Fortune’s Wheel

In October of 2015 I went with a friend to hear Elizabeth Gilbert on her Big Magic book tour. She was on the cusp of her ten-year publishing anniversary of her memoir on divorce, despair, and re-discovery of life--Eat, Pray, Love--which launched her into global fame. During the audience Q and A someone asked her if she’d re-read Eat, Pray, Love in the years since it was first published. She responded by saying that she had just recently re-read it for the first time, as the 10th anniversary was approaching, and that she was shocked to find how many times she referred to herself as old in the memoir, because there she was ten years later, feeling quite young.

My favorite modern-day philosopher, Alain De Botton captures this experience well in his latest novel, The Course of Love, which chronicles the phases of Rabih and Kirsten’s relationship, with plot punctuated by philosophical vignettes. In one such vignette he states:

“There is in reality no ultimate truth in either Rabih’s or Kirsten’s mind as to how things actually are between them. Their lives involve a constant rotation of moods. Over a single weekend they might spin from claustrophobia to admiration, desire to boredom, indifference to ecstasy, irritation to tenderness. To arrest the wheel at any one point in order to share a candid verdict with a third party would be to risk being held forever to a confession which might, with hindsight, turn out to reflect only a momentary state of mind—gloomy pronouncements always commanding an authority that happier ones can’t trump.

This concept of “arresting the wheel” and saying out loud (or heaven forbid publishing in a best-selling memoir) that captures a crystallized moment is, in fact, a risk we all must take. The alternative is staying mute your whole life. Only, our reflections on our own experiences are obsolete as soon as we utter them. At least for us. But perhaps not for those that hear them. Eat, Pray, Love gained such incredible traction because that year in Elizabeth Gilbert’s life resonated with so many people who were suffering or coming back to life in similar ways to the ones she so beautifully chronicled.

I have friends that will call me wanting to talk about their relationships that begin the conversation with these disclaimers of “I need to talk about what’s wrong, but it doesn’t mean everything is wrong.” “I know,” I say. Stories are sound-bytes. They are malleable. They change.

Despite being an International Studies major in college, the only section of the NY Times I read reliably is the Modern Love column. I wrote my first Modern Love essay (not published, just for private consumption) in 2015 when I was trying to make sense of my broken engagement. A year later, re-reading it, what I had written, and felt so sure of in 2015, no longer fully resonated. So I wrote a new version in 2017, and that one rings truer, but it's still not quite the full picture. And the truth I’ve landed on is that nothing written (or spoken) stays personally true forever. Good writing taps into universal truths that other people can relate to, but on an individual level, we can never step in the same river twice.

Last spring when I was in the middle of hard weekend, I texted my dad and told him that I was impatiently waiting for things to change. He wrote back: “When the present changes, so does the past.”

There is a form of therapy, called Narrative therapy, where the focus is on how we make meaning out of our lives, by crafting our own life story in such a way that it heals old wounds and creates space for generativity.

A friend recently sent me this beautiful Vanity Fair article, “Monica Lewinsky: Emerging from ‘the House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #MeToo.”  I was 12 years old in 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton affair dominated the daily news. I remember going with my mom to her aerobics class occasionally on the weekends, and the instructor calling out in a chipper tone, “Alright ladies, let’s do the Lewinsky,” which was some variation of a hip thrusting move paced to loud 80’s music. As a 12-year-old, I wasn’t all that invested in the scandal. I didn't consider that Monica Lewinsky was just 13 years my senior, and that like her (and every other human), I would also make big mistakes in my life, but that unlike her, I wouldn’t be crucified on the cross of public humiliation. 

Now as a 31-year-old, I read her incredible story of rising up from unimaginable ashes—and I regret unthinkingly mocking this young, incredibly unlucky woman all those years ago. The Vanity Fair article quotes, Salman Rushdie in a statement he made after the fatwa was issued against him:

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

I started blogging as a way to make sense out of my life. The writing is for me, but occasionally, I hear from people that what I’ve written strikes a chord with them too. Because the human experience is universal—it’s only that we land on different parts of the experience at different times.

I was visiting friends I love dearly last night who are in a very different part of the human experience from where I am currently. They are newlyweds, who just bought their dream home, who are successful in their chosen careers, and who are eyeing their new spare bedroom as a future nursery. Meanwhile, I’m recently broken up, trolling job boards, with a dog (aka: my lifeline) who has been alternately throwing up or having diarrhea for the last few days, and a birthday on the horizon that makes me feel like my chances for children are growing slimmer. In short, it seems that my friends and I are living on different planets. But I’ve know these friends for a while, and I know they’ve done time on Planet Suffering too. Because we all do—nobody escapes it. 

When I’m in the dark moments of my life, it is hard to imagine that they will end, even knowing on a rational level that they will. My dad (aka: my other lifeline) likes to remind me that Fortune’s Wheel is always spinning. That I’m not stuck. That this is temporary. I know he is right. It’s just getting my heart on board with this truth that takes time.

The Pig Behind the Story

Thank you to my friends and family (especially my mom who orchestrated such an incredible surprise appearance) who traveled from near and far to be in the audience last night for the Moth GrandSLAM, themed "What's Love Got To Do With It?" I told my first Moth story ever, last April, on the theme of Refuge, and was quite surprised and delighted to win the StorySLAM that evening. That night not only gave me my entry to the GrandSLAM, but it also connected me with a stranger in the audience who has now become a dear friend, all because she reached out after the event to tell me how much she'd enjoyed my story.

There aren't many things in life that feel capital "T" true, but one of them for me is that stories are the connective tissue of the human experience. Real stories, from people I love, were what saved me when I felt like my life was falling apart. Personal stories are at the heart of this website. And it feels fitting that the Refuge story about my dad's love, gave me a chance to talk about my love for Hamish...the little pig that unexpectedly came into my life in a significant way the summer of 2009. 

My life has been rich in many kinds of love (and of course a complementary variety of heartaches). Some of those love stories, I'm still metabolizing. Some I'm in the middle of living. But Hamish was a rare gem--who came into my life all in a rush, and left just as quickly. And in the years since our time together, I've started to discern the wisdom that a little pig has to offer. 

Moth stories are told live without notes, so what I said on stage isn't word for word what appear's below, but it's close...

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The summer of 2009 Elin, Carlisle, and I were all recent college grads. We’d traded days in the library and nights in seedy basement parties for a summer of manual labor on the farm that provided the meat and produce for our beloved summer camp.  We were thinking about sneaking off into town one evening when the walkie-talkie crackled to life, and Dale announced, "It's happening!" 

This was the moment we'd been waiting for. Jezabelle was in labor. We rushed to the pig pin and found Dale grinning like the Cheshire Cat with a mucous covered piglet in each hand. The rest evening was devoted to tying off iodine dipped umbilical cords, cleaning a passel of pink and spotted piglets, and burying the massive afterbirth in the chicken yard. In short:  pastoral bliss at its finest. 

Only over the next few days the piglets started dying off. First one, and then a few more. Several more seemed sickly, and as days went on they grew worse not better. We took the sickly piglets back to our cabin to care for them, but each of them died. Except for one. 

We called the one who lived Hamish. Hamish was a pink little bag of bones when he came to live in my room. He had a scabby tail and droopy skin and he was violently incontinent. Piglets cannot regulate their own body temperature for the first few weeks of life, which is why in the wild, they sleep in a pile on top of their mother. But Hamish’s mother was sick (we’d later learn she had septic mastitis). and his brothers and sisters were dead, so I decided the best place for Hamish to sleep would be with me… in the bed. So under the sheets he went!  

The summer of 2009 Elin, Carlisle, and I were all recent college grads. We’d traded days in the library and nights in seedy basement parties for a summer of manual labor on the farm that provided the meat and produce for our beloved summer camp.  We were thinking about sneaking off into town one evening when the walkie-talkie crackled to life, and Dale announced, "It's happening!" 

This was the moment we'd been waiting for. Jezabelle was in labor. We rushed to the pig pin and found Dale grinning like the Cheshire Cat with a mucous covered piglet in each hand. The rest evening was devoted to tying off iodine dipped umbilical cords, cleaning a passel of pink and spotted piglets, and burying the massive afterbirth in the chicken yard. In short:  pastoral bliss at its finest. 

Only over the next few days the piglets started dying off. First one, and then a few more. Several more seemed sickly, and as days went on they grew worse not better. We took the sickly piglets back to our cabin to care for them, but each of them died. Except for one. 

We called the one who lived Hamish. Hamish was a pink little bag of bones when he came to live in my room. He had a scabby tail and droopy skin and he was violently incontinent. Piglets cannot regulate their own body temperature for the first few weeks of life, which is why in the wild, they sleep in a pile on top of their mother. But Hamish’s mother was sick (we’d later learn she had septic mastitis). and his brothers and sisters were dead, so I decided the best place for Hamish to sleep would be with me… in the bed. So under the sheets he went!  

Each morning we marched to the laundry with soiled sheets, and each evening I woke up to his shrill “EEEeeeeeEEEEE” multiple times, begging for a bottle. One evening, when I’d just showered and put on clean clothes, I picked Hamish up and put him in my lap, and he immediately had a bout of diarrhea. Sleep deprived and exasperated, I wanted to throttle him. But instead, I laid back on the floor defeated, leaving Hamish, marooned in his own feces. He crawled out of my lap and up over my stomach and came to rest with his chin on my collarbone. And in that moment, everything melted. All was forgiven.

Eventually Hamish's night squawking got us relegated to an abandoned attic room over the old camp lodge. Hot nights and wasps in the rafters joined in our daily routine. But no matter how much work Hamish proved to be, I fell deeper in love with him every day. 

The summer of 2009 was my sixth summer working at the camp. The camp property held layers of memories for me. My first kiss, my first love, my first excruciating heartbreak. I’d presumed 2009 would be no different. A fling at minimum; a summer romance if I was lucky. But as it turned out, I only had eyes for my pig that summer.

Hamish and I became completely inseparable. When the other farms girls and I would go for our daily skinny dip in Carson Creek, Hamish would plunge right in after us. When Fourth of July rolled around Hamish accompanied me into town and we sat side by side watching the fireworks. He joined in on all the farm chores and trotted close at my heels when we walked around camp. I started to have dreams of grandeur, that someday Hamish and I would hike the Appalachian Trail together. Everything felt possible.

The weeds in the garden were sky high that summer, but I'd wager we had the happiest pig in the county, maybe even in the whole darn world. September came, and I moved down the road to start a job at a school. Hamish stayed on at the farm. I came by on my days off to visit him and take him out for walks, which were nice, but ultimately a far cry from living together. 

Hamish, as the first syllable of his name suggests, was always destined to become dinner. I knew this from the start, but I fell in love with him anyway. It was impossible not to. I was out with students on a backpacking trip when I got the call from camp. It was January. Hamish was eight months old and a good 250 pounds. He was headed for market. I missed saying goodbye. Truthfully, I don't think I could have stood it. I'm a terrible farmer. Much too sentimental. You see, farmers are always dancing with the dissonance of loving that which they will eventually lose. In fact, we all are. And still we fall in love.

I believe in homegrown food. I believe in local meat. I believe Hamish had a wonderful life. I always knew that someday he would become someone's dinner, and I certainly knew that someone could never be me. Most of all, I know that on that June day when I first picked Hamish up, with his big eyes and his curious snout, love was no longer a choice. Love was just the reality.

What do we do with our pain?

When my grandmother was 74 years old, her leg was crushed under a golf cart, when the bridge she was passing over collapsed, launching her and her golf cart down into a small creek. Her friend, who she was out golfing with, escaped the fall with a few scrapes and bruises, but Maw-Maw, as I grew up calling her, had to have skin grafts and months of dressing changes following the incident, and her left calf was permanently scarred and dented.

In the days that followed the accident, personal injury lawyers kept calling her up and sending her gift baskets, trying to woo her. It would have been an easy case. Grandma falls when bridge collapses; a negligent golf course is to blame. Only, Maw-Maw wasn’t interested in a law suit.

In a society where you can sue for coffee being too hot, making the threat, empty or real of “I’m calling my lawyer,” is ubiquitous. Laws and courts exist for a good reason, but all good systems can be abused, and there is perhaps nothing we as a country have abused more than our legal system.

It is the place where we can turn with blame, rage, and anger that has no home—a place where we can demand that someone take responsibility for something senseless that has occurred. Only sometimes something is truly, totally senseless. Something bad happened, and there is genuinely nobody to specific to blame.

Most of us (myself included) are not very skillful at just sitting with the pain. It’s so uncomfortable we want to lash out at anyone or anything to try to escape, even just a little bit, from our discomfort. And we want to pin it on someone or something—as if finding the right target to blame will solve the actual problem.

If my family had a patron saint, Maw-Maw would certainly be ours. Several years after the golf cart incident, when she learned that she had an aggressive brain tumor, she turned to the assembled family members who’d accompanied her to the appointment, and said, “Let’s go get ice cream.” As a doctor, she had perhaps a better sense of the futility of treatment given her circumstance, and she chose, on the spot, the relish the time she had left—doing things she loved with the people she loved.

Maw-Maw’s internal compass was always oriented towards love. Even when she was in pain. Even when she was dying. And this doesn’t mean she was a doormat, letting people take advantage of her. Rather it means that she was ruled by her internal court instead of giving all her agency to wild furies that flew around her.

My grandmother has been gone for fifteen years now…a statistic that seems truly unfathomable. I didn’t know when I was sixteen, and she was dying, that I should ask her how she learned to sit with her pain. Perhaps it was such an innate quality in her that she couldn’t have explained how anyways.

It’s hard to know what is teachable and learnable in the span of a human lifetime. I could spend my next forty years trying to inch closer to Maw-Maw’s equanimity, and not budge from my starting block. But I do know, that her way of being in the world, was the best way I’ve ever seen.

There are times when people wrong us, and we have to stand up for ourselves—but there are other times when we'd do well to remember that some pain is just part of the human experience, and it’s blameless—and it belongs to everyone. This kind of pain does not require action. It requires stillness, and breathing into the moment, no matter how hard it might be.

Black Ice

I can count on my fingers the number of times I have driven a car in the calendar year of 2017. This is not a remarkable statistic for me; I’ve always been a reluctant driver, looking for ways to avoid being behind the wheel. As a 16 year old, my parents had to demand I pursue a license—I had zero intrinsic motivation to avail myself of the responsibility of maneuvering a giant hunk of metal at high speeds. And those feelings haven’t dissipated in the last 16 years. I am not on the whole a fearful person. I will happily spend a month out in the wilderness or travel to rustic places solo. Scary neighborhoods don’t generally scare me. Nor does public speaking. Or being emotionally vulnerable. But if you ask me to merge or make a left turn, I start to sweat.

I’ve never been in a wreck. I’ve never even had a fender bender or a speeding ticket (if I ever get it a ticket it will be from going too slow). I’ve just lived a life primarily in residential schools where daily driving was never a necessity, and now I live in a city where a car would be a liability, and so I’ve never become immune to reality that driving is fundamentally dangerous. Far more so than climbing a mountain or being lonely in a new country. 

There are however occasions, when it is worth it to me to get behind the wheel. The pursuit of quality time with friends in hard to reach places is generally the only thing that compels me in this direction. So this New Year’s Eve, in my compact rental car, I set off to Asheville, NC to ring in the New Year with some of the people I love best. The weather was slated to be clear and cold, but when I was about twenty miles from my destination a light mist started to freeze on the windshield, and within minutes cars were sliding down the interstate on a sheet of black ice. Everything slowed to a crawl. My car started to slide at one point, and my normal driving sweat reached unprecedented levels. As I crept into town, I passed by dozens of wrecks, each involving multiple cars, trucks, and even semis. I did what many, self-purported agnostics do, when death feels imminent—I started to pray.

When I made it to my friend’s house. I turned off the car, and sat in the driver’s seat shaking. I was lucky. It was clearly not my driving prowess that saved the day—I so easily could have been among those cars scattered like spilled marbles across the interstate. Before the black ice, my thoughts during the drive were focused on my plans—the friends I would see, the events we would attend. During the black ice, my thoughts were focused on all I have that I could so easily lose. I was flooded with gratitude, sitting there in my friend’s driveway, that I was one of the lucky ones.

To my chagrin, just a few hours later when the event we were supposed to attend was canceled due to weather, I found annoyance creeping up. My very important plans were being thwarted. The irony wasn’t lost on me; the reality that my flood of gratitude dwindled so quickly is troubling. We grasp the preciousness of life when we imagine we are on the cusp of losing it or when we are in the company of a loved one who is dying. But day-in-day-out that preciousness is cast to the back burner; the plans we’ve made feel like our birthright. It is pomposity on the grandest scale.

My friend and I, along with her two other friends who were taking refuge at her house, unable to get to their respective homes for the evening, rang in 2018 together. In the alternate universe of our minds we were going to ring in the New Year surrounded by hundreds of people singing Kirtan. But in the real world, we rang it in a far quieter way: talking in a small circle on the floor of her bedroom.

I love believing that I am in control, but that, along with the myth of invincibility is just a story. Each year is full of lessons, and I’m grateful for the final lessons of 2017: that gratitude is a choice you have to consciously make (most of the time), that control is largely an illusion, and perhaps most importantly… that good friends are genuinely worth the drive.

Writings on Robin’s Rules

As we move closer to the holiday season, it is worth spending time thinking, or re-thinking, our relationship to our stuff. In this vein, my mom, Robin, a former professional organizer and a long time armchair philosopher on the intersection of material goods and contentment, has written a sequel to her first book, Robin's Rules of Order. I was honored to write the forward to the sequel, Writings on Robin's Rules. It follows here: 

As a child, I sometimes chaffed under the strictness of “Robin’s Rules of Order.” When toys mysteriously “disappeared” (usually to Goodwill) or my mom was particularly upset by a mess left in the living room, I would tell myself that I would never care so much about order when I was older. By the time I was in college, I was the apartment-mate picking up my peers’ belongings left in our living room, and leaving little piles of possessions inside their bedrooms. The first time I engaged in this ritual, I realized, much to my horror that at the ripe old age of 21, I had already become my mother. Part of the gift of getting older is realizing that those things I hated as a child, actually had great value, and are in fact life enhancing and worth embracing in my adult life.

My mom will freely admit, that “Robin’s Rules of Order” are her personal credo and that they work for her because they are shaped by and for exactly who she is as a person. She offers them to the world as a suggestion, not as dogma. She recommends that each of us find our own credo, because having some rules for living, paradoxically breathes freedom into the areas where it really matters.

My own credo is of course, very informed by my mother’s, given that I was one of her first students. My ability to pack light is directly attributable to my mom. And packing light has afforded me the opportunity to live out of a backpack for weeks on end in remote wilderness settings, to move abroad for three years (and return from abroad) with two suitcases, and to pick up and move my life when opportunities have called. Not having literal excessive baggage has given me access to people and places that are heartbreakingly beautiful and mind expanding. Not having excessive baggage has fundamentally shaped and altered the course of my life for the better.  

While my mom is quite right to note that her rules are not universally applicable or relevant, she is perhaps too quick to humble her perspective. She has spent a lifetime studying, practicing, cultivating, and living enough-ism. I’ve seen her contentment grow as she’s moved closer and closer to this guiding principle, and I’ve reaped the benefits early of knowing I never hope to own so much that it would hold me back from accepting an invitation to live my life in a more expansive way. If Robin’s Rules of Order provides the skeleton, Writings on Robin’s Rules provides the flesh—ripe with wisdom for those who are willing to listen.

The Wind

I am not trying to
coerce the wind

Even if I could
the satisfaction
would be short lived

Holding a wild thing
hostage
always, ultimately,
breaks the jailer's heart

I am simply looking
for wind that is
blowing in my direction

Landing lightly in my hair,
washing over my skin...
freely, joyfully

moving towards me
and with me

Stardust and Special Snowflakes

“How does spending your days deep in the pursuit of understanding dark matter impact your mundane life?” I asked the physicist sitting next to me at dinner.

“Mundane life?” his wife asked, “He doesn’t have that!” she jokingly insisted.

“Does dark matter change how you think about buying toilet paper?” I persisted.  

“It does make you understand, on a very literal level that we are stardust. And that we are infinitesimally small.” “There’s a Jewish tradition” he went on to say, “that encourages you to carry a different slip of paper in each of your pockets. One that says, ‘I am but dust and ashes’ and the other that says, ‘for my sake the world was created,’ and I like that tradition. Studying dark matter demands that you consider the former, but of course there are times in life when you need to consider the latter. The point of the tradition is that you should reach into the pocket and pull out the paper that will serve you in the moment.”

If someone were to ask me to explain the inner workings of a toaster oven, I would have very little to say. So the idea that a person could begin to conceptualize dark matter seems truly wild to me. There are, of course, many kinds of intelligence, and precious few of us can have them all. So while I won’t be embarking down the path of physics in any meaningful way in this lifetime, I do want to know what anyone who operates in different fields of intelligence from the ones I call home, has to say about the world.

When I was younger my dad encouraged me to learn a second language—not solely for the practical reason that it would broaden my ability to communicate, but for the more philosophical reason that it would give me a new way to think. “Language constrains our thoughts—learning new languages gives you new windows into the world,” he said.

There is, in my mind, a different language that you have to learn, to be able to conceive of things as abstract as dark matter. And the gift I got at this dinner, was to hear a translation of this language in terms I could grasp: “I am but dust and ashes.” But, equally important to this wisdom, is the other slip of paper: “For my sake the world was created.” Certainly, in the world of physics, I would imagine this second statement is beyond ridiculous, but in the scope of the human experience it is profound, because we are driven to make meaning out of our dust and ashes.

Some of the people I love best dwell primarily in the pocket of “I am but dust and ashes.” Humility is a very attractive quality. But I’ve seen the detrimental impact of dwelling there too long—of forgetting the human capacity to generate meaning and to stand in wonder of your own life. For those people, the second statement, “For my sake the world was created,” is not about arrogance. It’s about worth and worthiness and remembering that having needs doesn’t make you needy. It’s about opening up to receiving, instead of just giving. It’s about setting down shame, and observing what is unique and genuine about the way their dust and ashes are arranged and expressed, and claiming that specificity, as something to celebrate and cherish.

The larger point of the tradition is not about choosing one slip over the other—it’s about learning how to choose both concepts, at the same time. It’s ultimately a tradition to work with the struggle of getting comfortable with the contradictions and conflicting truths that are part of the human experience.

Being and Becoming

This March I was in the audience for a conversation between my favorite Podcast host, Krista Tippett of On Being, and my favorite poet, David Whyte. Tippett was on tour for her new book, Becoming Wise, and Whyte was drawing her out on some of the themes of the book, as well as sharing his poetry. When it came time for the audience Q & A, I got in line to ask, what has become one of my seminal guiding questions. I prefaced my question by saying, that I’d recently turned 30, and that in looking back on myself at age 20, it was hard to imagine I was really the same person, but that when I flipped back through diaries I kept at age 13, I was shocked to realize, that perhaps I hadn’t really changed at all. So, I said, “Your program is called On Being, your book is called Becoming Wise…and I’m curious about the interplay of being and becoming.”

Tippett, is one of the thinkers I admirer most, and she’s spent years marinating in the wisdom of other great hearts and minds, so I had hope that her answer would be elucidating. It was. In essence she said, there is no soundbite reply to such a big question. She said, “The ‘becoming’ word is just as important as the ‘wise’ word (in relation to her book title Becoming Wise).” She went on to say, “and it’s [wisdom] not a destination. It’s a lifelong process and adventure….This phrase ‘old and wise’ fails us. There’s a wisdom that a four-year-old has, and there’s a wisdom that a 21-year-old has: this impatience and this ability to see the world as it should be, and this desire to throw oneself at it. That is a wisdom that the world needs, and that we need to accompany. So I think wisdom is something that is possible at every age, and that we cultivate, but it is absolutely a matter of becoming, not being.” For matters of wisdom, the idea that it is a process of becoming, resonates. But what about the interplay of being and becoming on the level of who a person really is?

When I created this website, I very intentionally chose Human Becomings as the domain name. The capacity to become is one of the most hopeful, affirming possibilities in the world. It is what breathes life into my former profession of teaching, and the vocation I’m currently working towards of mental health counseling. That we can become kinder, wiser, more patient, more loving, or any other host of qualities provides a sense of agency and direction that can be life-saving. And this possibility, which has long been recognized by ancient traditions, is now being supported by the science of neuroplasticity that has shown that the human brain can grow and adapt throughout the life-span. An old dog, can in fact, learn new tricks.

If so much can change, the question then becomes, does anything stay the same? Is there any thread of constancy that binds together a human life, and substantiates the claim that we are human beings as well as human becomings? Invisibilia Podcast hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, examine this question in the episode “The Personality Myth.” They start the show outside of the Superior Court of Washington D.C. on a June day, talking to couples who have just tied the knot—committing to lifelong partnership. When asked about their new spouse’s personality, partners are quick to list off the immutable qualities that make their partner just right for them. The general sentiments of the happy newlyweds were perhaps summarized best by Unidentified Man # 5, “Your personality is your core…that’s who you are.”

The Podcast, of course, calls this notion of a core personality into question. The clips of the joyful newlyweds are counterbalanced by a clip of a joyful divorcee, exiting the same Courthouse, calling out “Free at last!” And then the story turns to a group of inmates, incarcerated for atrocious crimes, who put on a TEDx Event inside the prison that includes ballet, poetry, singing, and talks—graceful, touching, sentimental performances that seem incongruous with the notion of their criminality.

After anecdotally challenging the notion of a constant core personality, the Podcast turns to Walter Mischel, the psychologist who gave us the well-known “Marshmallow Experiment,” which looks at children’s capacity to delay gratification—to not gobble down a marshmallow that they’ve been given right away, but to be patient and to wait for the promise of a future reward of a second marshmallow on down the line. Spigel says, “Over the last two decades, the marshmallow test has become a kind of poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that we all have inside of us that are stable and consistent and will determine our lives far into the future.” Only Walter Mischel, the psychologist who created and ran the experiment, says, this is a wild misinterpretation of the experiment. Contrary to popular interpretation, Mischel says, “your future is NOT in a marshmallow.”

The way the Marshmallow Experiment has been framed is in fact inimical to the real learning Mischel discovered from the process. “What my life has been about is in showing the potential for human being to not be the victims of their biographies—not their biological biographies, not their social biographies—and to show, in great detail, the many ways in which people can change what they become and how they think.” He explains that the part of the Marshmallow Experiment that never airs, is the part where you tell the child who is tempted to eat the marshmallow right away, to simply imagine that the marshmallow isn’t really there, and this simple cognitive reframing, allows most children who wouldn’t have delayed gratification, to be able to do so. Mischel says that your mind is the gateway that allows you to mold the same basic raw material into different shapes and forms. The mind allows for ever expanding permutations and expressions of a basic personality, caught in a specific social construct.

For most people it is not too much of a leap to say that our “being” doesn’t live in our physical body. We know that our cells, our basic physical building blocks, are quite literally different every seven years. We see the ways our bodies grow and change and fall apart and morph in a very tangible way. Many would say, our seat of “being,” lives in our minds. That are minds represent the thread of constancy. Others would say that our seat of “being,” lives in our hearts…a core of emotional constancy. But emotions and thoughts, if examined even for just a short amount of time, are anything but constant. They are racing, rushing, changing entities.

I spent a month at a Sivananda Ashram this summer, and each morning and evening as part of Satsang (a Sanskrit word that means, “gathering together for the truth”), we would sing various mantras, songs, and chants. One chant, called the “Song of Will” answered the question of being and becoming from the yogic perspective. It starts out by listing all the things we are NOT, which per the Sivananda Yoga tradition includes: body, mind, intellect, emotion, energy, and ego. These things are not immutable; they shift and change. The core, per this tradition is: “satcitananda,” which is Sanskrit for “existence, knowledge, and bliss absolute.” Satchitananda transcends a limited human experience—it describes the divinity that is everything, when the limiting factors are stripped away.

Each tradition—be it religious or scientific or cultural—has its own answers for being and becoming. Outside of the philosophical realm, this question has plagued me on a far more granular level. As someone who feels at home in so many disparate contexts, I wonder if I am adaptable or just disingenuous. I wonder if I have honed my capacity to become, at the expense of my capacity to be. Each year, nominally for work, but mostly for my own sanity, I go into the mountains for a month. This extended time away from such a high velocity of inputs and pushes and pulls gives me the chance to just be. This summer, out in the most exquisite field of wildflowers I’ve ever seen, I made my peace with my understanding of being and becoming. It’s unsubstantiated by science, and unbacked by religion or philosophy, but it is shaped by all of these. For me, the highest truth has always lived in poetry, and so that’s where my answer to this question lives too: “A Chameleon with a Core.” My nod to the interplay between being and becoming--a dance made graceful by the interaction of the sweeping, beautiful movements and the quiet, stillness that punctuates them. 

Hope

When I was living and working in Switzerland there was perhaps nothing that pushed my buttons more than hearing from people back home about how wonderful my life must be. As if chocolate and cheese were somehow an immutable barrier to suffering or unhappiness. This presumption that I was living the dream added an extra layer of guilt to what were, in fact, quite difficult years in my life. Difficult, because in some fundamental ways, my work in Switzerland was out of alignment with several of my core values, and staying put meant stifling parts of myself that I didn’t really want to stifle. But leaving was even more complicated than staying, and full of heartbreak too, so it took some time to get up the gumption to go.  

In response to these Pollyanna-ish remarks from well-meaning friends and family, I developed a distaste, and then a disdain, for people who seemed to solely focus on the positive. Their optimism didn’t feel joyful—it felt invalidating, myopic, and somewhat stupid. The optimistic mindset felt like it left out a huge swath of the human experience—grief, heartbreak, uncertainty, disillusionment. Optimism in some very important ways felt in conflict with reality.

But, cynicism, it turns out, seems to be in conflict with reality too. The notion that the future is grim, and all doom and gloom is just as myopic as dwelling in the land of optimism. Both presume constancy, which is out of touch with the reality of evolution and change.  

Part of this is a debate of semantics. My definitions of optimism and cynicism occupying the extremes of a spectrum do not align with how many people use these terms, but for my own internal lexicon, I’ve been wanting to land on a word that is large enough to hold both the dark and the light. Krista Tippett, in her book, Becoming Wise, offers the word “hope” as an antidote to these other more reductionist terms. She writes: “Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes a spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

This concept feels large enough and nuanced enough to invest in. David Foster Wallace, in his famous Commencement Speech, “This is Water” says this: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

Choosing your altar is critical and life defining. I don’t worship at a religious altar or at the altar of science. One seems too content to overlook and the other too impelled to overcome the fundamental irrationality and limited scope of the human mind. I want an altar that acknowledges that we cannot know the full story, that in life, in the words of the poet David Whyte, “everything [both good and bad] is waiting for you,” and that the redemptive thing we have as humans is the capacity to approach this wild world with a willingness to be surprised, and to be humbled and uplifted by that which we do not know. "Hope is a choice, that becomes a practice that becomes a spiritual muscle memory.” Hope has to be cultivated. It is an altar you build—not one that you can inherit or buy. I don’t want to spend any more time paying homage to the altars of optimism or cynicism—both feel flat. Hope, on the other hand feels like a choice worth making, again and again.  

The Boring Things

“So I have to get better at the boring things?”

“Yes. You have to get better at the boring things: being on time, picking up your trash, and making sure all of your gear is inside the tent or your backpack before you go to sleep each night.”

So went my check-in with one of my students on the backpacking course I co-lead this summer out in Wyoming. He was a precocious 14-year-old—with a wry sense of humor. He was tall and strong and could run up a mountain with more ease and grace than I could. He had perfected back country baking (no easy task), and he was already adept at reading topographical maps. Additionally, he was a charismatic leader (if controversial at times). But he was categorically unskillful at the “boring things” (his label). Of course, being on time and picking up after yourself are rarely a teenager’s priorities. And objectively, they are fairly boring tasks—cleaning up spilled macaroni doesn’t really supply the adrenalin rush of summiting a peak. But these lessons…these unsexy, every day, boring lessons…were, in my mind, the most important lessons he, and all of the other students on the course, were getting to learn.

In our final week of our month-long backcountry trip, we were moving towards greater student independence. As such students were responsible for planning the next day’s route and navigating and traveling on their own through the mountain terrain. The evening prior to one such independent travel day, I reviewed the map with the student leaders, fielding their questions and making sure they picked a thoughtful route and next campsite. We were at one of those annoying junctures where our travel had us moving through the corners of four different maps. In order to more easily read the maps we had origami-ed them together, and laid them out on the ground in our "kitchen" area of camp. The map review went smoothly. The next morning however, after a night of hard rain, we woke up to find that the carefully connected map sets had not made it into a tent overnight, and were a pile of paper pulp.

In the backcountry, there is no quick fix for lost or damaged gear. Some fixes you can MacGyver with tools in your repair kit and some ingenuity, and other things (like pulpy maps) you can’t. And this reality, is actually a great lesson in the truth of the natural world. In privileged, modern day America bumping up against resource limits is a rarity. The closest most of us in this sector of society come to limits is an “out of stock” notice under an item we want on Amazon. But “out of stock” is just a temporary condition. There is no larger sense that someday in the not too distant future we are going to be “out of stock” of some of natural resources that really matter: like fossil fuels and fresh drinking water, for instance. And the party line is, “Don't worry, by that time we’ll have the technology to fix the problem,” but I think that’s a fairly risky and myopic insurance policy, and one that I personally have never had full faith in.

That morning of the wet and pulpy maps we didn’t end up leaving camp until 3pm. Students ended up sharing the one dry map set and traveling as one large group (which isn’t ideal for Leave No Trace wilderness ethics). The morning languished in camp was slow and tedious. A resource issue quickly evolved into interpersonal group issues—a common progression. And by the time the practical logistics had been sorted out, the group had descended into a funk the color of blame and frustration, which necessitated a group meeting. 

Blame is such a classic response to frustration. Blaming someone else, blaming yourself, blaming the world. And while blame might feel momentarily cathartic, it’s efficacy as a response is fairly short lived and unhelpful, because at the end of the blame game, you still have a soggy pile of maps to deal with.

A backpacking course is a fairly ideal research lab to really understand the value of the boring things. To realize that the small actions you do or don’t take can have large consequences, not just on your own life, but on the lives of everyone around you. So many of us are isolated from this reality in our daily lives because the consequences of our choices are veiled by distance and time.

I love standing with my students on the summit of a mountain, or watching them reel in their first brook trout, but the longer I work in the backcountry the more I love the mornings where it is rainy and messy and the oatmeal is burned and stuck to the bottom of the pot and the maps are a pile of pulp. Because these sticky moments are so ripe for learning. Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh famously says: “No mud, No lotus.” This wisdom is far more accessible when you are witnessing your students in their permutation of mud, knowing that a lotus awaits on the other side of their struggle. Keeping that faith when you are in your personal mud pit is of course harder.

My “mud” this summer was waiting for me on the backside of my wilderness course. More and more, coming in from the wild is far harder than staying out. But I’ve been out of the woods for a month now, and the mud is starting to clear, reminding me that good people and good work are not geographically bound…that a lotus flower I can’t yet imagine is emerging. In the thick of the mud it is hard to appreciate the boring, the hard, the sad, and the frustrating things. But eventually, sometimes years (or lifetimes) later, the fragments come together in a way that finally makes sense and is quite beautiful. 

Chameleon with a Core

I am a chameleon with a core
My shell shrinks and grows
Soft, then firm, then soft again

One Christmas I am
taking bucket showers
At a humble home on
the banks of the Ganges

The next I am
plucked and polished
Champagne corks punctuating
the rhythm of the waltz

The statements: 
Everywhere is home
and
Nowhere is home
are both true

I am like the wind
shifting to fit
whatever shape I find
Carrying whichever
fragrance I come across

And also, there is a
Core in me
Quite unlike the wind

Something solid
and lasting
and eternal
That moves with me
through each of these worlds

It is the pulse
in the hearts
of the harem
of women
I carry in me

A core radiating
love and connection

Sometimes it is a whisper
sometimes a roar

But even in the
fiercest wind storm
It is there
beating like a metronome

The one thread
of constancy
In an ever-changing
world

The Moose

There's fire in the mountains
Morning looked like one of those
Pixelated sunrises
over the Serengeti

Only instead of endless flat
It was a dusty orange orb
Rising over rocks and pines

Smoke and clouds
rolled into camp all day
Close enough to notice
Far enough away to be ignored

A day ticked by
spent in a field
never going further
than the nearby lake

And now night is
closing in
Faint lines of orange
mixing with smoke
on the horizon

And in the fading light
A giant moose dips her head
into the lake

Splashing...delighting
in the cool water on her legs
the skim of warmth
on the surface
that greets her velvet muzzle

On the bank her calf looks on
A young student
in the art of joy

The Meadow

I have never been so in love
with the texture of a place
The way the blue bells clump
along the stream
that trickles through the meadow

the splash of yellow buttercups
that rise and fall
over gentle mounds of grass

The proud bistort
lifting their white heads skyward
each in varying stages of ascent

And then a pop of purple
All set against massive grey canyon walls
Carved out by time and elements

The softness of this meadow
The magnificence of these peaks
This perfect early morning breeze

Making the flowers sway
Backlit by the coming of day
Each dancing to a slightly different tune

Years can pass without seeing
a beauty like this
But when you find it
You realize this what your soul
Was asking for

Karma Yoga

We've been told that when people would arrive to the Sivananda Yoga Farm Ashram when it was first founded seeking wisdom and guidance from Swami Vishnu-Devananda he would send them to the garden to weed or to the kitchen to do some dishes. And maybe after a few months the teachings (in the permutation that the aspirants were initially seeking) would begin. In yoga you don't start with the heady philosophy or even with the asanas (the physical postures that we often call yoga). You start with the dishes, or the weeds, or the trash, or the dust. You start with Karma Yoga--the yoga of selfless service. You start here because through selfless service you begin to eradicate the ego and it's twin brother selfishness, which per the yoga teachings is crucial for reaching enlightenment.

Selfless service by definition demands that you put the needs of others first. By practicing selfless service you also learn the hard lesson of detachment. Your good actions might not yield the results you hoped for, but if you are truly engaged in Karma Yoga then your focus is on the "actions, not the fruits of the actions," as elucidated by Krishna in his teachings to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. 

So that's all very well and good. It's the Yoga parallel to the Golden Rule, found in various permutations in various religions and philosophies many times over. But what's different here at the Ashram, from so many other contexts where I spend time, is that people are truly training in this path--in the Karma Yoga path. The Ashram functions in a tangible way because there is a staff of Karma Yogis who work here without days off or a paycheck. The recompense (at least of the variety that most of us would recognize) they get is a place to pitch a tent and two meals a day. The intangible recompense is of course the teachings, the community, the distance from the rest of the world. But in watching them and talking with them, it's clear that recompense is not their priority--that they are in fact seeking to diminish it as a priority to the point that recompense isn't even a thought in their heart or mind. They are, as you would imagine, remarkable, if unusual people. 

As part of my Advanced Yoga Teacher Training course I am engaged in what I'll call Karma Yoga lite. A fellow classmate and I sweep the Yoga Hall and set up meditation cushions for class and evening Satsang (Sanskrit for: "association with the wise") each day. Our assignment, objectively speaking, is one of the easier ones. On the first day of the course when we were assigned our duties a Swami cheerfully told one of my peers that he was going to be the "colon of the Ashram," in other words: the garbage man. In any case, we each have our duties that take about an hour to complete. The naysayer would look at this and call it extortion--we are after all paying customers here. The moralist would call it a sham--assigned (and required) selfless service is a bit of an oxymoron. But I think the truth is closer to this: we are being asked to stretch and strengthen the muscle of selflessness. A couch potato who is an aspiring runner doesn't start with a marathon; he/she starts with a couple of red faced, ugly, gaspy, sweaty miles. And then it builds. The service starts as a requirement and somewhere along the way you get glimmers of selflessness. My peer who I clean the Yoga Hall with is one of my favorite people at the Ashram--and if for no other reason than to ensure I don't leave her with more work, I do want to do my work well. And sometimes, I can expand the circle wider than just the two of us and include the Ashram as a whole. 

I have worked in two other contexts where the principle of Karma Yoga was in play under different labels. The Outdoor Academy, a semester school where I formerly taught, had a "work crew" that was a core part of the curriculum, right there alongside geometry and Spanish. Students and faculty alike were responsible for keeping campus facilities clean and functioning. Teaching my students how to scrub a toilet was as important as our classroom discussions on environmental ethics--more important perhaps. Because it was in this "in the dirt" learning that the ethical concepts, which we could read and discuss ad nauseam, really came to life. You don't need to read Garrett Hardin's essay on Tragedy of the Commons when you have a peer who was lazy during his wood chopping work crew, and the fire boxes are empty, and the wood stoves are stone cold. That learning quite literally goes into your bones. 

NOLS, the outdoor leadership school I work for in the summers calls their version of Karma Yoga "Expedition Behavior." The premise is the same. Your expedition's needs come first. Notably, you have to take care of yourself in order to be able to care for your group. But in the students' (and leaders'!) minds this sometimes gets distorted into a justification for lavish self care. Suddenly, when there's a tent to take down and a pot with oatmeal residue to clean, a student might realize that they have to massage their foot before the hiking day begins. This is of course a perversion of self care--a crucial concept that has been crucified by marketing. If your self care regimen leaves you no time to care for others then it has crossed the bridge from self care to self indulgence. In the midst of a 30 day wilderness expedition where the relativity of what counts as an indulgence shifts so radically from the front country, it's easy to confuse the two concepts. But when we don't...when the group is really working in the mentality of Expedition Behavior...it's magic. And interestingly, there is more time for, and less need for, self care in this kind of group. 

Most of us intrinsically understand selfless service of the people we love best. We are less skillful at extending the mentality to those we don't love or don't know, and even less skillful at serving those we dislike, or even hate. Social scientist, Adam Grant, explores the idea of generosity in the workplace in his book  Give and Take. He posits that most of us adapt one of three attitudes towards generosity in the workplace: a taker, a matcher, or a giver. Through his studies he has found that givers in the work place are present at the extremes of the success (as defined in the business sense) continuum. Givers are among the most successful and the least successful with takers and matchers generally falling in the middle. If your hackles are rising, fine. I also know plenty of takers who seem to be having their cake, and eating mine and yours too. And Grant acknowledges that there are takers at the top, but what he says is that successful givers who rise to the top are less likely to crumble (because they have the authentic support from those they have helped along their way) and that a person with a giving orientation at the top acts in such a way that others benefit from their success and so the success multiplies and grows. Takers on the other hand can truly make a work place toxic, causing scarcity mentality and encouraging everyone to hoard resources, talent, contacts, and expertise. Of the unsuccessful givers, Grant says this: they have not learned to be discerning in their generosity, and so they are taken advantage of and they burn out. 

I was curious about this concept of discernment in the context of the Ashram and Karma Yoga, so I asked the Swamis how they react to laziness  (or malice) in other people. One said: You stay out of judgment, and you try to maintain the mentality that the person you perceive as lazy is acting to the best of their ability in the moment, and you keep giving them opportunities to serve." This suggestion is of course monumentally hard to follow. I can think of various distinct instances in my life where I was livid because I felt like I was picking up someone else's slack. Unsurprisingly, I can think of precious few where I was the cause for someone else's frustration. This is not because I am ready to be canonized as a saint--quite the opposite. Like most humans, I am better at remembering the times I was slighted than the times I was doing the slighting. Perhaps something to think about when I am diving headlong into judgment (one of my favorite swimming holes, as it turns out). In response to this same question a different Swami  said: "You have to see the other person as yourself (one of the key teachings of yoga is unity of all things), and from this perspective give compassionate feedback. And then let go of the hope that they will put that feedback into practice." In a later lecture this same Swami pointed out that you can't teach people who aren't already seeking out the teaching.

Only the truest aspirants would stick around the Ashram doing the dishes for months (or years), because they know that the dishes have lessons to teach, and maybe once they've learned the lessons from the dishes, they'll be ready to receive what the Swami has to say.  

While I am not staying at the Ashram to do more dishes after my course ends, I do know, on an intuitive level that the Karma Yoga teaching is right. That lessons of the soul start down in the dirt and muck before climbing higher. That those machines in the Skymall magazines of yesteryear that promised a suction cup powered by electricity would jiggle your belly fat away were an unadulterated crock of shit. There is no just add water recipe, no silver bullet. Just hard work, which is remarkably satisfying if you let it be.   

Mother’s Day

When my parents were young, Mother’s Day was marked by the color rose you wore pinned to your church outfit—a red rose meant your mother was living, white meant she was dead. My mom’s mom died when she was fourteen, and she hated the rose tradition. Not only did she lose her mom, but she also had to wear her private grief publically, pinned on the collar of her dress. I certainly understand her distaste for the antiquated tradition, and also, I wonder at the damage caused by not publically acknowledging that holidays, particularly perhaps Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, are devastatingly hard for many people for myriad reasons.

Charles Dicken’s oft quoted, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is perhaps the truest description of holidays for most of us. I was thinking yesterday about all the people I know who fall into the white rose category—either symbolically or specifically. Friends whose mothers died before they got to drop them off for their first day of kindergarten or who weren’t in the audience at high school or college graduation or who didn’t get to see them walk down the aisle or who will never meet the first grandchild, or the second. Friends whose mothers cannot be there for the less glamorous, but vitally important, day-in-day-out parts of life. I was also thinking about my friends whose moms are still alive, but who are unavailable because they are either too mentally or physically ill or too scared or too damaged by their own life to be fully present for their child’s life. And I was thinking about my friend’s who want to be moms and who aren’t because pregnancy has been complicated or the right partner hasn’t come along. I was also thinking about the moms, who have given everything to their children, and been snubbed or abandoned by them anyways. Or perhaps the most painful—the moms who have buried their children, at any age, under any circumstance.  

And when you start to think about all those people then you realize that right there pulsing beside the wonderful tradition of honoring and showing gratitude for the women who bring us into the world is a throbbing heartache. And that heartache doesn’t get acknowledged in the card shop or by the florists or by the restaurants offering bottomless mimosas alongside your Mother’s Day Brunch. And that oversight—that myopic focus and lack of nuance—is a kind of salt in the wounds.

I celebrated when I turned thirty, delighted to be turning the page after so much turmoil in my twenties. When I turned thirty-one this year, I felt, for the first time, that sense of urgency that if the stars don’t align sooner rather than later, I’ll miss out on being a mom altogether. And so while, I am lucky enough to be the daughter of an incredible woman, with every reason to celebrate Mother’s Day, it’s also become a day tinged with my own particular flavor of sadness. And I don’t need anyone to tell me to have faith or to trust in modern medicine—those aren’t the altars where I worship. I worship at a nexus of reality and hope. And the reality is this: I might not be a mom. And not all pregnancies are joyful. And moms who walk out, might never come back. And dead moms and dead babies are certainly not coming back from the grave.

Not all stories have happy endings. Some do, but they are not the only important and worthwhile ones.

I am not advocating for a return of the rose tradition on Mother’s Day. I don’t think the Hester Prynne model of wearing our shame or our fears or our sadness quite literally on our sleeve is the way forward because not everyone deserves to know our rawest, most vulnerable parts. But I feel certain that ignoring them altogether, and only paying attention to that which is good and happy, is a kind of sickness that we should strive to avoid.

The Farm

The farm is a giant mandala
Weeds you pluck today, are back tomorrow
A belly you filled then, is hungry now
The peas you picked have grown back

And you should rejoice
That the animals and peas are growing
That the soil, fertile for weeds, is fertile for crops

But instead you want to scream
STOP
For just one minute
STOP

And sometimes you do
When you’ve just laid down the fresh hay
And the calf has the indecency to soil it again
Before you even leave the stall
You pause and lean against the wood panels
Of the old barn

And then you feel a kinship with Sisyphus
Pushing a boulder
Going nowhere
But striving with all your might

And you consider Mary Poppins
Industrious and curiously cheerful
In the presence of a never ending mess

And for a brief moment
You understand why
The monks destroy
The mandalas
That take so long to build

And you realize that
The calf is your Tibetan master
Not your prison guard

The Social Climb

Every human group has a social ladder, even if the group’s core value is decrying the horror of a social ladder. In the city where I grew up, your rank grew with the size of your house, the number and make of the cars in your driveway, and the shine of your stuff. In the outdoor world where I’ve spent much of my young adult and adult life, your rank grows with how far, how fast and how hard you climb or run or bike or boat. In the little mountain town that is my chosen home, your rank grows by how much do-gooding you do and by how fervently you pursue personal growth. In the part of Boston, where I live now, your rank grows by the number of academic diplomas you’ve accrued, and who issued said diplomas. Each group has its distinct currency. There are many places I have not lived and thus many social ladders whose rungs I am unfamiliar with, but I do know that each place I’ve gone that is inhabited by people, there is a social ladder. And each ladder is—at least for me—in some ways enticing and in some fundamental ways repulsive.

Modern day philosopher, Alain de Botton explains this phenomenon in his book Status Anxiety in this way: “Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.” This second tale—the more secret and shameful one—is the quest to gain status.

Botton’s book examines how the western world has defined status for the last several generations, and how it reached such a fever pitch with the birth of the idea of the United States being a meritocracy. This myth of meritocracy is so firmly lodged in the American psyche that to question it is to question the bedrock of the country. But like all stories we tell ourselves, this one is only true for certain people with certain circumstances. Yet because it’s in the groundwater, it feels like an immutable truth that everyone in the United States can indeed pull him or herself up by those bootstraps and clamber right on up to the tippy top of the ladder. There are enough such stories that the truer reality—of success being a confluence of privilege, luck, timing, and a pinch of ingenuity—gets lost in the roar of the American Dream. Prior to the idea of meritocracy, if you were a person of low societal status, you could blame your lot in life on circumstances beyond your control, but as Botton says, “to the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now adds the insult of shame.” Not only are you of low status, but also it’s your own damn fault that you are all the way down there at the bottom of the ladder.

In his poem, Desiderata, Max Ehrmann poignantly notes: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” Yes. A thousand times yes. Comparison is a curse I carry very close to my heart. I am a champion comparer. A gold medalist at this point--I feel sure, and I know I'm not alone in this misery making footrace. But I do not think, with all due respect to Max Ehrmann, that it is an IF you compare yourself, but rather a WHEN you compare yourself. Comparison, 'thief of joy' that it may be, feels rooted in human social fabric.

While you can’t fully escape status anxiety, you can find a new group, and you can consciously exchange your old social ladder for a new one that reaches in the direction of different virtues. But the ladder does remain, because, as social creatures, part of our individual story is defined by how we live in relation to others. Another tactic, besides swapping ladders, is that you can try to covet status less. Perhaps some truly enlightened souls can arrive at a state of not caring a wit for what society thinks of them, but for us mortals, the aspiration is likely going to be to soften, rather than to vanquish, comparison tendencies. I fundamentally mistrust anyone who says they’ve moved beyond comparison. Of course, I think some people are more skilled at the important practice of cultivating self worth than others, but any self-reported flawless track record invites my skepticism. As Botton says, “Nothing could be nobler, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else.” And that commonality includes wading in the muck of desiring status.

My life trajectory has been erratic. I’ve dipped my toe in many ponds, and settled in none. I know I don’t want my social ladder to be one of material wealth acquisition, but I say that from a position of wealth, so if all my resources burned up, I’d likely be singing a different tune. I also know that I’ll never run fast or far enough, or be physically daring enough, to earn acclaim in the outdoorsy world, though I will persist in that world as a mediocre performer because I love it. And while I love the virtue of the do-gooders, the humorlessness that sometimes accompanies this ladder can be truly insufferable (and I say this from a place of knowing how devastatingly humorless I can be sometimes). This is the ladder where people decry the ladder, without realizing that they are on their own set of rungs made slippery by the blood of bleeding hearts.

So picking a ladder, it turns out, isn’t so easy. I suppose ultimately you choose the ladder or ladders that you think are less bad and more in tune with your soul, and hopefully don’t forget that the ladder you are climbing is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.

And what of this possibility of softening? Of caring less about what the world thinks of you? Botton states: “We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.” Humor it seems is the answer here. Developing a greater sense of humor about how small, insignificant, and terribly un-special, even the most special among us are.

David Whyte, my favorite poet, said this in a public conversation: “I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid 40s or 50s…But another step of maturity is actually realizing that the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go. That you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up, and make way for something else…” I do not think that Whyte was endorsing a group swan dive off the proverbial cliff here, but rather was doing what the most skilled artist do best: getting us to see the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be, and allowing us to see the beauty (and importantly the humor) in that reality.

So Many Kinds of Love-A Reading List

Connection is biologically hardwired. It is fundamental to our survival as a species—if not mammalian babies would surely be abandoned. When you strip away connection a baby is just a screaming mass of needs and demands with nothing to give and everything to take. But biologically, we are wired to love and care for our offspring—to take the long view—and to attend lovingly to that tiny human until it passes safely through its most powerfully needy phase into more subtle and nuanced needy phases.

This survival necessity provides a clear biological explanation for the purpose of connection, but the roots of connection are deeper still. Connection does far more than just grease the skids on the baby-propagating machine. It is, for most of us, what gives meaning to our lives, well beyond those first years when our survival is most obviously tied to another human.

There are so many kinds of love that we can experience in a lifetime. The German language alone has thirty distinct words for different kinds of kisses—and kissing is just one expression of those many kinds of love. It would be impossible to catalogue all of the kinds of love that exist in this world, but what follows below is reading list that speaks to some of the most prominent categories of this most important part of the human experience—of the connective tissue that ultimately gives meaning to our brief lives.

1. The life-giving love of authentic friendship. Friendship is remarkable because it is so voluntary. No DNA chains attached. Just two people who connect at a soul level—making the unbearable more bearable and the light all the brighter. Nobody captures this kind of love more aptly or more beautifully than Truman Capote in A Christmas Memory, where he chronicles the friendship between an old woman, Ms. Sook, and a young boy, Buddy.
   

2. The devoted love of a pet. Human animals can be so incredibly cruel, and sometimes it is the love that crosses the species barrier that is the most healing balm. It is not an accident (I think) that Dog and God are anagrams, for I have met far more dogs than humans who dwell in the realm of sainthood. The devoted, undeserved, unfailing love of a beloved pet is captured in Eleanor Atkin's Greyfriar’s Bobby, which tells the true story of Bobby, a devoted Skye terrier, who sleeps for years on his master’s grave—an old shepherd who would have died alone, if not for the company of Bobby.
   

3. The dedicated love of long-time partnership. This audacious kind of love aspires to much, and is perhaps only truly experienced when the aspirations are crushed and both people choose to remain anyways, giving time for something greater than the first blush of new love to take root. Two books speak powerfully to the evolution that occurs in long-term partnership. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea describes the three marriages that exist within a long single marriage—that each iteration has its time and place, and that in the end all are just right and beautiful. And Alain De Botton’s The Course of Love: A Novel which, similarly arrives at the conclusion that people are only ready to be married after they’ve "enrolled in the curriculum" for years; when they have arrived—not to the promise land—but rather to a delight in the reality of what it means to live a life intimately with another.
   

4. The fierce and eternal love of family. Mary Karr, a memoirist, once said “A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” This sentiment gets at the complexity of a love that is wrapped up and weighed down by chains of DNA. Sometimes the dysfunction is too much, and the only way to save your own life is to initiate the painful process of breaking away from the chains, but for those of us who are lucky, the chains don’t really feel like chains at all—but rather like the benevolent tether that keeps us moored in this wild, fast spinning world. For this reason, Jeannette Wall’s memoir, The Glass Castle is especially striking. The family life she describes is in many obvious ways deeply dysfunctional, but what pulses louder and clearer than the dysfunction is the fierce and eternal love that exists within the family. It is a shining example of what it means to love someone even while you hate them, and to know that the circumstances of a life can be restrictive in a multitude of ways, but that those circumstances cannot constrict the boundless edges of love.
   

5. The hard-won love of reality. For many this is the hardest love to achieve, because it doesn’t respond to roses or Milk Bones or apologies. It requires the laying down of fantasies about how life should or could be, and accepting life as it is, in this moment, without excessive wailing or head banging—without despairing defeat. Byron Katie’s Loving What Is offers a roadmap and philosophical underpinning to arriving at this kind of elusive, hard-won love.

And perhaps the book that sums up the messy, hard to define, giant concept of love best comes from Margery William’s children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit. In this story the little stuffed rabbit and the stiff Skin Horse are discussing what it means to be real. And this notion—of realness—is by necessity at the heart of true love. 

“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

A Soft Beginning

I have often approached the New Year with an ambition to tighten up: tighten my waistline, tighten my budget, tighten my unruly life. These New Year’s Resolutions are heavy with residue from a Puritan cultural heritage and reek of the “keeping up with the Joneses’” mentality. And not once has one ever stuck. And that is not because I’m a quitter. In fact, in most areas of my life my “stick-to-it-ness” is over the top. I’ve finished marathons on knees that were screaming for the last ten miles. I’ve stayed in jobs for years that I knew were bad for my soul. I’ve spent sleepless nights finishing projects that didn’t really matter all for the simple reason that quitting wasn’t an option I gave myself. So why, if I can muster up the resolve in all these other instances, have my New Year's Resolutions all been spectacular failures?

I’ve been wondering about this in the days leading up to January 1, 2017, and I don’t have an answer, but I do have a hunch. The word “resolution” comes from the Latin past participle stem, “resolvere,” which means, “to loosen.” In my mind resolve and resolution are about hardening, holding tight, being firm, and steeling oneself, but that is just baggage that I (and many others) have heaped onto the term. If you peel back the layers all the way to the core, you arrive at: “to loosen” or “to unbind.” And I think missing this core concept—of loosening—has something to do with my history of failed resolutions.  

Most notably I’ve spent years cultivating a practice of being hard on myself. I’ve gotten the same feedback since I was in elementary school: that I need to be less self-critical and more self-compassionate. While I admired self-compassion in theory, I spent years wondering whether it wasn’t just an excuse to be lazy and complacent. A way to explain away days spent on the couch eating Hostess cupcakes and watching reality TV. But I understand now that self-compassion and self-indulgence are not even in the same family.

There are three terms I’ve learned over the last few years that lend heft to my understanding of self-compassion--grounding the term lest it float away on the winds of pop psychology.

The first is Wabi Sabi, a Japanese term described by Buddhist author Taro Gold as “the wisdom and beauty of imperfection.” This aesthetic and philosophy is hard to define in English, in part because it is so inimical to our notion of beauty, but it is easy to understand when you see a Wabi Sabi piece of pottery—simple, natural, and perfectly imperfect.

The next term, Metta, translated as lovingkindness, comes from the Buddhist tradition. Again, the concept defies translation, but the marriage of the words 'loving' and 'kindness' into one run-on word is intentional. The traditional practice of a Metta begins with a mediation where you extend lovingkindness to yourself, and then gradually widen the circle to include those you love, then those you feel neutral towards, and then those you dislike or even hate. While it might seem that the last step—of loving those you hate—is the most impossible, I think the first step of extending love to self is frequently harder but nonetheless crucial to the success of the successive steps.

And the final term comes from the German tradition—Schadenfreude—a pleasure that is derived from seeing another’s misfortune. If this seems incongruous with Wabi Sabi and Metta, it’s because it is. To a large degree. But not entirely. The Germans, so frequently cast as stern and unrelenting, have (I think) the most fine tuned sense of humor. I love a culture that can call a spade a spade, and moreover can laugh about it.

So there are the terms: Wabi Sabi, Metta, and Schadenfreude. And here’s what I’ve gleaned: find beauty in the imperfections of your life, love yourself and others, and maintain a sense of humor about your broken, dark parts. I think these facets of self-compassion are the true building blocks of a resolution—or a loosening. They are not however the materials we are trained to reach for as we dream up all that we will accomplish in this next trip around the sun.

I know how to pick up the whip and crack it on my own back. What I’m less skillful at is setting the whip down. But the whip is broken. It’s never gotten me where I want to go, so I’ve been learning how to retire that tool over the last few years. Last year a friend introduced me to a new tool: The Desire Map. This tool conceived by Danielle La Porte is a way to reframe the resolution making process by focusing on your “core desired feelings.” Your core desired feelings capture the essence of how you want to feel across all areas of your life, and they serve as a kind of internal compass once you are aware of the points of your personal compass rose.

I think I’ve landed on my core desired feelings for the coming year(s). They are feelings I've been thinking, and occasionally writing, about for the last few years, and probably longer. My core desired feelings are: joyfully connected, content, expansive, and alive. I know this sounds a bit like a description of an Edible Arrangement. Schmaltzy and trite. But it isn’t. This, I’m convinced, is the yellow brick road to sucking the marrow out of life. Here's hoping for a soft start to 2017 and a heartfelt path in the years ahead moving towards the things that really matter. 

The Empathy Tool Box

This Christmas, my gift is: The Empathy Tool Box, for those people out there who perhaps subscribe more to the stiff upper lip school of emotionality, but who have people in their lives who they love, who live in the land of feeling all the feelings. I've read (or watched) each of the resources that follow dozens of times, and the ideas within are now stitched into the fabric of my being. When paired, I think they make a comprehensive Empathy Tool Box, to be put to use during the trying times. 
 

THE TOOL BOX: 

1. THE DEFINITION OF EMPATHY (NOT WEBSTER'S...BUT ONE THAT GETS RIGHT TO THE HEART OF IT) :

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.”

— Pema Chodron

2. UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY:

In this short animation, Brene Brown describes the fundamental difference between these two related, but wildly different concepts. When someone is in grief, they need empathy—sympathy will actually make things worse. 

3. KNOWING THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY

Empathy is about connecting with another person's feelings (which are universal...hence the connection can be authentic), but it is important to remember that you can never fully understand another person's particular story line (even if it seems quite similar to your own, even if you love them more than anyone else, even if you really, really want to). Nowhere is this concept more beautifully stated than in Brian Doyle's exquisite essay, Joyas Volardores, in which he writes: 

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.

— Brian Doyle

Empathy is about flinging the windows wide, wide open, but knowing that you can never fully immerse yourself in another person's inner world. This is a lonely thought, and also a truth. It is damaging to presume that your beloved's grief is a replica of your own.  

4. UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF A NON-EMPATHIC RESPONSE (OR: HOW TO NOT KICK A DOG WHEN HE'S ALREADY DOWN) 

This is crucial, and the importance of knowing what not to say (because it's usually what we say that get's us into trouble) and what not to do, cannot be overstated. There are two readings that speak powerfully to this truth. The first, is a letter and response from the Dear Sugar Advice Column (now gone book...Tiny Beautiful Things). Cheryl Strayed (Sugar) responds to "Stuck" a woman who miscarried six and half months into her pregnancy. Stuck closes her letter with this: 

“My daughter, she had a name. She was loved. I feel like the only one who cares. Then I feel like shit for mourning “just a miscarriage” after nearly a year. I’m stuck.

— Stuck

Strayed's response, which is best read in full, like the letter that prompted it, includes much wisdom, but this particular line stands out as the wisdom that is essential to The Empathy Tool Box: 

“Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over any thing. Or at least not any thing that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away.

— Cheryl Strayed as Dear Sugar

Feeling grief is okay. Feeling grief on your own timeline is okay. It's just people who are uncomfortable with grief who make it not okay. Don't be one of those people. Better to do nothing than to cause harm. And better to be empathic than to do nothing. 

And, this heart wrenching pair of letters is complimented by blogger, Tim Lawrence's Post: "Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason," which gets right to the heart of the words and behaviors that harm instead of help. The antidote to the "emotional, spiritual and psychological violence" caused by a phrase like: "everything happens for a reason" is the truth, kindness, and wisdom in this lifeline of a phrase: 

“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

— Tim Lawrence

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Say it, sing it, write it--this is the mantra of Empathy. There is no return to a magical land of "before" or "normal" when something terrible happens. Perhaps, with time, your world grows large enough to hold your grief and joy side by side, but the grief never vanishes. Being an empathic support is a life long commitment. Nothing organic (like feelings) is linear. The natural world move in circles, so it stands to reason that while Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us a more nuanced understanding of grief, her linear model could never stand the test of time.