more importantly to say only what I would fully stand behind--no empty threats.

It takes the courage to move beyond the reasonableness of fear and rationale of doubt to use our word as the measure of our integrity. We never can get there by gliding into it: it must be practiced as a way of life.

Robert Reich on the 60s

This says what I recall so clearly, especially from the days of Bobby Kennedy when I was a young graduate student at Stanford.

Idealism of Realism

Religion in America

A lead article in today's New York Times (Monday, February 25, 2008) covers the decline of formal religion in the United States.

...........The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age............

In my work as a wedding celebrant, I meet couples continuously who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Most of these young adults were raised with religion, but abandoned the practices somewhere in their high school years.

This is no small issue for the older generation, for the parents of these twenty and thirty somethings. But somewhere along the line, teenagers will think for themselves and sometimes they rationalize their way into a spiritual framework that may be more open and accepting of larger ideologies than their family religion allows. I once spoke to a bride on the phone who used the following to screen her officiant: "Do you marry gay couples?" I replied that I do, but she had just described her fiance as male. I was a little perplexed. "I could never have an officiant marry me who has a narrow view of the right for anyone of any gender orientation to marry whomever they want."

I conclude from this (and many other samples I won't go into here) that single issues might become intolerable to some young people, and that a single issue, particularly indicating intolerance, can tip the scale. Tolerance is a hallmark of the current generation of young adults. This sends a message to the guardians of religious dogma. Open up to fresh air or watch the numbers decline.

Inspired

This one has moved me to tears. Take a look and hold back if you can.


Idealism of Realism

A New Earth

A good friend just sent me a notice that Oprah and Eckhard Tolle are doing a webinar on Tolle's book, A New Earth, for ten weeks starting March 3rd at 9 PM EST. There are 225 million people already signed up and it's free. I understand you do have to read the book, however. If you're interested, go to www.Oprah.com to sign up.

Why is this a good idea? This is a good book, and one I recommend. I read it last summer and reread most of it during the fall of 2007. I never reread any book, and rereading this one wasn't because it was hard to understand the first time. It was so practical and nourishing, I just wanted to stay refreshed from the same well.

What do I remember? It's about your life's purpose and it helps to get front and center with what's essential, what's at the heart of what makes you and me truly happy, and how we can find the doorways to that happiness everyday in the simplest of circumstances. The older I get, the more I see how to let go of old superficial goals: another trip to the Riviera, going first class on transatlantic flights, $200 dinners in Manhattan. Yes, those weren't my stated goals, but when they were present for me, I lapped up the luxury and felt deserving. ( And it's OK to feel deserving).

I don't see those luxuries these days, so how can I be happy? Remembering that my higher purpose is to wake up everyday and notice I'm alive, to be available to the chance for other humans to know they're alive, and that we all walk through this journey together. The randomness of our everyday unconscious behaviors doesn't have to rule. All of this is available to all of us when we come together on common ground. Tolle (now collaborating with Oprah) offers a conversation to do just this.

Meanwhile, I'll be picking this book up again soon and writing up more this coming week based on his work.

check out: ellyjackson

This week, February 15 to February 21, I'll be posting daily to my other blog: ellyjackson@blogspot.com. I'm keeping my word, but placing my words on another blog.

Back to you all next week!

Score one for coming through

This is the time for some indulgent self-congratulations. Last Thursday I declared I would post material here every day through February 14th. Well, I did it.

What does that mean? It merely says that in a field so fragile as the creative work of blogging (all writing careers are fragile, not only for the actual means of making a living, but also for the very act of writing itself), what you say you will do is as good as having a boss who demands performance or you're out the door.

Writers must get up every day and do the hard work of writing, which has almost nothing to do with inspiration, but everything to do with commitment and determination. As a writer (or blogger) you ARE your word! If you keep your word to write your words, you have a fighting chance.

My own struggle with writing has to do with seeking and rarely finding the free time to do the hard work of writing. Now, consider this: when you or I find a window of free time, what do we want to do with it? Work? NO. Hard work? Definitley NOT!! I seek to luxuriate in reading, bathing in hot bubbly tub water, calling a friend, preparing a special meal, catching up on housekeeping chores and laundry, grocery shopping, or, god forbid, watching more TV! So the shift has to happen differently, as a way to get into the habit of doing the hard work necessary to get to the joy of having delivered on my word and then the joy of having delivered words I might be proud of.

What I like about blogs for writers, as a means of getting oneself into the writing habit, is the fantasy that there are hungry readers waiting to catch that daily entry, that brief but pithy slice of thinking that will inspire or arouse their curiosity. So today I did it: I have a week under my belt of daily blog entries. And today I pledge another week. Onward to February 21.

When the mighty refuse to fall

What on earth can we learn from the hearings around Roger Clemens' possible use of HGH? The jury is out as the hearings are on today, and the analyses of his passionate commitment to clearing his name spill out daily on sports and other news media outlets.

I cannot guess how this will turn out, but it's not looking good for Roger. Brian McNamee has retained in his basement the syringes from 2001 (seven years old, ladies and gentlemen!) and DNA may still be on these articles. With physical evidence, the "he said, he said" means nothing.

News reports say Clemens spent Tuesday (2/12) on Capital Hill lobbying various members of the congressional committee investigating him. Why? Without condemning someone whom I increasingly feel sorry for, I wonder what there is that leads anyone to believe that personal charm, persuasive lobbying, can matter when the cards are stacked at this level.

If in fact Clemens is forced to admit that he didn't understand the rules (say, what?), what makes him think that this investigation is simply a matter of interpretation? This smells of an Enron, (at least the hubris of the CEOs), or any number of events in the past decade, which indicate that sometimes when we rise to the top, we are insulated from holding fast and strong to ethics, logic, or examining the consequences of breaking or bending the rules to fit our need to stay on top of our game, maintain our status, or protect our reputation.

It's enough to make me grateful for my puny place in life, for my lack of climbing a ladder whose perch I could never have sustained. But still I look to my own hubris. I ask where am I assuming a special forgiveness where I can talk my way out of scrutiny. Is this embedded arrogance an outcome of a litigious society where a good lawyer can slice and dice the issues so well that anyone wealthy enough or fortunate(?) enough can get by with murder?

How do you know you're happy?

If you're having a birthday and people wish you a happy day, is it incumbent upon you to be happy? If someone says: have a nice day, must you follow that advice?

You know you're happy if you're not crying, not cranky, not falling asleep at 9 PM on an otherwise normal workday. You know you're happy if you remember that your complaining gets you nowhere and that you can generate your own well-being by remaining in a state of relative ease in spite of the circumstances. You know you're happy if you can lose a gold earring and look for it and then resign yourself that it just may be your turn (again) to give up something treasured in order to remember that the day you die, you will give up all the treasures.

You know you're happy when you remember that it's good to be alive, in spite of the dirty dishes, the long overdue dental appointment, the very uncertain and frighteningly changing economy. You know you're happy when you remember you are not alone, no matter how shameful it sometimes feels to recall your own inadequacies.

Political Overload

When does political junkie-dom become an issue of addictive over-indulgence and a way to avoid real life life issues? I can't say exactly, except if you suspect this may be happening, it's already happened.

I noticed over the weekend that whenever I was upstairs on my desktop, where the Huffpo website is saved as my opening screen from Safari, I would get sucked right in to the Clinton/Obama/McCain/Huckabeee races in the next cluster of states in the endless run to the conventions and on to the the election of 2008!!!!!

It didn't hit home fully until I got my achey body over to the gym to grind away on the elliptical, and I glanced over at CNN to watch excerpts from Hillary and Barack doing what sounded like tired stump speeches in Washington State or in Virginia. They both looked bored and sounded boring. They both had the same old, same old sound and look.

Is this the post Super Tuesday super-sized media bloat? I thought I had recovered from CNN during the first Gulf War. No, I watched more than anyone's fair share during the Iowa and new Hampshire primaries, and followed Super T on PBS (oh, how tame and dull; how deliciously dull). Now it's not such an overwhelming number of primaries to follow: how dare the Democrats make this such a long, drawn out process. I have to go back to the disinterest of July 2007. But, there was something good about last summer: I got things done for myself. I paid attention to the issues of my life that matter: making a living, staying in touch with close friends, taking care of my home, wardrobe, diet, etc. It's not that these things have disappeared; they have just taken on a dull quality, not because the competition from electioneering is more important, but just because it's packaged with bells and whistles that make it seem of compelling interest.

It always comes back to balance. We must ask ourselves every day, before the veil of illusion covers our conscious life in the excitement of media magic: what's the world for me now? Am I drowning in entertainment, masquerading as political urgency, or am I advancing my conscious mind and personal equilibrium to put the stimuli of the media in its proper proportion? I know today where I stand on that question. Adios for today.

It's never too late

Well, it's still the same day to keep your promise even if it's just around ninety minutes before midnight.

I have nothing to say except that there's a recession in the wind and people are more afraid than ever of not finding work or losing the meagre job they're holding onto right now. My next door neighbor is a Russian technology scientist who was making around 150 until he was laid off in November, but then he was picked up again as a full time consultant until they cut everyone out and shipped all their work to China. So he's unemployed again, but he says there are still more interviews ahead. He owns the condo we live in and he won't get much for it now with the Boston real estate market in such a funk, much like the rest of the country.

As for me, I'm losing my office at Northeastern U at the end of spring break, along with twenty or so other teachers. Who knows where they plan to put us, but I have some pretty good art I brought in which will now be relegated to my basement again, as I don't want to hang that much in my home yet. I always have more art than walls to hang any of it.

So, it's getting late and I have lesson plans for my early morning college level angels, who will be sorely disappointed that I haven't finished reading their first draft papers. But this was a busy weekend, full of tiny nagging details, one of which is writing for my blog, but I'm not complaining. Life is full of tradeoffs, and if you do everything perfectly the way you know you ought, you won't grow. You won't make yourself take on new tasks, new challenges. So there! I'm done and I made it just in time.

Lethargy

Fear was yesterday's topic; lethargy is today's. Lethargy is defined as a lack of energy and enthusiasm. It was used originally in medical terminology, but has come around to more frequently describe mood in the late twentieth century. Mood itself is defined in one iteration as a sullen state of mind. A lethargic mood is therefore loaded with down-tempo, depressive like, dare I say "fear" centered overtones?

The more I explore the words I use to describe my current frame of mind, the worse I feel and the fiercer I am to get moving of this cesspool of negativity. What to do next? Well, as if there isn't a platter of duties to attend to, or a long list of quality of life items that could use my undivided attention: clean up my wedding business files to access the most commonly used templates and put the rest in a folder that saves me seconds and sometimes minutes in useless mining through old material every time I sit down to write the next wedding script.

Or, in short, get off my duff and do the next thing in front of my nose. Life is action, not worry, not endless reasoning. I have spent too much of my life reasoning through the options and not enough time acting on the obvious, for fear of making a mistake and/or wasting time. (See the last two days' postings). I'd like to say more, but my lethargy has disappeared and I have to get to work.

Overcoming Fear

What does it take to push oneself just one step closer to doing the next right thing?

The next right thing often has an obstacle surrounding it when it stands as its own barrier to action: fear. Fear of something happening in any number of unforeseen scenarios or directions freezes most of us in place. Well, it certainly does that to me.

What fires up my fear today? Wasting time!! Today is cold and snowy and grey, not atypical for February in the Northeast. I slept in (Friday is my Saturday) and put off a scheduled Friday morning meeting until noon. Then my next plan was postponed to give my husband the car. Then the series of phone calls which were supposed to lead to another set of actions actually yielded no response, and so my plans have changed three times over since starting the day. It feels like I'm wasting my time.

True or not true? It seems like I can't be wasting my time if these changes are not coming from my own resistance. After all, I did what I said I would do and how dare I believe I can control someone else picking up the phone? Weren't the original plans just ideas, and aren't ideas flexible, made to move around and let themselves become other better (or worse) ideas with time and other people's energies and intentions intersecting?

We are either spending time or wasting it, but either way, time waits for no one. The suffering, the self-punishment for wasting time is itself a waste of time and healthy energy. Sometimes it takes me years to see a certain commitment that yielded great disappointment might have been a waste to begin with. But that doesn't add up to wasted time. We just can never know. That hindsight adds up to wisdom. This much is true. It helps to question the frame of mind that assumes wasted time when things change quickly or just don't go our way. The only time we waste is that set of moments we wish to escape from, not the ones we spend living in the possibility that meaning is available to us whatever is served up in front of our faces.

Keeping Your Word

I have long forgotten, living so forcefully and fully in the reasonable, rational stratosphere of delusional self-interest, that keeping my word mattered to making meaning in my life.

I wonder, for instance, why I don't want to write daily in this blog. My excuse is that I don't yet know how to attract readers, or I've let myself remain ignorant of how to find out about attracting traffic, and creating helpful and mutually productive links. So if no one is reading (or watching) what's the point? Why bother? All of this connects to another way of thinking. If no one expects anything from me, I'm off the hook. I can breathe, as I will not be asked to be accountable for one more thing (there are plenty of other accountabilities, after all).

It occurs to me today that I have a basic "excuse" mentality, looking always to get more from life than I'm willing to put into it. This is not that hard to understand. I've had a great deal of disappointment. Haven't I earned the right, as well as the expertise, to take short-cuts? Actually no. That's just not how life (or blogging) works. I can't maintain an active blog if I'm not active myself. I can't create traffic---readers---unless there's something to read, and if I write everyday and begin to feel excited about the work, I may just produce enough to ask a few people to read and comment and even to help me find a way to attract more than just friends as readers.

So, what does this mean? I will write in this space every day for the next week. Every day. Everyday until February 14, there will be a posting in the blogspot. My word matters to me; perhaps my words will matter to others.

Obama, Oh Boy!

This morning from my couch in Boston I'm one of millions of bloggers who are saying one thing or another about the phenomenon of the Senator from Illinois.

Why is there such passion around him? Is he merely an icon of possibility, a sketch of hope clothed in the diversity of his color and personal history? Or, does he represent something else, something like what an educated person ought to sound like, or what a person of courage ought to behave like? His unique detachment from the foray of the ugliest political rhetoric makes him a magnet of abuse from the status quo. In short, he's dangerous to power hungry interests and he surely knows this, although he may not be able to overcome the perception that he's too hopeful, too idealistic and too green to face the enemy (whoever that is, but it's guaranteed to be always out there).

What does he represent to me, a woman, liberal, Democrat, just a year older than Hillary? He's growing into the role he may be destined to assume right before our eyes. The NYT has an article on this today.

Obama's unfolding story and compelling appeal goes something like this: be true to yourself and there's a possibility there worth fighting for. Fight long, fight hard, but don't give up the essential you. Trust the best in others and leave the rest behind. And then let the will of God, manifesting through the will of people, decide that if it's your time, so be it. Take it on with pride and joy.

Loyalty: Priceless

I've been thinking about loyalty. It's not prized today in the workplace, and cynics will sneer at how marital loyalty, especially in the spirit of a Hillary Clinton, is for the weak or codependent. OK, so when is loyalty a worthy character quality? When is loyalty clearly a noteworthy characteristic to be cultivated, and especially at the expense of one's own precious ego? I believe it comes most alive in friendship. Loyalty among friends has no particular financial security (like a job), no long-term institutionalized protection (like marriage). Being loyal to a friend stands on its own as the price of developing character.

I see loyalty among my friends who never seem to forget me, even when geography and time zones separate us from easy relationship or casual connecting. They find a way to find me and keep in touch. They remember our last conversation, even if it was several years ago. They just pick up wherever we left off without rancor or blame when time has been a distancing factor. But that's the easier side of loyalty, even though it's hard enough in itself.

Another kind of loyalty may be uniquely feminine : the loyalty to take my side, if even just long enough to let me vent or express a perceived grievance against another. This doesn't mean turning a loyal friend into a YES (wo)man. It means that before offering a differing opinion, or before explaining how wrong I am, first make me right!

Loyalty demands a momentary sacrifice of ego . The rightness of anything can always be delivered in due time. First let me know it's safe for me to be my jerky self around you; then let me know softly what a jerk I am. That kind of loyalty is worth the price of friendship. That's one kind of loyalty that survives today.

Lessons from New Hampshire: Inevitability Loses

I was having a creepy feeling all day Monday and Tuesday last week when there was such a sudden and confident inevitability to Barack Obama overtaking Hillary Clinton and putting her out of the Democratic race. It seemed way too volatile to be true.

As an artist, a spiritualist and a lifelong terminal optimist, I have never been able to shake a propensity towards riding the wave of something changing for the better. But when the "upset" happened and Hillary beat Obama, it felt like an appropriate reality check. If I was thrilled that his Iowa win meant she was not inevitable, I also saw that her New Hampshire win meant he wasn't either.

What's wrong with inevitability? It has the sting of cynicism masquerading as reality. We do know that death and taxes are inevitable, but pretty much everything else is not. The New England Patriots are not inevitable to have a perfect season: anything could happen in a single football game. And anything can move voters in a variety of positions inside the voting booth. No Monday morning quarterbacking will ever figure out exactly what turned the pundits into embarrassed dimwits by Wednesday morning.

Inevitability takes us all off the hot seat of having to wrestle with decisions. If no one has anything locked up because of a high stakes "machine", all the better for democracy.

When we just don't know how the primaries will turn out, it means we have to turn out at the voting booth and choose, and if we're lucky, we'll have clear cut guidelines, and this year the Democrats probably can't lose. Obama has less baggage, but Hillary's has already been exposed. I think the battle against political cynicism has been won---inevitability loses. That's real democracy working.

Bring out the sun

It's January now for five days and it's a mixed sun and clouds day in the Northeast. Like so many New Englanders, I long for longer days and sunnier skies, but here we are. According to the Boston Globe weather site, we have only nine days of full sun in January, on average and almost four inches of rain. No wonder a few of us get cranky and take it out in road rage (Boston is in the top five cities for RR--Miami is first, then NYC, then Boston and then LA, and finally DC).

My dear friend SuEllen recommends full spectrum light bulbs and they do work better, but there's nothing like a walk in fresh air and sunshine to lift the spirit.

What's the spiritual equivalent of sunshine to lift the spirit? Simple meditation, for five minutes a day can't hurt. A calm inner life starting at the early part of the day is a good shield against the emotions that fighting cold and grey skies inspire. I frankly find meditation extremely hard, but I can do anything for five minutes a day. It's actually enough to set a calmer tone in motion.

So it's 4 PM on the first January Saturday in Boston and the cloud cover is in full resplendence. I like to write in this kind of weather. The grey area is where all things converge, where we can avoid extremes and find nuance. That's good for the soul, so with that I welcome one of the 22 days of clouds for a typical Boston January.

Iowa all the way

I don't generally write about politics, but today it's too compelling to avoid. Character, after all, is always some kind of underlying issue in political campaigns. Fortunately, the C word has not arisen in the Iowa caucuses. The evangelical vote and religion have insinuated themselves into the Republican side and I have to admit, as much as I eschew any kind of religious political agenda, I like Mike Huckabee. Full disclosure: I'm a lifelong Democrat.

Why is Huckabee so appealing, especially in Iowa?

1. He's quietly religious
2. He has an aura of tolerance, rather than righteousness.
3. He has a gentleness about him that looks like he might listen to others, even those who disagree with him.
4. He's the only Republican who was willing to criticize George Bush.

Would he make a good presidential candidate for the national election? Probably not: he's too green. For the Democrats he might be easy to beat. But John McCain could be hard to beat; and he today promised (suggested) he would only stay in office for one term, very appealing to Democrats, if not everybody.

This is fun, but unfortunately it is not a popularity contest, so Huckabee might be tonight's winner but a poor choice for President. The same is true for Obama. I'm glad I have another five weeks before we vote in Massachusetts.