Grace in Small Things – 9

We love Windsor Folk open mic nights and the quarterly showcase nights as well as the concerts that bring in Canadian talent from all over, but some Fridays we are just too beat by a long work week and end up retiring early instead.

I’m SO grateful and happy that both of us found ourselves with enough energy yesterday to keep to our plan for date night.

We got to MacKenzie Hall early and found there was some excitement going on in the gallery, so we had to check that out before finding our seats for the music. Interestingly, there was another music event in the adjacent room, a talk called How Cape Breton Music Came to Essex County, an interactive music lecture hosted by local Cape Breton fiddler Kenneth Macleod, who traced the steps of the Cape Bretoners as they made their way to this area and influenced local music and culture. It’s good I wasn’t aware of that beforehand…I would have been torn!

• The mail art exhibit in the Common Ground gallery. WOW, neat! (See photo below) The call for submissions said “ open theme, open size, open technique, no jury, documentation to all!” I was inspired both by the art and by the democratic and organic nature of the mail art phenomemon.
• Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It always stirs my heart.
• A wee lassie named Marissa who will be five years old in April wiggling and twirling and leaping to the music, a glossy mop of dark brown hair framing her porcelain-coloured tear-drop face.
• Sitting across from my sweetheart at Marukin–a Japanese restaurant new to Riverside–sharing tempura and sushi. I’m so so so happy happy happy this restauranteur decided to move his establishment from Essex to Windsor recently.
• Stuffing my jacket pockets with flyers and postcards for upcoming exhibits, a new eatery called Biscuits and Gravy Southern Bistro and the latest issue of The Scoop (Windsor’s alternative newspaper) and realizing I am starting to love this city.

Grace in Small Things – 8

• Meeting a new friend at WMG tonight
• Having the burden of a difficult claim decision lifted off me, which left me giddy the rest of the day
• My sweetie taking a pair of my pants for mending and dropping them off again after
• The 85% dark chocolate bar that was dropped off with the pants
• Finding this quote: “If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint…and that voice will be silenced.” –Vincent van Gogh

A Stab at Hesse

Ok, for you folks who wanted a translation of the poem. It’s a HARD one. I really hoped to find a translation on the web somewhere, but it’s not one of his more popular ones. Keep in mind that for me to come up with a translation that also rhymes and keeps a consistent metre from line to line could take months or prove beyond my abilities in this lifetime. So you will have to make do with a rough translation, rhyme and metre out the window.

I remember my German teacher telling me she got the feeling the poet was walking home after a party, dejected at unrequited love, received once home by his little house, his bed, the lamp. The last two lines are so deftly worded in German, but impossible to put into English without losing both meaning and artistry. Too bad.

Coming home late at night

smitten, spurned, graced by no kiss

and in the blanching skies to see

where Orion sadly earthward sinks

And then home, greeted by light and bed

resigned to being lonesome and left out

lured hither thither by heavy desires

longing for sleep, dream, solace

Complete sorrow over a life wasted

mining the shafts of memory

and knowing that we are given but one consolation:

forced to live, we’ll be allowed to die

Oh, Ambiguity

Today’s lojong card said to me this morning: “whichever of the two occurs, be patient.”

The back of the card contains Ani Pema’s elaboration: “Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.”

I carried this with me into my day. I needed it.

Last night after supper, I did a leeetle bit of venting about my job. I am just now understanding another facet of my brain and personality that make me a less than perfect fit for my current position. I hate ambiguity. Yes, yes, I know. Comfortable with uncertainty… life is messy… the moment of your death is not going to be tied up in a neat package, with all the details firmly under your control.  So get used to it!  I know.

But…

I LIKE working with data, numbers, math. I like it when there is one right answer.

One of my downright favourite parts of my last job was when the sales reps came to me saying they had a half million dollar sale, but it all hinged on our being able to get the enrolment info typed onto 500 forms for the plan members. Our forms were not automated (the competitor’s forms were). Ours were hard copy only, to be filled out with pen.  Because the marketing managers so badly wanted the sale, I stayed late one night and pulled out my ruler. I began measuring each of the little boxes on this form.  I built a grid in MS Word that exactly matched the pre-printed form down to fractions of millimetres. I put in the merge fields for first name, last name, gender, earnings, and so on. When done, we would be able to feed our forms through the printer and they would come out pre-filled, saving a whole plant full of steel workers–many of whom do not read English well enough to complete the forms–from having to do more than sign the bottom.

The next really fun part came when the sales reps would send me the data that the potential client had provided from their payroll system or spreadsheet or whatever they had. Each file was different. Some were missing key pieces of data, which I could sometimes build or extrapolate from other pieces. Oh, it was challenging. But that was the fun of it…coming up with solutions to seemingly unsurmountable problems.

Scrubbing data files was the same. I loved coming up with macros to catch all the different problems that can make a file corrupt and break our nightly batch run.

The thing I loved about that job was that every problem had a right answer. It wasn’t a matter of judgement or morals or right or wrong or wrecking someone’s life. No grey area. No worrying that today’s decision is going to turn into tomorrow’s 20-minute heated discussion with a broker trying to get you to reverse your decision. No. If you stay at your desk long enough,  you can find the problem with the data file. If  you’re clever enough, you can fix it and upload a clean file by midnight so that you’re not greeted the next morning by dozens of phone calls from angry plan members coast to coast whose drug cards suddenly are not working.

In my current job, every problem does not have one right answer. Most do, but there is still a lot of grey area. No matter how long I sweat over some claims trying to find the right way to adjudicate them, I still get called to my supervisor’s desk to be shown the error in my thinking.

Normally this is fine. We are all a team and we are learning together how to apply myriad policy clauses to real life events. But this week it seemed I could do no right. I started to feel picked on. If I took initiative, it backfired on me. If I tried to stay under the radar, it backfired.

I awoke this morning having left a particularly difficult claim decision hanging, to continue today trying to get my supervisor to see my way of assessing it. I am not an especially forceful person unless I really love and trust the person I am grappling with.  I could have been very forceful with my superior at my last job because I loved her, respected her on a professional and personal level, and trusted her completely. I knew she always had my back, and in return my loyalty to her was so fierce that I once even promised her I would not ever quit so long as she was still our captain. I kept that promise, too.

But with my current boss, I will tell her “here’s my concern.” But if she disagrees, I’ll then say, “Ok, well, then you need to reopen that invoice for me so I can deny it.” I back down easily. To me, the discussion starts to feel too much like a power struggle. I don’t like those.

The lojong card was just what I needed to get me through today.  I was able to reach that place of peace and loving detachment.

Here’s the cool part. After having acquiesced, I ended up being able to pay the claim I had spent the night worrying about.

Finding Hesse

When Sylvain and I were in the Muskoka area this past fall, he sent me up a very tall lookout tower to take photos of the view. On the way to the top, I saw this bit of graffiti:

I’m not talking about the RC + JS. No, look on the ledge under that where the sun in shining.

There are many great authors whose work I have not read. For many years during my youth, if anyone told me I absolutely HAD to read x book or see y movie, my response was “I don’t HAVE to do anything.” Pure rebellion. I just didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing or read what everyone else thought was mandatory reading. I missed out on a LOT of good stuff this way.

A page of a magazine looks up at me with its list of Five Books Everyone Should Read at Least Once. I have not read one of them. Not Lolita, not any T.S. Eliot. Not Waiting for Godot (does seeing the play count?), no Thomas Merton, not Things Fall Apart by Achebe.

While getting my B.A. in Spanish, there was a lot of required literature. Somehow being assigned to read for a class circumvented my rebellion response most of the time, and so I have read in the original all the greats of the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages, Baroque, Renaissance and Romantic periods right up through the Magic Realists–novels, essays, poetry and prose included.

In German class, we read Hesse, but only his poetry. We often were assigned poems to memorize before panels of judges at festivals and competitions. I was 16 or 17 years old when I committed this one to memory.

O so in später Nacht …

O so in später Nacht nach Hause gehn,
Verliebt, verschmäht, von keinem Kuß beglückt,
Und in die bleichen Himmelsfelder sehn,
Wo der Orion traurig erdwärts rückt!

Und dann daheim, von Licht und Bett empfangen,
Sich niederlegen einsam und betrogen,
Von schweren Wünschen hin und her gezogen,
Umsonst nach Schlaf, nach Traum, nach Trost verlangen,

Voll Trauer über ein verschwendet Leben
In Schächten der Erinnerungen schürfen
Und wissen, daß nur Ein Trost uns gegeben:
Dem Lebenmüssen folgt das Sterbendürfen!

I remember reciting it over and over while I walked alone through the woods, snot running down my face. It was during a language immersion weekend at a camp. I was on a top bunk in the girls’ cabin, and I was crying myself to sleep. Frau R. asked me what was wrong and I blubbered on about the poem and how I knew what the author felt. As I remember it, my teacher–calling me by my German class moniker–said something to the effect of, “Oh, no, Christel, don’t be silly. You’re young, ….”

But that’s the last I remember of Hesse.  I didn’t read Siddhartha when Eddie Frothingham told me I just had to. I didn’t read the Glass Bead Game when it struck my girlfriend so deeply that she had to name her cat Magister Ludi.

Where is all this going? Four days ago he popped up again. There among the shelves and shelves of worn out romance novels and this weekend paper’s flyers and circulars,  Steppenwolf appeared. I remembered the graffiti on the lookout tower. How could I not oblige someone who feels deeply enough about this man’s writing to carry a can of paint up eight flights of metal steps?

Grace in Small Things – 7

• the smell of cedar wood in the heat of the sauna
• opening my eyes under water with no sting because it’s salt water
• finding the blog of this kindred spirit (thank you, Andrea)
• waking with the aspiration to keep an open heart and an open mind all day, and ending the day feeling I succeeded
• sharing my veggie masala and quinoa and baba ghanoush with Sylvain

Grace in Small Things – 6

• opening cardamom pods one by one and grinding the seeds with mortar and pestle
• watching a little gold and red hill of spices grow as I measure out turmeric and paprika, fennel seeds and coriander into a tiny glass bowl
• rubbing spices in my hand to wake them up, tinting my fingers golden yellow
• laughing at Garrison Keillor’s new song about Barack Obama
• the fact that I don’t mind Mondays at all

Vegetable Masala

I didn’t manage to finish cooking all my dishes for the week yesterday, so the job spilled over into tonight. The apartment smells sooooo good now. The burner has been turned off under the veggie masala, so it is just cooling off so I can put it away.

I’ve made variations of this recipe three or four times now, I love it so much. Here is the recipe from Barbara Cousins’ book Cooking Without: Recipes Free from Added Gluten, Sugar, Dairy Products, Yeast, Salt, Saturated Fat. (Suitable for the Control of Weight, Candida, Chronic Fatigue and Allergies.)

• 6 to 8 cups selection of vegetables, such as: cauliflower florets, leeks, carrots,broccoli, celery, onions, zucchini, parsnips, green beans, sweetcorn
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp garam Masala
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1/2 tsp fennel seeds
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/3 cup creamed coconut
• 1.5 cups boiling water
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 2/3 cup ground almonds

1. Cut the vegetables into shapes which will cook in roughly equal times. Sweat the vegetables in the olive oil until they begin to soften and brown.

2. Add the spices to the pan and sweat for another 2 minutes.

3. Dissolve the coconut in the boiling water and add to the vegetables along with the lemon juice, ginger and ground almonds. Stir to mix.

4. Simmer for another few minutes until all the vegetables are just cooked. Add a little more water if the mixture startes to become too dry. Serve with rice, millet or quinoa.

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My favourite veggies to put in this are zucchini, cauliflower and peas. Tonight I used potatoes, peas, zucchini and Brussels sprouts. The combinations are endless. I like to whip up a chutney to go with this, like raisin chutney. This dish goes best with basmati rice, if you ask me.

Oh, and a great tip on ginger. Did you know the easiest way to peel ginger is with a spoon? Skin comes right off. Keep a peeled ginger root in the freezer (you can wrap it in foil) and it will be ready to grate into any recipe or fruit smoothie. It grates so easily when frozen.

Grace in Small Things – 5

I want to apologize ahead of time if I get repetitive over the next 360 Grace posts, but what I’m finding is that I feel blessed every time I sit down to a meal. I know I am very fortunate to live in a country and a time when the market shelves are brimming with lush produce. I love the ritual of selecting, smelling and bringing home lemons, heads of garlic, shiny aubergines, puckered mushrooms.

I have never been homeless, though I do remember a few nights spent outdoors when I was hitching around Europe and three hungry days in Tokyo after I had left Sapporo and forgotten to take the $100 bill my mom had sent me out of the prayer bead drawer of my Butsudan and put it in my bag for the journey back to America. Xavier’s brother had packed me  hearty sandwiches for the time I would spend in Tokyo fulfilling a promise I’d made to my friend Shailesh to try to find a long lost pal from his days as a Zen monk.  But the mayonnaise in the sandwiches quickly went rancid in my warm backpack and spoiled them. According to Shailesh, the monestery would have to give lodging to a wandering stranger. He must not have been thinking about my gender. I think that was what prevented the gatekeeper monk from letting me in. The monk did give me directions to the house of the lost friend, who was no longer at the monastery, but when I got to that house, the housekeeper told me that the man was away for a couple of weeks and closed the door.

I also remember my last day in Europe, having barely enough money left for the bus ride back from Newark to Little Rock, wandering Gatwick in search of meal trays left behind with food still on them. My thanks go out to people too lazy to take their trays to the garbage can.

Are those experiences to credit for the gratitude I feel every time I pull out my wallet in the checkout line, open the refrigerator or pantry door, or drizzle oil into a frying pan?

• Thin slices of eggplant sitting on a glass dish in the kitchen, a layer of salt leaching out the bitterness.
• Indulging in one of my favourite pastimes: taking myself out to the movies. I saw Frost / Nixon.
• That none of the men over at the marina (within view of my balcony) has fallen through the ice while fishing through the holes they saw in it. I hope they are being very careful.
• Learning to walk slowly and mindfully with every step in and around the bathroom since befriending the little family of silverfish. This is especially challenging in the middle of the night, but I’m getting in the habit now of reaching for my glasses before I step out of bed.
• A serendipitous book find in the laundry room, which I’ll talk about soon.

Grace in Small Things – 4

• Overcoming last-minute dread and going through with my plan to attend the lunar New Year buffet at Linh Son Temple at the behest of my coworker and friend Rachel. She was curious to see what it was like inside.
• My decision to tell Sheila and Gerry about it; they came, as did one of the meeting members they told about it on Wednesday. The angels arranged it so that they pulled up just as I did and parked next to me, which was very good since I was too chicken to go up and enter the temple by myself.
• So many delicious Vietnamese dishes, like: green worms in coconut milk soup with red beans; green beans infused with the essence of cilantro; deep fried baby eggplant; glass noodles in sesame oil…oh, yum! I’m just kidding about the worms. They were not really worms, of course. Everything was vegetarian.
• Bowing to a 100-year-old nun.
• Laughing and bouncing all the way home in the car, saying, “that was so fun, that was so fun!”

Suki Interviews Me

Suki:  You have a strong connection to Persia and things Persian.  What sparked this interest and how has it affected your life?

Kelly: The Iranian Revolution resulted in a few Persian families popping up in my area. There was a new girl in my gym class–Afsaneh. Neither she nor I liked to participate and the teacher blessedly allowed us to spend a lot of time up in the bleachers together, where she taught me to say and write a few words in Farsi.  I came across more Iranian students when I was a sophomore at UALR in 1982 or ‘83.  This particular group attracted me for a few reasons. They were warm, intellectual, welcoming and they loved to talk about poetry and Marxism. How could I resist that combination? At that time I was in love with languages and took at least one semester of every foreign language offered on and off campus, including Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German and Spanish. So naturally I tried to learn Farsi, but at that time there were no good books or tapes available.  Fast forward to 2003. I was recently separated from my second husband (the one for whom I moved to Canada) and noticed there was a growing Iranian community in Waterloo. I decided to try once more to learn Farsi and signed up for Saturday school alongside the children of immigrants. That eventually brought me into the heart of the Iranian community, which I blogged about here. I still get a chuckle when I think about that night.

For me the biggest impact on my life has been an ability to see how slanted American news coverage is when it comes to covering issues that involve countries whose people or whose leaders do not kowtow to the American agenda. Surely my own view is also biased, as I’m not sure there is such thing as pure objectivity.

Suki: You often mention your love of movies.  Name three movies you would recommend for us to watch and why.

Kelly: There are so many films considered ones you must see before you die that I have not seen yet. But now that Sylvain has subscribed to zip.ca, we are ticking them off one by one. Can you believe I’ve never seen Casablanca?

• Babette’s Feast – if you don’t mind films that go deeply and unhurriedly into character, story and landscape, you might like this film. If you are also foodie, you will love this film.
• The Piano – I think this one resonates with a lot of women, but especially with those of us who have sold our souls in relationships. We learn to survive and prostitute ourselves until we can get free, but getting free…finding our way back to our soul is more important than breath itself.
• Gandhi – because his story proves the power of non-violent resistance. I saw it at that so crucial point between childhood and adulthood. It changed the direction of my life and beliefs.

And a few just for fun: Me and You and Everyone We Know, Amelie, Smoke Signals, Talk to Her

Suki:  Recently you began meditating with a local meditation group.  How has this commitment impacted on your life, your spirit, your outlook?

Kelly: Do you remember the Solomon Asch study from psych 101? All of my life I’ve marched to the beat of a different drummer. Well, my brother would tell you I have my own rhythm section. There is no way to measure the impact of finding a group who validates my values, my reality.  It’s sanity saving to have a group of people I can be 100% authentic with…a group with whom I never have to hold back what I really want to say. I can share anything with Sheila and Gerry and not have to worry about getting that look. You know…the look that means the other person thinks you’re a wack job.

It is very lonely when there is nobody in your world who understands why you won’t squish a bug. It is comforting and reviving beyond words when you find a someone to whom you could say, “every day I practice dying,” and the other person wouldn’t even need you to explain what you mean by that.

Suki: While reading some of your older blogposts I came upon your words “my mystical experience.”  What can you tell us about this experience?

Kelly: I told the whole story here. Every once in a while I have an experience that is similar, though about 1/1000 as life rocking as the first time. It’s hard to talk about because the experiences themselves do not lend themselves well to description in words.

Suki: Fairly recently you moved from one Canadian city to another.  On reflection, what was the most significant and powerful aspect of this move?

Kelly: Without a doubt the most powerful aspect of this move has been to drive me more deeply into my spiritual practice. It has made me look at my former life with distance and perspective and see what I thought was “me” was just personas. Though we have to have personas to get along in society, this move has allowed me to see them more clearly for what they are. I can now play with stripping away layers of them consciously.

The new situation has given me a chance to know myself better. It has taught me that happiness can be linked to circumstance, but we have so much more power than we ever realize to create happiness by becoming aware of ego, watching ego, and–with patience and compassion for ourselves–aligning more with that in ourselves which is not ego.

Finally, this move is about being in a relationship with Sylvain. I would like to think I am learning more than I previously have about the art of staying.

If you would like to be interviewed:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me”.

2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions).

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Work

We have a reading material exchange area off the laundry room. The other day I picked up a few old issues of O Magazine. An article in the September 2005 issue called Getting Unstuck got my attention. Suzy Welch poses five questions to help you decide whether to stay in a job and give it your all or get up the gumption to move on to something else:

1. Does this job allow me to work with “my people”–individuals who share my sensibilities about life–or do I have to put on a persona to get through the day?
2. Does this job challenge, stretch, change, and otherwise make me smarter–or does it leave my brain in neutral?
3. Does this job, because of the company’s “brand” or my level of responsibility, open the door to future jobs?
4. Does this job represent a considerable compromise for the sake of my family, and if so, do I sincerely accept that deal with all of its consequences?
5. Does this job–the stuff I actually do day-to-day–touch my heart and feed my soul in meaningful ways?

Wow, eh?

Lots to think about.

The first time I read through the questions, all I could think was, “So THAT’S what’s going on…that’s why I’m not happy.” My first reactions were just that…kneejerk reactions. Yes, I put on a persona just to get through the day. My brain is in neutral. It doesn’t open any doors. It pays less than I was making before. Rarely do I handle a case that feeds my soul in a meaningful way.

But then I decided to experiment. I was laying out the dress I would change into after work for Folk Music night. On a whim, feeling a bit daring, I decided to wear the long hippie dress to work. Why not? It’s clean, it’s pressed.

I felt happier all day.

I decided to experiment again. What if–instead of looking for a different job where I can work with people who are more “my tribe,” I poked and prodded at my definition of “my people.” Maybe if I think of myself more as a human being and less of a this type or a that type–any given subset of the human race–then I will feel more at home among my coworkers. We are all members of the human tribe.

Can we experiment with #2? I could, if I chose to, get quite a bit more out of this job in the way of knowledge.  I could take the medical terminology class, and/or I could take medical transcribing and learn to read all those funny doctor shorthand squiggles that we currently have to ask the RNs to decipher for us. Certainly I find medicine fascinating. That could make me more employable in a number of other jobs that call on the same medical knowledge.

Number three: I’m not sure yet. We are purchasing a new system, scheduled to go live this year. Maybe a business analyst position will open up in IT when that happens.

As for four, not really. I don’t have to work weird hours or commute a long way. The pay isn’t great but I’m getting by. The benefits pale when compared to what I had before, but that’s more a disappointment than a “sacrifice.”

Five is the hardest one. This is the factor that drives me back to the want ads again and again through my life. I want to do something that leaves me feeling I make a difference, a significant contribution to the planet. But if I think outside the box, this one is workable, too.  At least for now, I could volunteer a few hours a week and derive my “I’m making the world a better place” satisfaction there instead of between 8:30 and 5:00.

PS Coming soon: Suki Poet interviews me.

Woke up Happy

Grace in Small Things 3:

• Waking up without the slightest trace of my usual morning angst. Feeling completely at peace. Bouyant, even. Maybe going to bed early was a very good idea.
• Sherried black bean soup that I cooked up on Sunday, with gluten-free bread Sylvain made just for me.
• Underground parking (no scraping ice off the car)!
• When I roll down my window and say, “hey, buddy,” a squirrel comes right down from the tree to get the peanuts she knows I’m about to toss out.
• Finding out that Random Kindness is alive and well and living in Windsor.

My supervisor has recently had several experiences of being told that she doesn’t owe anything for her coffee, the person ahead of her paid for it. She came to work giddy, telling us what a rush it was when she decided to do the same and hand over her money for the person behind her in the drive-through.

Grace in Small Things 2

I went to the pot luck.

And so the small graces in my life today were named Rose Marie and Neil and George and Marion and Ed and Donna and Gus and Dorothy and Helen and Alice and Dora and Bev and Ted.

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In my last post I talked about neuroplasticity.

Yes, maybe sometimes I am too serious with it and too hard on myself. But I strive to be a better me. Changing myself for the better is something I find very exciting. It’s especially exciting when I can measure the changes, can really see them happening when I look back six months or a year.

I am not the same person I was before my purple bracelet came along. (Thank you Patti Digh and Christine Kane!) I also owe a debt of gratitude to my new teammates. They just are not gossipers. At my last job, we sometimes bonded over a bit of lunchtime gossip. I often felt bad afterward. I expected more from myself. Some years I even set a New Year’s resolution not to do it anymore. But I failed to keep that promise to myself more than one year.

It amazes me as I look back to how difficult is was to get through my first complaint-free (gossip-free, criticizing-free) day. I’m not about to tell you that I no longer ever criticize or complain. You know I sometimes slip into moanful wistfulness for certain aspects of my life in Waterloo. But now the status quo is not complaining but rather to work with what is unless and until I am ready and willing to work toward a change. The slips are the exception now, not the rule.

Pema and her little lojong cards are helping me, too. Today’s says, ” Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your own happiness.” The back commentary says, “Don’t build your happiness on the suffering of others.”

Yesterday’s was “Don’t bring things to a painful point.” You know…like when you’re in a position to humiliate someone or get them back, don’t use that power. Don’t rub it in.

I read this sign as I get dressed for work. ME? I don’t even need to read such a sign. I would never do anything like that, I think.

Today I was tested and the test was so much harder than I ever expected.

Today I was–by sheer accident–put in a position of power over someone who wronged me a few months back.  She wronged me and many others in her oblivious disregard for our privacy, for routinely making public confidential personnel matters entrusted to her. Today a highly sensitive personal phone message was mistakenly routed to my extension instead of hers.

I am not proud to say that the temptation to share her secret is strong. But then I realize that it is not stronger than my resolve to walk a path to ever higher ground.

Frontiers of My Brain

The link Patti sent me of the interview with Dr. Norman Doidge about his research into neuroplasticity just blew me away.  He keeps referring to our “use it or lose it” brains. What he is talking about helps explain why I–when I overcome a long-standing fear–have to keep doing the formerly scary thing or else it becomes scary again. My brain slips back into the old tracks. Of course I think if I stayed in the new tracks long enough, the new behaviour would become my new nature.

It takes time and repetition.

Out of Doidge’s collection of amazing stories, the one that stuck with me was the one about a woman who has a constellation of severe learning disabilities. This woman was very low functioning and dependent on others. One of the glitches in her brain made her unable to read a clock. She had a speech impediment, could not understand double negatives in language, could not follow plots or story lines.

She worked a helper with flash cards. On one side of the card was a picture of a clock face, on the other side the time it represented. The work was gruelling. She kept at it for hours, days, weeks, months.

The breakthrough came.  I know I’m not doing this video justice, as that was a very late night way past my bedtime and I was glued to it and falling asleep at the same time. So you’ll have to read up or listen for yourself.

The bottom line is that there is a paradigm shift taking place in the fields of science and medicine. Under the old model, we thought that someone with brain limitations like the woman above should find work-arounds in order to function with the disabilities. Now we are finding that rather than letting the brain off the hook and finding a way around the disability, we should be forcing the brain THROUGH. Teach it to do what it cannot do.

I find this stuff thrilling.

I have long been fascinated by neurology. When I was 24, I couldn’t get enough of Oliver Sacks. Had to special request some of his books via interlibrary loan.

Well, I didn’t go to medical school and I didn’t become a neurologist. But guess what? Nobody can stop me from experimenting with my OWN brain. :) I don’t need a medical license to do that. It’s my brain. And I’m not cutting into it. I want to see just how far I can go using non-invasive methods alone.

The woman Doidge talks about in the video makes it clear. The reshaping of the brain oesn’t come easy. It’s hard work.

But with a nod to Annie, I promise to give myself a break.

Right after brain boot camp.

:)

Grace in Small Things 1

A couple of days ago I was invited to join a group called Grace in Small Things. I think I am supposed to post five things every day for 365 days that have graced my life, either that day or ever. Well! I don’t know if I can manage a post every day, but I definitely can talk about at least five small and not so small graces of every day. Almost every day.

Yesterday I was overcome by amazement as I stared at my refrigerator.  There is a gorgeous card from a pen pal that has travelled to me from halfway around the world.  I have never seen this dear friend’s face, but if she needed a place to sleep, my house would be her house.  Next to that is the photo that just arrived from Gloucester, Mass. A few years back my cousin married a man from Africa, and this Christmas photo was my first time to see his beautiful face and the face of their little boy, who looks so tickle-able, I wish I could reach right into the photograph and squeeze him! Below that is a card I just received from Elspeth. The photo on the front is of a bananaquit sitting in her hand. When I look at the collage of friends on my frig door, I can’t help notice all the lovely shades of skin…from my cousin’s husband’s very dark skin to my cousin’s skin that’s pink like mine and every shade in between. That makes me think of the two weddings we attended this year. At the first one we were surrounded by the groom’s Jamaican family (boy, do they know how to party) and the bride’s Italian family. At the second one, we saw Italian relatives mixing and mingling with their new Iranian in-laws.

I look at the collage in my kitchen and it hits me! A few months ago I was feeling lonely and isolated. But I am surrounded.

From here my reverie travels to Washington DC. Have you watched America’s first couple’s first dance? Sylvain sent a link so I could watch it. (Not having TV, I am not yet as saturated by too much coverage as some of you may be. I did manage to see the inauguration during my lunch hour.) What moved me even more than watching America’s new HOT first couple dance was watching the way Beyonce looked at them, and the short interview with her afterward. Fighting back tears, this young woman said, “he makes me want to be smarter, he makes me want to be more involved.”

Everywhere I look, barriers are coming down.

======

Every month or so the social committee in the condo community where I now live hosts an event of some sort so residents can mix and mingle. I missed the November and December ones due to conflicts, but decided I would skip Meditation Group this time in favour of meeting my neighbours. My landlord’s account of his first and only foray to one of these events did not deter me in the least. I do not mind being the youngest person in the room by a few decades.

Yesterday I was in the elevator with a gentleman whose cap was decorated with WWII veteran insignia.

“Are you coming to the potluck tomorrow?” I asked him.

He said he was not coming.

“Ohhh, you’re going to miss my Aunt Catherine’s famous corn casserole,” I warned him teasingly.

“I have a conflict,” he said guardedly.

I looked into his face. He hesitated as if weighing whether to open to me, then continued:

“I go and sit with my wife every night. She is in long term care.”

I was struck. This is what I used to do when my 96-year-old friend Miss Olive had to go into a nursing home. Right at first, when she was still adjusting, I went every day on my lunch break to make sure she ate. I remember how many people did not have family to visit them even once a month, never mind once a day!

I stared at him with awe and new respect. Huge respect.

“You go? You go. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

I think I caught him off guard, the way I just stared then, my eyes welling with tears.

“Well, we’ve been married a long time,” he said. I could almost see the memories passing across his line of sight.

His floor came too soon. I wanted to say more. I’ll save her some corn casserole, I wanted to say. You can take it to her.

But he was already exiting. From the hallway he looked back at me one more time, a smile coming to his face…like something fresh…like a shadow lifting off of him.

And Above All, Keep a Sense of Humour…

This may inspire Sylvain to buy a Super Soaker.

Fear, Part II

Excerpts from an email to a friend:

Today I’m not feeling down. I made myself swim. The dance I do with myself is so ridiculous. I sit here and make all sorts of excuses not to swim. I get this inertia going that is like being chained to a rock. I don’t want to leave the apt. I want to go online or do my crossword puzzle or snuggle in bed early or eat a snack and another snack. WHY WHY do I put off the swim? Never ever has it failed to leave me feeling great after! It leaves me feeling good physically, mentally, emotionally and proud of myself for going. So why, oh why is it always a struggle to get off my ass and walk down there? Grrrr.

Yeah, I am missing Waterloo but some days I do feel optimistic about this town. My friend from work (the one I invited to the movies as one of my Be Brave acts) has invited me to check out a Buddhist temple in town for the buffet they are offering for the Chinese New Year. And Thursday the winter instalment of the Windsor International Film Festival starts up with a good French film that won a Golden Globe.

It was funny because when I first posted about experimenting, you were one of the few who understood what I meant. The readers who were saying to focus on fun stuff, I felt didn’t “get it.” Why do you think I’m trying to stretch outside my comfort zone? Because that’s where all the fun stuff is…out there in the world! LOL. But now I see they had a point. Just by focusing on the word “fun” and the concept of fun, I’ve started having more fun just today. While swimming, I said to myself “I’m having fun.” And it was true! Normally I watch the clock and make myself continue for 20 minutes. This time I just realized it was fun. Well, what a great experiment! The hypothesis: if you intentionally look at an activity as fun, does it become more fun? If you ask it if it’s a particle, it says yes, I’m a particle. If you ask it if it’s a wave, it says yes, it’s a wave. The observer changes the observed.

Tonight was meditation group. Sheila talked about a television special series running this week about the mind. She talked about synapses firing and firing until a neuron forms. This is like a behavioral pathway. For a few thousand years eastern philosophers have understood about habituation and overcoming habituation; now western science is catching up. You can retrain the brain, is what Sheila was saying. Each time you crave a snack, you might think to have ice cream. But if you instead give your body an apple the next dozen or three dozen times, you will create a new neural pathway so that in the future when you crave a snack, your mind will think, “apple please.”

We can do the same with anything. We can create loving kindness neurons, she said.

Today at work the administrative helpers who have done my phone calling for me for the last several weeks were too busy with other work. I did my own calls. I noticed that in the work setting, anyway, I can now make those calls without the slightest hesitation (time for anxiety to build) before I punch the number. When I started the job, those phone calls caused me stress and tummy aches. I’ve been successfully desensitized to that formerly anxiety-provoking act in THAT CONTEXT. Now, who wants to let me practice calling them up to invite them to do something the three dozen times it might take for the same desensitization in the personal context?

I KNOW on an intellectual level that the same is true of all the fears and inhibitions that are currently limiting my life. If I work at it strategically, I can deprogram these fear and anxiety triggers. I can, can’t I? They are just pathways in the brain, right?

I had high hopes for doing this with the Be Brave project, but I think my goals were perhaps too lofty that time around. I had all these great ideas for brave things to do, and indeed I did three or four of them. But in the end I think I do better with really tiny baby steps, and with just experimenting with doing things DIFFERENTLY rather than choosing acts that scare me.

Karyn of The Honesty Project really nailed me good when she said the first list of fun things just seemed like a way to torture myself. Yes, it’s true. There are days when I feel like the biggest f-up for leaving my last job, for leaving my fair Waterloo and all the connections and friends and family took 8 years to come together around me.

BUT…

It was good to put that list on paper. I learned something from that. What I realized when I looked it over was that the majority of really fun things come not from planning but from relationships that were the result of happenstance. Synchronicity. Coincidence. But none of those happy accidents and relationships and resulting fun came from sitting around a an empty apartment doing crossword puzzles.

I have to get out or let people in. I have to call or give my phone number to someone and welcome their call to me. Sitting around feeling all safe and protected from the messiness of life ain’t gonna cut it.

Lynn asked why all my experiments have to be dreadful things or scary things. Ok, this is the weird thing about my head. You can take almost any one of the fun things I wish was part of my life…let’s take for example calling a friend to do something together. When it comes time to choose that person I’m going to contact or actually make the contact, there comes this little voice in my head saying you really don’t want to do that. It will just be a hassle or you really don’t have a lot in common with her or you’re really on different energy frequencies and it doesn’t feel “right” or she’s probably too busy or she really doesn’t like you and she’s going to say no or even worse she is going to say yes even though she wants to say no and the whole evening is going to be awkward. And oh, that crossword puzzle is over there just waiting and it’s so cold out. Let’s just STAY PUT.

In other words, that fraidy cat part of my head turns ANY slightly risky situation (risk of disappointment, risk of rejection, risk of making a fool of myself) into something I don’t want to do. THAT’s why the experiments are about doing stuff I don’t want to do. Because that’s the barrier standing between me and all kinds of fun stuff I wish were in my life. Experimenting struck me as a way to break through to the other side.

Inventory of Fun

Some things I used to do in my former city that were fun for me:

• Stopping by Katryn’s house for a chat over tea
• Dropping in on Violet and Coffee, howl with the Beagle, or meet at Ye’s for sushi (sans Beagle)
• Shooting pool with Gary and Katryn and Gary’s neighbour
• Babysiting my beautiful, smart nephew (who now has a little sister)
• Visiting my friends Linda and Gary and the small animal rescue
• My job (creating and supporting small software apps, especially)
• Blowing soap bubbles on King Street
• Going to a GRIC potluck
• Inviting some girlfriends over to make earrings
• Cooking dinner for Mehran and Zarrin and Nagmeh and Javaad
• Going to an earth-based festival with the families of my Farsi classmates
• Going to Khorshid’s violin recital
• Hanging out at the Princess Cafe with my laptop or a book
• Attending a lecture at Perimeter Institute
• Seeing a foreign film at the Princess
• Geting a hug from Anatole
• Playing with my rats
• Helping Wendy and Al move into their new house
• Playing with Isabelle
• Leting Julia talk me into another exhausting round of badminton in the driveway
• Watching the rabbit out under the apple tree

Some fun things I have discovered can be done now:

• Date night with Sylvain
• Windsor Folk music night once a month
• Windsor Meditation Group each Wednesday
• Feeding the  squirrels
• Picking blueberries
• Going to Point Pelee for the day
• Cooking

Some things I used to find very fun but don’t anymore (though I might again…can’t rule it out!)

• Duplicate bridge
• Birding
• Sewing
• Making earrings

Some things I imagine doing in the future that could be fun

• Games night with a group of friends
• Learning to quilt
• Taking a class
• Playing with magic markers and paints and podge and stuff
• Learning to knit, esp in a group

Something that everyone but me seemed to find out of this world fun

• My company’s (drunken) glow golf tournament

Something I find great fun that few others would

• Observing and interacting with the family of four silverfish that live in my apartment*

*They like one grain of rice every few days and a damp cloth to hide under. Please don’t tell my landlord.

Experiment

My word for 2009 is EXPERIMENT.

If I present myself with a new behaviour and tell myself I’m doing it because it’s good for me–like getting enough rest, eating right, swimming, not isolating myself too much from other humans–it opens the door to my inner rebellious teenager. This part of me is really good at saying “screw you, I’ll do as I please.”

So this year it is my intention not to engage in that inner parent vs. inner brat dance.

What I am going to try is experimenting. Be a scientist of your own spiritual experience. I like science. I like research. I like discovery and logging results.

And so.

What I propose for myself in 2009 is that I try doing some things I do not want to do.  Just to see what happens. A series of experiments.  Some things will be things I dread doing or fear doing. Others will just be things I don’t feel like doing. And then I am simply going to keep notes on how it felt, what happened, what didn’t happen.

I think I’ll make up a template or form to be filled out for every experiment. I’ll want things on there like what feelings arose in my body before, during and after, how my experiment affected those around me, what my ego had to say before, during and after. Do you have ideas for other questions that should go on the template?