The Road To Hell

So my 30-days-of-blogging extravaganza came to a screeching halt on the 15th when life intervened in the form of malware.

I am going to go ahead and give myself a big fat pass for missing the last five days because, well, just because. We all of us sometimes need to just forgive ourselves for not following through. It doesn't matter a bit sometimes why we don't follow through. In my case, a substantial malware infection, a yoga teacher training weekend, and a renovation intervened, not in that order, but even if I just felt like taking the weekend off because it was a gorgeous two days strung together, that's good, too.

This yoga weekend was not particularly fabulous for me, on a couple different levels, but the one thing I had reaffirmed was that it's really important to figure out what it is you want and go for that. The guest teacher talked about the word "should" as the heavy cat-o-nine that we flagellate ourselves with. He called it "shouldistic behavior" and said we were "shoulding" all over ourselves, two clever plays on words to indicate the painful and grotesque ways in which we sometimes attempt to motivate ourselves.

This applies even when your intentions are good. If you say things like "I should exercise more," then maybe your inner anti-cheerleader is talking shit in your head about how flabby you are. Maybe it's comparing you to the toned arms or buff abs of other people. In this way you perpetuate the cycle of feeling badly about yourself instead of focusing at the core of why you aren't doing what you feel you "should" be doing.

And here is (one of the places)  where the teacher and I parted ways. He said that motivation is about changing the word "should" to the word "want," and then everything will be just peachy. Turns out that is kind of bullshit. I have studied what motivates people for the past 18 years and have found unequivocally that just changing the words, although that may be a start, is not nearly enough to change the behavior. Even just changing the behavior (like forcing yourself to exercise more) doesn't really silence the anti-cheerleader or change the internal dialogue.

And here's the unfortunate punchline: motivation is a complex issue that I have no answer to (nor do experts, really. Just suggestions.). Neither did the speaker in the workshop (although he seemed to feel that he had the only answer, and any time there were objections it meant the objector just wasn't ready for his message or the objector was lying to themselves or  some other something. I felt like this teacher's ethos was very deeply rooted in est, the cult founded by Werner Erhard. I can speak directly to my interpretation of his premise because my father forced the entire family to go to an est weekend when I was younger, and the humiliation of that remains a vivid memory).

In other (somewhat depressing) words, motivation is unique to each person and can change over time. Key components to following through seem to be a mix of factors that are both internal and external. People who spend their lives being externally motivated (by gold stars as a child in school, by money in a job, or by compliments on appearance) may find themselves at a loss should (when) those external things disappear. Internal (intrinsic) motivation is far more valuable in the long run but far harder to cultivate, especially in a culture that is so comparative (and competitive)  in nature.  And, as evidenced by this weekend's computus interruptus, internal motivation can still be affected by the vagaries of life.

And here's where the rubber meets the road to hell:

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most  easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind." ~Bruce Lee~

It's good to have goals and develop persistence and internal motivation. It is satisfying to meet the bar we set for ourselves.

What's not good is beating ourselves up when shit happens. What's not good is comparing what we are doing to what other people are doing. What's not good is "shoulding" all over ourselves to the point where we are a puddly mess, incapable of taking the shape of the next move (that's  a Wonder Twins reference).

So today I am back on the road to hell. Expect blogs this week covering writing like a motherfucker and why Deepak Chopra made me cry. But if it doesn't happen, that's fine, too.

Have a beautiful week. Or don't. Either way, don't beat yourself up.

Namaste.

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Making Lists

(sky's the limit...get it?)

I am a list maker. There is something very satisfying about organizing your day/life in one column, checking off tasks and goals as they are completed. There are all kinds of rules about making to-do lists, like the one about not putting more than four items on a list per day and the requirement that you prioritize items, just in case you go back to bed instead of working on the list. Which never happens here. Or hardly ever.

This morning when I was coming home from yoga, I felt an overwhelming urge to create a list. Rare these, days, to get an overwhelming urge to do anything, so I have indulged myself. Ten things I want to do in 2015. Not prioritized because that's dumb and not helpful to me and how can I say which one of these will feel most important two months from now?

Also, this might be cheating a little because some of this stuff I already know is happening. But it's my list, so I can do what I want. There are big things and little things on this list, but if I can control it, they will all happen.

Here it is. Good luck to me.

1. Publish a book. I have two that I am working on, and it's time to stop putting them off. If they are published electronically, then the deadline is December 31, 2015. If I actually manage to get a publisher, then a contract by the end of the year is the goal. So I guess I better start writing.

2. Dip a toe in the Pacific. Down in Cali. Comin' at you, Left Coast.

3. See my friend Michael in Chicago and eat his food (he's a sous at The Brass Monkey). He has lived there for many years, and I have threatened to visit a couple different times but have dropped the ball. That's dumb. Combining this with a cross-country jaunt to fulfill goal #2 and stopping in Denver to see my friend Mandy, too.

4. Go riding. I miss horses, so much that it is hard to even look at pictures of my horse, Sadie. I have had a few opportunities to go in the past year, but I have a feeling it is going to be difficult for me and have been avoiding it. Just a little trail ride, nothing major. Get back on the horse, literally and metaphorically.

5. See my grandmother once a month. We were doing that when we first moved here, now three months have gone by and we haven't seen her. She is 97 years old, and it is such a small thing, to go see her and to help The Teenager develop a relationship with her. I have one memory of my great-grandmother, and it is filled with dusty cobwebs and dark wood. I want Sicily to know her great grandmother. Plus, it makes my grandmother happy to see us.

6. Plant a garden. Our new house has limited sunshine and a tiny backyard. This doesn't mean I can't grow my own food. Much to my neighbors' chagrin, I am also researching ways to cram a couple chickens in the backyard, too.

7. Work on my French. I speak passable French but understand more than I speak. I would like to change that, and it's not hard. Since this is a really vague goal, I will make it more specific: ten minutes of French daily. I have an app on my phone, and in the time it takes to whiz through all of my social media, I can surely squeeze that in.

8. Tattoo #2. This is going to happen as soon as I donate blood. So sooner rather than later. And while I'm at it, here's my call for you all to go donate blood. You can save up to 11 lives with a single donation. Find a donor center here.

9. Play the ponies at Pimlico. The best part of having non-traditional employment is that I can go day drinking on a Tuesday and take my chances at the track. I have hazy memories of a Preakness infield experience, but I'd like to go as a grown up.

10. Crab feast at the new house, and institute Sunday Dinner. Sunday Dinner is unrelated to the crab feast (more on that as it unfolds), but both are important, and both are happening this year.

Bonus: Dating a boy or two would be nice. Unless it's not. Then this item can be scratched off the list.

Double bonus: There is the possibility of Opening Day tickets for Friday. Cross your fingers!!!!

Are you a list maker? What's on your list for 2015?

 

Why Don't We Do What We Should?

As a former educator I have been thinking about persistence and motivation for twenty years. As a human, I suppose in some form or another I have been beating myself up with this topic my entire life.

Why don't we do what we should?

Take this blog, for instance. I haven't written a single entry in three weeks. It's not that I have nothing to say; what's in my head could fill an editorial calendar with daily blogs for months. So why don't I write?

And yoga. As I twist myself into pretzel-y shapes at yoga this morning, a class that I love but still had to drag myself to, I was even considering why it is so hard to push ourselves to do even the most basic of things we know we should do. Some of them, like folding laundry and putting away the clean dishes, are just mundane tasks that are no fun, but even those simple things take no time and yield small pleasures like clean clothes and eating utensils. In our house, we will sometimes nearly empty out the clean dishwasher by using the cups, plates, and spoons (always spoons), piling dishes in the sink until we can't take it anymore (which is a long time if you are a teenager, less long if you are her parent).

I don't think I will ever fully embrace folding laundry or emptying the dishwasher, but there are important things I am not doing. Knowing that yoga makes me feel better and writing is deeply satisfying, why is it still so hard to do it?

For me at least, this goes way beyond laziness or lack of motivation.

Reflecting on myself, The Teenager, other people around me, and the literally thousands of students I have taught, I have come to believe that it is a complicated mixture of fear and insecurity that keeps us from doing the things we love.

Fear

There has long been a theory that human behavior is motivated by two things: fear and love. Fear is a powerful block to pretty much anything in the world, just as love is a powerful motivator. When I don't write, or I don't throw myself fully into yoga teacher training, it's not love that is holding me back. It's fear. What if it doesn't work? Or *gasp* what if it actually does? What if all of my wildest dreams come true? Then what?

I can't turn this blog into a motivational speech. All I can do is speak for myself. If I actually do all of the things I say I want to do, the world will open up in ways both frightening and powerful. There are days when I am just not ready for that; I am not ready for the responsibility of living up to the life I say I want. Then there are days when I look around at the routine I have built for myself and shudder to think of me doing the same thing, 20 years from now. Both imaginings are rooted in fear, one of not living up to my own expectations and the other of  living up to my own expectations.

See how I did that?

Insecurity

Fear's bastard cousin is insecurity. This is the anti-cheerleader in my head, that bitch who follows me around chanting about how I can't possibly think that my writing is good enough and who do I think I am? It's the one that looks in the mirror and judges things others miss. It makes commentary on my walk, my voice, my face, my writing, my progress in yoga. It's judgmental and loud.

Insecurity is rooted in instability, in the idea that at any moment the world could change and things could be different. It's why we have bedtime routines for kids and take our dogs for walks at the same time every day; the routine is reassuring. But what happens when the routine is suddenly, violently changed and everything you knew to be true and planned for is swept away?

Get over it, right? It has been two years since Dane died. Move on, yeah?

Unless you have experienced a similar death, it is hard to understand what it feels like to have everything you planned for change in an instant. As to the stages of grief, I am still struggling with acceptance in that it is still very difficult to reconcile the life we had planned and the life we have now, especially as we are still not 100% settled and are still moving around a bit. Even becoming a mother was easier to adapt to; yes, I became a different person in many ways with different priorities, but at least there was planning and time to adapt. Even two years After The Crash the idea that everything could be gone is still ever-present.

Insecurity is also deeply tied to fear. As I get ready to send The Teenager to Paris for a week, I have had to work hard to not give in to every awful fear I have about what could happen.

So insecurity makes me clinging and grasping in some ways, holding on to what stability I have. It's like all of the balancing poses in yoga. First you have to hug into the center of yourself, and then when you feel stable you can expand outward. Like a turtle, I am not sure how stable I feel yet, and because of this it is very difficult to expand outward.

It has taken me three weeks to write this, which speaks to how hard it is to admit and to also put into words. Hello, everyone: I am a raging ball of fear and insecurity. Not necessarily a confident introduction.

But the first step is to admit you have a problem. Hi, my name is Suzannah, and I am deathly afraid of both success and failure and deeply worried about losing the tenuous grasp on reality that I have worked really hard to cultivate in the last two years, one month and 11 days.

Hi, Suzannah. Keep coming back.

I guess the plan is to keep coming back. The key is to feel the fear and insecurity and do it anyway (like sending The Teenager to Paris or writing this down). I spent the first year after Dane's death saying "yes," and that has changed; these days I have to force myself to go out of the house, to explore, to engage, to say "yes" when I just want to go home and take a nap. I am getting bogged down in the minutiae of daily living and find myself thinking if this is really it for the next ____ years until I am dead.

That, as they say in the parlance of the 12 Steps, is stinkin' thinkin'.

Still working on steps two through 12 on this path. Thoughts and suggestions? What works for you to move past whatever holds you back?

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Swim Ten Strokes

The dog did not get the "fall back" memo, so he poked his cold nose under my hand at 7 a.m. on a day when The Child has no school. Normally this dog will sleep until I am good and ready to rise, but not this day.

Two hours later, there is a cup of coffee in my belly and two pots simmering on the stove, one of homemade meat stock (steak bones and chicken) and another of curry. The Child is sleepy-surfing the interwebs with her own coffee as I sit down to write.

Mondays are list-making days, the time of the week when I sit the week down firmly and tell it how things are going to go. This does not often work, but I persist at any rate, attempting to ignore the siren call of anything other than what I am supposed to be doing. There are corners of the city that have gone as yet unexplored, and although it is blustery and not so nice outside I feel like putting on my boots and walking for miles.

I often write about motivation and persistence. For me, the key has always been to get into a routine: you get up and do certain things because that's just what you do. It's the routine. In Georgia, I did yoga every day because that was the routine: get up, write for an hour and a half, go to yoga, come home, eat lunch and write some more, all done.

Here, we are so uprooted and cattywampus that there is no routine beyond delivering The Child to school every morning at 7:45. At that hour my brain is fusty with poor sleep and I am not ready to write, and there is no yoga to go to, and sometimes I am meeting a contractor or going to a museum training or Something Else Very Important, and then it is 2:45 and time to pick up The Child.

I have not ever been very good at self-discipline.

My father told me the story once of an English Channel swimmer, this old dude whom they interviewed as soon as he hauled his scrawny, exhausted, hypothermic self from the water. They asked him, of course, how he did it. What he said is the thing that got my father through chemo therapy (among other things).

"I told myself," (says he, the swimmer), "that I would just swim ten more strokes. Then after that if I had to, I would quit. So every ten strokes, I would keep saying, well, I guess I can swim ten more. And I strung together ten strokes at a time and got all the way across."

So it's entirely possible that my dad made this up, but its lesson is important. Today, I will swim ten strokes.

What are your ten strokes today?

Effort

Startling-not-startling revelation of the day: everything requires effort.

Any time someone talks about something being "effortless" or seeing someone appear to do a task "effortlessly," what they are actually seeing is the culmination of tons of effort put in over long periods of time, usually willingly but sometimes grudgingly like in the case of teenagers who don't really want to get out of bed but totally want to do something cool that they planned for that day.

Effort also strolls around in the mask of "perseverance" and "motivation."

Newsflash: there is not a direct correlation between effort and excellence. Some people put all of their effort into the wrong thing and do it poorly. Like the one time a student made a map of Europe and put eleventy million toothpicks with flags on them that represented something that was not even close to what the assignment was and then sicced her mom on me when she got a 'C.' "But she worked really hard," said her mom, which was the equivalent of saying that she worked really hard to dig a hole when what I asked for was a paved road.

But I digress.

Effort is a tricky thing in that no matter how hard you want something, sometimes you just don't want to put in the effort. Building the tiny house was like that sometimes. Going to yoga is like that sometimes. Being a writer is like that most times.

Still trying to figure out how to reliably suck it up and put in the effort, even on the days where I would rather sit in a coffee shop and stare out at the water, except I don't even want to put the effort in to get to the coffee shop.

Thoughts? How do you make yourself do stuff you want to do when you don't want to do it?

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Writing A Book, Or How To Make Yourself Do Stuff

I love writing, and I think I am pretty good at it. I am efficient and know how to use words, and I can write in a variety of styles. This makes me an awesome mercenary writer because I never miss a deadline and I love a happy client.

So what is the deal with my own stuff?

It is incredibly hard to make myself sit down to write this next book, and it's not because I don't have any ideas or material. The whole book is outlined, and I am into the first part of it already. It is a compelling idea whose time has come, and I think it will be popular.

That is, if I can get past the difficulty I am having sitting down to write. It's not like I am cramming writing time in my hectic schedule (although I did just become a docent for the American Visionary Art Museum and am starting a work-study program at Baltimore Yoga Village Friday). It is pure-dee laziness.

It's loving the idea of having written the second book without having to write it. Jeez.

Apparently, along with fart jokes and rope licorice that you tie into knots over and over again before you pop it into your mouth, I will never outgrow my wicked streak of I-don't-wanna.

Crap.

*I am doing it anyway because I am a grown-up, but it's slow going, and being a grown-up is overrated IMVHO because even though you can drive and eat Pop-tarts for dinner if you want you have to pay bills, worry about eating vegetables and getting enough calcium, and think all the time about people other than yourself. But I digress.

**Oh, and also for the record, this blog was written as an active avoidance tactic in which I write a blog to convince myself that yes, I am writing my own stuff, even if it's not the book. So here's a paragraph of the book. All rights reserved. So don't steal.

"Rome wasn't built in a day, and it certainly wasn't built without tools. You could use any old tool at hand for most jobs, and some folks create beautiful things with nary a power tool in sight. Both approaches work, but in reality, the proper tool for the job makes everything go much more easily. The work is more efficient and generally easier to accomplish, and when you are learning all the other skills related to building a house or taking on another large project, if you can make it easier on yourself, more’s the better."

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Pulling The Trigger, Or My Year Of Grieving Dangerously

A gun metaphor seems appropriate for Charm City, even though the murder total is down from last year.

This morning while I was avoiding doing any sort of work, I came across the opportunity to train to be a volunteer docent at the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM). AVAM is my newest most favorite museum. It is filled with untrained artists, lots of local color, and the quirkiest, best, most non-museum-y gift shop ever. You would think I would jump at that opportunity, as I am sure it comes with free stuff, like memberships, etc, and I am all about trading.

But I am having a hard time pulling the trigger.

There are other things I haven't done that I could have, a few opportunities here and there that I have passed on by doing nothing.

It's hard not to beat myself up about this a little, but I recognize that is ridiculous.

The second year of grief, which is over halfway finished, has been marked by constant motion. CONSTANT. From finishing the tiny house to showing it at the White House to moving it to Delaware to packing the townhouse to moving the bulk of our stuff to storage in Baltimore to cleaning and fixing the townhouse to rent to finally moving to Baltimore (take that, grammar check). CONSTANT MOTION.

Now we find ourselves in a purgatory of moving, staying with friends and looking for a house, settling into routines that will be upended and re-established when we finally move into our own space. When I am alone, I have been melting into a well-loved reclining rocking chair by the window, working periodically but mostly watching the world outside the windows and listening to the dogs snore (and bark wildly whenever someone walks by).

It's not relaxing, necessarily, so much as it is just stopping. Not moving. No motion.

So when it's time to move again, the laws of physics kick in. Inertia. It's hard to get the object in motion.

Even for things I know I will enjoy, it is hard to get up out of the chair to make them happen.

I think this is part of my Year of Grieving Dangerously. Now that we have made a huge move and instituted changes, the real work begins. I am writing, which is immensely satisfying, and I am in a state and a city I love, which I have waited for years to come home to, but the interior work that requires simultaneous action and reflection is still in progress. I think the key is to do it whether or not I want to. To make plans and go into the world.

Very complex. Very difficult. Feels impossible.

It is every part of the first two and nothing of the last, but still. It's that part of nothing to look forward to and every possibility in front of me at the same time. It's the part of grief that isn't wailing and weeping and woe-is-me-ing but is just as potent and powerful and capable of sitting you on your ass. In a well-loved reclining rocking chair by a window. Waiting for snow.

Trying to pull the trigger.

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