Living-Deliberately.com

Happy Holidays everyone! My gift to myself is to take the last two weeks of the year and unplug as much as possible.  This is as much to rest as it is to give myself more to my family, explore other creativity, and to combat the blues that can sometimes come from the stresses of the year. I’m looking forward to a scrubbed-clean January, with all the white freshness and lemon scent it always has; days of new goals and a refreshed spirit.

I hope you all have a blessed end to 2008.

Onward~ Tia

This morning when the alarm went off I was in the midst of a heavy dream. An old woman was sitting across from me. She had long white hair to her waist that was windblown and she was telling me the flip side of things. I had in my hand snapshots of days and she was telling me what was going on in the periphery of each one, the part I couldn’t see. I saw my life, my set of circumstances, as glimpses, and she made them round and full. It was dawning on me that in each one, my knowledge of the truth of things was smaller than I’d thought, and the revelation was increasingly disorienting. When the alarm did sound, and I opened my eyes, I spent several minutes trying to sift through what day it is, what I needed to get up and do, who is really in my life and who is not.

It’s a strange way to wake.

Later, on the treadmill, I made a mental list of what is really mine. For the most part, they are intangibles. Memories, decisions, thoughts, dreams, loves, losses, healed wounds, choices…these are the things that are our own. No one else can take them if we want badly enough to hold on to them. Disaster can strike, I can lose everything, and if I live, I still hold onto what’s inside. I was thinking about how tangibles become weapons during a struggle, and the prize is the intangible.  In wars through history, tangibles (house, belongings, money) are taken in order to break a people, in hopes of gaining their behavior, belief, dependence, etc.

External struggles aside, I can choose who controls or accesses what’s inside. It seems what is most necessary is perseverance, endurance. We practice this as little children. Any mother who’s in tune with her kids knows when they may be sitting on the outside but inside, they’re really standing up. As we grow, we learn when to capitulate to an external force and when it’s okay to assert our will. When the surrounding force is oppressive, what happens is that there is never a time when it’s okay to express self. Uniformity, conformity, is all there is. The battle is for the heart and mind. They will take it any way they have to, and dead or alive generally does not matter, as long as they remain in control. I think we see this on both a large and small scale in our world, in everything to warring nations to domestic violence and child abuse.

But what is inside is our own. Our own to hold, our own to give (or not). Our voice is ours. What we choose to focus on is ours too. At the moment I have heaps of negativity in my life. Lots is wrong, which is probably what is behind disturbing dreams and heavy sleep. But that is only one glipse of the circumstance. There is also heaps of positivity, some in the periphery of the snapshot and some in the center focus. This list of positive things is not for sale, not for the taking. I embrace it, I fight for it, I choose to focus on it, I choose to give it power. In my quest to live a deliberate life, I may not be taking steps forward right now. But I *am* standing fixed, both feet planted. Rock crushes scissors right? The wolf couldn’t blow down the house of brick? A garden full of strong, green things will not fall prey to weeds, even the persistant ones.

I choose to keep my essentials. My intangibles. My sacred. While I wait out this storm I choose to be calm, I choose to be strong. I choose to put my hands and my energy to good work.  I choose to put my mind on good thoughts. I choose to love and I choose to live. I have no idea how things will end up.  Sometimes everything does not work out okay and bad things come to pass. But in the scope of eternity, our spirits will soar past moments in time, circumstances in our small span of years. There is a bigger picture here than we see and that is where our faith comes in. “The evidence of things unseen”. And if a day is a microcosm of a life, I add a good one to the mix, on purpose, because I can.

Good things today:

• we woke up on time
• school is going well
• great friends
• leftover steak for breakfast, with waffles
• a strong work out
• pretty school pictures
• chickens happily pecking and exploring in the yard
• playful kittens romping on the arbor
• funny blog posts
• Christmas music in the background
• work to do
• a stocked fridge
• people who see
• ample sources of advice
• good lawyers
• kayaks and the peace of water
• friendship and love
• progress on projects and the memories it creates
• secret Christmas projects and the fun anticipation of surprise
• expanding families
• warm veggie soup for dinner tonight
• cooperative children
• insurance coming through
• the ocean
• teamwork
• an awesome support group
• cell phones, text messages, facebook, linkedin, twitter…I love our techno age
• for every crazy person on the planet, there are more who are rational and healthy
• post-it notes, my personal favorite for organizing
• weekend plans
• ideas for paintings and stories and creativity

What are good things in your day today?

Okay, so here’s the deal: I was going to spend November writing about “What’s Right”, December articulating what needs to change, and January preparing to implement. And in the last month I did indeed do lots of thinking about What’s Right. Somewhere between my brain and my fingers there was a sludgy disconnect and paralysis; I couldn’t seem to drag myself over here to get the thoughts written. I kept adding it to “my list”, thinking the posts over while I drove or stirred beans or scrubbed behind the toilet. And then I’d get up and head outside to check the mail or to Facebook to play or basically do anything but sit down and wax verbose about what is “right”.

The procrastination is not because there’s nothing to write about. Nope. There’s plenty. In this very fast year there were LOTS of things that went right, and more lastingly, things that are so right that I want them to stay just the way they are into the future.  Things like friendships, which I did manage to post about, and others that I did not. Art, and the pursuit of creative expression, whether or not my efforts are ever seen by another human eye. Music: the sublime exploration that is broad and free. My children are healthy and happy and doing well in this transition we call “Going To School”. My family and I have a pretty decent routine hammered out, having survived the biggest challenges of an adult child moving back in with her four hungry and loud babies. Food is beautiful; there is simple abundance and a joy of cooking that has returned after the shock and trauma of 2007. My health is good, my body strong, my hair the length that I like and my clothes fit my frame the way that I want. My faith has deepened, both privately and publicly….I’m regularly at my wonderful church, my prayer corner is a place of peace, and I’m learning about the saints daily. Somewhere over this span of days a little seed called “hope” took root and grew and is restored: I do hope for our future, for love, for joy, for a simple life. And speaking of love, that’s in my life too, but I’m not going to blog about it.

Less rosy is the ample list of what needs to change. This one is a glaring part of every day, challenges that line up and drive me to rub my temples and ask for miracles and force me to get up when the alarm goes off at o’dark thirty. In my own footprint on the planet, there’s enough turmoil to fill a book; one that I refuse to sit down and write because it’d be depressing. A synopsis is enough: I’m broke, my ex hasn’t paid child support in any sincere fashion all year and not at all in months, business goes up and down, my children have ongoing trauma from said ex and his incessant insistence on what he wants rather than what is best for them, my vehicle is on the brink, my family sometimes reels from the impact of absorbing 5 additional members, my belongings are all in storage, there’s a house I can neither sell nor live in, a mortgage company that stole my money, a son with a medical condition but no insurance, and honestly, for most of this stuff…no end in sight. I have goals I want to meet that the above may prohibit…it’s hard to buy Tri equipment or learn a new skill without funds, harder still to devote time to personal things when stretched so thin.

That’s just me and my world. Turning on the TV in the mornings is almost catastrophic: no news is ever good…falling stocks, uncertain times, watered down baby formula, bombings everywhere, murder rampages, a scared American people trying to adjust to life without credit. Everything seems to have a tinge of soot around the edges, worn, tired, and weary.

And that brings me to what else December is, far and beyond my little self-created season for evaluation: it’s Christmas. For most of this year I’ve looked forward to the holidays. The gradual and definite upswing through the year suggested a very happy season at the end, with a return to the candy canes, tunes, decorations, and festivities I embraced before Puritanism greyed our winters and sucked our joy. “More redemption”, thought I. But doggoneit if it the spirit has been elusive! Friends posted on their Facebook statuses telling little bits of a common struggle…trees are going up late, decorations are recycled, gifts are homemade…women try to scrub and shine and smile cheer over everything but like a warped record, everything feels a little off.

“Wait for it”, is what I thought a week ago. “It’s still early yet”. “List what you’re thankful for”. Done…and what was left after that was just more of the same: beige, grey, tired, everyone trying but nothing very vibrant breaking through. Maybe this is just more evidence of the solstice; we are still on the dark half, the half that hungers and cries out for light. The Advent season is about waiting and watching for Light. There is comfort that comes in the counting down of days, of sacremental steps towards something, and this is the time. Our troubles are not unlike those in a multitude of days and years and moments; my mothers’ tears have been cried before by others,  fertile soils of opporotunity turned to famine is a reccurring blight, investors of many kinds have looked up to the sky in prayer and desperation, whether on Wall Street or in their planted fields. There is always a chance to remember our smallness. And this year, it seems we all “get” that…only we get smaller and smaller and wonder how we’ll survive.

There is a move in Karate that was described to me. When a force is pushing against us, we tend to resist and push back. But power can be found in surprising the source of the force by going the other way, the way one is being forced. It allows for a catch, a gasp. The force is caught of guard, befuddled, and an escape can be made. I’ve been pondering this for a few days. The force pushing against me is Oppressive. There’s a very real temptation to get depressed and blue and be a scrooge for the holidays. It’d be so easy…and few would blame me. There’s enough on my plate to adequately explain stress and fatigue and enough commonality so that everyone would understand. Every day though, there’s been tension. A very real question of “do I or don’t I” (give in) has formed on my lips. I’ve chosen so far not to give in. One day at a time.

It looks like going slowly through the motions. Make lists for a few gifts. Keep doing what I know needs doing. Turn on that holiday music while cooking. Be enthusiastic over someone else’s effort. But it’s also a good recipe for endurance. These are all baby steps that once accumulated, get one over the hump and mean the race can be won. My little “gasp” though, was to stop. Take a day and just cling to routine and give zero thought to Christmas or holidays or gift lists or rosy cheeked singers with candy smiles.

The lapse in tension made way for a little miracle that wasn’t random, that just might start a snowball of Happy Holidays on down the mountain of the season. I was shopping with a friend and we were in the express aisle with our groceries. We had a little friendly banter between us and the elderly lady standing behind us with two loaves of white bread and a pack of bologne. My friend told the cashier that he’d like to add the lady’s groceries to his tab…he’s a generous man by nature and thoughtful with little things so this didn’t catch me much by surprise. After all, she didn’t have that much and it was more the gesture, than the size of the gift, that was being communicated. But what came next was tenderly sweet. The cashier smiled in disbelief, saying she’d never seen anything like that happen, especially at Christmas. Everyone these days is living so tight themselves that giving just doesn’t happen much. The elderly lady started smiling and almost crying…she is a cancer survivor and having a hard time and this just absolutely made her day.

And that’s the essence: a good deed started spreading like a warm circle around us. He smiled. I smiled. The clerk smiled. The lady smiled. The man behind her smiled. We all exchanged, “have a nice day” enthusiastically, and “Merry Christmas” and meant it. Maybe for the first time all season, I felt it, rather than just went through the motions of saying it.  One small thing became a highlight of the day. Our step was a little bouncier, the lights a little brighter, the music in the background a little cheerier. Bad news seemed a distance away, like it somehow couldn’t touch us for a few moments, because our day would now be defined by a small act of kindness. Troubles kind of melted in the eye contact between strangers.

Lots of little motto’s run through my mind on day like that: “How we spend our days is how we live our lives”, and “God always reaches us through people”, and what’s a more obvious way to “live deliberately” than to intentionally see someone else’s small need and meet it? I realized that this little thing could be it’s own genesis miracle, if I let it. It seems God reached a lot of people in that simple act…the lady, who pocketed her few dollars, to stretch another day. The cashier, who probably smiled at subsequent customers and had a story to tell when she came home of “how was your day”. The giver, who is always blessed through the act, which feels so good. And little me, watching, and realizing that these little moments always exist and can define the momentum of our days. Perhaps the larger issues are out of our reach, but little things abound that actually, like snowflakes, accumulate and cover and can define.  One person can touch another, one happy thought can lead to another, one choice can set into play a domino effect of joy.

So in December I don’t want to spend the days defining what I want to change. I’d rather share other stories of Pay It Forward. And make paper chains of red and green with my kids. And bake a variety of cookies to share with a friend. A tree here, a tree there, and the neighbor’s lighted reindeer next to a plastic Mary and Joseph. Notice the twinkle of stars and the fingernail moon and Wait For the Light. What’s merry and bright this year may be as small as snowflakes, each unique and tender and quiet. I, for one, am listening.