The enemy of joy

     Maybe it's because it's the Christmas season or the end of another year, but I've been thinking a lot about the concept of joy: what it is, how we know we're experiencing it, where it comes from, and how we can get more of it. I've experienced fleeting happiness, I've been giddy with delight, I've laughed-out-loud.  But Joy with a capital J? I associate that with religious experiences, the birth of a child, or an exquisite experience in nature.  Joy is deep and heady; it's serious business to be joyful.

In Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, author Brene Brown, PhD, describes joyfulness as "probably the most difficult emotion to really feel.  Why? Because when we lost the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding."

That statement floored me.  For most of my adult life I have had an uneasy relationship with joy.  An example: when my husband first told me he loved me--at a subway station in Times Square--I remember feeling a woosh in my whole body.  I couldn't stop smiling, even after we parted ways to go to our respective offices.  I positively vibrated with joyfulness and it must have showed because a young man approached and started talking to me as we were waiting for the Walk sign to light up.  It had to be because of my smile--my default expression is usually one of distraction or mild annoyance, and neither are exactly inducement for flirtation. 

But I can place a pushpin right on the moment when my joy turned to fear.  Not an overt fear of what it meant to find the person you planned to marry, but the more subconscious kind, the dangerous subterfuge that tricks you into thinking that the laws of the universe dictate that joyfulness must always be followed by sorrow.  I became obsessed with my health, imagining all the ways I might die young, right at a time when I had found someone who loved me.  Like in a Julia Roberts movie, I would be stricken by Cancer and die young.  Love would become my enemy.

Ms. Brown would call this "rehearsing tragedy."  It may sound like something only neurotic, Woody Allen-types would practice, but according to Brown it's actually a common technique used to arm ourselves against our own vulnerability.  

"Softening into the joyful moments of our lives requires vulnerability," Brown writes, "When we spend our lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can't hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy."

It is easy to see why we're uneasy with joy. Everyone likes to blame the media for society's woes, but I would agree with Ms. Brown that if not directly responsible for our insecurity, media certainly aggravates it.  Today I had the radio tuned to the news and heard the awful story about the school shooting in Newtown, CT.  Even after I had heard the account in as much detail as was known, I continued to listen throughout the day for updates.  I heard the same sound bytes over and over, the increasing number of dead, the predictably frantic response of the parents, the fact that the children all knew what a "lockdown" meant, which was heartbreaking in and of itself. The talking heads argued over whether or not it was the appropriate time to discuss gun control and I listened to a criminologist who described the type of deviant who would commit such a sick and desperate act.

Finally I had to turn the radio off.  Not because I didn't care but just to save my sanity.  Although I don't have any children of my own, I can still empathize with the pain of the parents who have just lost a child, and I could also imagine the fear that the families whose children were spared must be feeling as their veneer of safety living in a sleepy New England town is torn off with such ferocity. 

We are confronted by these tragedies all too often.  But I'm learning that dwelling on them for too long and worrying constantly about when the next shoe will drop won't make me or my loved ones any safer.  Such constant dread will only rob us of our human birth right to experience undiluted, uncompromising joy. 

The Name Game

a lightning whelk

"Bring me back a shell," said my mother over the phone when she heard I was spending a long weekend on Sanibel/Captiva Island in Florida.  My mother loves small objects that she can display on her windowsill or on her wooden bookshelf crammed with cookbooks dating back to the seventies: everything from The Frugal Gourmet to Jacques Pepin.  I don't think she consults her cookbooks much, but she likes seeing all their spines.

The shoreline where I found the whelk (pictured above) was located not far from the toll booth leading onto Sanibel Island.  We were there for a friend's lavish, multi-day wedding, but they weren't expecting us until 6 when we'd share drinks at a popular Captiva bar and grill.  I was overdressed from our flight out of a snowy Logan Airport, and the wind was whipping my silver scarf and strands of my hair into my eyes as I walked slowly along the shore, looking down for gifts from the sea.  

Mike and I later learned that some of the shells we found (including the whelk) weren't without their original occupants.  At the Bailey-Matthews Seashell Museum we watched a short film about the life of mollusks (yes, we really did).  To say the film was an amateur production would be paying it a compliment--it was more like the home movie your high school biology teacher might have filmed over winter break.  But the shells we saw on our walks were so varied and pretty that finding out their names and where they came from seemed the respectful thing to do, especially if I was going to be carrying pocketfuls of them home to Boston.  

We learned the difference between a gastropod and a bivalve, that the lower portion of the mollusk's body typically forms a muscular foot, which is used for creeping or burrowing in the sand.  I recalled that my lightning whelk still had it's black foot peeking out (when I tried to pull what I thought was the dead creature out, it stuck like it was glued in). I realized that I might have plucked a live organism from its natural habitat.  Not only was that inconsiderate to the poor gastropod, but it was also illegal in Sanibel.  Oops.

My authorized finds included an atlantic kitten paw; a broad-ribbed carditid that resembled the sort of fan ladies in polite society used to carry; a purplish calico scallop with what looked like small parasitic mouths covering it; and, my favorites, a few small and white spiny jewelboxes.  I'm not the type who can rattle off the scientific names of flowers or trees or birds (I'm reading a novel right now that features a scrappy young heroine who seems to have committed every volume of Handbook of The Birds of the World by heart--she rattles off their names to anyone within earshot).  I'd like to be more informed, know the proper names of things, what each thing does, and where it comes from. 

I'd like to have names for all the objects of the world, as if by having their name I can come to know them.

spiny jewelbox

Book Review: The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

Thank you to Noetic Books/New Harbinger Publications for the review copy.

On the back cover of this New York Times Bestseller is the question "who are you really?"  Before I read this book, I would have answered, "I am my thoughts, opinions, actions, experiences, and memories" or "I am a 39-year old wife, daughter, aunt, and friend." 

After reading The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself I realize that the answer is more philosophical and complex than all that.  Basically who I am and who you are exists in the seat of our consciousness.  We are the person who observes our thoughts, emotions, actions.

Why is this distinction of self important?  Because, according to author Michael A. Singer, "you not only have the ability to find yourself, you have the ability to free yourself."

I'm attracted to books on mindfulness because in the last few years I've realized that, like so many people, I'm in danger of losing myself in my thoughts.  It occurred to me that I was missing most of my life because my inner thoughts were loud and ceaseless, like some annoying passenger on a five-hour train ride who decides to pass the time by calling everyone she has ever known on her cell phone (which is why I try to get a seat in the Quiet Car as often as possible). I want to put these inner thoughts on mute so I don't miss the experience of being alive.

The Untethered Soul struck a chord in me because it encourages detachment from this never-ending feedback inside our brains.  "The best way to free yourself from this incessant chatter is to step back and view it objectively," Singer writes. "There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind--you are the one who hears it."

Singer goes on to say,

If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.  In fact, your thoughts have far less impact on this world than you would like to think.  Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself.  It's the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.

The idea that we are not our thoughts is sometimes a difficult concept to get one's head around.  But if you can understand this you are poised to enjoy your life much more than you ever could when you were viewing life through the filter of your inner thoughts and perceptions.

I did take issue with some of the sweeping proclamations in the book, such as "Once you reach this state [of letting go] you will never have to worry about anything ever again."  That may be true, but if it is human to suffer, then are we really meant to transcend all our worries all the time?  Wouldn't that make us more like automatons than real people? 

Singer goes on to write, "No matter what happens, you can choose to enjoy the experience.  If they starve you and put you in solitary confinement, just have fun being like Gandhi."  This seems oversimplified and, frankly, kind of ridiculous.  There are certain situations where having fun with adversity would be a baffling response (Can you imagine the Staten Island woman who lost her two sons in Hurricane Sandy "having fun with it?")

But then even the concept of Death is given a positive spin in the book.  If it were not for Death, Singer reasons, we would not appreciate our life and the lives of others.  If you thought that this week was your last week on Earth (or the last time you would talk to your mother or best friend), wouldn't you want to enjoy it (and reach out to that loved one?)  If Death did not exist we would squander our time because there would be no end of it.  So in this regard Death -- or our knowledge of it coming at any time -- becomes a gift.

Overall I responded to Singer's words and how he is able to boil life down to one choice: do you want to be happy or do you not want to be happy?  I don't think he's asking readers to wholly discard our difficult thoughts, emotions, and experiences.  Instead he encourages us to transcend them, to see that who we are is in fact larger than all that.  Depending on your religious beliefs, we are all existing on this constantly-changing, spinning Earth for a short time.  Do you want to give up your one chance to fully appreciate the ride?

The Untethered Soul was not a quick read for me because there were many ideas I wanted to digest slowly.  Like with life I wanted to pay close attention to this book.

Recommended for anyone interested in books on happiness and/or personal/spiritual growth.

Angry at the Herbs

My sad little herbs

Back in the spring I bought a little starter kit for an Italian herb window box at Barnes & Noble.  I never planted anything from seed before and all of my colleagues' talk of gardening had inspired me to take a baby step toward growing my own.  I live in an apartment so I had to keep it small anyway.  Italian herbs seemed a good way to get my hands dirty.

I didn't actually get around to starting my kit until August, which may have been my first mistake. The process was simple enough--you placed the clay pellets on the bottom of the container, soaked the eco-coir disks in water, then spread the resulting soil over the pellets. In this small way you had the opportunity to get your fingers knuckle-deep into soil, and the experience was both messy and primal. I finally had soil beneath my fingernails.

The next step was to sprinkle the tiny seeds each in their own section (sections were marked off with pencil on the side of the container) and cover the whole container with plastic wrap to speed up the germination.

My second mistake was leaving the plastic wrap on a little too long.  Sometimes I have a tendency of wandering away and forgetting things, and in this case, I didn't expect the germination to happen so fast.

It was exciting to see those first green shoots--each one the size of an ant.  I was supposed to put the container somewhere sunny.  Unfortunately our apartment is as dark as a cave.  Our livingroom has two windows and though we don't have any window treatment on them, they still don't shine much natural light into our cellar-like dwelling.  The sunniest room is our office so I placed the container on the windowsill that seemed to attract the most sun.

For a while there was noticeable progress.  The parsley growth were still as tiny as fleas but the oregano and basil were shooting up above the lip of the metal container.  Of course, I was anticipating the lush herbs I would be using in my tomato sauce by the end of the week, but my husband said to be patient--it would take more time.  Patience is not my virtue; in fact I have only a fleeting acquaintance with it.  But I mentally calculated that my herbs would be ready by September.

In October my husband suggested I harvest some of my stubborn little shoots to make room for them to grow exponentially.  They were too small to use but I needed to allow more room in what was becoming an overcrowded tenement.  Although I was pissed off that my shoots were stunted, they were still my little seedlings.  How could I choose which ones to kill and which ones to spare?  I had my own version of Sophie's Choice here, and I didn't want to cut any of them off from a potentially viable life as an additive in my marinara sauce.  But I hadn't come this far just to chicken out--if you wanted to live off the land, I reminded myself, you had to be willing to make the tough sacrifices. 

So I plucked about six shoots from the box.  I cradled them in a soft tissue and laid them to rest in my wastebasket.  One of my cats fished the wadded tissue out of the trash and spread dead seedlings all over my floor, leaving a trail of soil behind her.  Even at the last moment, these aborted herbs were denied a dignified burial.

After the brutal harvesting my herbs just stopped growing.  I watered them and turned the box around so both sides could receive benefit of direct sunlight.  Each time I went to check on them, my herbs remained dwarfed and barely fragrant.

That's when I got angry at my herbs.  I had given them my tender loving care and attention, but they refused to thrive.  They seemed another example of the failed potential I saw in my own life.  I still hadn't written that novel.  I hadn't traveled to the Amalfi Coast.  I hadn't been profiled in O magazine wearing a gown of jewel hues.  I was almost 40 and I couldn't even grow three simple herb plants.

I remember the last time I was unemployed, which was only for a month.  Still, my husband and I were both unemployed at the same time, and this seemed a bad omen.  But I didn't know from bad omens until some goldfish we had rescued from a wedding where they had been centerpieces all died in the same week.  I woke up one morning and found two of them had jumped from their bowls onto the place mats on our kitchen table.

We are doomed, I thought.

I did get a job pretty quickly after that and Mike did, too.  So maybe my superstitions were unfounded.  Still, I would like to see at least a couple of bunches of basil flourish. 

I keep hope alive.

A slight detour (with recipe)

In the past month I've found myself in a new situation: I'm a stay-at-home housewife.  I say this with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but it could be said that until I find new employment I'm essentially living the life of an old-fashioned housewife.

It makes me appreciate the women's movement that flourished while I was still in diapers. I can ironically call myself a housewife without really meaning it.  Yes, in the absence of new accomplishments at a job I am priding myself on my skills with a toothbrush putting a new shine on the bottom of the bathtub.  I'm cooking Mike dinner almost every night AND a made-from-scratch dessert.  I greet him at the door in an apron, and I usually have on lipstick because I'm one of those women who finds it difficult to get motivated until I have my lipstick on.

But for me it's all about making lemonade out of lemons.  Once I get a new job things will go back to the way they were--simple but adequate dinners at home during the week with some take-out thrown in, essential but cursory house cleaning, etc.  And I can credit the generation before mine for making it possible to choose what role I play in my marriage.  I'm not expected to keep house and serve my husband a cocktail at the end of the day.  But if I want to, it can be fun.  And right now I have to admit--it's kind of fun.

I start my day the way I always have--with a cup of coffee and my bowl of Kashi cereal.  I make Mike lunch, which is usually a peanut butter sandwich because he's a creature of habit.  Lately it's been Peanut Butter & Co's Dark Chocolate Dreams. The radio is tuned in to NPR, and I'm able to catch all the morning talk shows while I'm doing the dishes.  We don't have a dishwasher (well, one that works, anyway) so I wash all the dishes by hand--something that Mike used to do while we were both working.  This way he can (ideally) get to work on time, since it's time-consuming to hand wash all the dishes from my cooking and baking adventures the day before.

About an hour or so is spent on the computer before I take a leisurely shower and get the the dog out for a walk.  When I return, I eat lunch (usually leftovers from the previous night's dinner) and take an hour nap.  I've read about studies that say a short nap around 2PM is good for your health, and at home I'm actually able to do that--making me a more awake and happier person when the nap is over.  Then I clean something and get dinner started.  In between I check my email or Pinterest.

Speaking of Pinterest--that siren--I've been doing simple but absorbing projects I pinned on my DIY board.  Nothing Etsy-worthy, but fun stuff that uses up some clutter in a way that won't offend my "reduce-reuse-recycle" partner.  I made the letter "C" out of corks ("C" for our last names, not for "cork" as Mike suggested), a candle holder made from a cleaned-out cat food can and clothespins, and an autumn centerpiece with real acorns as a filler.

This is where I start to sound a little out-of-my-head.  Am I at summer camp?  Have I gone over to the dark side and become something out of The Stepford Wives?  What happened to my career aspirations?  My desire to make a mark in the world? 

Rest assured, those longings and ambitions are still very much a part of me.  But this is a tough economic time in a volatile job market.  I've been working in the same industry almost non-stop for the last sixteen years.  I could pull my hair out at the roots with worry about my unemployment, or I could take this opportunity to clear my head and do something different for a little while.  You should try a piece of my/Martha's Coconut-Buttermilk Pound Cake. It's to-die-for good.

Would I lie to you?

 Graphic taken from Dailymail.co.uk

"So-called vanity sizing is rampant in the clothing industry. Marketers are relabeling large-size clothes as small to give customers the satisfaction of feeling that they still fit into small-size clothing.

"'It's not a question of being lied to," University of Michigan marketing professor Aradhna Krishna said. "It's a question of do you want to be lied to.'"--NPR, "How Food And Clothing Size Labels Affect What We Eat And What We Wear"

In some areas of my life I want the truth--I'd rather read realistic accounts about the dust bowl in the Midwest or the quality of education for poor kids in the Bronx then I would Harry Potter or any of his fantasy ilk.  I listen to National Public Radio because I trust them as a truthful (if left-leaning) source of news.  If I have spinach between my teeth or the hem of my skirt is half-tucked in my underwear, please tell me.

But there are other instances where self-delusion is my go-to coping strategy.  In the last few years, denial about my body size is a lead example. 

It's not something I endlessly drone on about because I think people (and women in particular) are way too obsessed with body weight, awarding themselves when they're under some arbitrary number on the scale, self-denigrating themselves when they're over that number.  If we took our collective anger at our bodies and turned it on the real injustices in this world, we would be more powerful than the Supreme Court on a judgment day.

It doesn't go unnoticed, though, that I've put on more than a few pounds, especially when I'm tugging on a pair of jeans that fit me at one point in this decade and whose zipper has now formed an aversion for its other half.  I have had to put aside several pairs of jeans for "later," that nebulous time when I magically shed the fifty pounds I've gained in the last four years.  My favorite pair of jeans happens to be a pair of "stretch" DKNY jeans that still fit me even though they are a size 10, despite that fact that I've gone up a good 2-4 sizes in pants since I bought them.

Before this precipitous weight gain I was a "skinny."  Black men used to come up to me and tell me to put some "meat on that ass." New York sample sales were a breeze because I could fit into those display size 4s with little effort or prayer.  I'm not saying this to brag--only because I know what it's like to be thin, and it certainly does have its advantages (except when you're given just a slice of seat in a two-seater on the train by a man who thinks that's all you require to be comfortable.) But being thin by no means solves all of your problems, even your body image ones, because if you're prone to insecurity there are always other aspects of your appearance to fret over.

So do I want to be lied to about my current size?  Yes.  I don't mean I want to fit into a size four that's really a size fourteen.  But a little white lie--like a size ten that's really a twelve--that's perfectly acceptable.  I'm not ignorant about my true weight and even if I was, I have my annual doctor's appointment weigh-ins to keep me in the know.  I just don't want clothes shopping to be an ordeal when it usually is one of my greatest, frivolous pleasures.  If sizes were realistic I wouldn't buy a smaller size--anyone who has watched even one episode of What Not to Wear (or what my husband affectionately dubs "What Not to Watch") knows that wearing ill-fitting clothing makes you look heavier.  But I wouldn't be happy about it, and if I was in self-protective mode (denial), I'd probably blame the label for making impossibly skinny clothes, thus proving the marketers' point.

So lie to me...a little.  Not a "The Emperor has no clothes on" lie, but perhaps the "you look fine" lie  your husband tells you when you're late and he's shooing you out the door.

Manual for the Middle Aged

Cartoon by Ron Plath


This weekend I was in White Birch Books in North Conway, looking for a book even though I don't need a book (I'm always buying new books; I'll be on my deathbed ordering from Chronicle). I like to support bookstores because its one of the few areas in my life where my actions are in line with my beliefs (for areas in my life where I suffer from cognitive dissonance, see: loves animals but always orders red meat in restaurants). I refuse to shop on Amazon unless it's the villain of last resort. If I could conjure up new brick-and-mortar bookstores, I'd put one in every inner-city and in every medium-sized town. Who would support them? If you build it, the readers will come...

Anyway, I was excited about my first find--an advanced reading copy of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth for $3. I'm a terrible hypocrite because part of my job is sending out ARCs to potential book reviewers and I'm careful to only send them to people who I think will actually REVIEW them. But then I buy someone else's ARCs for half-price at The Strand or at White Birch Books, thereby supporting reviewers who sell their ARCs and pocket the money (also see: eBay). At least White Birch uses the profits from ARC sales to fund author events.

But $3 isn't going to keep the store open through another summer, so I looked around for something else. I spotted a book of essays called 40 Things To Do When You Turn 40. I almost didn't pick it up. There was something embarrassing about it, like finding your parents' old copy of The Joy of Sex and seeing all those pencil drawings of naked couples with hippie hair and mustaches. This was the kind of book I thought I'd never buy because I was never going to be that old.

There is something compelling about lists, though (see: this blog post). And at least it wasn't titled 40 Things You Should Have Done By the Time You Turn 40, You Loser. 40 Things to Do When You Turn 40 sounds more like a wise instruction manual, a test prep for the future self, a view into those uncertain years I never fantasized about when I was a kid because my imagination only went as far as age 32. Would any of these 40 things make me happier than I am now (see: signs of Dysthymia include low energy, oversleeping, increased appetite--especially for cold cereal and 2nd Street Creamery Vanilla #148 , which is heaven in a pint)?

Reader, I bought the book. The woman who sold it to me looked like she might be in her 40's so I didn't have to slip the book under a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.

I'll share some of the ideas in the book on here since I know a handful of people who are turning 40 along with me next year (see: most of my friends from high school). I may even do some of the things and talk about it. Unless it involves affirmations or letting your hair go grey.