The Virtue of Tunnel Vision

Yesterday was a day when I allowed excess ideas and words to prevent forward progress. I was moving – at breakneck speed actually – but getting absolutely nowhere. Wheels spinning, sitting in place. Like a hamster in a cage on her exercise wheel. I had…all at once…too much and not enough. Very frustrating to not know what to do with it.

In her book, Bird by Bird, Ann Lamott speaks to the importance of writing about what you can see through a one-inch by one-inch picture frame. There may be a lot more going on – much more in the surrounding space – but you only need to address what can be seen in that tiny space. That shrinks something that seems too big or too much into a manageable portion. Good advice for running too…and cleaning my house. And life. Shut off your peripheral vision for just a moment and take care of one thing that is right in front of you. 

It’s that one step at a time principle…I don’t need to consider everything all at once.

Writing is like that. One of the reasons that I have so many stops and starts on my resume is that I’ll come up with an idea – a good one – and then I am overwhelmed by the thought of the entire process that I just walk away. Paralyzed. Numb. It’s like parenting…if I become obsessed with the shoulds or with the totality of what occurs between birth to college, I miss the precious and finite opportunities to cradle the baby or play with the toddler or laugh with the teenager. There is freedom and joy in experiencing one day – one moment – at a time.

Today I am working on taking all of the thoughts and words churning in my brain and making just a few coherent sentences – intentions for myself and anyone else who wants to join in. I don’t need to write everything down. In fact, writing everything down at this stage would be a grave mistake like eating an uncooked filet mignon. My thoughts are pretty raw right now and they need some time on the grill.

Today’s thought bubble: Learning to say no and learning to say yes – that’s the same skill. It’s all about the why.  Saying “no” to what is soul-crushing is saying “yes” to what is life-giving. Loving yourself this much is the foundation for loving others.

Say yes to something that is scary – not diarrhea scary, but butterflies-in-the-stomach scary. (Although if it is diarrhea scary, it might be worth investigating why.) I heard Brené Brown say, “If I’m not a little nauseous when I’m done, I probably didn’t show up.” I intend to show up and be seen.

Say no to something if the only reason to say yes is to make people like you more. The most important people will like you for who you are not for what you do. So just try and stop it with the people-pleasing. If you need to please people, remember that you are also people. Please yourself or rather…take care of yourself.

Slow down so that you can choose both thoughtfully and deliberately. If someone pressures you for an immediate decision, tell them to back the $#*! off. They can wait 5 minutes for you to decide. Also they will think twice about rushing you in the future and part of them will think you’re a badass for showing up on behalf of yourself like that.

Pray for the chance to make decisions like these and be grateful when they are laid at your feet.

Peace out, friends. 

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

I have a confession to make. 

When someone that I don’t particularly like or respect suggests that I read something (or watch something or listen to something or do something)…I will absolutely refuse to do it. Forever. Or at the very least, until someone that I do like or respect -- to an equal or greater degree -- makes the same suggestion.

The irony is that I often don’t remember who or what triggered my desire to remain ignorant or unexposed to something – or someone – but once the negative association is there, it takes a hold. Like a dog who has dug its teeth into a bag of treats or a favorite toy…my determination to avoid things can be like a vice grip on my personal growth.

Such is the case with Brene Brown.

At some point…someone must have quoted her or mentioned how good her book was or raved about her TedTalk – The Power of Vulnerability – in my presence and it was someone that I must not have thought too highly of because I’ve managed…until today…to avoid what can only be described as an ocean of wisdom and humor and courage – all the things I value and seek. The internet is awash with books, recorded speeches, blog posts, and interviews that I have never experienced and now that I’ve dipped my toe in at the shore, I want to drown in all of her words.

All of them.

I’m neck-deep now having spent 40 minutes on Ted Talks and another one hour and twenty minutes on a podcast where she was interviewed. I have placed all three of her books into my Amazon cart and they are all I want for Christmas now. 

How did this happen? How did I go from active avoidance to uncontrollable obsession? Well…thankfully a person that I do like and respect suggested that I look up something that she said about the word “should”. I was lamenting, among other things, the inertia of sitting in my comfy chair reading Rolling Stone’s ranking of all 141 SNL cast members…which had a link to a funny critique of the movie Love, Actually. I started listing the things I should be doing and her response was

Could be. Could be. Could be.

I acknowledged that could was a much gentler…less judgmental…form of “should” and that maybe that would be my blog post for the day. And she said, “Yes. See Brene Brown on should!” Then I bristled for a moment…because of the now-unidentifiable association to whomever…but started looking.

But I came up empty. When you type someone prolific into Google along with a word like "should", your results set consists of every single thing ever said by or about that person. Every. Single. Word. That’s when I turned to TED…and typed in her name to the search field. Two talks...the aforementioned one on vulnerability which has 22 million views….and another one called Listening to Shame. So I read her bio first. Just who the heck is she? A “researcher storyteller” (which is what I believe myself to be)…but an academic. A college professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Houston who has studied Shame for over decade.

Huh? Social Work? Shame? A TEXAN?! I just don’t know… But hey, it’s only 20 minutes I’m committing to and I’ll choose the one with the least number of views because I always root for the underdog.

That was 3 hours ago.

I am so in this moment of wanting to soak up this awesomeness that I wasn’t really going to write anything today, but I remembered how the reason (one of the reasons) for starting this blog was so I had a tablet for consistent writing. An online tablet which would promote some accountability. I am acutely aware that I haven’t posted anything in 11 days. It feels lame. 

But I am also waterlogged from swimming in the ocean of Brene’s words and ideas and I can barely come up with my own to write about -- I am still processing. I don’t feel bad about it at all, by the way, but I do need to get back into the habit of writing everyday. So I’ll talk about TV and anger for a moment and leave it at that.

First, TV is the devil…as in Devil’s Food Cake…something that I know is going to upset my stomach but I just can’t say no when it is placed in front of me.

I have been catching up on all the shows I missed while I was on my TV fast. I have come to the conclusion that even “the good stuff” may be glorified crap. Ever since taking Seminar in Television in college (yes, that was a real class and it was fascinating) I have, in the back of my mind, always wondered if this particular medium could possibly lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.

Think about it…It is a giant box of pixels that we bring into our homes and stare at. For hours. We design our living spaces around it. We organize our schedules according to its output (or did, before the advent of digital recording). We eat in front of them. In fact, there is an entire section of the grocery store dedicated to frozen meals that were born from something called “TV dinners” which were designed to be eaten in front of the giant box of pixels. 

Beyond the attention we pay it, there are the flashes of light themselves that enter (and alter) the way we see the things and the people that are shown. You know how when you see someone in person that you’ve seen on TV, they always look “not quite the same?” It's because TV distorts reality – both in form and in content. And don’t even get me started on commercials. We had two class discussions in college on the relationship between TV and advertising that were akin to the chicken and the egg metaphor. Was TV designed to increase the population’s exposure to advertising? Or was its invention solely for entertainment value and it just happened to be a good way for advertisers to reach consumers? We talked in circles until the professor made us move on. I still don’t know the answer.

From my own personal experience, watching television crushes my creative spirit. Aside from truly educational programming (of which there is precious little), I find that the only thing I am inspired to do after watching a TV show is to watch another one. And then another. It doesn’t foster any creativity or thinking for the most part. Garbage in garbage out. Turns out we aren’t only what we eat, we are also what we watch – at least I am. Especially when I watch alone. SO….my November habits may need to become the norm…and only at night when I don’t need to be productive.

Except Christmas movies. Because Elf.

My other mini-topic…Anger...not the emotion, but the book by the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Reading for 20 minutes each day (and highlighting or annotating) is one of my new 5 daily rituals and because I started this practice in an angry moment, this seemed like a good book on which to launch it. At first, I wasn’t overly impressed with the way this monk expressed himself on paper – not in a literary sense, anyway. It’s probably written on a 2^nd grade level and as I read the banal prescriptives for interaction with self and other…I just wasn’t grooving on it. It had significance, but I felt almost anxious about how unintellectual – how unprofound it seemed. Until he began talking about how we consumed things...not just what we ate, but what we watched and listened to, who we spent our time around, what we read… and how all of those things could feed our anger.

Anger in, anger out.

And then he talked about caring for our anger – like it was a child – and how taking care of our wounded self was the foundation for our capacity to show love toward others. I quickly softened toward the lack of flowery writing and accepted it as instruction for the 7-year-old who resides in my spirit. Not everything has to have literary significance to be worth reading. 

Like, for instance, a blog.

But I am tinkering with something significant in my mind that I would love to be able to put down on paper – hopefully not written on a second grade level. I’m trying to lean into the tension between short-term discomfort and long-term contentment. Between recklessness and responsibility.

Thanks to my ocean swim this morning, the following words are sloshing around in my head like water caught in my ear:

Courage

Resilience

Audacity

Vulnerability

Enough

How should I…how COULD I…proceed?

Order Amid Chaos

Well… it seems my writing muse’s appearance is dependent upon me exercising in the morning because this morning I didn’t walk or run and I also can’t think. Have to rest though….race tomorrow.

SO maybe I’ll just do a little stream of consciousness writing and see what happens. Should be fun for everyone.

I listened to a podcast the other day in which this guy – a productivity “expert” – shared the 5 things he does every morning. It actually turned out to be the 5 things he attempts to do every morning and if he completes 3 he feels like he’s won the day. I decided to listen and this is what I got:

The first one was Make your bed. I can get behind that. He’s not the first person who has suggested this. Some people see this small tidying task as a metaphor for creating order out of chaos. Control what you can control…surrender the rest. It’s also a way to start building momentum – once you’ve completed one easy task, other tasks may come more naturally creating a flow. And then when you return to your nest in the evening, no matter how cruddy or wasted you feel like your day was, there is evidence that you did, in fact, take one task to completion. It also offers maximum benefits for minimal work. I like chores like that.

The second one was Meditate – this makes sense too. I don’t need a lot of convincing on this as I already KNOW that I should be doing this every day. That’s why I did (did NOT) do that 30 days of Yoga challenge. It was intended to be about creating meditative time and space for me to decompress. I should probably figure out a way to try that again. He did offer some more realistic ways to turn it into a habit – websites and apps -- that I will likely employ for any future attempts at adding this discipline to my everyday routine. I’m willing to give it another go.

I’m going to skip 3 and 4 for the moment and jump to number 5 which is Journaling. That’s kind of what this is, but probably not what he means. He writes in his journal to establish priorities and behaviors for the day. That sounds like a good idea, but sometimes I just want to ramble about things such as ridiculous running ensembles or burned-out Christmas tree lights. So can’t blogging count? I think so. Or maybe some more introspection is called for? Whatever, I’ll think about it.

And now I’ll go back to the other two which are, frankly, not likely to be embraced by me. Or if I can find some other way to do something similar -- something I find more appealing and therefore would be more likely to adopt as a habit. Anyhow…

The third one was Hang. Man, he couldn’t get to the explanation of what the heck he meant by this fast enough – I could not even begin to imagine what he was referring to. And then once he started, he couldn’t finish fast enough for me. (That’s not what she said.) I quickly hanging was not something that was ever going to make a list like this for me. In short, he spends a few minutes each morning hanging by his hands from a bar on this contraption that he built himself. He also hangs upside down using…gravity boots which apparently cost only $99 and he keeps a pair in the 3 cities where he spends the most time because they are so difficult to travel with.

He only hangs upside down in the afternoons though. He said something about improving his circulation and clearing his head and blah blah blah. I don’t know ya’ll, I’ll try anything but I’m trying to imagine it and I just don’t see myself purchasing gravity boots unless someone is planning to take me to the moon. And then, I’m hoping they provide them as part of the travel package. Maybe if someone gave them to me? Would I ever use them? What if I’m hanging from the ceiling and I snap my neck? How the heck do they work? I have to stop thinking about this now because it’s kind of giving me anxiety. How about this for keeping an open mind? My daughter has a door-mounted pull-up bar and if I think about it someday I might give hanging from my hands a try. But I would rather run sprints around a track or do hill repeats to stimulate blood flow and clear up any brain fog. As much as I don’t like either of those things, they work pretty quick and don’t seem as…well…weird.

And just when I had finally recovered from that bit of eccentricity, he moved onto the fourth one which was drinking Tea. OK. SO he’s a tea drinker. I like tea. This is not a strange ritual by any stretch…but it’s an afternoon drink for me. Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, water all day. But I listened. In fact, I listened through about 6 minutes of this 15-minute podcast about how he prepares his tea and what kinds he mixes together and how “tea snobs” will scoff at his preparation techniques and the special cup and kettle that he uses and where he gets it all and the temperature of the water and the length of time you steep it and what goes in it and OH MY GOSH I thought we would never stop.  Coffee Mug…$10 kettle from Bed Bath and Beyond…Yogi Tea Bag…honey. THE END. If I ever drink tea again, that is, because he almost ruined all tea for me. Forever.

Actually, I like this guy and the mini media empire he’s got going on. This was the first time I reacted to him this way. I also referred to him yesterday. He kept me hooked through an episode that was one hour and 45 minutes long. I’ve adopted some of his other suggestions, such as a couple of email add-ons and some writing software – productivity stuff – that have been great resources. He seems to do a lot with very little, so rather than write off the entire thing, I examined it all closely for what I could use to my benefit. Establishing daily disciplines, in general, seems like something that some productive adults might do so maybe I’ll just choose 5 things of my own.

Let’s give this a try:

I’ll make my bed. Maximum impact, minimal effort…sounds like a winner.

I’ll drink a cup of coffee. (This is the ONLY thing that I already do every morning but based upon the 3-5 times in the last year that I didn’t drink it, I know that it is an absolute must. Some people call that “addiction”…I call it “knowing your limitations”. One cup of coffee. Without the tea-style fussiness. Done.

As I have been writing I’ve been thinking about how I can expect to make running or walking a part of every morning when rationally I know that when I’m training for a marathon I will need  to have a day or two each week when I rest. Or maybe an easy walk outside wouldn’t make that big a difference on a rest day? I don’t know. But it seems like it should be one of my 5 things. So let’s say at least 20 minutes outside running or walking. Or doing handstands on the front lawn. That’s kind of like hanging but without the gravity boots.

   

Meditate. I’ll try once again but not 30 minutes. 5 minutes for 5 consecutive days. That was his suggestion for getting started and that’s something I can commit to.

Journaling. For me that’s going to be stream of consciousness writing. Which is what I just did here and then tweaked it a bit and that was that. It was much easier to compose when I didn’t let myself stare at an empty page, I just started clicking away on the keyboard. Eventually I made words which became sentences and, I don’t know, you tell me. I like it enough to publish so that’s something.

Who knows what Monday will bring – Monday being, of course, the day that all things start and thus will my attempt to establish these 5 morning habits.I shall ponder all of these things as I spend about 2 hours running on the streets of Memphis tomorrow morning in what looks to be perfect racing weather for me.

Oh and the curse jar currently contains $2.75.

Peace out, yall. Have a good weekend. 

Hey Wait...How Did that November 30-Day Challenge Go?

I don’t do a really great job of documenting these 30-day challenges the way I had intended. But I have at the very least introduced them at the beginning of each month and then done a kind of post-mortem on them when I finish. It occurred to me this morning that I have not wrapped up November’s challenge in a blog post, so today seems like as good a day as any.

Upon reflection, 30 days of no television may have been the most successful experiment yet. I didn’t achieve the pure TV-free atmosphere which I had hoped for, but there were some definite benefits anyway. It began with me just noticing my own mindless tendencies which have evolved over the course of 40+ years. Sitting down and escaping when things become either too much (stressful) or too little (boring). Letting it be part of such a large portion of our family time whether as a centerpiece or as background noise. The need to watch certain shows...to keep up with the scripted lives of fictional characters...to the exclusion of writing my own script in my own life. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for escape now and then. Reality can stink and TV is a quick cheap way to take a break from it.  But all breaks must come to an end. And I think mine has. 3 days after the challenge is over and I’m still basically doing what I did during that 30 days.

As we approached the end of November, I lamented that it was coming to an end – as though I didn’t have control of it or something. Absurd. So I asked myself, What, if anything, did I miss that would require me to return to "normal"?

There are shows that are – or have been – truly compelling and thought-provoking for me. Shows like Frontline and Finding Our Roots with Henry Louis Gates which are obviously educational. But also shows like Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain that show me places and people to which I might otherwise never be exposed. And there has even been compelling fictional TV for me…Lost being chief among them. Since May of 2010, I’ve been on a search for something else like it and five years later I’m still searching. When great characters are combined with creative storytelling, I'm hooked. (Cue the 500 recommendations from the peanut gallery.) I own the entire series on DVD and I think we still have a DVD player somewhere. Maybe I should just watch it again – if I really feel the need to just watch for the sake of watching. But why? And is TV even the best source for visual storytelling anymore?

I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was essentially one entrepreneur asking another entrepreneur questions about life and career. The questions led to conversation and the whole episode was 1 hour and 45 minutes long. I knew this when I got into it so I really didn’t expect to listen to the whole thing. What I didn’t know before I hit play was that they would be drinking wine the whole time and how much humor that would infuse into what turned out to be an extremely provocative exchange. At one point, the conversation turned to friends they had who would claim to never watch TV. They would do so in a really self-righteous way that implied intellectual superiority or in a way that suggested they were just too busy and managed their time too well to fit in television. But then they would go on to find out that these same friends spend 6 hours a day watching YouTube videos.

Same thing, people.

I definitely didn’t want this experiment to turn me into someone like that and I could completely be a candidate (hopefully minus the self-righteousness) since I replaced a lot of TV time with all kinds of Internet time over the month of November. If I was to present my web-surfing time as a percentage, I would estimate it to have been about 80 frivolous /20 constructive and that’s nothing about which to boast. Some might say I just substituted one form of escape with another. That’s probably correct if I look at the month as a whole, but if I compared November 1 escape time with November 30 escape time they would look VERY different. I wasted a lot less time on cat videos toward the end, opting instead to read articles or watch TED videos that were informative or inspiring.

There are of course things that I won’t miss about the forced self-restriction – like having to leave the room or sit off in the corner when the kids are watching TV. I eventually learned to tune it out when it was on in the same room and this came in quite handy during the football extravaganza that took place

EVERY SINGLE BLASTED WEEKEND THIS MONTH.

These are the other things I learned in no particular order:

I absolutely love the sound of silence. I loved the silence that I experienced in November and how musical the other sounds in my world – the ones that are normally obfuscated by the television – are. Take, for instance, Monday of this week…the third straight day of rain. The previous two days, I found the rain aggravating. It was like the drone on a bagpipe -- the distinctive, ever-present note that stays constant with the melody -- but with an unpleasant melody or no melody at all. No one who loves the bagpipes (as I do) wants to listen to the drone pipe without a beautiful melody to accompany it. That's what the rain was over the weekend for me -- the drone pipe to the unraveling of Christmas lights and the sounds of football. On Monday, however, it was the musical bass line which accompanied the melody of every personal thought and every other sound. A far cry from the <Rage Against Humanity Ensemble Singers>. There is also an army of squirrels that I believe is assembling an arsenal to be used against us in the near future. They are frantically scurrying across the roof and up and down the wooden posts on our back porch. This is the percussion but I'm a little afraid of it too. If you go a day or two without hearing from us, please send animal control.

Finally, I just how much I love my family -- even when I don't always like them. I love when all four of us are in our family room simply co-existing. In the past, that has generally centered around TV-watching. During the month of November, I realized that when we were all together in this room without the TV on – even if we were all doing our own thing and not talking – I was at peace. When the TV was on – and I was trying not to watch it – I felt this weird isolation because I wasn’t engaged with them and I wasn’t engaged in what they were engaged in. And there was the sound that I was working to tune out. I won’t miss that. I hope that we can have more evenings that are TV-free for all of us by choice.

So there you have it. There was actually another thing I learned about myself that I’ll save for later. Maybe. It’ll be very unpopular (inside my own home even) and so I’m going to allow it to swirl about in the cortex of my brain for a while before releasing it into the vortex of the internet. 

A New Challenge Begins

Fear Anger Hate.

That’s probably too much to cover in a single blog post but you know I am undeterred by a challenge. I’ve been considering these things a lot lately…because I’ve happened to notice them at lot lately. I’m not saying there is more now than ever before – that’s a feeling I have, not a fact. I’m actually trying my best not to judge it at all but merely observe it without being sucked into it.

That too is a challenge. Just this week, I’ve used my own anger, fear, and hate as material for funny musings about my own irrational tree decorating and shopping behavior. But these emotions – or my reactions to these emotions – can cause pain too. Pain is not funny. Anger, fear, and hate harm us. They cause physical maladies in those who don’t address these emotions in a healthy way and they injure (sometimes irreparably) those around us when we act on these emotions indiscriminately.

As I attempt to objectively observe the anger, fear, and hate that I see around me and within me, I am also searching for ways to understand it. I have a fascination with neuroscience that I really wish I had known about when I was in a position to make decisions about my vocation. Not saying it’s too late for me – it just isn’t the right time now. Fortunately, I live in a time when instructive materials are available to me outside of a formal educational environment and so I spend a lot of time reading books and online articles about neuroscience – the study of the brain and nervous system. To me, there is no greater mystery – more fascinating frontier – than the pathways between human thought and action.

 

Thought…feeling…word…deed.

You’ll notice that thoughts and feelings aren’t the same thing. I’ll let that sink in for a minute because I sense that might be a shock to some people. Now, hold onto your hat because there is more…our thoughts aren’t necessarily fact either. Our own thoughts – no matter how certain we may be of their veracity – do NOT equate to absolute truth.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment too. 

Just because one says what one thinks, does not mean they are “telling it like it is.”

I’m just going to leave that right there for you to ponder.

Now, if you’re still with me, you may be asking, if we can’t rely on our own thoughts – even those formed by years of study or experience – and those thoughts lead to feelings, how can we know that what we say and do is right?

Well, you can’t – and that’s why it behooves us to carry some humility with us at all times. Humility helps us recognize that the pathway isn’t linear or one-way. It’s not “bad” to have incorrect thoughts, but it might result in bad behavior if we don’t recognize our own fallibility. That’s why we should probably think, feel, and rethink before we spew words based on our thoughts and emotions and/or act on them. We are human. We can mature and – really, you’re going to have to sit down for this next idea – we can change. We can change our minds, we can change our feelings, we can change our words, and we can change our actions.

And we can do so without fearing that change or hating anyone who thinks, feels, speaks, or acts differently.

I read an article earlier this week by a mediator who has clearly spent a great deal of time – years, in fact – trying to understand the source of anger in himself and in others and I found that his particular viewpoint on this emotion really spoke to me. I told you once that fear is an emotionwith which I am intimately familiar and that anger is one of the many fruits ofthat seed. Of all of the children of fear…anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, false pride, superiority, ego…anger is the one that manifests first and most frequently when I am afraid. Because of this, reading about his experience helped me frame not only the source of my anger, but offered an accessible strategy for examining it and responding appropriately.

The author, a mediator named Oliver Ross, began by discussing expectations, specifically, how we develop them early in childhood and often fail to adjust them as we mature. As adults, when people or situations fail to meet these expectations (control-based expectations), we feel angry because it shatters an illusion for us. If we’ve built our belief system – our rules about how life should be or how other people should behave – on a foundation of unrealistic expectations (of others, ourselves, or the world at-large) then we have a house of cards just ready to crumble when those expectations aren’t met. This crumbling causes us to feel angry.

Feeling anger is completely normal, by the way, and at times it is completely justified as Ross takes the time to point it out. All feelings are part of the human condition and, like thoughts, are not inherently bad. In fact, I have always believed that we have to experience these so-called negative emotions completely in order to enjoy the positive ones. There is science to support this belief too. For instance, the neural pathways for hate (the “hate circuit) appear to activate two of the exact same portions of the brain as the “love circuit”. (Thin line between love and hate?). The most significant difference that neurobiologists have identified between these two seemingly opposite emotions is the ability of love -- specifically romantic love -- to shut down the part of our brain that passes judgement. (Love is blind?) What I’m saying is that no emotion is bad in and of itself, but how we react to our emotions can be downright evil. That’s why the rethinking – throwing that process into reverse – is so important. You can stop hurting before it starts. You can not say words that can’t be taken back. You can not do things that can't be undone. It’s worth our effort each time we feel angry to engage in some self-examination and at least try and identify the source. Otherwise, we risk reacting to feelings that are based on our own unrealistic expectations – thoughts that aren’t true.

I recognize that I’m using a lot of “we” and “us” in my language but if I’m realistic about my expectations, I can’t expect that anyone else should decide that now is the right time to examine their own anger despite the plethora of angry rants, memes, comments, and passive-aggressive ambiguities that I see on social media ALL DAY LONG. So if I want to let there be peace on earth this December, I’ll let it begin with me. I'll just examine my own anger – with as much objectivity as possible – and you can continue to do what you want to with your own.

So…how might I turn this journey of self-examination into a 30-day challenge? And how might I do it knowing that my children will be on holiday from school for HALF of those 30 days?

I’m going to begin at the surface with the most obvious and least appealing indicators of my anger…cursing. I am ashamed of how hard it’s going to be for me to change this habit. I know it will be a challenge because I know how many f-bombs I dropped on the road to getting my perfectly-lit Christmas tree in working order this past weekend. I had some help identifying this particular habit as one that I should seek to change. Sunday night we were all sitting in the family room talking about something and I let a colorful metaphor fly out of my mouth – I don’t even remember what it was, not an f-bomb but one of its firecracker cousins. And then the boy – my baby boy – let one fly right after me.

That pretty much decided it for me.

30 days – no curse words. Not when I talk. Not when I write. Not when I run. And if I do, I’m putting a quarter in a jar the contents of which I will donate to charity on December 31.  I will not punish myself from thinking them, only for not having the self-control to vocalize them. As I mentioned earlier, thoughts aren’t always true but we have the ability to rethink before we speak and act and this will be part of practicing that discipline for me.

It should be interesting to see how many sentences I fail to finish or how creative I’ll become about my self-expression. You know I love words and I just have to wonder what percentage of my vocabulary goes unused when I rely on the old *&*$# standbys. Will I explore the use of milder, more archaic expletives? Will I start sounding like The Fantastic Mister Fox (What the cuss!)? Or will I simply stop completing sentences altogether? And if it’s so entrenched in my daily speech, how will I even notice that I’ve uttered something forbidden? 

Two words. 

Disapproving. Teenager.

The girl will notice ALL of them.

It’s December 2 and there is $1.75 in the jar.

I’ll keep you posted – in a civilized manner.

Holiday Joy Part 2

You’ll remember when I left off yesterday that a dark pall had befallen the land as I related the extraordinary plague and pestilence of our Black Friday shopping excursion to you. I should mention that before we went to the outlet mall, my husband and I had removed the Christmas tree – our pre-lit Christmas tree – from the attic and he had set it up in the family room and plugged it in. We’ve had this tree for four years and for the last two, we have plugged it in with bated breath just praying that this isn’t the year that some or all of the lights stopped working.

This was the year that we had been dreading. 

The lights on the bottom section of our 3-section tree were fine but from there on up was just dark. I tugged out some obviously burned-out bulbs and actually made one additional strand light up. But as I pulled at others, I could make no more Christmas magic. We knew then that we were going to have to deal with it. But first we went shopping and that's where we pick up our story.

It's Saturday morning. The kids are at swim practice and I decide to start unraveling the lights from the branches.

And darkness descended once again.

I can’t imagine what kind of sick, twisted, angry little Christmas elf was responsible for attaching all those lights, but he was thinking of me with hatred and vitriol as he did it. They were tied in knots, tethered to each and every branch, wound about one another and there wasn’t a single “end” to begin with -- there were dozens of "ends". It was like a Hydra. Each end led to an intersection and each intersection was coiled around a branch and each branch was wrapped in some sort of pipe cleaner that resembled bark. I really can’t adequately describe the wrath that simmered inside me as I spent an hour and a half unraveling the top section – the smallest section. I kept it from bubbling over by reminding myself that the Christmas tree was central to my favorite things about the holiday season.

See…as I have aged, the number of holiday traditions that I enjoy have grown fewer and fewer. I do find this time of year stressful and too commercialized. I enjoy very simple things like a fire in the fireplace with Christmas tunes on the stereo…a game of Banana-grams after a meal with friends…a Christmas movie in our pajamas…and my early morning coffee which I enjoy under my fleece snowflake blanket in the dark family room with only the Christmas tree lights illuminating my space. These are THE Christmas moments I cherish most.  And the Christmas tree is lit in ALL of them.

So I have to just put on my big girls panties and get these lights untangled so I can string some up that work.

And so I did. The top section. And then I moved onto the middle section and OH THE HUMANITY. Between the not running (of which I was into my fourth day by now) and the pouring down rain outside and the football game on TV, I felt there was some invisible force determined to deliver me as many soul-crushing defeats as possible. I actually believed that this was being done to me. Not rational I realize now (because I have gone for two runs since then and my sanity has been restored), but wow did it feel real in the moment.

My husband helped me tackle the middle section after I explained to him the importance of this tree to my personal well-being. I think he knew that if he didn’t help, there was a chance that he might be killed in his sleep.

By someone.

So we toiled. For 3 long hours – or however long a college football game lasts. We started at kickoff and they took down the goal posts about the same time we snipped off that last tangled mat of green wire from the very last branch. I was telling a friend yesterday morning about the experience and she said that she hoped we had at least put a Christmas movie or some Christmas music on while we worked. I told her that we didn’t but that it was OK because there was football on and a heart-warming performance by the “Rage Against Humanity Ensemble Singers” playing in my head. Who needs Movies and Music when you have your own mad melody and hostile harmony to keep you warm? Certainly not me.

When we were done – our arms a shredded mess from the constant jabbing from all the synthetic branches and our spirits heavy from the hours of my ranting about the tiny angry bearded elf who had done this or about the company that paid him to create such a jumbled mess that when the lights went out we would just chuck the whole thing and buy a new tree. Yes, by the 3rd quarter, I was sure it was a corporate conspiracy and even though my back hurt and my arms looked like I had been in a fight with Freddy Kruger, I was determined not to give any of the artificial tree conglomerates the satisfaction of me buying anything that they manufactured. EVER.

Now it was simply a matter of principle.

We reassembled the tree, strung new lights – in a far more friendly and loving manner than the hostile elf had done – and plugged everything in. It was dark outside now and still raining. The tree, even without its ornaments, was immediately soothing. It was totally worth it and I had, for the moment, beaten corporate America at its goodwill-annihilating game.

Win. Win.

And now as I sit here…drinking my coffee…after an invigorating 5-mile run…under my fleece blanket…in front of my perfectly-lit Christmas tree. I realize how ridiculous it all was. The cortisol alone probably trimmed 5 years off my life and for what? It’s Christmas. I’m supposed to be joyful – filled with joy.

Sunday night…alone in the quiet family room next to my perfectly-lit Christmas tree…I watched a Ted Talk by this neuroscientist named Daniel Levitin about ways in which we can stay calm when we know ahead of time that there is the potential for stress. How can we avoid making critical mistakes (like surrendering our own joy) in stressful situations (like hours spent untangling burned-out Christmas tree lights or when you choose to go on a Black Friday shopping excursion)? What he suggested was a pre-mortem.

Like a post-mortem but before the death of your good sense and best intentions.

I guess I had kind of tried that with my “let’s be someone else while we shop” plan of action on Black Friday but we all know that trying to be something you’re not isn’t usually successful…not in the best of situations and certainly not in a fight or flight scenario. Probably the best thing to do to avoid making a mistake when venturing out on Black Friday – at least for me – is to just not do it at all.The shopping is the mistake and it causes stress which leads to more mistakes. I’m not sure there is any amount of planning, list-making, or Xanax that will make that an experience that I enjoy. 

But what to do about the burned out lights?

I sit here looking at my tree with complete confidence that the original lights in the bottom section will not work when we plug it in a year from now – if they even make it through the next 35 days. The tag on the remaining original cord says 100 hours of usage and I know we have more than exhausted that. Still, I have a year (or a couple of days) to decide how I’m going to handle it when it happens. Probably should pop in that Christmas movie – a funny one – and turn it way up to drown out the voices of the Rage Against Humanity Ensemble singers who are perpetually ready to perform. I think long sleeves will be in order too to protect my arms from the claw-like branches. And wine or beer will be a must. Because, yes, the alcohol may indeed slow me down and ultimately make it take longer, but it will also inhibit the anger which, for that few hours, will benefit everyone in my immediate vicinity.

Pre-mortem. Check.

And now…on to the next 30-day challenge which has already begun.

Holiday Joy Part 1

And she did not write and she did not run. And a darkness fell upon the land and there was no joy and there was no contentment. And a decree went forth throughout the nations, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

For 5 days.This is what happens when I don’t do what needs to be done for myself.

The writing wasn’t going to happen and I kind of knew that. The laptop gets taken by the teenage girl and the iPad gets taken by the teenage boy and I am fine with that because they are quiet. And it’s not like I would have been able to think over the incessant yelling at the many thousands of football games that were on ALL WEEKEND LONG.

Oh the yelling.

I actually did sit down to write a couple of times but thanks be to the Almighty I didn’t publish any of those raw, unfiltered diatribes. Each day was rawer and less filtered because of the other thing I didn’t do for myself for 5 days.

No running.

I started off all wrong on Wednesday – the very first day of vacation. I should have gotten up to run, but I didn’t do it. I was sore from the day before and the bed felt SO good and no one else was getting up at the crack of ass on the first day of vacation so why should I?

Because when you don’t, by three o’clock that day, you kind of want to kill all of the people in all of the places all of the time. Whatever, I’ll run in the morning on Thanksgiving Day – it’ll make me feel better about eating myself into a coma later on.  Then I slept on an air mattress Wednesday night and woke up needing traction or a chiropractor or both. Not only could I not run, I could barely walk. OK – so that only lasted a couple of hours and we didn’t eat until 2:00 but inertia and…well…just inertia. And Jonesboro is hilly. I’ll run Friday.

Yeah.

Remember the cozy bed? And the vacation? And now the inertia? Well, let's just say my running shoes stayed dry both Saturday and Sunday as it rained. And rained. And rained some more. And then 5 days were done. Just like that.

And then my running buddy returned and it was all well and good and I am normal again. 

But let me give you a rundown of what occurred in the meantime.

I had my usual Black Friday meltdown…but on crack. I do not understand Black Friday. I do not like Black Friday. Too many gifts…too many people…too many emails…too many “final” Christmas lists from the children (which are never really final). And what about Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday and OH MY GOSH WHO ENJOYS THIS SHIT?!!!

But we went down to the outlet mall – the newly-opened…like 7 days earlier…outlet mall. I’ll set the stage for you. Husband suggests we just go down and look. In my mind, I know this is never going to happen…but whatever. Kids get excited, I tamp down the anxiety that I feel about the crowds and the no-plan-for-anyone’s-gifts-yet angst.

It’ll be nice just to see the Christmas decorations and enjoy the warmth of the holiday spirit amid all the joyful shoppers and the accommodating shopkeepers.

Oh the lies we tell ourselves.

And I knew it was a lie because I had just read an article about how my state “won second prize” in the contest to see who experiences the most Black Friday fist fights. Fist fights. This has to be a good idea…right?

In the car, husband asks the boy – our human GPS – which will be the best way to go to avoid traffic. I snickered to myself. They hemmed and hawed about it and started to get bickery. And then the girl chimed in. And I said,

“Look. There’s not going to be a “good” way to get there, only degrees of bad. And it’s not going to be calming or uplifting when we arrive because of all the people in a gimme gimme gimme mindset. But it’s gonna be OK if we all just decide to be someone else. We will be a completely different family for the next 2 hours. We are going to put on shells made of our best selves. (To husband) You won’t be the angry, impatient driver. (To daughter) You won’t be the clueless teenager who thinks her parents are made of money. (To son) You won’t be the sullen teenager who thinks we’re only going where everyone else wants to go. And I won’t be that prickly bitch who hates crowds…and shopping…and shopping in crowds. We’re just all gonna be not ourselves and everything will be dandy.”

Traffic…nightmare. Parking…bloodbath. There was a neighborhood across from the entrance to the mall where they were charging $3.00 to park. On a residential street. Owned by the city. A nearby church was charging $5.00 to park in their lot and while I’m sure all the proceeds were going to the Syrian refugees who are being mercifully welcomed by the State of Mississippi, we took our chances and turned into the mall lot. We were still acting like the best version of ourselves rather than our natural selves and maybe because of this, we actually managed to find a spot with reasonable swiftness. It wasn’t close, mind you, but we are all healthy people who don’t mind walking so we called it a win. Bolstered by our good fortune, we headed toward the shops.

It’s an outdoor mall. Praise be. So…fresh air (when I wasn’t around the 70% of the people who were smoking), natural light (or something like it beyond the cloud cover and occasional raindrops), and less concentration of sounds (I could block out the Christmas Muzak and people yelling at their kids.) It was looking like I was going to remain inside my shell of a normal person. As we entered the common area, we saw a sign that indicated the mall had been open all night. That’s ALL. NIGHT. Which means there were probably people who had been working ALL NIGHT. I filed this information away so that I could be extra cautious and courteous toward each and every sales person I encountered lest I get cut.

We ventured in and quickly out of stores. They were crowded and people were completely and totally unaware of the sea of humanity that surrounded them as evidenced by their ability to step on, push aside, and cut in front of anyone and everyone in their paths. 

After getting knocked about a few times and not being able to organize any kind of coherent shopping list in my head, I felt the shell of my normal self cracking under the pressure. Thankfully, the kids asked for a snack and chicken tenders magically appeared in a kiosk before my eyes.

Saved for the moment. But the cracks were already there and, as I quickly learned, the kids’ shells weren’t holding up either. Husband’s was fine because we weren’t in the car and his resilience was about to come in quite handy.

Fortified by our crack-laced chicken snack, daughter and I spied a store we wanted to look in which was serendipitously situated caddy corner from a store that my husband and son wanted to check out. Let’s divide and conquer.

Or be conquered as the case may be – as the case was indeed. These two stored contained twice as many people each as the entire rest of the mall combined.

I tried…so help me I did. We looked at some racks. I fielded requests from the girl about Christmas dresses and black leggings…but all I could think about was the metal taste in my mouth. Adrenaline? Fight or flight?

Flight. I told her I had to get out and she rolled her eyes before reluctantly following. I registered the eye-roll and decided to ignore it because this was clearly the Zombie Apocalypse and a teenage eye-roll was the least of my worries. I barely made it out of there without having a full-on panic attack when suddenly I’m at the doors. Freedom! I push them open to inhale that sweet breath of fresh air and as I do, someone in my path exhales their cigarette smoke directly into my face.

Are you EFFING KIDDING ME?!

No I didn’t scream it. But my face surely said it because the woman quickly apologized and ran from me as though I were Super Fly TNT.

I shook it off and headed to the other store to gather the rest of family so we could all run away from this place as fast as possible. When we entered that store it was more of the same. I think I blacked out for a minute. Daughter actually started looking at stuff to buy and in my daze, I wasn’t able to make words to stop her. I scanned the crowd for any people who looked familiar. It was just more Zombie Apocalypse though. I decided that the husband and the boy were going to have to fend for themselves and I would do my best to just survive with my daughter. I grabbed her arm and my desperate face must have said it all because she just followed. No eye roll this time. As we reached the door, we saw the other half of our party – which sounds much more festive than this felt – and I all but broke out into a full-speed run toward the exit.

I don’t know what happened after that. I think the boys may have actually gone back in and bought something? I have a vague recollection of sitting at a table – all four of us – me slumped over in a chair. My shell had long since shattered and I was just a soft lump of formerly-human material. Somehow we got home. I know this because everyone was present and accounted for when we walked in the door. I have no memory of walking to the car or driving back to the house. I’m just glad we made it out alive. And it kind of gives me a ray of hope that we might in fact survive a Zombie Apocalypse because I’m pretty sure Black Friday is the same damn thing.

So that was the first thing that happened.

The next was that we put up our Christmas tree. You can read about that tomorrow and I'm serious this time because I’m writing it now but you don’t need to read any more about my craziness today when you clearly have more important things you should be doing with your time. 

So, until tomorrow. 

One Step At A Time

I am nine weeks into a 22-week training program in preparation for my first full marathon. I am not going to talk about how this is my 6^th try. That’s a topic for another day. What I will say is that in my experience, training for a marathon is at least as hard as actually running one. It’s week after week, mile after mile of exhausting, hours-long training runs that simply have to get done if you’re going to have any hope of completing a 26.2 mile race.

I have a bad habit of looking ahead at the big picture or at big chunks of the even bigger picture.

• 35 freakin’ miles one week in January.
• 20 freakin’ miles one DAY in February.
• 8 freakin’ hills on the Auction Street Bridge and a 45-minute tempo run two weeks before the marathon.
• What the hell am I thinking?

I am guilty of considering things before it’s time to do so.

Fortunately, I have a superb running partner to travel with on this journey. We run a similar pace…have overlapping personal interests…and practically identical points-of-view about our goals for these two races for which we are training. When I’m not demoralizing myself with the thoughts I listed above, my saner self trains in pursuit of the following goals:

• To finish the races (a half marathon and a full) upright, bearing weight on my own two feet without the help of medical personnel, and having a modicum of control over my bodily functions when I cross the finish line.
• To run as much of both races with my training partner– though both of us are prepared to lag behind or forge ahead should it become necessary.
• To celebrate each race with my family and friends by drinking and eating anything I want.
• To complete each training run – no matter how much walking I end up doing.
• To enjoy the journey and remember that it is a privilege to live a life in which I can take 1-4 hours out of single day (often a weekday) in pursuit of these goals.

The last one is, perhaps, most important to me.

We have done the vast majority of our long training runs on trails. These trails are situated amid a vast green space – the largest of its kind in the whole USA – just 20 minutes from our neighborhood. It is a jewel. From various vantage points within this space you can see 5 or 6 different types of communities – urban, suburban, rural farm, commercial, residential, recreational, correctional (yes, you read that right). Sometimes you can stand in one spot and see several all at the same time. It is a remarkable gift.

And it’s not the only one. We have a state park 20 minutes from us which offers running trails – swampy and hilly with switchbacks and the slight threat of bears – we like to run there on the roads in the dark with only headlamps to light our path. No, I’ve never encountered a bear.

And if that’s not enough, one mile from our house is another large urban park complete with an old growth forest, and THREE choices of running trails (dirt, limestone, concrete) all closed to traffic and positioned under a canopy of large indigenous trees.

We are acutely aware of how fortunate we are to have these places at our disposal. We often discuss it as we pound out mile after mile, all the while looking for ways to distract ourselves from the discomfort that running long distances can produce. We are also mindful that no everyone in our city has access to these treasures – not because they are costly to use – but because they are not proximate to the pockets of poverty in our community. We talk about that when we run.

We appreciate this gift.

When the number of miles which lay ahead become too much for us to handle, my partner is fond of saying, “Look at us out here.” And I respond with, “We are gettin’ it done.” We say these things a lot. We are putting one foot in front of the other. One step at a time is infinitely easier to accept than 12 more miles and that’s what that exchange means to me.

One step at a time.

In between these brief exchanges, we have great conversation by virtue of our overlapping interests. These conversations make the miles go by faster (or at least it feels like they are going by faster). But we also have differences which complement each other. I have a tendency to starting talking about big stuff – like global affairs or climate change or municipal financing – and when I’m passionate about it, I speed up. She sees the details and connects the big stuff on a more personal level. This slows us down to a sustainable pace.

My favorite thing that she does is when we are running and lost in conversation (at least I’m lost) and all of a sudden, she exclaims, “Look at the sky!” and I’ll look up to see another beautiful sunrise – because we see the sunrise pretty much every day when we run. It’s always different. It’s always stunning. And she never fails to notice it. Or she’ll stop me as say, “I just want you to stop and look up; do you see the light?” and I’ll look up to see individual beams of sunlight as they peek through the canopy of the old growth forest. These are things that I am not apt to notice when I am by myself but I think they make me a better person when she points them out to me.

It’s so easy for me to become overwhelmed or discouraged when I look at too much at a time. Whether it’s the worsening conflict in the Middle East, my sadness over the treatment of Syrians looking to flee it or simply the dozen-plus miles that lay ahead of me on the road, it’s much more manageable to focus on one thing at a time. After I’ve waxed on about policies and ideas, my brilliant companion brings be back to the faces of people, the colors of leaves, the scenery around us, and the light of each new day.

When I focus on what is right in front of me, I feel empowered to affect the big things in small ways. There is little I can do to impact the international response to ISIS. But I can pray that intelligently-targeted and sophisticated policy will prevail over a continuation of the 30 years of shock and awe retaliation that have led us to this place. Leaders don’t listen to housewife-blog writers about such things…but I believe God does. I can’t change the suspicion directed toward our Syrian brothers and sisters which has led so many in the US to vilify them. I can’t take away anyone’s fear. But I can help the refugees that are already in my community and welcome them one at a time.

I can’t erase the miles of pavement and trail-pounding that stretch before me for the next 13 weeks and I can’t get anyone to do them for me (nor would I want them to), but I can remember why I’m doing it in the first place.

TO finish what I started…healthy, grateful, and in the presence of good friends (and good food).

One step at a time.

23 Days of Forsaking the Talking Light Box

I have now passed the three-week mark without* television and I thought I’d give you some of my thoughts on this experiment.

First, you probably noticed that asterisk next to “without” – let me explain. It’s not like the asterisk next to the names of homerun hitters and cyclists in the 1990s – I haven’t been doping. I’ve just tried to remember the spirit of the 30 days – no mindless watching or channel flipping during the day, no using it to escape the stuff that I should be doing, no watching it in the evening with my family, and no TV at bedtime.

Here is when I have permitted myself to watch TV:

• On November 7, I watched OT in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game – and that was worth it for sure.
• On November 15, I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes with my family, until 30 minutes in when both kids left the room and then I just watched it with my husband.
• On November 18, we sat down to watch an episode of Frontline that we had recorded a couple of weeks earlier and I fell asleep 20 minutes into it. I finished it the next morning.
• I sat in the same room during a number of football games this weekend though I wouldn’t say that I was watching them. I’ve pretty much had my fill of football for the year. Anyway, it was Sunday and my whole family was in the family room watching and I didn’t feel like isolating myself.

And that’s it. Our DVR is almost full and I’ve had to make the kids go through and delete stuff that they have watched so that there is room to record the rest of my shows for the week. I know…what was it worth if I’m just going to go back and watch them?

This is what it was worth…

I have had lovely, quiet evenings in the family room with my family over the last 3 weeks that included conversation unrelated to the boob tube. We don’t have a lot of down time at our house. For instance, on a typical Monday, our daughter’s day starts with a 4:20am wake up call for 5:00am swim practice. Both of their schools start at 7:15am because everyone knows that’s the exact time of day that teenagers are at their most chipper and ready to learn. That’s a topic for another blog post on another day. They get out of school at 2:15pm and are home a little before 3:00. Then they change, snack, chat with us a bit and head to swim practice (that’s #2 for daughter) at 3:45. They get home at 6:30 and scarf down the entire fridge or dinner – it all depends on how quickly I can get it in front of them. And then they scatter to do homework until bedtime at about 9 or 10 o’clock. Not a lot of family time.

Now, they don’t scatter to do homework, they do it in the family room. We can all talk

about things as they do it, or we can help ( if it’s not math, because 5^th grade is that last time I was able to help with that.) It’s quiet but not silent. And it is commercial-free which is the best part. Commercials make kids ask for dumb stuff that you step on and break when you walk around in the dark. Or they cause them to ask for cereal and candy.  And then I have to be a “no” mom. I’d rather be a “yes” mom but TV makes that harder. Anyway, these evenings have made my heart full and that, as Martha would say, is a very good thing.

I have read a lot more. Mostly news articles. I feel like an educated citizen and since there were local elections this month, that’s a good thing for me to be. I wouldn’t say that the news is any more hopeful when I absorb it through paper or online, but I definitely feel as though I’m getting more legitimate information. Did you know that getting your news from a Facebook headline or from a 140-character tweet might leave you without part of the story? Did you know that when two or three gas-bag, political pundits are screaming at each other on a “news” channel, that it isn’t actually news? Did you know that BuzzFeed is not a quality source for journalism?  I stand by all of these statements and offer this one word: Reuters. Do with it what you like. I’d also like to say, The Atlantic, but at least half of you would say that it is slanted…and that is partially true. However, it takes me about 45 minutes to read an article from The Atlantic and while it is likely covered from a particular angle, there are mountains of verifiable facts included in a single story. And they are sited so that we can go back to the source of the information to decide if we think it’s credible. This may sound like Journalism 101 – of course periodicals have to site their sources.

Au contraire mon frere.

There are an astounding number of online “news sources” which include links in their articles that lead you only to other unsubstantiated articles published by that same journal. It’s like a giant circle of ignorance. SO I’m not just a more voracious consumer of news, I’m a more discriminating consumer of news. That means the left side of my brain – the analyzer – is still working. And that too is a good thing.

Finally, I think my creative muse is present with me for more of the day now because he/she doesn’t have to compete with all the noise and other voices. I have book ideas and blog post ideas and gift ideas and event artsy craftsy ideas at the most random times throughout the day – and I dream about them at night. I forget about 75% of these great ideas but just having them is so reassuring. The right side of my brain – the synthesizer – is not dead either. Another positive takeaway.

So that’s three plusses and zero minuses – a success to say the least. I’m not giving it up forever, but I’m also not going to forget what I’ve learned.

• It is spirit-lifting and peaceful to be in a room with my family when the TV is not on – even if there is math going on in the general vicinity.
• It is beneficial to the universe for me to absorb actual facts with my news.
• My creative muse appears when it is silent and the more time he/she spends nearby, the more he/she gives me to work with.

One more good thing…I have not watched any debates. I could not be more pleased about this fact if you covered it with chocolate and stuck $100 bills to it. I’m not sure either side of my brain...or my heart... or my stomach would know what to do with that crap right now.

Maybe come December I’ll give myself 2 days a week to watch in the evening. And maybe after I go back and watch what I’ve missed, I discover that I didn’t actually miss any of it at all. 

Knowing Just Enough to Know That I Don't Know Anything

I've heard it said that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. It was said by me.

The other day I was straightening up the dining room and under the table I noticed a collection of things that our dog had taken there for “safe-keeping”. There was a boot, an old running shoe of mine, some unidentifiable plastic items, 3 wooden pencils and a crusted-over stuffed animal with no eyes that my daughter had once loved. It had been a dog too, and maybe Dash felt threatened by it. 

Anyway, I returned the boot (thankfully not destroyed) and the running shoe (which I had already destroyed by running in them) and put them back in their rightful spot. The rest I scooped up and threw in the garbage being sure to hide the stuffed dog at the very bottom so that my daughter would not see it. She hadn’t played with – or likely even considered –that stuffed dog in years and I knew that she would not be scarred if it simply remained forgotten forever.

What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. This is an example of that statement being true.

There are, of course, examples of situations in which this statement is not only patently false, it is inherently dangerous. For instance:

I’m hiking in the woods and I see a pretty flower that I want to pick and take with me. It’s in the middle of a lot of other plants…mostly green foliage…and I don’t know what poison ivy looks like. And I am allergic to poison ivy. Very allergic. This is an instance in which what I don’t know (the shape of a poison ivy leaf) could definitely hurt me.

In the most important of matters, the decisions we make and/or the actions we take based on what we do or do not know can actually hurt others as well. Lately, I have come to recognize that my own ignorance (and the general ignorance of most Westerners) about the Middle East has had disastrous results – international implications, in fact – for the people living there and for the world at large.

So I have gone on a learning quest – a reading binge made possible by the fact that I am not watching TV this month. Interestingly enough, I must have had an inkling as to my own ignorance about 2 years ago. At that time, I stumbled across a list of people compiled by Reuters who have been covering the civil war in Syria since the Arab Spring in 2011 and doing a thorough, unbiased job of it. For some reason, I created a Twitter list of all these people (10 in total) and told myself that I should check it periodically to keep myself informed.

I took advantage of this self-created, 21^st Century listserv exactly ZERO times.

But since Friday’s attack in Paris and in the days that followed with all of the…er…conversation about Syrians and refugees and ISIS and terrorism, I realized that what I knew about the war in Syria – and it IS a war – could fit in a thimble.  The realization was magnified by a factor of 100 when I watched this 5 minute video created by Ezra Klein back in October. After watching this, I realized that what I knew about the war in Syria could fit in a thimble…for Tinkerbell.  

And I knew that wasn’t good enough.

In my attempt over the last 4-5 years to remove the ugliness of American politics from my social life, I have also stopped reading about current events. These two things, at one time in my life, were hopelessly intertwined because I worked in politics and all of my friends did too. 

I used to spend hours and hours reading research and policy papers on any number of subjects. It was a habit shaped by my years working on Capitol Hill where it was my job to flood my brain with as much information as possible on a given subject until I could speak and write intelligently about it. It was a really marvelous way to enter the workforce. Being informed and knowledgeable was seen as a positive quality. Sharing different perspectives was commonplace – especially among people my age who were still trying to figure out what we thought about the world around us. 

Our parents had shaped our views until they handed us to our college professors who honed our outlooks a bit more. Now we had bosses, colleagues, and influences which were further shaping our policy perspectives and it was up to us to figure out what voices were our own and what voices belonged to other people. We did this together and because we were friends, we did it respectfully. Despite spendning each day reading and learning and soaking up all there was to know, I lived with the constant awareness of how much I still didn’t know. This type of environment can engender humility and, for me, this humility was an ever-present reminder that I didn’t (and still don’t) have all the answers. 

The best part was that I was living in a vacuum in which fact-based arguments were appreciated – invited – by people regardless of their ideology. We had feelings about domestic and world issues, but our discussions were largely free from emotion and, more importantly, free from reactive response.

The real world offers no such vacuum though it has its share of unbreathable space, namely cyberspace and particularly social media. And I won’t go into the pros and cons of one environment over the other, but I will say this…there is a lot of reactive response going on, precious little true knowledge, and absolutely no humility. And it’s not just our leaders who are showing it.

It’s US. Me and you. 

So, I’ve been revisiting my roots. I’m not going back to DC or Capitol Hill, but I am going back to some of the behaviors that I learned there that helped me grow, specifically, binge reading. Right now, the subject is the Syrian War and, peripherally, its relationship to the Islamic State. I am not qualified to have an opinion, engage in an argument, support a position, or judge a Syrian (or anyone else, for that matter) until I have at least tried to understand what is actually going on over there. As you saw in that video, there is much more to this than just Syria and ISIS. This bleeds into Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and a dozen other places. Everyone has an agenda and allies and enemies shift with each passing day. It can't be "boiled down" into one article, premise, opinion, or soundbyte and anyone claiming to do so is lying to you. There is nuance and complexity and…

There is no black and white about it. 

If grey area is not your thing, then you will not like studying the War in Syria. Also, if you’ve been a supporter of US policy in the Middle East at any time in the last 60 years, you may not like the questions that this kind of examination will raise in your mind. So, if American exceptionalism is something that you need to embrace to the exclusion of self-edification, you should know that studying this might be for you.

But I hope you will not allow fear of knowledge to keep you from seeking wisdom outside of your normal circle of influence. What you don’t know can hurt you and it can actually hurt lots of people. We have to remember that the story of this violent and turbulent region is a story about people. They are unlike us in many ways, but just like us in many important ones. Like us, they long for security and stability and freedom and they are struggling to find a balance that gives them a fair amount of each. If we allow our leaders to construct a narrative in which these people are mere characters used to justify their agendas, then we are ignoring their humanity.

Below is a list of my resources so far. If you are already reading a lot on this subject and would like to add to my list, please do so in the comments. I’m looking for fact-based articles and thoughtful analysis from people with boots on the ground and feet firmly planted in reality. I'm not interested in rants or quips from people sitting behind a desk jockeying for airtime or trolling from behind a computer screen to collect “hits,” “likes,” “follows,” or “shares.” So, if you have things to share...I welcome them.

I’m regularly reading from these websites:   

• www.projects21.com/category/middle-east
• www.syriadeeply.org
• http://www.mei.edu/
• www.al-monitor.com

These are the people on my Twitter list – some because of what they share themselves from inside or nearby the conflict or because they tweet other interesting information about the war and other happenings in the Middle East:

• Joshua Landis @joshua_landis (Director of the Center for Mid East Studies at the University of Oklahoma)
• @BSyria (This is just a twitter feed that retweets other Syria-related tweets from Twitter – like a listserv inside my listserv)
• Randa Slim @rmslim (she wears many hats and is an expert on Middle East affairs)
• Jenan Moussa @jenanmoussa (reporter based in Dubai who works for Arabic Al Aan TV)
• Laila Lalami @LailaLalami (novelist and essayist)
• Laura Rozen @lrozen (reporter for al monitor)
• Liz Sly @LizSly (WaPost Beirut Bureau Chief)
• Hassan Hassan @hxhassan (author, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy

This is very good:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/inside-assads-syria/

And these are some of the articles that I (a) have already read, (b) am currently reading, or (c) am about to read:

• http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/?utm_source=SFFB
• http://www.thenation.com/article/we-cannot-defeat-isis-without-defeating-the-wahhabi-theology-that-birthed-it/
• http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hidden-hand-behind-the-islamic-state-militants-saddam-husseins/2015/04/04/aa97676c-cc32-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/18/how-isis-makes-its-money/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-a-propaganda-war-us-tried-to-play-by-the-enemys-rules/2015/05/08/6eb6b732-e52f-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/life-in-the-islamic-state/2015/10/01/overview/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/16/5-stories-you-should-read-to-really-understand-the-islamic-state/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/an-american-family-saved-their-son-from-joining-the-islamic-state-now-he-might-go-to-prison/2015/09/06/2d3d0f48-44ef-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html
• http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/11/15/paris-attacks-the-wests-fatal-misunderstanding-of-islamic-state/?utm_source=Facebook
• http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/how-isis-started-syria-iraq/412042/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-long-war-against-islamist-extremism-has-become-more-complicated-than-ever/2015/11/17/0b255c26-8c8e-11e5-934c-a369c80822c2_story.html?postshare=1751447890823635&tid=ss_tw
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-long-war-against-islamist-extremism-has-become-more-complicated-than-ever/2015/11/17/0b255c26-8c8e-11e5-934c-a369c80822c2_story.html?postshare=1751447890823635&tid=ss_tw
• http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/18/kurds-cant-be-syrias-saviors/?utm_content=buffer19415&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
• http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/15/confessions-of-an-isis-spy.html
• http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/11/19/overconfidence-and-the-war-in-syria/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
• http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:12458de66d2e4de79bfd9c8835a903ba