Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful I took a risk and changed my life dramatically. I am thankful for greater happiness and confidence. I am thankful for my family, especially Mom and Dad, for supporting me. I am thankful for the good friends I have met here, and for those I miss back home.

I am thankful for my friend Leti, who insisted we have a mini-Thanksgiving dinner. I waivered a bit wanting to celebrate--well, not so much in wanting to celebrate but in thinking that I had time. It truly was a busy day. I taught at 8 a.m. After that, I had my Spanish class and then a work training. During the afternoon I went on a Spanish student excursion to Barrio Italia, which was chic and lovely. There were students from Brazil, Germany, and the U.S. The German guy treated us to gourmet chocolate ice cream, which was swoon-worthy. (The ice cream, not the treating us part.)

I taught English from 6:30 to 8, and then hustle-walked back to my place where Leti was waiting, her bike loaded with a roast chicken, wine, and banana bread. She had really wanted to make a pumpkin pie but couldn´t find canned pumpkin.



We moved around my little kitchen with the ease of old friends to assemble this pretty little meal. We even found half-burnt tea lights and pulled out the plates with the gold trim.

I am thankful for such a day.

Not Enough Time

I just got home a little while ago from a book club meeting at the D.C. public library. I love talking about books. I feel most at ease talking in font of a group when I'm talking about a book. For this meeting, I read The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. 

The story is about two women: Cora and Louise. Cora is a 36-year-old woman bound by social constraints as much as her restrictive, welt-producing corset. She married at 17 and has been living a secretive, passionless life. She jumps at the chance to chaperone the 15-year-old Louise for a summer dance program in NYC because she grew up as an orphan there until she was sent to Kansas on an orphan train. Louise is strikingly beautiful, worldly and womanly—worrisomely so for her age, in fact. Louise is try to break all the social rules while Cora tries to reign her and look for her birth parents. Of course, she finds someone who kindles the passion in her. 

I found the settings and time period (the 1920's) as interesting as the characters. I love imagining New York as it was then. It's funny that 100 years ago tourists did many of the same things, like going to the top of a skyscraper (then just 60 stories high), taking a tour of Central Park, and seeing a Broadway show. It made me miss NY, a bit.

I like this snippet from the book. To give some context, Cora is speaking with a man who she just told her life story to. He suggests that she get a divorce.

"What would I tell people? What would I tell my sons?"

"That you want to be happy."

"That’s not enough."

"No?" He leaned closer, just a little. She drew back, looking away. The Italian woman had gone out in front of the store to sweep.

"What a waste," he said.

She looked up. They stared at each other unblinking, with just the sound of the fan and the distant scuffing of the Italian woman’s broom. 

Later in the book Cora realizes that she "lived too much of her life so stupidly, following nonsensical rules, as if she and her, as if anyone, had all the time in the world." Don't most of us do this? I remember looking up after I read this line and thinking, "There's no time, no time at all to live an unfulfilled life.

Gratitude

I'm reading a book for an HR book club at work. I love book clubs. I now belong to two, soon to be three. The perk of this particular club is that I got the book (hardcover!) for free. It's called "Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard" by Chip and Dan Heath. It's a business self-help sorta book. Not one I probably would've chosen to read on my own. Anyway, between snappy case studies and an analogy comparing the emotional and rational sides of a person to an elephant and its rider, there was a line that captured my attention. 

"Imagine a world in which you experience a rush of gratitude every single time you 

flipped a light switch and the room lit up."

For a second I imagined this literally. And, truthfully, it seems like a bit much. It made me think of the crazy blend of awe and wonder Amy Adams captured so well as Giselle in Enchanted. (I really don't know why I'm thinking in terms of Disney movies lately. Gosh, there have surely been doctoral dissertations on Disney indoctrination in American children's psyches. Back to the quote though...) It makes me wonder about the lack of gratitude in my daily life. I imagine feeling thankful would have a snowball effect of positive emotions.

I think I saw an example of this in grad school. There was a woman in my education cohort named Kim. I met her on the first day of math class when she sat down next to me and promptly introduced herself with a big smile. I thought she was about 30. I found out months later she was around 50. Wow, what a shocker. Her sheer joy was youthful in so many ways. Even later I found out she had had breast cancer. She was always smiling, always sort of in awe of how great everything is. I wonder if people can achieve that without facing a life-threatening condition...

While I can't imagine truly feeling grateful every time electricity works its wonders, I would love to find the peace that comes with gratitude. My Great-uncle Ralph is 90. He and I exchange emails. I love what the wrote one day: At my age, the talk of death is something  one faces every time you go to bed at night.  But then you wake up the next morning and Hey!!  Another beautiful day!!

It is another beautiful day.

Thought Wrangling

“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; 

for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”

-Marcus Aurelius

Katie and I in Morocco just after riding a camel on the beach. Yes, that's right.
 I wish I saw, daily, a big smiley face with a message in French and Arabic to remind me to stay cheery.

One day a couple months ago (unlike the day in the picture) I was having a bad day. No actually that deserves some arbitrary capitalization. It was a Bad Day. The type of day when everything and everyone else is  annoying, ridiculous, and incomprehensible. Will explained the following idea to me. I wrote it down. Well, really I typed it on a virtual sticky note and there it's stayed on my laptop's desktop since. I re-read it pretty often and felt like, hey, today is as good a day as any to share it.
  
"Your thoughts are reality. Don't let the world affect you. You affect the world. YOU determine who you are. Thoughts are powerful because when you think too critically, you will judge AND THAT will drive you crazy. If you think it is bad, it is always going to be bad to you because you think that way. We have to be careful with our thoughts."


Yes, but how do we manage our thoughts? Can we wrangle them into always being positive ones. Probably not, I guess. I think living a passionate life will get me on the path to a mental chain reaction of happiness. And the quest continues.

New beginnings ?

I just took a walk, a rather long contemplative one. I had a lot to think about because, well, I've made some big changes as of late. The walk was on a wooded trail. The sun cheery as it fell through the leaves in blotches. The trail was quiet, much more so than I'm used to, but that's because I'm no longer walking in Central Park. I'm in Maryland, staying with family. I got a job in DC. Not just a job, my dream job, actually. Very exciting. Quite unbelievable. A little strange.

Strange that I'm not still in New York. Strange that I left behind friends and a boyfriend and am essentially starting a new life. As soon as I wrote that last sentence, I questioned it and remembered a quote I wrote on a mirror in my old apartment: "I am constantly creating my life." So perhaps it's not a new life any more so than every day of my life. But it sure feels different.

Back to the walk: I paused on a bridge over a small stream. Arms crossed and leaning on the rail of the bridge, hip jutting to one side, I looked up at the sunlight, the light and dark green leaves. I looked down at the water and then let my gaze wander. (I had just finished reading "Dances With Wolves," so I was feeling particularly attuned to nature.) 

When I looked back down at the stream. I looked at the parts, not just the whole. I noticed a little bunch of leaves caught on a submerged stick, flapping in the modest current. Then, a handful of minnows swimming upstream. Lastly, a carefully designed spider's web stretching between branches, hovering above the surface of the water, prettily.

Sometimes the more intently you look, the easier it is to see things. Beautiful little things. I plan look closely at new things in the future, whether starting a new job or just out for a stroll.

Music in the morning

This weekend I took action -- while loafing about my apartment. I did, after all, start this blog. Preceding my tentative venture into bloglandia, I trolled sites about happiness. First to pop up on the trusty Google search was Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project (http://www.happiness-project.com/). No cajoling necessary to get me signed up for her 2012 Happiness Project. One of the projects is to create weekly resolutions that you can track online. My first resolution is to begin each day with a song and a smile.

Sometimes, when I find myself feeling down during the day, I listen to some tunes to bring my mood back up. In that case, why not start my day with an upbeat, feel-good diddy? Yesterday, morning I blared Hey Soul Sister by Train. (btw, Sunday mornings are for sleeping late in my book, so I took the liberty of turning the volume way up for my morning music fix - the neighbors had long-since been awake, I think...I hope.) Today, I forgot to listen before I went to work, so I worked head phones and youtube as soon as I got there. Won't be making a habit of that one, but I do believe it was worth it to get my spirits lifted by Stereo Hearts.

I've never been a huge music person, but I do have some fond memories of listening to music with my parents as I was growing up. The kitchen was the music spot in my house. Whenever my mom and I were bustling around getting dinner together at 4:45 pm (yeah, that was us), having a marathon holiday cookie baking session or cleaning, we had the radio going. We knew every song on our local station. I still do whenever I go home

When my sister and I were young, it was rare that my dad was at home in morning to get us ready for school. I loved when he was, though, because he would play his old records from the 70's, especially The Grateful Dead. I smile every time I hear Sugar Magnolia and Touch of Grey.

Do you have any stories about using music as a mood-booster? What are your favorite upbeat songs?

Yellow Ball

If the world is a beach, then the lives we are all trying to build for ourselves are like sand castles. Your possessions, status, degrees, promotions, they are all too weak to support you. They are but grains of sand. Water washes away, without resistance, all sand castles, no matter how elaborate or fortified.

What you really need to do is find your yellow ball, who you are -- your true self. Paw through that mound of sand. The insignificant things will slip through your fingers. They have buried that special part of you.

Join me as I search for my yellow ball.