“Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first. “ ~ E.B. White

“Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything, so that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.” ~ Agnes De Mille

I like Agnes De Mille, and I normally agree wholeheartedly with the things she said…

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking. “

and

“The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.”

(LOVE that!)

But this quote about our hasty lives… I’m having trouble with it.

I’ve definitely lived a “seize the day” “what would you do if you knew this was your last day” kind of life, welcoming intensity of experience, cramming all the good things and great wonder into a packed existence, all in the name of Really Living.

Which is exactly what Agnes is talking about… but I’m not sure it’s working – not for me, not for anyone…

It seems as if, in a driven Western mind, all of these motivational “make the most out of your days” catch phrases actually compel us to skate furiously on the surface of life instead of allowing ourselves to be fully immersed in… well… anything.

What are we missing because we’re working so hard not to miss anything?

Instead of wondering how we can squeeze every drop of life from our years, what if we ask, as Creativity Coach Jill Blixt does, “What would I do if I knew I had all the time in the world?”

My own list includes things like:

Spend more time with family and friends
Meander through my days at a much slower, more nurturing pace
Study another language until I was fluent
Linger over coffee with loved ones, or even by myself
Dance daily
Take naps
Enjoy where I am at in the moment, without worrying about what comes next
Enjoy the experience of exploring and nurturing relationships without worrying about the outcome

There is so much wonder and beauty and magic in the world, not just in big, mind blowing, life altering experiences, but in subtler, more nuanced moments…. The kinds of moments that we miss when we’re moving so fast…

It’s the difference between running through the Louvre in order to see Winged Victory, the Mona Lisa, and Venus de Milo before lunch and a tour of the Eiffel Tower, and choosing to spend the day sitting and studying just one of Monet’s paintings…

Both have value; there’s definitely a balance to be achieved… but Agnes is right when she says that ours is “an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat,” a beat that is ever quickening as we feel our breaths slipping away, forever aware and fearful of the limitations of human life.

What if we let go of the limits?

What if our goal was depth of experience rather than breadth?

What if we choose to behave as if there is time enough for everything that is really important?

What if we relish life instead of trying to conquer it?

If we choose to live moment to moment as if there is all the time in the world… what small miracles will we witness, what subtle discoveries will we make, what connections will we deepen, what joy will we savor “to the last drop”?

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away” ~ attributed to George Carlin

“When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out – because that’s what’s inside. When you are squeezed, what comes out is what is inside.” ~ Wayne Dyer

R. went to graduate school with me… she was tall and willowy, with flowing dark hair. She had a low quiet voice, and corn-flower blue eyes. She looked like I imagined the historical Mother Mary would, if she stepped out of one of her paintings and into modern clothes.

On the first day of our Art-as-Meditation class, R. wore white… all white for painting.

At the end of the session, I looked up from my own work to see her… she had painted these great, swooping, dancing purple curves – graceful and dynamic – and her whites were still pristine.

As I turned away, I caught a glimpse of my own face in the mirror – somehow, in the throws of creation, I had painted it green… my whole face – GREEN.

It was first grade all over again. In first grade C. was the always perfectly put together epitome of femininity. While I was playing kickball with the boys, and spraining my ankles running in clogs, she was sitting knitting quietly… and her knees socks always stayed up.

Mine were always bagged around my ankles… and now my face was green. Some things never change.

But where my 6 year old self hated C. for her perfection in the face of my… not-ness… I admired R. her ability to create while remaining unmarked; I yearned to discover the secrets of her seeming serenity, her quiet way of moving through the world… she appeared to be the epitome of what we think of as “spiritual.”

And me… well… my personality seemed to constantly be bursting out in fits and spurts, evading all my attempts at stillness and quiet.

I went to school for spirituality in large part because I yearned to connect – to find the peace and calm and surety that would come from directly experiencing mystery.

And so far, by my own measure, I was failing…

I mean, c’mon… my FACE was GREEN…

And then I met Hildegard…

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century mystic. Dedicated to the church at a young age, she had always been sickly, but then, suddenly, in her early forties, Hildegard began having visions. Her health miraculously recovered and she experienced a surge of creative vitality. She wrote the earliest musical that we have extant; she painted; she wrote amazing manuscripts on the natural world and its connection to spirit. She even wrote letters to all the higher officials in the Church, including the Pope, telling them how they could better do their jobs…
Hildegard was a force to be reckoned with.

The instructor explained her this way, “When you think of the mystics, you think of those blue- green mystics…. Your Francises of Assisi, your Meister Eckharts… but, Hildgegard… well, Hildegard was an orange mystic.”

It was like a bolt from the blue – the sky opened up, and I saw….

“THAT’S WHAT I AM!” I whooped inside my own head, “I’m an ORANGE MYSTIC… sometimes with CHASER LIGHTS!!!!”

Suddenly, my brand of high energy, enthusiastic, questioning searching had a place – a place that had been part of the fabric of spiritual seeking for at least a thousand years, and most definitely long before.

I didn’t have to repress my passion, or stay above the action, or even keep my socks up in order to place my feet firmly on the path of discovery – I could simply be me, and the right doors would open.

And they have.

The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow. ~ Charles R. Brown

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.” ~ Vincent van Gogh

“The art of being yourself at your best is the art of unfolding your personality into the [person] you want to be… Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others.” ~ Wilfred Peterson

Self care is at the top of my personal resolution list this year – driven, in large part, because I fell so totally off the wagon between Thanksgiving and New Year’s and paid the consequences.

Now… when I am resolved, I tend to be RESOLVED…

I have an inner critic who reminds me a lot of Louis Gossett, Jr, in An Officer and a Gentleman. He is BIG; he is MEAN; he wants me to PULL UP MY BIG GIRL PANTIES and get my butt ON THE TREADMILL. He wants me to PICK THAT WEIGHT UP AGAIN!!

He is also into denial – NO sugar, NO wheat, NO chai tea lattes!

According to Lou, self care is about hunkering down and doing what’s RIGHT; it’s about DISCIPLINE and, YOU, GIRL (that would be me) NEED TO GET SOME!

Beginning this week, the plan was to be back in the gym – with a VENGEANCE!

So I went, full of grim determination and grit, my New England roots showing all over the place. I had an action plan in hand and I was going to follow it through to the bitter end.

But there was a problem…

(betcha didn’t see that coming!)

See – this grand plan I had made for myself, sitting in my cozy apartment with the Drill Sergeant yelling in my ear- it pretty much picked up where I had left off when I stopped running, which, when I’m really honest with myself, was around the time softball season entered into full swing… in other words, JUNE.

In the spring, I could run 6.5 miles at a 7 mph pace and feel successful and triumphant at the end. I was considering training for a half marathon…

6 months later, 3 miles at a 6.8 mph pace left me gasping for air and feeling like a failure.

Oooh, you should have heard Lou – I was LAZY and UNDISCIPLINED, if only I had STEPPED AWAY FROM THE DESSERT TRAY, if only I had been a better person ALL SUMMER LONG…

Which is where I called a halt to the beatings.

NO ONE – not even the meanest, most hard ass inner critic there is – gets to mess with softball.

Because, really, if I had to do it over again, I would still choose playing short center, sliding into third, drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade on the bar patio after a tough won (or lost) game, and riding my bike home through the dark, quiet city streets over spending the summer in the gym.

Softball is fun and competition and companionship and a little bit of church all rolled into one… the treadmill is just… discipline.

And at the end of my days, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to wish I’d had less fun and more regimentation… so why am I trying to make it my life now?

So I took a big breath and a giant step back from all that self-berating and I re evaluated.

First, I had a big chat with myself (yet again) about the Perfection of Effort –

Being upset or disappointed with myself because I’m not where I could or should be fitness-wise doesn’t really help. And trying to stick to a plan that I’m just not up to is going to end with me dropping out all together, or worse yet and way more likely, sticking to it and getting hurt.

If I accept that I chose to make other things a priority over working out, and I agree that that was the right choice for me at the time, then I can accept responsibility AND treat myself gently.

Maybe self care doesn’t have to be about buckling down, and limitations, and denial… maybe it can be about expansion, and freedom, and affirmation…

The actions may look the same – I’m still going to not eat wheat, or sugar, and limit my chai tea lattes. I’m still going to go to the gym and I’m going to work hard…

But now I’m coming from a place of being ok where I’m at… of appreciating myself enough to want to take as good care of me as I would anyone else – which means good, healthy meals and enjoyable exercise that pushes me without killing me; it means enough sleep and a nap when I need one.

It also means embracing the joy and the fun and the grace that is always there for us – if only we loosen up a little and give ourselves permission to see it.

“Love yourself—accept yourself—forgive yourself—and be good to yourself, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things.” ~ Leo F. Buscaglia

“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.” ~ Hippocrates

“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” ~ Paul Boese

A year ago, I was a reluctant social networker… I didn’t want to be found; I had moved on from my past and become somebody new. I didn’t want to go backwards; I didn’t want to feel like I had to defend who I had been, or worse yet, have people expect me to still be that person.

But I joined Facebook anyway. Truthfully, it was because my softball league started a page and I wanted to support my girlfriend who was organizing it.

And, of course, the next thing I knew, I was getting friend invites from people I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years.

“She never talked to me in school, “I muttered, “Why does she want to be friends with me NOW?”

“He never said two words to me – does he even know who I am?????”

So I let those invites pile up… but the longer they sat there, the more anxious I became.

I found myself reliving old hurts and humiliations, stupid things I had said and done, embarrassments that almost a fifth of a century later still made my face burn with shame.

“They don’t know who I am; I’m not the same person I was then… I’ve grown, deepened, matured, mellowed… I am NOT the 8th grade Class Chatterbox anymore, DAMN IT!”

And then it hit me… yet another of my should’ve-been-obvious Cosmic Ah-Ha moments….

If, over the last 19 years, I’d changed…. maybe they had, too?

Maybe they wanted to discover who I’d become?

Maybe the only person hanging on to who I had been back then was… ME?!?!

oh

wow

I accepted all of those friend invites and have discovered – or recovered – some pretty amazing people…

I’ve also had my entire high school experience reframed – I’ve been reminded of kindnesses I did, and told that things I said back then made a difference. There have even been a few past crushes who admitted they’d been interested, too… even the bad boy down the street… 😉

I’ve worked really hard over the last 20 years to get to a point where I like who I am… but the truth is that the stamp of approval I sought was always mine to give… even in high school, I was ok – I just didn’t know it.

Now, when I look back, there’s no more pain, just empathy and compassion for that girl who, even then, was striving so hard to become…

In healing the past, I’ve freed up space for the future… and I have Facebook to thank for that.

Who’d-a thunk?

“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” ~ Wendell Berry

“It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.” ~ John Cage

“Survey says American workers can’t get no job satisfaction; recession partly to blame.”

This was one of the headlines in today’s Chicago Tribune. Apparently, we, as a nation, are reporting record rates of job dissatisfaction.

The article goes on to talk about employees who find their jobs dull and the disconnect between the rate of inflation and workers’ salaries. For those who are interested, you can read the piece here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-unhappy-workers,0,3793430.story

But I think there’s another factor at play.

What I keep hearing over and over again from people in all kinds of professions is that they’re “lucky to have a job in this economy.” And they’re not incorrect.

But this isn’t an expression of gratitude; it’s an explanation for why they’re not leaving jobs that make them miserable or asking for what they need to make their work bearable.

I think we’re unhappy at work because, in the midst of these difficult economic times, we feel as if we have no choices.

I’ve worked jobs that I wasn’t crazy about, means-to-an-end kinds of jobs. And, for the most part, as long as no one was trying to force me into too small of a box by piling on rules the point of which I couldn’t understand, or demanding an intellectual/ emotional commitment I couldn’t, with integrity, give, I was fine to come in, do what was asked of me, make my money, and leave.

I was happy to sit in the corporate cage so long as the door was left open; I stayed years in jobs like that. But I warned more than one boss that if they tried to lock me down, I was likely to beat myself to death on the bars… and them with me.

And I meant it… being trapped in a job is a little like suffocating…

A certain amount of freedom seems to be a basic human need. Having choices means we have power over our lives. And feeling disempowered means feeling discontented… if we don’t feel we have any control over our work life, it’s no surprise that we are unhappy.

The truth is that there are always choices… powerlessness is a perception, and it has nothing to do with reality.

There are always means of improving where we are standing, alternative ways of looking at our situation… and if we can’t find our way through the fear and the despair, that’s when we need to call on our support system to help us see with new eyes, to recover the choices that can make all the difference.

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’” ~ John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein