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.