Happy follow-up to the previous post

Helen Mirren Has the Sexiest Body On the Planet, from Salon.com

Aging well

Picture came from this site.

"There is clearly nothing desirable in the world of advertising about growing up. An ad for a truck says 'About the only thing it has in common with the typical 50-year-old is the spare tire.' Fifty is still young these days. Most of us at fifty are much wiser than we were at thirty and we still have another twenty-five or thirty years to go. But we get the constant message that it's all over for us. This is demoralizing for all of us, men and women, young and old--we learn to dread the natural process of growing older and we feel terribly devalued as we age."--Jean Kilbourne, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel

I often fantasize about moving to France. It's not that I want to practice my high school French, or eat brie and baguettes every day (though that's certainly an appealing proposition) or that French Women Never Get Fat (I've been to Paris, and trust me, some of them do.) There is more respect for the "older woman" there. A woman is not judged by what age bracket her demographic falls into. She is not "past her expiration date" at 40. Actually in her 4th decade she's just coming into her own, and her self-knowledge and confidence give her a particular kind of allure.

And if you're older than 40? TV, magazines, and other media either ignore you or try to carve you into some warped version of your younger self. Once you're 60 or 70, you fall off the media radar completely. Never mind that Americans are living longer and feeling healthier than their parents did. Aging, like Death, is taboo territory. If we don't acknowledge it, maybe it will go away.

One of my personal pet peeves is the raw deal given to senior citizens. Apart from some excellent films depicting older people--like the beautiful Away From Her, directed by Sarah Polley (a bright young thing herself) or any Helen Mirren vehicle--seniors are typically the butt of jokes. They horrify people by displaying what younger people see as inappropriate behavior. Being seen nude seems to be the worst offense a senior--particularly a woman--can commit. It's incredibly sad that a person can live on this earth for half a century or more, adapt (willingly or not so much) to all the changes time and technology present, earn the knowledge and life experience and resilience that only personal experience can give you, and then Poof! suddenly disappear from society, erased like a chalk outline. What they deserve is our respect, but what they get is either our pity, our ridicule, or our indifference.

If living in the present is one of the keys to happiness, why all this emphasis on being younger, exerting all your energy trying to go back to a time in your life that no longer exists?

Speaking of impossible time travel, Mike and I drove down to New Jersey this past weekend to attend my 20th high school reunion. I thought it would be fun to listen to all my favorite music from when I was a teenager. Turns out a lot of it just isn't so compelling anymore. I had forgotten how melodramatic and/or annoying some of my favorite singers were: Morrissey of The Smiths promising to throw his white body down on the rocks below and other happy sentiments; Edie Brickell screeching "What I am is what I am are you what you are or what?"; and They Might be Giants, whose lead singer sounds like he's suffering from a chronic sinus infection, warbling nonsensical lyrics like "But don't don't don't let's start. I've got a weak heart. And I don't get around how you get around." (although "Istanbul [Not Constantinople]" is still one of my favorite alternative pop songs.)

I look to my parents for signs that they are suffering from a lack of youth and relevancy. My father has always kept up with pop music--he knows when Duffy has a new single and has opinions on every American Idol finalist. My mother could care less about pop culture--she's interested in painting, photography, crafts...all the things she didn't have a lot of time for when she was raising me. My father works longer hours than I do, and commutes three times the distance--every weekday and sometimes on Saturdays. Once in love with New York City nightlife, now he would rather be up in Manchester, VT, working on their little "recession cottage." They're both looking forward to his retirement. I respect all they've been through and admire their resiliency. Yes, I do tease my mother about her age sometimes, but that's more of a childish habit than anything else.

I doubt that Big Advertising's message about the unacceptability, the miserable shame, of aging will change--can you imagine an ad for a facial cream aimed at women of a certain age that doesn't promise miracles? That shows a real woman with real skin imperfections applying it simply because it feels and smells good? No way. If the Baby Boomers can't change the twisted message about getting older, who can? But not buying into the media propaganda that life ends at 50--that's up to us. Living in the present and owning our age is something anyone can do, at any time. It's certainly better than the alternative.

Locked-down

*Photo credit unknown

"The ways in which we need to grow are usually those we are the most supremely defended against and are least willing to admit even exist, let alone take an undefended, mindful peek at and then act on to change."--Jon Kabat-Zinn, from Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

When you're a worrier, life is a lot harder than it needs to be. A worrier gets a bill in the mail from their primary care physician for a large sum of money and instantly thinks, Oh no, I can't afford this! I thought my insurance would cover it! One quick (well maybe not quick) phone call to the insurance company would correct the error, but already the worry has done its damage. The worrier starts to obsess about an unreality: I'm going to have to pay $250 for that benign mole they removed at my request. It could have been melanoma. I might have died!

Or a worrier takes a harmless, or at best, ambiguous situation, and infuses it with doubt. I was in a cab once and the driver, a Haitian immigrant, starting singing in French. I was mindlessly scrolling through the Apps on my SmartPhone just to fill the time, but when he kept singing--his voice becoming stronger and sweeter--I put the phone away. It would have been rude to act like I didn't hear him, and he did have a nice voice. We started chatting and he told me that he was a musician and songwriter, and that what he just sang was an original piece he wrote. Then when I asked him how long he had been in this country, he said he was a refugee from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. He went on to describe how his mother died in the quake, and how he tried to save her life and in the process seriously injured himself.

I didn't know what to say--what can you say to a stranger who tells you of such personal tragedy? Then I started thinking, maybe he's making this up for a better tip. Yes, I'm embarrassed to say that that thought popped in my head, and started snowballing until my empathy turned to anger. How dumb does he think I am? And how dare he use a true disaster for his own financial gain!

I threw out a cliche in reply, "Life is suffering," I said. How dismissive. I had a chance to demonstrate some compassion for the guy, but I let it go. How many times have I had the opportunity to show a small act of kindness toward a stranger and then didn't? I worry so much about being made a fool of that I find it hard to be openhearted sometimes.

There was a recent survey that named Boston the Least-Friendly City in America (not to mention the worst-dressed, but have they seen Newbury Street or been to the South End on a sunny Saturday?) Though I live just outside the city, I'm not one of its defenders. I DO think Boston is an unfriendly town. For a moment I was happy to learn that my perspective matched an independently-funded survey's. But instead of bitching about it, I could be part of the change I want to see in my neighborhood.

So I'm trying to think of it this way: we all face uncertain situations everyday. Maybe that person is lying, maybe the bill is accurate, maybe the woman who bumped into you meant to be rude. But when you chronically worry and doubt and spin out worst-case scenarios without knowing all the facts, you're going to experience more unhappy, unsatisfying moments than the average person--and the chances to connect with people with openness and compassion will float away like so many seeds on a dandelion.

The budget crisis

Credit: http://vladolarte.wordpress.com

"We live impelled by desire. We hunger, we experience a fundamental and pervasive dissatisfaction with what is, and expend enormous amounts of time and energy in striving to attain a better external circumstance and a more satisfying state of mind."--Sasha T. Loring, from her article "How to Tame the Wanting Mind" in the July 2011 issue of Shambhala Sun

"Greater happiness lies in coming together--a transcending of the self. No amount of consumerism can ever approximate the happiness that comes through generosity and giving."--Raj Patel, in an interview with Andrea Miller in the July 2011 issue of Shambhala Sun

$30. That is my allotment of "fun money" for the week. I am finally going to be living on a budget, one that will allow Mike and me to live within our means, not accrue debt, and boost our Emergency Fund. For too long I have been looking at my husband as if he were the cramp in my spendthrift lifestyle. But the truth is right there in the spreadsheet in which we track our monthly bills. Some unexpected expenses coupled with Carmelita's $5 a day Bully stick habit ($150 a month if you're counting) means that for the time being we have to conserve our funds for just necessities. $30 each is what we can afford until our home economic recovery.

My reaction to scarcity is not that different from most people's--I go into panic mode, looking for any loophole, any extra income flow. How much change have I accumulated in my Vermont Common Crackers container? ($37.) How many summer pieces have I sold at the consignment shop so far, and when can I pick up my check? (12 pieces, end of July, although they're usually slow in paying up.) What about those rebate checks for the $80 worth of wine I bought over the last three months? ($10.) Does anyone owe me money? (Sadly, no. The only woman I loan money to is Linda, and that's only $5 here and there. I may be desperate enough not to be above a trip to the bank to cash two $5 Estancia rebate checks, but I'm not about to act as loan shark to a senior citizen living on disability.)

I've taken to squirreling away whatever money I do get. While visiting my parents in New Jersey recently, I pocketed the change from the $20 my father gave me to go into Starbuck's for his daily Caffe Americano. Two days of this, and I had earned about $35 not counting tax, but I also had to endure the ribbing my father gave me about his cup of coffee suddenly going up in price by 733.333%.

Why the obsession over nickles and dimes? Mike and I both have jobs, a roof over our head, fresh food in the fridge, health insurance, clothes, etc. I am not in desperate NEED of anything. I know I'm being irrational, greedy even. But being on a strict budget is like someone with a drug addiction finding out that his only dealer has gone out of town and left no forwarding address. I know that I won't have to live on $30 a week forever--the amount will fluctuate along with our income and expenses. Mike has to adhere to this amount the same as me, and he isn't suddenly looking for change in between the sofa cushions. Then again, he's an ascetic compared to me.

I have to face the fact that I use money as a salve for the emotions I can't control, the emotions that are a part of my being alive. Having money makes me feel safe, but so does spending it. As long as I have money to spend, I can shut out any sadness or anxiety that comes my way unbidden, like closing the screen on a window: the mosquitoes are still there, but instead of biting they butt their little heads against the wire, unable to penetrate.

A woman I work with said that back in Iowa where she spent part of her childhood, mosquitoes are just a part of summer life, so ubiquitous that you hardly notice them. This got me thinking again, the more you try to escape something, the more of a threat it becomes.

I have definitely curtailed my shopping in the last couple of months, but that feeling of wanting more money remains. Just yesterday I broke my budget buying summer sandals at a discount shoe store. Desire is always buzzing in the background. I just hope to reach a point where it doesn't bother me that much because our solvency as a couple means more.

No one was here

Photo credit: Malagent on Flickr

"Often, we leave rooms a bit messier than when we entered. We think, 'I'll clean it up later.' Later never comes, until the mess is unbearable, and we become irritated enough to undertake a thorough cleaning. Or we get annoyed at someone else for not doing their part in the housework. How much easier if we take care of things right away. Then we don't have to feel growing annoyance at the gathering mess."--Jan Chozen Bays, from How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness

If you leave a glass on the table in my mother-in-law's kitchen, don't expect to find it when you come back. She's likely swept it up and into the dishwasher before you have a chance to reclaim it. I think she's practicing Leave No Trace.

When I worked for a brief time at the Appalachian Mountain Club, I noticed that they teach a whole program for outdoor guides about Leave No Trace. Although I never caught on to the appeal of sleeping outdoors among all manner of bugs and no running water or electricity, I did agree strongly about their Leave No Trace edict. When I see empty Michelob Lite bottles and crushed Doritos bags strewn about outdoors, I want to pick up the trash and throw it in the person's bed, preferably with him/her still in it.

But at home I find myself leaving things for that mythical tomorrow. I cook dinner, and afterward, feeling full and lethargic from a day at work and too many carbohydrates, I wander off, leaving the mess in the sink to deal with later. But waking up to a sink filled with dirty dishes is like leaving a filmy residue on the next day. Same goes for the bag of papers to file soon and the magazines to look through and recycle at some point. I have a hard time getting rid of my glossy magazines like Food and Wine and The New Yorker but at this point I have a whole periodicals section in both the living room and office, and no one looking anything up or borrowing them.

I'm slowly reading the new Jan Chozen Bays' book and in it she has an exercise called "Leave No Trace." You're supposed to choose a room and then make sure that you always leave that room in the same condition in which you found it. Like her other exercises you do this for one week. The reason I'm doing this particular exercise is that I find that my sense of self-discipline is lacking. With this flaw in mind, I told Mike what I was up to so he'd be there to nag (I mean, remind) me about it. I chose the kitchen since I like to cook and the dog is confined there during the week, and sometimes the younger cat Joey Thumbs jumps the pet gate and sniffs around for our leavings. At this point I've loved her into obesity (food = love, except when it causes Feline Diabetes) so she's not doing much jumping on the counters when we're not home. Still, starting the day with a clean sink is really a lovely feeling.

So far it's going well. Mike was inspired to take over the Leave No Trace duties this morning by washing our breakfast dishes. If you want someone to do something, it helps to lead by example.

Not that it's easy. I have to fight my urge to walk away from that pile of crumbs or that coffee cup with the lipstick print and coffee stains on it. The call of an intriguing book or Carmelita with the road kill toy in her mouth, begging me to play tug-of-war...they all have to wait until I erase my trace. The idea is not only to be a neater person, but also to appreciate the everyday objects that we use and then mindlessly leave behind. My Captain Haddock mug, the one-cup coffee press, the tiny IKEA spoon--all serve me well every morning and they deserve some props.

So many of us want to leave our trace in this world, but there's something to be said for traveling incognito, coming and going without anyone knowing you were there.

Losing my perspective

"Simply put, how we react is not the most important element of any situation. When we fixate on our reactions, they pull us away from a primary experience of what's actually happening, into a small room where how we think and feel about the experience is the most important thing, the thing we're now in a relationship with.
"The moment is vast, with a lot of space between the things in it. The moment is generous. I don't have to zero in on my reaction, to act impulsively on it or repudiate it or improve it, all of which tend to reinforce the sense of its importance, but just accept it as one (small) part of what's happening. Usually that simple shift changes everything. It allows us to step out of the small room of second-order experience and back into a fuller, more realistic experience of the moment."--Joan Sutherland, from her essay "Gaining Perspective" (Buddhadharma, Summer 2011).

For as long as I can remember, I've been guided by my emotions. I've lived much of my life so far like an overgrown teenage girl, deeply invested in her feelings about everything. If I felt uncomfortable at a gathering of people I didn't know well, I'd assume it was because people found me boring. If I felt strangely attracted to someone who from all outward appearances was not right for me, I would follow that impulse anyway, often to its inevitably bad ending. If I felt envious of someone who seemed to have everything I wanted, I only saw the positive aspects of that person's life, and not the moments of suffering that we are all privy to, no matter how charmed a life we otherwise lead.

But so what? Weren't we taught from a young age, particularly if we were a girl, that our feelings mattered? That they were our thermometer to adjust until we got the temperature just right? If your house is too hot, you start to sweat and your tongue turns to tissue paper, and you go and turn down the heat until you're comfortable. If I'm feeling lonely it must mean that I don't have enough friends and will probably die alone. As if feeling lonely at times is a problem that needs to be remedied like a stomach flu or a migraine. The result is we spend a lot of time trying to fix what's not broken, and then we worry about that fact that we can't fix "it."

Now I'm trying to unlearn this lesson in egotism. When I first moved to Boston and was feeling an almost constant anxiety and sadness--which I was convinced were the result of circumstances outside myself, NOT the negative thoughts that made a constant loop in my head--I went to see a cognitive-behavioral therapist at a respected clinic in the city. I was tired of living at the mercy of my feelings, of never being sure if my emotions were a result of a given situation or "all in my head." I wanted to pick apart the feelings and the thoughts to form something closer to the truth of my experiences. Some people are labeled "sensitive" or "serious" because they let their negative thoughts run the show most of the time. I was walking around feeling like an open wound--anything that touched me hurt, and instead of healing shortly after the injury, I was letting it get more and more infected with every exposure.

In CBT therapy I learned the difference between "feeling" and "being." Take-home exercises often included thought records on which I was supposed to list a negative thought, like "that woman is looking at me like she can't stand me" and consider all the other reasons why the person might have looked sour, like "She just had a fight with her mother" or "she is thinking of something unpleasant that happened at work." Sometimes it could be as simple as "she just naturally frowns when she's among strangers on the train." When I am waiting for a friend to arrive, and I see her walking towards me before she sees me, doesn't she sometimes have a serious, even slightly hostile look on her face? Then she sees me, too, and her face softens into a pleased expression. How often do we infuse meaning in a situation when in truth there IS no meaning, or the meaning is not what we thought at all?

After I quit CBT therapy (it's only supposed to last a maximum of six months, but I turned out to be a remedial student) I tried to be more aware of what was around me in the moment, and not pay as much attention to the content of my thoughts and feelings. Reading about mindfulness techniques has helped. For instance, in Jan Chozen Bays's new book, How to Train a Wild Elephant: And Other Lessons in Mindfulness, one of the exercises is to use your non-dominant hand for a week. Not for everything, but just when you think of it. It didn't take long before I was catching myself not using my non-dominant hand, and there would be a pause as I shifted from left to right hand. Of course what hand I was using at any given moment wasn't important--it was noticing when I had floated away in my thoughts, become unaware of where I was in the here and now.

Letting go of the moody teenage girl in my head has been hard. But she's been living at home too long--eating my food, racking up bills, leaving messes everywhere she goes. At some point, you have to grow up, open your eyes and ears and heart to all that is out there in the real world.

Fitting in

"When we spend a lot of time with our body doing one thing while our mind is on vacation somewhere else, it means that we aren't really present for much of our life. When we aren't present, it makes us feel vaguely but persistently dissatisfied. This sense of dissatisfaction, of a gap between us and everything and everyone else, is the essential problem of human life. It leads to those moments when we are pierced with a feeling of deep doubt and loneliness."--Jan Chozen Bays, from How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness.

I'm coming on five years of living in the Boston area, but somehow it doesn't feel like home yet. I keep waiting for that moment when ta da! I feel one with my surroundings. Like if I've been away and I come back, it's almost a relief because I'm in familiar territory--the city I love, the place that embraces me and welcomes me back in the fold.

Is it that the place you lived when you were young will forever feel like home? When I moved to Boston in the summer of 2006 I was moving to be with my future husband, but I also saw it as an opportunity to grow. I didn't want to be the person who stayed in one place their whole life.

I remember when I spent my first night in the new apartment, our apartment, the first we had owned. Mike had moved up to Boston ahead of me and for the past couple of months we had only seen each other on weekends. Now this was my home, too. I brushed my teeth in what felt like someone else's bathroom. There was a hand towel of questionable origin hanging from the rack near the sink. The only toiletries were Men's products: Speed Stick, cologne, a razor with black hairs in the blade. There was a light brown soapy film covering the sink.

This was not unlike the scene four years before when I moved into Mike's apartment in Astoria, Queens. I had to find a way to squeeze myself into the space that before had been your typical bachelor pad (except without the leather couch and neon Heineken sign, thankfully.) At one point, when I was removing some decoration of Mike's that he had in the kitchen and replacing it with something floral and pink, Mike said, "You're removing every trace of me!" A slight exaggeration--why would I want to remove every trace of the person I loved? But I could also see his point.

But in this new apartment, in this strange city, moving in wasn't as easy as putting my collection of Belle Epoque advertising signs on the walls and clean and fresh hand towels in the bathroom. For the first four months when I hadn't found a job yet and so had lots of free time I went to work with Comet and a sponge, removing the former occupants trail and introducing our own. I thought that if I could make my mark on the apartment, I could do the same in my new city.

Of course it wasn't enough to unpack my collection of coffee mugs and martini glasses, bottles of skin lotion and pretty guest soaps. Even when my books were side-by-side (but not mixed together--never!) with Mike's, when I went outside in my neighborhood it always felt like I was just visiting, a subletter using another person's couch, coffeepot, bed, until the owner returned. It wasn't Mike's fault--he encouraged me to explore the town and take writing classes and make new friends. This city was somewhat new to him, too. He was from Massachusetts, sure, and had gone into Boston for Red Sox games. But he's from a small town an hour west of here. In a way, even though he had family nearby, this was all new for him, too.

Maybe if I was of college-age when I moved to Boston it would have been different. The city is chock-a-block with young people. Walking around town is like walking on the biggest college campus you'll ever visit. I found myself swamped in nostalgia for overpriced textbooks, world literature lectures, Thursday night bar crawls.

But as a woman in her mid-thirties I felt marooned. Where could I fit into this picture?

Since that in-between summer in 2006 I've been striving to answer that question, making lists in my head of favorite local restaurants, stores, open markets, art house theaters, etc. I started learning and writing about mindfulness, staying present, appreciating where you are right where you are. It has been a slow process, and ongoing.