A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

I wrote a rememberance last week about my great aunt who passed away. And I mentioned a story involving a suckling pig. My dad read my blog post out at the memorial service and a cousin emailed my mom a photo of said event, in which I happen to look on in shock (horror? fascination?) at the piglet. Thought you might be interested:

A picture really is worth a thousand words.

I love old photos -- particularly the fashion. I am rocking red overalls. It also gives me hope that when I go gray, perhaps I could actually go blonde again? When you lived in 1981 you had no idea what it actually looked like (scary), so it's cool to revisit the experience.

I won't write a long post this week as I am running behind on February's New Year's resolution project, which actually was January's, which over ran into February. You see? This is the problem with New Year's resolutions.

So now I have two days to finish clearing off my netbook so I can pass it onto a friend and figure out how to recycle my old blackberry (this year's first project was about updating my technology).

Then in March, I'm onto the wedding photos. This means actually printing out and framing our wedding photos and displaying them (just in time for our first anniversary). It also includes making copies for my in-laws and putting together some albums for everyone.

The part I forgot about getting projects done is accountability. So please remember to bug me in March about whether or not I'm working on those photos. It's important, because after all, someday, they will be worth a thousand words.

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Problem? What Problem?

Most troubles, when left to their own devices, go away. Would you agree?

After reading the fabulous A New Earth, I've been trying to put the lessons learned to use. It's not supposed to be difficult because, after all, it's just a shift in consciousness – you don't have to really do anything. Still, old habits die hard, and I just find it so easy to worry.

So I got to thinking about what my 'problems' really were and wondered if it was possible to stop worrying about them?

I've come to the conclusion that there are three things that happen when you leave your problems to sort themselves out:

First, you relax. You don't worry about the problem anymore and therefore your mind becomes free to come up with a creative way to solve the problem. Richard Carlson calls this the 'back burner' effect. If you have some big problem you don't know the answer to, just get on with other things. Your subconscious mind will 'work' on the problem, but that pesky ego part of the brain that really blows everything out of proportion and gets itself tied into knots won't get involved. This happens to me all the time with work difficulties or writing problems. I can't figure out how to get something done so I just stop thinking about it. Usually when I am on the train or on a walk somewhere a solution will just pop into my head out of nowhere. Putting problems on the back burner really does work.

Second, it gives you the space to assess if it really is a problem. Sometimes 'problems' are just uncertainties or worries you've created. (Actually, most of the time that's what they are.) If you tell yourself that a problem will sort itself out, sometimes that's just the right amount of space you need to realize that it isn't really a problem. And, if you do decide there is a problem, and there's something you can do about it, then you can come at it from a relaxed, clear mindset, instead of a flustered, angry one.

Third, letting problems sort themselves out gives the universe time to, well, actually sort it out. Most things aren't really in our control. You may decide that you can't stand your boss and you don't know what to do about it. But then your boss might get transferred, or a new job opportunity comes up. You don't have to do something about everything. Sometimes all you need is a little acceptance and before you know it, the situation will have changed.

I know that many would argue that real problems don't go away, that there is always something to worry about and bad things do happen. And while bad things may happen, so much of what we worry about is in our mind. When you think about the now – the right now – what really is the problem?

So for now, I'm taking a stab at truly believing that my problems will get sorted out and leaving them to it, so that I can relax and actually enjoy my life.

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Great Aunt Ruthie

My great Aunt Ruth died a few weeks ago. I won’t be able to be there for the memorial service on Saturday, so I wanted to write a remembrance of her – she was a really special lady.  

Aunt Ruthie gave me my first real Christmas tree. She and Uncle Rolland brought it to our house along with red shiny Christmas ornaments. She showed me how you put the small ones at the top of the tree and the larger ones near the bottom. She gave me dolls from China and Hawaii. She made cotton candy at the local fair.  She had a certain magic to her.

We cousins always liked going to Ruthie’s. Perhaps it was the cookies we got to eat in the kitchen on first arriving. Or the fact that there was always a treat on the pillow of the bed we were sleeping in. But then there was the plant incident. We were running around the house and I knocked over a plant. She got really mad – I’ll never forget that. Knocking over plants was not the sort of thing you did at Aunt Ruth’s house.

As a young child who hadn’t been much further than the bounds of New York state, my first glimpse into the worlds beyond came from sitting on the floor in a darkened room as Ruth (and Rolland) conveyed their trips to exotic places like Europe, Japan and China, through the clicks of a slide slow carousel projected on a real screen. It felt like going to the movies, but better, as they narrated, which often included a slightly heated ‘discussion’ of where the photo was actually taken.

Then there was the Thanksgiving when Ruth and Uncle Doug plotted together to surprise the family with a suckling pig, complete with a shiny red apple in its mouth. I was five and I’ll never forget the mix of fascination and (frankly) terror, seeing that piglet brought out on a platter.

The thing about Ruthie was that she never did anything half way. When you arrived at her house she always had something new to show you. There were artifacts from the latest trip overseas, or a tour of the two or three Christmas trees, each with their own theme.  She loved so much to create beautiful things, whether they were gingerbread houses or pristine jars of real jam preserve. And the joy that she found in crafting things shone through in the excitement she had of sharing these treasures.

I miss you, Ruthie.  

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Book Review: A New Earth

Now, some people love self-help books and others groan at the thought of them (guess which one I am). So let me start this post off with a question: 

Do you ever wonder when you're going to be happy? Do you feel like you live in a constant state of wanting things to be better, waiting for the day when you have less stress and find some peace? Do you often find yourself thinking that you will worry less and be happier when [fill in the blank] happens?

The first self-help book I ever read that really started to get at the root of these issues was Richard Carlson’s Stop Thinking, Start Living. It was the first time I realized that perhaps I was causing my own unhappiness. That I really didn’t need things to be a certain way for everything to be OK.

I will continue to recommend Stop Thinking, Start Living as a must-read, but A New Earth: Create A Better Life by Eckhardt Tolle (you may know him as the author of The Power of Now) is the newest must-have self-help book to sit on my bookshelf.

Tolle explains that the root of all our suffering comes from a lack of awareness of the fact that the person we know to be 'I' is split into two parts – consciousness and the ego. The ego is that part of your brain that you 'hear' all the time. The thinking part. It spends its time getting attached to things, not just material things, but any kind of form. It likes to be right (and for others to be wrong). And it's also a big fan of drama and storytelling. It is – essentially – our identity, our personality.

Its purpose is to survive, no matter what, so it attaches to whatever it can. For example, if you decided to rid yourself of the ego and attachment by renouncing all possessions, the ego would look for something else, say attachment to anti-consumerism. How many people do you know who have tried to search for greater meaning through something and then become unbearable with the steadfastness with which they attach to it?

Understanding the idea of consciousness versus ego is not an easy one – for the very fact that we are so strongly identified with our ego. But Tolle does an amazing job of making it all so clear, through examples and approaching the concept in many different ways until you find your perspective slowly shifting.

I believe (myself included) that most of us experience a background unhappiness without realizing that we are creating this ourselves. The ego makes assumptions – unexamined thoughts that are then confused with reality. As Tolle himself says, "Listen to people’s stories and they could all be entitled 'Why I Cannot Be at Peace Now.'"

And how to be at peace now? We’ve all heard it before, but by making peace with the present moment. The problem is that people don't really believe this will work. They live for the future, they live in the past, and they are skeptical that if they just focused on what they were doing right now, at this very moment, that nothing would change, nothing would get better.

Read the whole book, I say. Because it will tell you again and again in different ways, effectively drumming it into your head so you can finally start putting it into practice:

To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.

And the best part? You don’t really have to do that much to make peace with the present. All that is required is a subtle shift in consciousness; an acknowledgement that maybe there is a different way. And it might just get you that one step closer to peace.

P.S. I clearly thought this book was fantastic. However, I will caution that there is a chapter on the 'Pain-Body' which I thought was a little out there (and I am pretty liberal when I read these books). You'll know when you get to it. I suppose I am not sure I agree with his assessment of collective pain-bodies, particularly the bit about women.

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Coming Home (Again)

Before Christmas I had been feeling homesick – really homesick. If you want proof, you can have a little read this of my ridiculous posting on sandwiches. The homesickness had clearly reached crisis level.

But what I found is that the only cure I needed was three weeks at home in New York over the holidays. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that I genuinely miss about my life in the United States, mainly the people – my friends and family – and pizza by the slice, and of course meatball sandwiches. (Mozzarella sticks also rank up there, but let's not go too crazy.)

I loved my time at home, but like any three weeks of my life there were ups and downs. There was exhaustion from jet lag, work stress (I worked from my New York office for some of it), and adjusting to my parents' love of a chilly abode. Christmas day even included a hearty snooze in my parents' walk-in closet, which to clarify for those English readers who have been asking me about it, is more like a little dressing room. But there was also lots of time to see – nearly – all of my friends and family based locally. It was truly great to be there for such a long time. I'm just never there long enough usually to actually miss London.

Which is what happened this time. I started yearning to go 'home', to get back to my own house (where I control the thermostat) and the air is damp enough that my hair has less static electricity trouble.

This is a recurring theme for me ('home' not static), and one that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Is it because I am approaching my 10-year anniversary of life in the U.K. in May 2012?

Perhaps. But what I decided this Christmas trip is that home is where your life is – and at this moment, for me, this is London.

So what is homesickness, really? Is it longing for home or is it just longing for life as you would prefer it to be? When I used to come to London for work, long before I actually lived here, I would fantasize about what life would be like living here. And it wasn't a complete picture of course, just a flashy image of an exciting ex-pat life, nothing like the rich complexity of life as it actually is, including the tough stuff. 

In that case, homesickness is probably just the common yearning we all have as humans for things to be easier and better, instead of focusing on the good things we already have.

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