To be honest, that whole experiment I did before – the one where I tried to reconnect with people – was just entirely too much work. By the time last week rolled around, I was jonesing for something that would involve a little less effort. A little less reaching out. Something a bit more…insular.
I picked meditation. I know, I know. My thinking that this would be a piece of cake was nothing short of ridiculous.
I’ve meditated before. At least two or three times and, I confess, it baffles me. But I’m enough of a sucker, enough of a wanna-be, that a part of me would like to be a person who meditates. It just sounds so … sophisticated. So with it. So Zen.
On day one of Meditation Week, one of my best and oldest friends comes into town. Initially, that seems to be a great excuse to really half-ass it. Maybe even quarter-ass it. Except, Cathi’s a massage therapist who’s learning energy healing work, so she is annoyingly excited about this whole meditation business.
Me? I just want to get it out of the way, which I’m pretty sure is precisely the mindset you want going into meditation. I can’t express how self conscious I feel excusing myself to go into my bedroom and meditate. I tell Cathi I’ll be back in five minutes.
“You need to do it for at least 15 minutes to see any benefit,” she says. That seems ludicrous. I tell her I’ll be back in five minutes. I pop my head into my husband Chris’ office – directly across the hall from our bedroom – and ask him to come and get me when five minutes is up. I don’t want to spend the whole time watching the clock. That seems like a very meditative way to think. My head is full of ideas about meditation. I’m certain almost none of it is actually valid.
Then I go and sit cross-legged on my bed. Like an idiot. I have no idea what to do. I’ve been told by friends who meditate that there is no wrong way to go about this, which sounds like when people say there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Sure there is. We’ve all been asked them.
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March 5th, 2010
I’m fond of saying that I don’t like people. It isn’t true. I do like people. Well, some people. And of those people, I like some very much, so in my own special kind of math, it sort of balances out.
I also like to isolate. I like to hang out by myself, ignore the phone, ignore my email and not talk to anyone. It’s easily compounded by the fact that I work from home. When my husband goes out of town, I could conceivably go days without talking to another human being. (Also without bathing, but that’s another column entirely.) Even if I force myself to the gym or the grocery store, the human interactions I have are highly superficial and don’t really require much effort on my part, don’t result in any real connection.
Despite all this, I seem to have acquired a fair number of friends over the years. Many of them are scattered around the country, even across the globe. And in the last year or so I’ve become increasingly bad at staying in touch with people, of making the effort to keep relationships alive and current. As a result, I feel like some of my connections and friendships are becoming increasingly tenuous. A distant, shared past can’t hold everything together forever.
According to this PBS website article, “connecting with others is the single most important thing we can do for our happiness.” And that is coming from PBS, which is publicly funded and often very boring, so you know it’s a 100% scientifically sound, true fact.
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February 26th, 2010
If it wasn’t for the whole “no meat” thing, I’d have been a vegetarian so many times by now. I’d have been one in high school, to fit in or to stand out or maybe just to piss my parents off and garner a little attention. I’d have been one in college to try to fit in with the hippie, theater-types I thought I was going to be palling around with (I was wrong, it turned out – meat-eating media geek misfits all the way!) I would have been one to make boys like me, to make people think I was cool, to give the illusion of being a person passionate about health/the earth/politics/chickens/anything at all.
I have a lot of vegetarian friends, which proves how evolved I am. Of course, I also have a number of pseudo-vegetarian friends. You know what I mean. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat fish. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat turkey. I’m a vegetarian, but I eat steak. As though the “veg” part of “vegetarian” leaves a lot of wiggle room. It’s kind of like a person being “sort of” sober. You either are or you aren’t.
I feel qualified to make such judgments about these things because it is precisely that kind of commitment to an absolute ideal that has ultimately kept me from seriously considering being vegetarian. Well, that and the meat.
That said, I’m not sure carnivores would come out to bat for me. I’m not a particularly good meat person. I only manage to pass because I operate with a highly evolved sense of denial about handling and eating flesh. I’m grossed out by a lot of meats, including all organ meats and anything too fatty, too pink or too … meaty. I’m extremely squeamish about handling raw meat, cutting it or prepping it. And I simply can’t have anything to do with meat on the bone. I prefer to pretend that my chicken breast or fish filet was just created that way – faceless, body-less, boneless, delicious.
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February 19th, 2010
I wanted to start this entry with the words: “I’m not a pray-er.” Only, it isn’t true. In fact, I do pray. Not often and not well, and I am extremely uncomfortable saying (or, in this case, writing) it. Because to say that one prays is loaded, invites all sort of assumptions and judgments. I’m afraid of what other people will think of me. Mostly, I think –coming from a family that worshipped at the church of atheist intellectualism — I’m worried about what I’ll think of me.
I’m not just uncomfortable writing or talking about my prayer life, such as it is. I’m also deeply uncomfortable doing it. Which begs the question: why bother? And what does that have to do with seven days of change?
Let me back up a tad. As I said before, my parents rejected outright organized religion and all its trappings and trickery. We valued knowledge and facts and scorned those who relied on this silly notion of a God. Thus, the only praying I did growing up was the foxhole variety that, interestingly enough, seem to be ingrained in our brains from birth. Dear God, don’t let me get caught. Dear God, don’t let that be the last piece of cake. Dear God, help me pass this test. Dear God, let that boy ask me out. Dear God, are you there? It’s me, Julia.
If I got the outcome I sought, I took it for granted. If I didn’t – which was most of the time, given the unlikelihood of the things I prayed for – I took it as further proof there was no God and that prayer was bunk. That approach, while frustrating and confusing, got me through most of my adolescence and young adulthood.
It’s impossible for me to talk about my prayer life without talking about my recovery from alcoholism, but I feel self conscious about that. I’m painfully aware how annoying it can be, how much it can alienate some readers. But it’s essential here, so if it makes you uncomfortable, I get it. If it makes you roll your eyes and think you’re stuck in a Lifetime Movie of the Week, I understand. Maybe you’ll come back next week for something a little less personal.
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February 12th, 2010
I know a couple of people who are awfully fond of mentioning the fact that they make their beds every single morning. Every. Single. Morning. I know, right? According to these people, the idea is that if they go on to get absolutely nothing else accomplished all day, at least their bed is made. That seems like a pretty low bar for productivity, even by my lax standards. I suspect that what they’re really doing is bragging about their superior housekeeping skills. Their discipline. Their inexplicable sense of pride revolving around a mundane task.
As evidenced by the fact that I consider this all highly suspect, I’ve never been much of a bed maker. I just don’t really see the point. You make a bed, you go about your business, you get back in it. A friend of mine recently commented that making the bed after you get up is a lot like tying your shoes after you take them off. (To be honest, I’m not sure it’s the world’s most solid analogy, but since I don’t like making my bed, I’ll take it.)
I am a woman who loves hotels almost entirely because while you’re out, magical fairies come in and make the bed for you. They make it wrong, to be sure, tucking things in too tightly, posing weird tubular pillows that match no human body part. Still, the bed making falls to someone else. This is, in my opinion, as it should be. If you have to do it yourself, the end result simply doesn’t seem worth it.
Yet, a couple of weeks ago, I was soaking in the tub and reading a New York magazine article entitled “50 Steps to Happiness. It included just the sort of worthwhile gems you’d expect, such as eating Greek yogurt or offering to help “a stroller person” up the stairs. (I must confess this sent my brain a-spinning, trying to figure out what the hell a “stroller person” is. Part human, part stroller? Are they a problem in New York?)
The second item on the list, courtesy of The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin, was this:
“Make your bed. Go figure, but outer order contributes to inner calm. Especially if you’re living in a small space—but even if you’re living in a gigantic loft. Start each day with a concrete, albeit tiny (and therefore manageable!), accomplishment.”
It was a simple enough (manageable!) suggestion, practically daring me to try it. I should be clear that I didn’t really entertain the notion that making my bed would be the key to happiness. But I’ve been wrong before. Once or twice. And I am terribly fond of the shorter, easier path to, well, anything. Perhaps I shouldn’t rule out the possibility entirely. What if it really was that simple? What if a little tug and tuck here and there and happiness was mine?
Or what if, at the very least, it was the key to … something? A sense of satisfaction? A kernel of discipline? A tiny demonstration of willingness? I was looking for a small change to kick off this blog and I figured I’d be hard pressed to find a smaller one that still actually qualified as change. Thus began seven days of bed making. In a row.
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February 5th, 2010
You know how it goes. It’s your first Chinese food of the new year and you crack open the fortune cookie with perhaps a little more anticipation than usual. After all, if you were the sort of person to believe in such things, you might think that whatever’s printed on this tiny slip of paper could possibly set the tone for the year ahead. Or, at least, the next few minutes.
My fortune read: You will make a change for the better.
I’m not often moved — or, really, affected at all — by my fortune. I don’t even eat the cookies and by some standards, that renders the powers of one’s fortune slip completely moot. But this touched on something I’d been thinking about a lot as 2009 came to a close and January settled in, the idea that some changes were needed in my life. There, in black and white type on that tiny piece of paper, it suddenly seemed such a simple notion. So appropriate for the start of a new year. So filled with optimism and promise. So … fitting for someone other than me.
I pondered this fortune. I put it on my desk. I posted it to my Facebook status and then promptly tossed the piece of paper.
There.
That seemed like plenty of change.
But it was the tell-tale heart of fortunes. Even after the trash was taken out, it thumped away inside my brain. For all of January, it nagged me. It didn’t help that, as the calendar pages turned to 2010, I was made painfully aware that this is the year I’ll turn 40 — and my life doesn’t look much like I hoped it would at this stage. Fine. Whatever. Change might work. Only, I wasn’t entirely sure (and still am not) what the change — or (gulp) changes — should be.
I am known for quite a few things. I’d venture to guess that my stick-to-it-ive-ness is not one of those things. I’m probably better known for getting overwhelmed by the mere thought of effort, then retiring to the couch to watch crime shows until my eyes. The very idea of change scares and exhausts me. It’s so… big picture. And my all-or-nothing thinking regularly presents me with a lengthy list of past changes I had implemented and promptly abandoned. It was depressing. Downright discouraging.
What if I couldn’t come up with a single change that I would implement and stick with forever and ever for the rest of my life?
Then I realized something: I’m the one making the rules here. What if, instead of thinking in terms of Giant and Overwhelming Permanent Change, I thought small. Really small. Really small and temporary. Surely even I could conceive of making a small change for one week. Just seven days in a row. If I did, would it have any impact on me, immediately or long-term? Would my life be completely and totally revolutionized by the most half-assed commitment to self-improvement I could conceive of?
Probably not.
But the experiment, I decided, could prove kind of interesting — and maybe not just to me. Thus, this new blog. One change for seven days and one blog post summing up the experiment. Ready? Set? CHANGE.
January 25th, 2010