Category: life

Losing the Edge

Rachel Henry1 Comment

The edges of my life are fraying. I like edges. They look clean and crisp and clearly mark where one thing ends and the next begins. I never was a color outside the lines kid and didn’t appreciate it when others played fast and loose with the boundaries in my coloring book.

But life apparently prefers watercolors and things are bleeding into each other at an alarming rate. By things I mean work and life because clearly work isn’t life; it’s some alternate universe we enter at eight and leave at five. Through the door in the toadstool after eating the mysterious cake.

The idea that a little less than 5/7 of my time doesn’t count as my life is a little absurd to begin with. It’s even stranger if you consider that people from work become good friends and are invited into the other realm. And of course no membrane prevents work experiences from infiltrating the way I think about the world or vice versa. To switch metaphors, the peas got mixed up with the mashed potatoes long before now.

Yet I’ve always considered work as other, probably because then it can be contained in a neat, little package and dropped at the side of the road when my real life comes along. If work doesn’t count, then I haven’t, for example, irrevocably not published a book because I’m not truly committed to anything else.

Maintaining this level of self-delusion requires serious talent. Let’s examine some evidence. If the amount of time I spend thinking about work while cooking dinner or taking a shower is any indication, I do value my work, thank goodness. Who wants to spend all that time doing something that feels like a waste? And believing that holding work as unimportant will help me accomplish other goals is like training for a marathon by not swimming.

It’s scary, though. If I give work official life status, what’s to keep it from smearing purple crayon all over the coloring book? This concern is probably as relevant to my life as the fear that I may become a couch potato, which, when discussed with a friend, elicited the response, “As if.”

Be Kind, Be Kind, Be Kind

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I voted today. Tomorrow, or tonight if you stay up late enough, almost everyone will have a reason to despair because of the results of a local or national election.

I believe, however, that neither politics nor economics ultimately decides the quality of our lives. I am not saying these systems don’t affect us. A leader’s decision to go to war, for example, changes lives forever. I am saying that there are other, more powerful forces at play.

I base this conclusion on the version of history taught in American primary education, which is mostly if not exclusively politics and economics. If history consisted only of the events in the history books, I’m convinced the human race would have wiped itself out long ago because, according to the official version, very little good ever happens. People and nations in power attempt to retain or expand that power and harm or kill a lot of other people along the way. If nothing stood in opposition to that story, the world would be a much more dismal place than it is.

I think what keeps or doesn’t keep us going is how kind we are to one another. While trying to figure out the motivation of the characters in my novel, I wrote to a few friends and asked them what they wanted out of life and why. My former Chinese religion professor wrote back and said, “Be kind, be kind, be kind.”

At the time I thought, that is not an answer, but now I wonder if it might be the only one worth pursuing.

Much of life is beyond our control, even in a country where we get to choose our leaders and in certain cases our laws. Sometimes being kind is all we can do for another person and all we can do for ourselves.

I think we often see kindness as a small gesture and forget what a tremendous difference it can make. It can change the course of history.

Not Going to Extremes

Rachel Henry5 Comments

In my hometown, keeping up with the Joneses didn’t have anything to do with the brand of your car or the size of your house. It meant running an ultramarathon the day after your soccer tournament. At 10,000 feet elevation. In the snow. Backwards.

Being surrounded by people rock climbing, skiing avalanche chutes, and boating class five rapids made it easy to believe that these activities made you feel the most alive. I often thought I should be doing something more death defying, dangerous, or at least generally uncomfortable. If you’d asked me why, I would have said those things counted more, though I might not have been able to tell you what we were counting.

Now, I work with faculty members who are equally extreme but in a different way. The number of projects their jobs demand they juggle both impresses me and makes me dizzy. A hypothetical one-person sample: teaching three classes, running their own research—which includes supervising students—organizing a conference, preparing reams of documents for their professional review, being a mom/dad, not to mention those unexpected items life throws at you.

I used to feel like a slacker compared to people who run their lives this way. Recently, a new feeling has crept in—sanity. I worry a little bit (because after all, what’s life without at least some fretting?) that no longer expecting myself to keep up that pace means I’m getting old and complacent, but the amount of activity we expect ourselves to do in this culture is not reasonable or healthy.

A few people might thrive on constant motion. But no one I know rattles off impossibly long to-do lists with joy, and my colleagues so often look slightly harried.

As usual, someone else has already said it better than I can. This time it’s the Sufi poet Hafiz. He says,

When all your desires are distilled
You will cast just two votes:
To love more,
And be happy.
(translation by Daniel Ladinsky)

I don’t think a longer list will help us with either one of those.

Simple Is Good

Rachel Henry6 Comments

The great thing about French is that it makes even the most ordinary things sound fancy. I cooked ratatouille for the first time tonight and discovered that it is not at all fancy.

I think ratatouille must once have meant, “I’m tired from screaming at the kids and milking the goat and cleaning the house all day. I don’t know what to make for dinner, so I’m going to roast whatever vegetables are ready to pick with some olive oil, garlic, and, hm, the rosemary bush needs trimming so I’ll throw in a couple branches.”

To make this dish, you cut vegetables in big pieces, toss them in some olive oil and salt, throw the pan in the oven, and end up with a rather delicious dinner (at least if you follow the recipe in the wonderful cookbook Cook This Now by Melissa Clark). Not delicious in the “my mouth is turning somersaults trying to figure out what this unique flavor combination is” but delicious in its simplicity.

Simple things bring us back to ourselves, snatch us off our hamster wheel of thoughts about past mistakes and future pressures and say to us, “Here, try putting your feet on the ground. It is a little easier that way.” Some people may feel most relaxed wearing an evening gown and dining on duck a l’orange, but I suspect for most of us it’s macaroni and cheese and our favorite sweats.

Our daily lives demand a lot of being on—on top of things, on the ball, on target. Stews, soups, and sweatpants, on the other hand, offer comfort without demanding a lot of skill or attention. You don’t have to impress the chicken and dumplings; they love you already. And your chicken and dumplings don’t have to impress whoever’s eating them; those people already love chicken and dumplings.

After dinner, the cat curled up in my lap, and we lounged until a moth appeared who needed to be chased. I think the Quakers had it right: ‘tis a gift to be simple.

Skimming the Surface

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A friend of mine once pointed out that humans, as a species, are weird. Her evidence: our interest in observing other species that we don’t intend to eat.

During my recent trip to Greece it occurred to me that tourism is kind of odd in this same way. I used to think that visiting other countries ought to profoundly affect me, but recently I’ve decided that in Europe, at least, you mostly look at old, beautiful stuff and eat good food (and hear people say “mama mia”).

I’m not talking about living abroad for an extended period of time, getting to know a people and a culture, letting their values influence your own. I’m talking about the kind of travel most of us do most of the time—there and back, a week or two, a variety of locations.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful I got to see the Parthenon, which definitely fits into the old and beautiful category, and eat genuine moussaka and baklava, which fit into the seriously yummy category.

Perhaps it is the lack of connection that seemed odd to me. Tourism is largely an experience of surfaces.

I learned a guidebook page’s worth of information about the sights we saw. Just at the point I’d start to find a point of reference in a town, we’d move on to the next. The Greek people were kind, welcoming, and friendly, but I’ll probably never see any of them again.

Of course there is always the possibility that one of these things will hit some deeper chord and lead to a new interest, a new direction in life.

Or maybe I’m over thinking this. After all, who doesn’t want to look at beautiful stuff and eat good food? One day we followed the GPS to a tiny seaside town we picked more or less at random off the map. It turned out to be one of the most picturesque places we visited, and the sole taverna in town served platters of small, perfectly deep-fried fish whose English name I never learned.

Perhaps, as with so many things, both are true: it does feel like taking the shortcut through someone else’s backyard in order to have these experiences, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Homecoming

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First, thank you to Anne for her wise guest blogs. Those hard-to-begin apples came to mind as I sorted through my accumulated emails. Second, this is your blog on some serious jetlag, so I’m going to keep it short. If it doesn’t also come out sweet, I beg your indulgence until my brain and I are reconnected in the same time zone next week.

I was in transit for a few days, which gave me the odd feeling of being location-less. Place began to slip away at the fancy airport hotel that lacked any hint of Greece except the stuffed grape leaves at the buffet. It disappeared altogether during a surreal sprint through the Vienna airport—picture any dream you’ve had about trying to get somewhere and failing, give it to Kafka for rendering, and you’ve got a good idea of being between terminals in Vienna. And finally, I spent a night in New York City but a New York City without subways and almost without sidewalks as my cousin picked me up from the airport and a car delivered me back to it at 4 a.m. the next day.

All of which made me grateful that I belong to a certain spot of Earth. The oak trees on the hills began to place me during the drive from LA. While I was eating lunch on my first full day back, a hummingbird came by to check out the Mexican sage by my bench. Greece and California look a lot alike, but I didn’t see any hummers while I was there.

So to all the people, creatures, and plants, the smell of the air and the feel of the soil, the ocean and the hills, and even the In ‘N Out hamburger joints, thank you for making this place home.

What Grit Will Get You

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I learned from a friend this morning that new Marines take three tests: intelligence, fitness, and grit. The greatest indicator of success is a recruit’s score on the grit test. (Caveat: I didn’t check this fact for the Marines, but I did find this article in The New York Times that says something similar about West Point cadets and college students.)

A few days earlier I had re-watched Little Miss Sunshine, one of my favorite movies, whose moral could be summed up as: things may not work out as you hoped even if you score 5 out of 5 on the grit test. (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t watched the movie and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now.)

A thousand pushups won’t help colorblind Dwayne become a pilot in the Air Force. Frank has forever lost the pinnacle of Proust scholarship, and Olive will certainly never wear the Little Miss Sunshine crown.

But the movie is very much about how grit matters despite all that. From the eternal pushing of the clutch-less VW bus to stealing grandpa’s body from the hospital, this family epitomizes the refusal to give up.

Not the refusal to fail. They do nothing but fail, as measured by society’s standards and their own goals, in the entire movie. But they never give up.

Olive doesn’t win the pageant; Richard doesn’t get the book deal; and Frank doesn’t get the boy. I think life is like that sometimes: grit doesn’t necessarily get you what you’re aiming for, but it might get you something better.

What’s better than winning life’s many beauty pageants? Dancing to “Superfreak” on stage surrounded by those who love you.

Note: My friend Anne Ford will be guest blogging while I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. Anne is the author of Peaceful Places Chicago and is wonderful and funny and by the end of two weeks you will wish she had her own blog.

Come in! Come in!

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My own bad behavior recently reminded me how important it is to support each other in whatever we dream to do.

A friend on the van knows someone who is thinking about writing a book and so asked me for publishing advice. My internal reaction was, “Write the blankety-blank book and then worry about it.”

My external reaction might have been slightly more gracious, but it wasn’t exactly welcoming. I didn’t say, “Wow, that’s great. What a fabulous project to undertake. What does she want to write about?” I didn’t pour out a list of helpful resources.

Trying to get published is often discouraging. I recently read an article in Poets and Writers Magazine that said, without connections, a writer has a one in 11,111 chance of getting an offer of representation from a typical literary agent.

That means you can be in the top .0001% of writers and still not get signed by a particular agent. My math is not good enough to figure out the odds if you considered all agents, but certainly not good enough to make me dance a jig.

Which is all the more reason to be encouraging to others entering the game. Nobody enjoys being one in 11,111. It is better to be two and even better to be five or ten, exponentially better, in ways that defy mathematics.

I don’t know why we need the support of others who share similar experiences, but anyone who’s ever felt really lousy and then talked to a friend or family member and felt better knows it’s true. We are social beings, and I think it’s hard wired into us to thrive more completely in community.

So, henceforward, I will take as my motto Shel Silverstein’s poem “Invitation,” which begins, “If you are a dreamer, come in.”

Not to Clean

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Labor Day is not usually life-changing for me, but this year, I learned something extremely important: cleaning takes time. Others may have grasped this concept much earlier in life, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Let me unfold the revelation for you. I played soccer all day Saturday. On Sunday, a friend and I went to an art show and then some other friends had me over for dinner. Monday morning I looked disconsolately around my house and wondered how another weekend had gone by without any scrubbing, vacuuming, or mopping taking place. No hope beckoned as most of the coming day was slotted for eating pancakes, giving my dad a birthday call, buying groceries, and hanging out with my mom.

Then, while describing my weekend to my dad, divine inspiration descended: I realized I could have cleaned only if I had done it instead of all those fun things. True, this is a bit like mastering a kindergarten-level mathematical concept while doing your Ph.D., but I had never accepted the either-or idea in this context before.

I always felt as if it should be possible to do it all—the fun stuff and the cleaning—as if everybody else knew some secret technique. But no, they were actually spending time with sponge in hand. That’s the problem with this whole finite thing, every moment can contain only one action, no matter what we like to think about multitasking.

I have a quote from Mastercard above my desk at work. It says, “Not having to choose—priceless.” It’s there to remind me that the people who say I can have it all are selling me something and that the freedom to choose is a great gift.

So if I have to decide between a soccer tournament and a clean bathroom, the bathroom will lose every time. And I’m OK with that now. Mostly.

Awed and Amazed

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It’s been a cup runneth over kind of summer on the Central Coast.

A couple of weeks ago a friend and I met by the beach to talk about writing and ended up bird watching. A swarm—yes, a swarm, as in way beyond a flock—of sooty shearwaters had turned a large patch of ocean brown. They couldn’t have been more than 100 yards off shore.
thousands of sooty shearwaters on the water
At some point, we figured we’d had our evening’s worth of magnificence and turned away, only to be lured back by the number of birds, their closeness, the constant splashes of pelicans fishing. I felt both the desire to and the impossibility of taking it all in.

At the same time, a few whales took up residence in Avila Bay and were kind enough to let the human world know about it by sticking their heads out of the water to feed, breaching, and jumping. I didn’t see the whales, but I did see some phenomenal pictures. A friend who did see them spoke of trying to leave several times and being pulled back to watch some more, much as we had been with the birds.

There’s a lot in life that’s just too big or too wonderful to absorb. Part of my brain wanted to hold onto and process all of those birds, to sort them or comprehend them. But what kept us watching wasn’t the possibility of comprehension.

Knowing exactly how many birds there were or understanding why the fish they were after had come so close to shore wouldn’t have improved the experience. If you measured every detail and understood every interaction at every moment, all that knowledge would not add up to the sense of sheer magnitude and wonder those birds inspired.

I’m blown away by nature on a fairly regular basis, but occasionally she pulls out the stops and reminds me that, when it comes to awe, she has an almost infinite repertoire.