March Forth With Less Ego

During the height of the COVID pandemic, while flipping through old copies of America’s Best Essays in search of light or meaning, I read the forward to the 2007 edition by David Foster Wallace.  The pandemic was a dark season in my life for many reasons, and in that space, David Foster Wallace’s words resonated: 

“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting ... to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of information and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help.  [To be a free, informed adult] requires not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.” 

The older I get the less I realize I know.  Acquiring the humility to understand not only that we know very little but that we have far less control over what happens to us comes through a painstakingly slow process.  When I think of what I know now (that I “know” very little), I must confess I shudder a bit at my own past “moral clarity of the immature.”  How many things I fancied I “knew.” How many filters I used that distorted what I saw. How many people I did not hear because I assumed things as I “listened.”

Being trained as a lawyer, I was and am open to the idea that there are myriad sides to any story or conflict.  I also have seen in courtrooms how flimsy “eyewitness” testimony is and how many different psychological factors go into what we perceive and remember.  Five witnesses to the same car accident, if taken to different rooms, will all remember something different.  The driver was distracted. The pedestrian darted out of nowhere. The traffic light was green. The extent to which we are not fully and accurately perceiving the world becomes increasingly evident any time different people describe the same event or conversation. 

As a diplomat, I learned and relearned how much our cultures affect how we perceive the same series of events.  Whether it is the directness or circularity with which we say things, the way we maintain or avoid eye contact, how and when we press someone to do something, or even whether we show someone the bottom of our shoes, the tiny corner of the world into which we are born colors everything.  

Thankfully, these experiences and professions left me quite open to what David Foster Wallace wrote. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across another quote, that led me to listen to countless podcasts and read books by its author, that I invested significant time in considering the “ego” and the role it plays in our sense of certainty and righteousness about what we “know.”  The quote was from Eckhart Tolle:  

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.” 

I had never read anything by Tolle when I came across the quote, and I found myself re-reading the sentence over and over.  Grace is my favorite word, and I wanted to understand how to be in a “state of grace, ease, and lightness.”  Everything around me felt ungraceful, difficult, heavy.  But I kept mulling the words “to offer no resistance to life.”  What did that mean?  We surrender to all that happens to us?  We give up? How do we do that and is that desirable?  I wrote the quote on a scrap of paper and put it on my refrigerator door.  

I then read two of Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth.  He is a quiet German-American who, at 28, lying in bed in a fit of existential, suicidal panic thought “I cannot live with myself anymore.”  This triggered for him an epiphany about how much we are “with our own minds.”  How much we are consumed by our thoughts that look into the future with anxiety, into the past with regret.  If we were able to reduce our racing thoughts and focus on just the present moment, much suffering would disappear.  Of course, monks have spent decades perfecting the art of being present, and I doubt I will ever come close.

But what I found most interesting about Tolle’s writing is his emphasis on the “ego.”  To Tolle, our ego is essentially what we identify as.  Our form.  Mother, father, wife, student, doctor, drunk, loser, philanthropist, hero.  It’s the list of things we put in our social media description.  The things we would tell someone at a cocktail party.  We all have our narratives of who we are, and by adulthood, we can rattle off our roles and our “story” with ease.  And in all of that identifying, by necessity, we are also saying what we are not.  

Social media, in many ways, has reinforced our egos and our associations with roles and identities.  I recently spent a year at Georgetown and Carnegie reading and teaching about social media and disinformation.  At the heart of my quest was to understand why America felt so polarized.  Of course, much ink has been spilled about the algorithms of social media and how they amplify both all the things with which we already identify and then amplify the “shock value” of content about those things.  Over the past two decades, we have become increasingly rigid about who we are and rejectful of who we are not.  This phenomenon is not only happening between the separate poles of political spectra, but within each pole as well.  One of the most common verbs used at the moment to describe what is happening *within* similarly-minded groups is “cannibalize.”

We have also become quick to dispense with people.  Last year, a documentary, 15 Minutes of Shame, explored the ways both public personalities and private citizens must now navigate harassment and public shaming online.  Thankfully, the documentary does a good job of noting that some forms of public shaming have resulted in progress toward better outcomes.  But in painful detail, the documentary describes stories in which every day people were subjected to a weaponized form of shaming or false accusations that were intended to hurt or destroy – often without an understanding of even the basic facts.  People lost their jobs and had their lives destroyed by a 15-minute whipped up frenzy of unexamined outrage.  And then the outrage moved on to a new target.  

A few years back, a close friend told me about the author Jonathan Haidt. I have now come to believe that his book The Righteous Mind should be required reading for anyone living in the modern era.  He examines moral psychology and the spectra across which we make several kinds of moral judgments and explains why conservatives value the traditional and liberals value change.  The overarching message is that conservatives and liberals frequently come out differently on moral questions, but each gets there in a “rational” way.  And neither is “wrong.”  We have become so certain that the other “side” is “wrong” that we do not even have conversations with each other anymore.  We do not try to understand.  We label and move on.

Jonathan Haidt famously quoted Zen master, Sent-t’san, from 700 CE in a TED talk:  

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be ‘for’ or ‘against.’  The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”  

This is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle about the “ego.”  Tolle would say the more we identify with labels or roles, the more inclined we are to defend that role or mindset in a knee-jerk, unexamined way.  The most liberating thing we can do is to identify less with the avatars we create of who “we are” and simply be present in the moment, with an open heart and open mind, willing to listen and see others.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but I would submit there is no such thing as “good communication.”  Very rare is the conversation in which each party walks away with the same understanding.  I have come to believe that communication is instead a whittling away of misunderstanding.  Adrienne Rich, in her essay "On Women and Honor:  Some Notes on Lying," defines an “honorable human relationship” as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”  As a society, we must get better at the long, sometimes terrifying process of listening to each other – of whittling away our misunderstandings.  Of restating and clarifying. Of repeating back. Of coming to conversations with an assumption of good will.

We all go around this earth asking “Do you see me?  Do you hear me?  Does what I offer matter?”  Many of our conflicts, since time immemorial, have arisen when the answer to those questions is a dismissive, self-righteous “no.”  So, this March Forth, I commit to trying to distance myself from my ego, from my avatar, from my righteous certainty of things I “know.”  I commit to listen and see more, and speak second, not first.  I commit to using less labels for myself or anyone else. Perhaps the only label that should matter is Open-Minded Human (the acronym is even onomatopoetic – oommhh).  For sure, we do not need to be so open-minded that our brains spill out.  We can still make moral decisions, improve other people’s lives, and do good things in the world.  But we can do all of those things with much more humility.

Marching Forth: On Being Lion-hearted

March Forth:  On Being Lion-Hearted

I have been thinking this March 4^th (2016) about the concept of being lion-hearted.  I’ve noticed in the past few years that there’s a genre of writing I can’t get enough of.  The writer has a messy, complicated life.  She is exquisitely honest about and troubled by the messiness and her contributions to it.  She feels overwhelmed.  Perhaps she has failed at something.  She is not who she wants to be.  She starts a journey to become a different, less messy, better person. 

 

The writers of this genre have what I call lion-heartedness – it is the integrity to acknowledge life’s sweep-the-knees pain and the courage to undertake the slow process of recovery.  Lion-hearted people understand that their recovery is ultimately their responsibility.

 

The writers in this genre are Cheryl Strayed in Wild.  Faulkner Fox in Dispatches from My Not-So-Perfect Life. Elizabeth Gilbert and Brené Brown. Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I started my love affair with writers when I read Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect” my senior year in high school during an AP English exam.  So enthralled was I with Didion’s raw truth, that I tore the essay from the exam booklet (this was before the internet) and have kept it with me ever since.  I re-read it in moments of personal failure. 

 

Essentially, Didion reminds us that self-respect cannot and should not derive from the “doubtful amulets” of “good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.”  Instead people with self-respect “have the courage of their failures."  They “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character … the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.” 

 

I am often struck that some critics of these writers I adore find them “selfish” or “self-indulgent.”  These writers’ resolutions of their problems are trite, they say.  Too Hollywood.  Tied up and packaged with a pretty bow.  “I’m healed!”

 

I would submit that these women hardly present a neatly-packaged picture.  In an age when we post idyllic, rosy-cheeked pictures of perfect lives on social media, I love the raw candor with which these women say “my life is a disaster” or “I am not who I want it to be and here I am bawling on my bathroom floor making a puddle of tears and snot.” 

 

The sources of these women’s pain run the gamut.  Joan Didion wasn’t accepted into Phi Beta Kappa.  For Elizabeth Gilbert, it was wanting something grittier than a life in the suburbs married to a man with whom she could not connect.  For Cheryl Strayed, it was the death of her beloved mother, an abortion, and substance abuse.  Maya Angelou survived rape and racism.  While the problems vary, the humility of the admission -- “I want to be something different/more/better” or “I want to move past this pain” -- is the stuff of true grit. 

 

I have evolved into my love for these writers.  As a young person, I used to say my favorite book was “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (the feminist heroine drowns herself at the end).  I also loved Virginia Woolf (the author drowns herself), and Sylvia Plath’s poetry (do you see a theme? – but an oven).  As a budding feminist myself, I was drawn to these women’s struggles with traditional gender roles and their desire for something different, against the odds.  But at that young age, it was still hard to imagine a less tragic, melodramatic end, especially one that involved the unglamorous slog of persistence and the courageous, growing self-worth I admire now.

 

It was after becoming a mother that I became enthralled with the writers who acknowledged the unfair or unfortunate forces working in the world and sought a way to nonetheless conquer them (or at least go Over, Under, Through! them as Tina Fey advises).  I wanted to read writers who struggled with these questions:  How do I survive grief or loss (it is as inevitable as, and the opposite face of, loving after all)?  What happens when I truly can’t “do it all”?  How do I rise when I fall? … because not getting up isn’t an option.

 

Right after my last March Forth post, I read the most powerful essay by Dear Sugar (my beloved Cheryl Strayed) called How You Get Unstuck.   It is at times bleak and sad.  In the essay, Strayed is responding to a letter from a woman who miscarried a baby girl and wants to know how to get “unstuck” – how to “fix” her grief.  Strayed acknowledged the woman’s suffering: “This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.”  And then she said:

 

“This is how you get unstuck. You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours—the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.”

 

The passage took my breath away.  Grief is hard work.  Grief is putting one foot in front of the other.  Only you can heal yourself.  I was reminded of the jagged, trending line of recovery after my dad died that is still very much a work in progress 15 years later.

 

The essay went on to tell about Strayed’s work as a youth advocate for a group of at-risk girls in a middle school.  I recognized these girls.  I could have been one of them.  In my 13th year, my life could have gone in any number of directions.  I, like the girls in Strayed’s essay, was aching, lost, angry, uncertain of my worth.  Strayed worked with these girls (giving them a journal – which conjured images of my own tattered black journal full of earnest scribbles), but found that the world didn’t really care about their troubles.  It was a startling reality for Strayed, but one she said shouldn’t have shocked her.  So she shifted tack – she taught the girls that only they were responsible for their fates.  Only they could do the work of saving themselves:

 

“Nobody can intervene and make [it] right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends … can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.”

 

I went to hear Strayed speak a few months ago.  Despite having read this essay more than a dozen times, I was jolted to attention about half way through Q&A when Strayed gave a “tough love” response to a heart-broken woman with spikey-hair and a nose-ring.  “Life isn’t fair,” she said.  “Bad things happen.  People fail you.  Self-pity is a dead-end road.  Giving a bad person the power to keep you parked on Self-Pity cul-de-sac is a waste.  You have to find a way to throw it in reverse and leave that road behind.”  I cringed (I’m a Myers-Briggs feeler).  Poor woman with the nose-ring.  But Strayed spoke the truth.  The courageous truth.    

 

There is one thing this truth is not, and two things it is.  First, it is not a “go-it-alone” admonition.  It does not suggest that you have to grieve alone.  It doesn’t suggest that the loving souls in your life can’t help you.  I have an intrepid Team Jennifer.  I have a set of family and friends who provide constant, reassuring, unconditional love.  I could show up on any of their doorsteps with a metaphorical black eye and a suitcase, and they would let me stay with no questions until I was ready to talk.  There are also houses of worship and grief groups.  And trained professionals who’s job it is to help.  And all of those forces can support you as you’re building that bridge through your grief. 

 

But here are two things this tough love is – first, it’s a reminder that when you’re grieving or lost, you don’t always make the best choices about who and what to trust.  Often in pain or despair or exhaustion (or all of the above), we look for crutches that don’t help us heal.  Some people use alcohol.  Some people work too much.  Some people lock away their hearts in an “air-tight casket of selfishness” (as C.S. Lewis says).  Some people find the strength to search for help but instead find careless anti-heroes.  Haven’t we all been lost in a barren emotional desert only to be approached by a “knight-in-shining armor” (said knight comes in both genders)?  He’ll extend his hand and announce he’s come to save you.  Only he’ll ride you a few hundred miles deeper into the desert and knock you off the back of his trusty steed when he sees you’re wrinkling his hero costume (he’ll probably take your canteen too as payment for having “rescued” you).  When you’re grieving, you can’t tell who’s a real hero and who’s a scoundrel.  And you may look for short-cuts to “heal” that only make things worse.  None of those strategies ultimately works.  You have to own your pain, be honest with yourself and others about it, and do the tough work of healing it.  And sometimes that process can feel excruciating … until it’s not anymore.  Until one day, you feel good for more minutes than you feel bad.

 

Second, healing yourself is deeply empowering.  While you have the responsibility to get better, you also have the power.  From that struggle to heal, to recover, to change, to live a life different than the one you envisioned or wanted, you gain self-respect.  You are the person who recreated yourself after a painful loss.  You are the one who had the courage to change.  You are the one who made amends.  You are the one who got knocked down and got back up again.  You are the one who is still rising.  You.  You did that. 

 

And it was fierce and lion-hearted.

 

 

 

Marching Forth One Day at a Time

I have seen two March Forths come and go barely noticing the date.  If I did notice, it was because a friend asked what proactive marching forth I was planning on my special day.  Last year, I think I reposted my outdated March Forth blog post from half a decade ago – a smug, happy year when I could think of nothing I needed to confront.  Oh, those now-inconceivable halcyon days.

  

Today, I would say there is always something that could use some March-Forthing in our lives.  And this year, after what feels like a long period of stagnant stasis, I have been thinking about many needed “actions in the face of past days of inaction.”

  

I have had a difficult job for the past two-and-half years -- loads of international travel, stress, and time away from my usual ballasts.  I say "stagnant stasis" to describe this period – but underneath the frozen landscape of my personal life, there were roots taking hold.  I recently opined that I grew more in the past two years than I did in the ten before it. That’s true.  I wasn’t fully aware of how I was growing – I’m still not.  But in the face of so many challenges and “growth opportunities” (my loving euphemism for all the crazy I witnessed), I had to grow or get crushed.  And sometimes I got crushed.  Often, it was in those moments of using a spatula to scrape my lifeless form off the bottom of someone’s shoe that I realized – if nothing else – the crushing was an opportunity to learn.  So, what did I learn?  Forgive the expletive, but this March 4^th, I am committing myself to the following:

1.    I will own my own shit.

2.    I will be grateful.

3.    I will do more than just avoid soul-crushers.

Let’s take them in reverse order.  

Soul-Crushers

We all know this to be true – there are mean, selfish, careless, aggressive, acerbic people out there (and some of them have a few of these characteristics).  We work with them, maybe we have one in our family, maybe one's a neighbor.  We see them in the larger world too – the dictators, the spewing pundits, the nutty people on social media who hide behind its anonymity to bully or belittle.  The crazies we have to live with and work with are the hardest to handle – we can easily turn off the TV to forget the dictator (in our blessed country) or delete the crazy person from our Facebook feed. 

  

When confronted with these people, I often think of my favorite Gandhi quote:  “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it -- always.”

  

Pollyanna I know, but it goes with my theory that there are more fundamentally good people in this world than bad.  Some days, it feels like there may be just 3 more good than bad.  Other days, it feels like the world is brimming with mostly-good souls.  I nonetheless remain committed to the ideal that good does indeed win … ultimately.

  

But how, then, to deal with the soul-crushers who scream, belittle, criticize, lash out, transfer, passive-aggressively don’t act, aggressively act?  I’ve seen a lot of soul-crushing in the last few years.  I’ve met a lot of angry people.  I’ve watched them and often wondered how they’ve gotten so far in the world (if they have) with their overflowing vices.  I have indeed – over the course of my life – given some of these people enormous power over my emotional well-being.  I have chosen on various occasions to please them, to fight them, to let them undermine me, to cry when they are abusive, to take their criticism to heart and doubt myself, and to watch passively as they have bullied others.

  

In the past two years, with increasing but nonetheless limited success, I have gotten better at seeing the signs of crazy early.  With some of the more sophisticated soul-crushers (the ones often who’ve been “successful” in their professional lives), it is hard to see the crazy or the narcissism at first.  Soul-crushers can be initially charming, but their motives are selfish.  What is good for me?  What will allow me to “win”?  Me first. 

  

I have noticed a characteristic of mine of wanting to point out to the soul-crusher what he is doing that is harmful to my peace (see Part III below on owning my own shit).  “You have to stop yelling at people,” I’ve said.  “Sarcasm isn’t what we need here.”  “That was unnecessary roughness.”  “I think it’s important that you don’t avoid this problem.”  I’ve often done it in a half-hearted way – the email sent after not enough sleep.  The drive-by snarky remark. It’s rather cowardly – but honestly, would sitting down with these people and engaging them in a heart-to-heart about why they are soul-crushing really be a productive use of time?  Probably not.  But what does the from-a-distance-lobbed-snark-grenade do either?  It lets them know that I know they suck?  Hooray.  Non-victory!

  

I think it best most often to just avoid the soul-crushers – and avoid the self-righteous attempts to let them know that you know.  But sometimes you cannot avoid them.  Sometimes they darken your very doorstep with their nasty.  Sometimes they come right at you.  Sometimes, they come at the people you are charged with protecting (your children, your employees) and you have to do something if you want to be a person of integrity.   Einstein said “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” 

So this March 4^th, I commit myself to two important goals that do more than simply avoid soul-crushers: 

1.    First, as I noted, I depend on the fact that good ultimately will triumph over bad because over time – like the stock market’s growth -- it always does.  Karma.  But it will only do so if good souls don’t feel helpless and apathetic.  In a world full of crazy, good souls have to be a force for fairness and light.  We can be magnanimous, grateful, kind, gentle-spoken, open-minded, and full-hearted.  We can encourage where soul-crushers criticize.  We can smile where soul-crushers scowl.  We can think the best of people or be empathetic where soul-crushers are suspicious of motive and think the worst.  We can be mindful of the consequences of our actions on others when soul-crushers often don’t even know the “others” are there.  We can contribute every day to the bank of good will.

2.    More proactively, I commit myself to the idea that every exposure to a soul-crusher requires a careful balancing of factors to determine the right response.  In those moments when I cannot avoid soul-crushers – when it is right to confront them – I commit to doing so, even when doing so makes me fearful of the personal consequences.  Several times in my life, I have watched a real leader protect others.  It happens all too rarely.  But I have seen it and been the recipient of it.  And I want to be the kind of person who does it.  I also want to be the kind of person who protects myself when necessary.  It is self-affirming and may ultimately have positive ramifications for the next potential crushee.  When and why to challenge a soul-crusher is a very personal calculus – different factors will move different good souls.  But it’s fundamentally important that we all summon the courage to do so and say “no more!” when a soul-crusher goes too far. 

  

Gratefulness

  

Ok, back to Pollyanna and her friend Oprah.  I did it – this year I started a gratefulness journal.  I wince a little at admitting it.  Recently, in my office, someone left a copy of the book “The Happiness Project (Or Why I Want to Start Every Morning Singing)” on a work table.  It became a joke that no one would claim it (it wasn’t mine.  I swear!).  No one wanted to be the cheeseball working on a self-improvement project in that environment.  I feel that timidity of spirit in acknowledging that I need to be more grateful, and I need to write myself a daily email to do it.

Have you ever heard of the “negativity bias”?  It is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g., unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful or traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state than do neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will affect your sense of well-being far less than something equally or less negative.  It is a phenomenon I notice more and more the older I get.  And it is one I am trying to fight.  I am fighting it myself as I try as well to give my children the tool of perspective.

When my son Ben complains about not having the latest gadget or James is “too tired” to do homework, I remind them of what life for most children in the world is like – and tell them, far from feeling sorry for themselves, they should bound out of bed happy with the Gods every day.  This is a hard thing for a child to understand of course.  But I’m going to keep teaching it – and taking my children around the world to see that not every one has even indoor plumbing much less an iPhone.  I think this perspective can not only help them avoid the negativity bias, it can also teach them empathy for other's suffering.  Empathy and grace are missing in the human spirit when it is at its most animalistic and base.  We could all use a little more moccasin-wearing.

I hope at the end of the year, with my 365 emails to myself – that remind me to get over myself because I have heat in the winter, clean water to drink, healthy children, a loving partner who accepts me flaws and all, public libraries – I will have developed a habit of gratefulness that will make me feel more joyful about the everyday miracles of my life.

  

Owning My Shit

  

This phrase (it seems too simple and coarse at first, but just wait – it will get you) was life-altering for me this year.  It comes from Elizabeth Gilbert (she who Ate, Prayed, and Loved her way into our hearts).  Here it is in all its seeming simplicity.  The two most important phrases to me are bolded:

“It’s very important that you learn how to own your shit. At some point in your life, you really have to get honest about the weirdest and most damaged and most broken parts of your existence, and take responsibility for it all ... lovingly, but unblinkingly.  For many years, I didn’t own my shit because I didn’t KNOW my shit. If you don’t know your shit, then that shit will control you and make your life into Crazy Town. Until you own your shit, all you do is make excuses for the madness that is always surrounding you, while throwing blame around like confetti.

By this point in my life, though, I know the worst of me. I know the triggers that make me into a temporarily insane person. I know my vulnerabilities and my pride. I know the stuff that makes me want to deceive, and the stuff that makes me vindictive, and the stuff that makes me insecure, and the stuff that makes me just flat-out mean and ugly. And I definitely know all my demons by their first names.

This is what therapy does — helps you to learn your shit, inside and out. This is what meditation is for. This is what recovery is for. This is what reconciling the contradictions of your life is for. This is what radical honesty is for. This is what the courage of truthful introspection is for.

Owning your shit begins to happen the moment you finally recognize that the common denominator in all your biggest problems is YOU.  Not them: YOU.  It’s a beautiful, humbling, necessary realization. It’s an education. It’s painful. It’s the beginning of adulthood. It's pretty much the definition of maturity. 

That doesn't mean abusing yourself:  it just means taking accountability. Own your shit with love and perspective and self-compassion ... but definitely own it.  Don’t worry if other people are owning their shit or not. That isn’t your problem. Just own yours.  Keep your side of the street clean and honest, and rest of it is none of your business.”

The first time I read this, I smiled knowingly.  As a person keen to understand what makes me tick, I loved every word.  But I have been most keen to understand me and less keen to “own” me – to take responsibility for my weaknesses and my own behavior.  To act in a manner that takes into account what makes me tick and what makes me overly-sensitive and what makes me ache and -- here’s the kicker -- control the behavior that comes after the ache.  To be responsible for me instead of “throwing blame around like confetti.”  That’s probably my favorite phrase of the whole passage – how many times a day since have I self-mockingly pictured myself in a tutu and crooked tiara scattering blame around like confetti?  The mental image makes me stop in my tracks – and makes me take responsibility for my part in whatever I am blaming someone else for.  And that accountability makes me work to fix my part of it.  To make myself better.  To act in an honorable, honest way.

I also find the idea of not focusing on whether other people are owning their own shit quite freeing.  Remember the me in Part 1 above on Soul-Crushers who likes to lob the grenade email in to tell someone how inappropriate he is or insensitive she has acted.  If my intention is to mentor or teach because that is my role in a particular moment, than talking to someone else about his or her behavior may be appropriate.  But if my intent is merely to show someone that I know that he doesn’t know that he isn’t owning his shit – well, that is none of my business.  

If we all worked a little harder to own our own shit and focused a lot less on what we find problematic about other people’s behavior, the world would be a lovelier place.

One Day at a Time

  

I am not instinctively good at standing up to soul-crushers, feeling grateful, or owning my own shit.  And I am good at fanciful declarations that feel like poetry in the writing and like bad prose in the implementation – I can talk big and play small.  So this March 4th, I am taking all three of these goals like an addict would – one day at a time.  May the Gods blow a gentle wind at my back as I march forth.  

Dear Belgium

Dear Belgium,

We got off to a bad start.  I'm sorry -- I came to you tired.  More tired than I knew.  And my job at NATO was grueling.  You also are divinely dysfunctional and dreary.  But please know in your beautiful, gilded Grand Place, I drank lots of strong Belgian beers with visiting friends and stumbled to the finish line of my first marathon.  Your chocolate and pommes frit are the world's best.  My husband Nick adores you.  You were an easy launching pad for visits to Sardinia, Oxford, Malta, Rome, Vienna, Tallinn, Vilnius, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Auchen, Oberammergau, Tbilisi, Baku, Sarajevo, Lisbon, Madrid, Reims, Lanzarote, Majorca (twice), Paris (a few times), London (a lot), and Sidmouth (even more).  And yet I never made it to Ghent and Antwerp.  You are the temporary home to life-long friends who were our "Brussels family" -- Barbara and Rick, Zabby and Zadam, Zia and Zeenat.  I also made friends at NATO, from all over the world, who helped me through.  Your international school was life-altering for my eldest.  Sighting the lion of Waterloo always made my boys exclaim with glee. Your parks are big and green and fun.  Thank you for the wonderful memories.  See you soon. 

Love Jennifer

Memorial Day Lessons From My Dad

My dad died 10 years ago last Thursday.  In some ways, the loss is as fresh and as acute as May 26, 2001.  In other ways, I notice the blurriness of my images of him now and fear that, more and more, he is becoming a set of fuzzy memories, a set of stories.  In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote about how the passage of time causes our mental picture of someone to fade:  "Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes -- the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night -- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of [him].  Ten minutes, ten seconds of the real [him] would correct all this.  And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again."

My dad died on Memorial Day weekend.  Nick and I were in Charleston looking for churches for our wedding.  We were staying in the Kiawah Inn.  My sister called at 2am to tell me dad "had a heartache.  And he didn't make it."  They were words that profoundly changed my life.

Driving back through the night to Raleigh, I remember being overcome by grief that my father would not walk me down the aisle.  So much lost that day, and yet I became fixated on a moment... a ritual.  A self-focused loss for a future special day.  It was a strange thing to mourn.  But the grieving mind knows no logic and is often selfish.  At that moment, I didn't grieve the larger losses.  That I wouldn't watch him grow old, that he wouldn't know my children, that I could not have grown up enough to have "grown up" talks with him, that I couldn't ask him for career advice or what the sunrise over the Carolina mountains looked like this week.

Today, we took our boys to a Memorial Day ceremony in the Ardennes in Belgium.  Ten years after losing my dad, I still remember that it was hard to arrange the military honors for his funeral because those who play Taps or neatly fold flags over caskets or fire 21-gun salutes were attending Memorial Day ceremonies to honor America's fallen.  Every Memorial Day, I cry when I hear Taps.  I sometimes feel embarrassed...like I want to explain I am not being overly patriotic or sentimental.  That I am still mourning.  That I am missing my dad.  But these are thoughts best left unsaid at a moment meant to honor others.


Listening to the Admiral today and watching the jets overhead, I thought my dad would have loved to hear my stories about working at NATO.  He was an Army Colonel, and he believed in service to your country.  When I work with my military friends at NATO, I think about how I used to help my dad polish his boots for summer camp over spread-out newspaper in the living room while watching NFL football.  My military colleagues remind me that soldiers are neat, punctual, polite, and honorable.  They say "sir" and "ma'am" like I was taught to do.  When I watch a soldier with his cover in his hands, I think of how my dad used to slowly turn his in his hands as he talked, creasing the edges with his fingers.  When I watch a promotion ceremony, I picture my dad proudly pinning a new rank on my sister's shoulder and saluting her.


I was trying to explain to Ben and James a little bit about what Memorial Day means.  I was using words like "fallen soldiers" and "courage" and "remembering and honoring."  It was too much for them.  James asked me if we would see zombies.  Teaching my boys about the heart of the matter won't happen for many more years.  And perhaps it shouldn't.  They should enjoy being young for now.

But today, I sure did wish my dad was around to help me explain.

I came home and looked for an article I wrote right after my dad died.  Re-reading it helped  me see that although I might not be able to teach my boys the true meaning of Memorial Day yet, I can continue to live my life, day in and day out, as my father did his, trying to show my boys how to be earnest, to be humble, to put others first, and to be courageous.  Those, too, are the lessons of Memorial Day.  And you can teach those without saying a word.


The Other Obituary
Raleigh News & Observer, Father's Day Special, June 2001

            The last thing my father said to me was “love you, doll.”  It was just one month ago.  He said it from the front porch of his home in Raleigh as he waved goodnight to me.  We had just had dinner, and I was leaving to go back to work.  I would give anything now to have lingered a little longer at my father’s table that night.  I didn’t know then that it would be my last chance to spend time with him.

            Three weeks ago, my father died of a heart attack.  He was 58 years old.  He ran 5K races with me, and was an active, busy, seemingly healthy man.  He was buried in Montlawn Cemetary with full military honors.  Those who loved him could hardly grieve yet because it seemed so impossible that such a strong man could be gone.

            The obituary appeared in Section B, page 6, of the paper the day after Memorial Day.  It was 28 lines long and told only the essentials of his life– that he left behind a wife, two daughters, a stepson, two grandchildren, a sister.  He was a retired Colonel in the United States Army, a high school football referee, and a N.C. State graduate.

            But as with almost every obituary I’ve ever read, it was wholly inadequate to describe the man who was my dad.  The obituary didn’t tell you about his big, brilliantly blue eyes that often shared his sentimental nature with the world or his boyish grin that could charm the crankiest of curmudgeons.

            It didn’t tell you that my dad never missed one of his children’s graduations, dance recitals, or military promotions, or that he waited nervously in the hospital waiting room when his grandchildren were born.  And it didn’t tell you that he was the loudest (and often the only) supportive voice from the stands at my junior high school basketball games.  Years later, when I played basketball for a year in England, he checked the team webpage after every game and wrote to me about my performance.  He was “there” still.

            The obituary didn’t tell you about the poems he wrote for the people he loved or about the inscriptions he put in the books he gave.  In Ayn Rand’s "Anthem," a Christmas gift to me in 1995, he wrote: “To a beautiful daughter with a mind for the intellectual and a soul for compassion.  Read Chapter XI and think about it.  Love Dad.” 

            It didn’t tell you that he taught his children multiplication tables, county seats, and how the solar system works (with fruit).  He taught his daughters how to change a tire and use a chainsaw.  But he wouldn’t let us use the chainsaw unless he was standing nearby.

            From the lines of the obituary, you couldn’t see the animation with which he talked about the D-Day landing with our guide on the beaches of Normandy just a year ago.  And you couldn’t see the joy in his eyes as he solved a Rubik's Cube or figured out a word while doing the Sunday crossword puzzle.  

            Indeed, as I write this, I am struck by the inadequacy of my own words to give you a small glimpse of a man who was larger than life.

           If you recognize your own father in my words, take the time today to thank him and to tell him how his constant support and love changed you.  We are given such precious little time on this earth with the ones we love.

            As for me, this Father’s Day, I hope to find comfort in the many happy memories I have of my time with my dad.  On the inside cover of a book written by a native of the state he loved so much, my dad wrote, “As Thomas Wolfe said, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’  You can always remember the good times with love and the not so good times with understanding and compassion.  And may you always look homeward, Angel.  Love Dad.”

25 Things About Me (A Recycled Product)

1.  Grace is my favorite word and my favorite trait in another person.

2.  Not only does my life have a soundtrack, but I like to sing along loudly. I think music is god’s way of telling us we’re not alone.
3.  My favorite smell is the ocean. I feel most alive on a beach.
4.  My big sister (a talented doctor) helped deliver Ben. She was about 3 months pregnant herself and not feeling much like getting her little sister through 18 hours of labor. She has protected me like that many times.
5.  I was the officiant at my best friend Dani’s wedding. Being asked to do that was one of my life’s greatest honors.
6.  I am not able to describe how close I feel to my mom. And I did not understand how much she loved me until I was pregnant with Ben. I found the realization startling and humbling.
7.  The judge I clerked for after law school is the wisest man I have ever met. He would stand at my enormous window looking out over the Cape Fear river and wax poetic about whatever he had read, painted, sculpted, invented, or talked to “his bride” (his wife of 50 years) about that day. When I remember those moments, the music in my head is Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (see # 2).
8.  My son Ben is a lot like I was as a child. He is stubborn, gregarious, mischievous, and the near-death of his parents. Being his mom makes me love my parents even more. Being his mom was my first experience with unconditional love.
9.  My baby James makes me feel peaceful. He is an old soul. I sing “Sweet Baby James” to him at night when I rock him.
10.  I named the high school I graduated from (well, I was the person on a student government committee who suggested the name that the School Board ultimately chose-- but the first sentence sounds cooler). It was Providence High. Very original. It sat on Providence Road.
11.  I was a daddy’s girl and a tomboy growing up. I used to go with my dad to football games he refereed and hold the yardline chains. He taught me how to shoot free-throws and always came to my basketball games. When I played basketball at Oxford, he would read about my games on the web and give me pointers-- he was "there" across an ocean.
12.  2001 was the worst year of my life. It followed right on the heels of 2000, the best year of my life-- which probably made it feel even worse.
13.  My girlfriends and I have GPWs (girl power weekends) that always make me feel heard, understood and/or loved anyway, and usually a little tipsy.
14.  “Shadow Lands,” about C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy, is my favorite movie. It reminds me that your joy is your sorrow—that they are one in the same. That makes me love more boldly.
15.  I always read Tennyson’s "Ulysses" right before I do something that is good for me but that nonetheless makes me want to throw up fear soup.
16.  I did not expect to fall so deeply in love with Mexico City. I left a big chunk of my heart there (probably in a bar in Polanco near a shot of tequila and a taco al pastor).
17.  I have kept a journal since I was 13. I love sitting in a coffee house and working out how I feel about something on a piece of paper. When I re-read my old journal entries, I am reminded of the last line of "The Great Gatsby": “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
18.  I’m a Tar Heel born, I’m a Tar Heel bred. One of the first things people usually find out about me is that I’m from North Carolina. I am unusually prideful about my home state.
19.  I used to sneak down to see my grandmother (she lived with us when I was young) after bedtime. She would cut an apple for us and read poetry to me from “America’s Best-Loved Poems.” My favorite was “The Female of the Species.”
20.  I gave my high school graduation speech. In it, I read part of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” (yeah, I know that makes you wish you had been in the audience). As I was winding up, I quoted: “But which is more, you will be a man my son.” And at that moment, on stage, it struck me as rather unfair that Rudyard had only mentioned men. So I paused and said, “or a woman” and nodded in this indignant, self-congratulatory way. People in the audience chuckled. I’m afraid being raised by my mother and my grandmother made my feminism rather inevitable. See # 19.
21.  I’m a picky eater. It’s one of the things I like least about myself.
22.  If I could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, it would be President Lincoln. It used to be Jefferson. But I think Lincoln had more of #1 above, and I find that the trait most lacking in our leaders today.
23.  I would like to learn how to cook and how to play the guitar. I think you are only “old” once you stop learning new tricks.
24.  I wish I had done a tour with the Peace Corps. I have never met a Peace Corps volunteer I didn’t like and admire. I didn’t do a Peace Corps tour largely because of #21… I would have a hard time eating bugs.
25.  About 10 years ago, Nick, without thinking probably, said one of nicest things anyone has ever said to me. He forwarded me the Word of the Day, which was “Gibraltar,” with a simple note: “You are my Gibraltar.” It was right after my dad died when he was, in fact, my Gibraltar. Since then, we’ve always found different ways of telling each other we are our strong place to lean.

March Forth!

March Forth!  No it’s not a misspelling.  And yes, it’s dorky.  I consider today to be March Forth!, not March Fourth.  I like this day. 

When I was young, I heard a sermon (yes, in a church) from a beloved minister on “March forth” and how we should use the day to march forth, with purpose, into a life of good deeds and kindness.  Over the years, I have thought a lot about the day, and I’ve turned it into my own Dr. Philesque self-improvement program.   

I'm a self-improvement kind of gal.  I make New Year’s Resolutions.  At the beginning of every year, I promise to do something new that I haven’t done before or done well.  Take a course.   Write more letters.  Drink more water.  Start blogging.  And I like the idea of Lent too – the notion of self-deprivation to remind ourselves to be disciplined -- but I haven't tried it.  Perhaps this year?

But March 4^th is my day to do something I should have done awhile ago—and I’ve used it mostly in my interpersonal relationships.  I think of March 4^th as the day to consider what I have let fester, what I haven’t said, what I need to say better, what I need to resolve.  It is a day of action in the face of past days of inaction.  It is girding my loins.  It is finding the courage.  It is doing the right thing.

I have used March 4^th to do many long overdue things.  I quit smoking on March 4^th.  I broke up with a boyfriend on March 4^th.  I forgave a boyfriend on March 4^th.  I had a really productive disagreement with my mom after one March 4th (we can do that).  I called up an old friend on March 4^th and cleared the air.

Today, I find myself in a bit of a pickle.  I cannot think of anything I want to quit or resolve.  Things are going pretty well, and on this March 4^th, I am thinking about my great fortune.  I have my healthy, happy 3 boys (2 small, 1 big).  A wonderful mom.  Loving friends and family.  Mi amiga, Obdu.  A career I like.  Several weeks in the Carolinas this summer to look forward to.     

I think this March 4^th I will sit somewhere and remind myself that sometimes it is nice to not have anything to resolve.  Sometimes it is nice, as my friend Ana tells me, to live in the moment and feel grateful for it.   Today, I will think of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote I just read and loved:  "I have learned that everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain, forgetting that how we climb it is all that matters."  Today, I will not try to fix anything ... today, I will just enjoy the climb.