Written Along the Way

There’s a lot of noise out there. Most of us are living in a whirlwind. We have so many commitments for our time and for our attention. We are constantly being given new information. We have bills to pay, people to take care of, even fun to be had. We are bound by our schedule. Do we even have free time? I’ve written before about asking ourselves who we want to be, but how can we even remember who we are when we are bombarded by so much noise?

I picture us in the middle of a storm with the winds swirling all around us. The wind is loud and objects are being blown by us. It’s hard to keep our footing in this strong wind. It’s really all we can do to get one foot in front of the other, push forward and not get smashed by one of the objects getting blown around in the wind.

We’re even overwhelmed with good advice. Everywhere we look there’s an article or an app trying to help us get better. Pick any topic: nutrition, exercise, finances. Think about all the nutritional advice out there. We should drink enough water, drink tea and/or coffee for the antioxidants, eat fresh fruits and vegetables, eat enough whole grains and fiber, incorporate “super foods” into our diet and on and on. I can’t eat enough in a day to include all these recommendations. There’s even advice about how much and how often to eat. Is breakfast important or should we skip it? And what about exercise? How many different workouts can we fit into a week? I’ve got a job too, I’m not just killing time in between workouts. Instead of being helpful, all this advice can become more noise and add to the stress that we already feel. 

All the daily routine noise is enough to overload us, but there’s often more than just that going on. What if your child is sick? A fever of 104 is a big wind gust in your already stormy life. Or your car breaks down or you need a new furnace? These extras aren’t uncommon. We all have things like this pop up in our lives.

I can’t make the noise and the winds go away. I accept that I am surrounded by this whirlwind, but I want to become the calm in the storm like the face of Shiva Nataraja as he dances in the midst of fire. We’re all in the storm or dancing in a fire everyday but we’re probably not feeling that calm. 

When we are living in this wind storm, the noise of the wind diminishes our focus, blocking out our priorities. We see the storm instead of seeing our life. We can be swept away by the winds. What does it mean to “lose yourself”? It can mean that you are so into what you’re doing, in the moment, that it’s like you aren’t thinking at all. Athletes call it being in the zone. It can be the goal of meditation. To shrink or even destroy the ego because that is what separates us from the universal oneness. But it can also be used to describe something that probably none of us want. It can mean to lose our sense of self. To lose our idea of who we are or what we want out of live or where we’re headed. When we’re focused on the noise, we aren’t focused on who we are or who we want to be. We’re not really living our lives, we just moving from one obligation to the next.

Constantly stimulated, distracted, interrupted. It puts a ringing in our ears. It puts us in a constant state of excitement. It’s a surprise that we can even accomplish our daily tasks but to be able to take it to the next level and remember who we are and who we want to be and actively work toward being that person seems impossible. How do we block out the noise? How do we not lose ourselves? How many of us are just living our “to do” lists? I’m always thinking about what I need to do next. What I want to get done in the day. I’m not really awake in the moment if I’m focused on my mental list of things to accomplish in the day.

There has to be some regularly practiced way to ground ourselves in our own reality. A regularly practiced way to step away from that noise or hold it at bay long enough to find ourselves, to regroup, to look at our life without the filter of the noise. To see our life instead of just seeing all the distractions and obligations swirling around us.

I have known about meditation for years and it’s always seemed like a good idea to me but it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to make myself sit still to do it. Maybe it’s the insanity of being a middle aged parent that has caused the benefits of meditation to be able to lure me in. When I am just sitting with my breath, I am not stopping the winds that are swirling around me. I have not erased my time commitments or paid off all my bills or removed any of the other distractions and interruptions. All those things are still swirling around me, but in meditation, we can find the eye of the storm. It’s all still flying by us but we can find a place to sit with our breath and not feel the noise that’s still swirling around us. 

Instead of being picked up and thrown around by the wind, I’m sitting still watching the winds spin by. That shift of perspective is a tool to use when I step back into the storm. A tool that makes it possible to be a part of the spinning but still see past the spinning. Then, instead of being directed by the wind, I am choosing my path through the wind. 

A few evenings ago, I discovered that driving when I am following the directions of an app on a phone makes me anxious. I don’t think it started that evening. That’s just when I understood that it was happening. Driving along a route that I am unfamiliar with doesn’t necessarily make me anxious. It’s being at the mercy of an app, being at the mercy of that lady computer voice that makes me anxious.

I have driven many places without an app to guide me. I have driven long trips across several states and short trips through a town or to a spot in the woods without an app to guide me. I was less anxious about that. I remember a trip, in the spring of 1995, from Pennsylvania to Cape Fear, North Carolina. At one point, we realized that we were in West Virginia. We weren’t supposed to be in West Virginia. It wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t panic. We sorted it out and got back onto the correct route. 

There were a lot of things about this drive a few nights ago that were out of my normal. It started out with me driving through a city I’d never driven through while looking for a place I’d never been to. I was driving my wife’s vehicle, not mine. Once I ran this errand, at this place, I’d never been to, we were headed home but that would start out on a route I’d never taken.

I’ve driven her vehicle before. It’s called an SUV but it’s a car. It’s a unibody. It’s just a big car with all wheel drive. But it doesn’t drive big on the highway. It’s easy to maneuver and quick. It’s got one of those information touchscreens on the center console. I’m not sure that we’re better off with these screens. It’s fancy and it’s sci-fi, but it takes the driver’s eyes off the road longer than the old knobs and levers did. I needed the assistance of a co-pilot to help with defogging the windshield, etc. She was an excellent co-pilot. She even peeled back the aluminum foil from the wrap I ate for dinner so I could keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. 

The vehicle didn’t make me anxious. The place I’d never been didn’t make me anxious. I went in alone and spoke to three different people who were all pleasant and polite. I got what I came for and more. It was a successful errand and I only have good things to say about it.

Seeing the map on the phone screen, having the touch screen center console, having the app ask me if I wanted to save eight minutes by changing the route mid-stream (Yes, I wanted to save eight minutes. We were already going to be arriving home past the kids’ bedtimes. I wanted those eight minutes.) are all very sci-fi, future is here now things. I always think of that stuff as being from Buck Rogers. It’s not Star Trek or Star Wars for me, it’s Buck Rogers (I wonder if I’d still like that show if I watched it now). We are living with the crazy gadgets of science fiction. 

The map app is not from the future. It’s not even a new thing anymore. But it still makes me anxious. 

Once we got to a road we knew, we turned the app off. We knew the way home, I had eaten my wrap, I was used to driving this vehicle again, and the kids might or might not have been asleep. Kid 1 was alseep. Kid 2 might have been in and out of sleep. Anxiety over. We were cruising. We had been listening to the Dead but I changed it up. I tried to listen to a couple of songs that were new by a couple of artists that I didn’t know. I was disappointed, but then we got a few good songs in a row: “Everybody Wants Some” by Van Halen, a demo version of “Young Lust” by Pink Floyd and a few songs later some live Led Zeppelin. Early Van Halen before 1984 is good. That started a good run of songs for us. 

But the anxiousness is what got me writing about this. Why the anxiousness? I used to have an idea of how I was going to get to where I was going before I left. Before I started the trip, I’d look at a map and check out the route. Maybe there’d be construction or a detour but I would still already have an idea in my head of which way to go. Now I’m lazy because of these apps so I have no idea where I’m headed or what to expect. And sometimes the apps are just wrong. They get confused and send me in the wrong direction. And it’s easy to miss a turn. The app calls a 90 degree turn a “slight right”. I think it was more enjoyable when I knew where I was going and I was just looking for road signs or the next marker or turn. Listening for the app voice to tell me what to do is more stressful.

Anyway, it was a good drive home. The anxiety only lasted as long as I was dependent upon the app and this time it didn’t steer me wrong.

Repetition. So much of life is repetition. Breathe in. Breathe out. All the daily routines from brushing our teeth and getting dressed to brushing our teeth again and going to bed at night. Over and over again. But when the repetition involves encounters with other people it wears me out. Having the same interaction with someone else over and over again is rough. I don’t have enough patience and perseverance to do it and feel good about it. 

This is especially true when dealing with my kids. Every single day, day after day, the same show of disrespect. The same show of not being able to think of anyone else’s feelings. That kind of repetition is grinding me. Each time my frustration mounts higher. Each time I have a little less patience for repeating the interaction. 

The mythology of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again is so perfect. He puts in the work to get the boulder up the hill only to feel the same frustration again as it rolls back down. No matter how I handle these bouts of disrespect from my children the result is the same. 

But there’s a more modern story about the repetitive nature of our lives that gives us more hope: the movie Groundhog Day. When I first saw the movie, I didn’t really like it. I was too young to appreciate what was really going on. The movie’s message isn’t about frustration and hopelessness like the story of Sisyphus. The movie’s message is that once we accept the repetitive nature of our existence, then we can free ourselves from the frustration and apply ourselves to being the best person we can be and apply ourselves to helping other people, who are still stuck and frustrated. That’s some powerful shit.

Today I had another version of the same conversation I’ve had with my daughter so many times before. She has long hair. She likes having long hair. However, she doesn’t like having it brushed. Snarls and tangles don’t feel good when they’re brushed out. I get it, but no one is making her have long hair. During today’s conversation, I told her that if she didn’t like having her hair brushed, she didn’t have to have long hair. She immediately started to escalate, thinking that I was threatening to cut her hair. Pause. No, I wasn’t threatening her, I was just trying to explain the reality of the situation to her. If every time her hair is brushed it hurts and she doesn’t like it, then what can she do to change this? Cut her hair. If having long hair is that important to her then she needs to accept that brushing it will hurt and handle it better. 

I was proud of my Dad skills there. I thought I had really explained something to her about facing a reality, accepting it and coming to terms with it. But, after a while, what I said started sinking into my brain too. Turns out, I am doing an equally horrible job, as my kids are doing, at accepting how things are. My son and I are stuck in a repetitive rut of his disrespect and my frustration, and I just explained the conversation with my daughter. So I am getting frustrated over and over again every time my son is disrespectful or my daughter is yelling about getting her hair brushed, even though I should expect these things. I have no reason to believe that these things will be any different yet I continue to get frustrated, upset, angry, worn out and every other negative emotion. Why? 

As a parent, this is a little murky. We should strive for our kids to learn how to handle things better and we should be trying to teach that. But for me to get frustrated every time, like I’ve described, is me not accepting things as they are. I can continue to try to teach them and guide them but why can’t I do that while accepting that their current behavior is going to continue? I’m not suggesting that I accept their behavior as ok. I’m saying that I could accept that their behavior is what it is and instead of thinking it’s going to be different next time, I could be prepared for it to be the same. 

If we’re expecting the punch to the face, does it hurt less? I don’t know but I’ve got nothing to lose. Will I have more patience and be less affected by their behavior if I expect it? Can I stay calmer and feel better and maybe even be a more effective teacher if I expect their behavior to be the same way it’s been?

While some of my frustration is about not accepting things as they are, some of it is also ego. My frustration is also about my belief that they should respect me because I am an adult and I am their parent. Some of my frustration is my dislike for having to deal with this behavior at all. Instead of it being about my need to be respected and my frustration about how the kids are acting, it could be about teaching them to be respectful and to handle themselves better. Ego is not helping here. Imagine if I didn’t react personally to these interactions. I wouldn’t be frustrated at all, I would just be doing my parenting job and moving on.

Accept things for what they are and destroy the ego. No problem.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

How much do you care how your lawn looks? How much time, effort, and money do you put into getting your lawn to look a certain way? Do you compare your lawn to your neighbors’ lawns? Are you annoyed if you have neighbors who don’t take care of their lawns? If you live in an apartment or condo, is not having to deal with a lawn, one of the reasons that you don’t live in a house?

The lawn is a big deal in America. People really care how their lawn looks and other people really care how your lawn looks. There are lots of people who don’t even use their lawn but still really care how it looks. The only time they’re on their lawn is when they’re taking care of it. 

We have a dog and kids so there are practical reasons for us to have a decent lawn. I don’t want to be wiping mud off the dog’s paws every time it’s wet outside. The kids play in the yard so it’s better to have grass to run on than just dirt or weeds. But my goal is for our lawn to be good enough. It’s a practical goal more than an aesthetic goal. 

We have tons of trees and some of them are oak trees. It’s takes a lot of time and energy to clean up all the leaves and acorns that fall off the trees. The acorns are a pain. If I didn’t clean them up they’d overtake the lawn making it hard for the grass to survive. They’re uncomfortable to walk on and the squirrels would be burying them all over the lawn making holes everywhere and digging up the grass. 

I don’t put that effort into our lawn so that it looks nice for other people. I don’t even put the effort in so that it looks nice for us. I put that effort in because we use the lawn. I would often rather be doing something else. I like being outside and I don’t mind the physicality of it but lawn care is usually not a lot of fun or my first choice of how to spend my free time. I try to do just enough work on the lawn to keep it good enough, but I’ll bet there are people who think I spend tons of time on the lawn or too much time on the lawn. Neighbors have mentioned our lawn to me. I assure them that it’s not perfect. It looks good from their side of the street but if they were really checking it out they’d see the bare spots and the weeds. They seem unconvinced. They think I’m being lawn modest. They think I am really into this American lawn thing and trying really hard to make it look like a golf course, but really I just want to have a useable lawn. 

 

What’s with all this lawn talk, you wonder? Our lawns are such a good analogy for anything and everything else in our lives. Every decision we make about how to spend our time or how to spend our money is a decision of one thing over another. We do not have unlimited time or money, so we always have to pick one thing at the expense of another. I have a certain amount of free time after work. How much time do I spend working on the lawn? How much time do I want to spend with the kids or doing some other thing? Can I do both? How much money is too much money to spend on fertilizer and weed killer for my lawn? Do I want to use all organic products or do I want to spread poison all over this lawn that surrounds the home I live in? 

Always choices. Always trade offs. Where do we put our priorities? Do we make something a priority because it really matters or do we just care what other people are going to think? Is this choice about appearance or is there a practical value to our choices? When we choose one thing, what other thing are we passing up?

I don’t care if you want your lawn to look good so that you’re the envy of your neighbors and I don’t care if you don’t take care of your lawn at all. I don’t care if you bought the expensive, uncomfortable pair of pants because they are stylish or if you bought the less expensive, comfy pants. We all have to sort out these choices, priorities, and trade offs, on our own, all day long, everyday.

I just think it’s super interesting. Last week, when I was out in my yard picking up acorns again (I’ve filled a 5 gallon bucket with acorns about a dozen times already this season), this whole idea just occurred to me. The trade offs. The idea of what our lawns represent to people and how people think about us and judge us based on our lawns. And then how all these lawn choices are just a microcosmic example of the prioritizing that we do all the time. I’m trying to get my kids to understand that every choice is choosing one thing over another. There isn’t enough time in the day to do everything. Every moment on lawn care is a moment away from something else. 

Even thinking about the motivation for our choices is interesting and our lawns are an especially good example of this because people do seem to care how lawns look even if they don’t use their lawn much or it’s not their own lawn. The part of this that’s about appearance and how other people see us, make how we feel about our lawns a great analogy. Why do we make the choices we make? Why are our priorities what they are? I’m curious about that and no matter what the whys are, it’s a lifelong project to balance all the trade offs. 

Ok, I know I’ve been slacking and haven’t been keeping up with my goal of one post per month. I’ll try to get another one up here this month to even it out.

I’ve written about not judging things that happen before. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s bad. How do we know how things are all going to flow together? And how is assigning a value to every little thing helping us on our journey anyway? Not judging each moment is really taking things as they come. These small shifts in perspective can have big results down the line. Is it an obstacle or is it a challenge? What’s the difference? Well, an obstacle just sounds like a pain in the ass, doesn’t it? But a challenge, while it is hard and requires effort to overcome, could still be fun.

I recently did one of those mud race obstacle course things with my daughter. We crawled through mud, carried rocks and climbed over a 6 foot wall. But we did it for fun. We really can have fun working our way through challenges.

After one of these posts, a friend of mine wrote to me about not seeing things as obstacles. I don’t remember exactly how I answered but it was something about how everything might not be good or bad but we can definitely tell if something is an obstacle or going to be hard to deal with. I was so stuck in seeing things as obstacles that I couldn’t see what he was trying to tell me. Getting away from judging everything as good or bad is a start, but I was still making a different kind of value judgement. 

I’ve been dealing with a moral challenge. I was given a piece of information that made me feel a lot of things. But, initially, I mostly felt confused. For the first time, in my adult life, I needed to reach out to another friend for help in how to handle a situation. The process has been ongoing. Speaking about it with this friend, again, on a second occasion, I was thinking how tired I was of talking and thinking about the whole thing. But, at the same time, I realized that part of me was enjoying the challenge of handling this moral dilemma. 

That  sounds a little weird, but what I’m trying to get at is the idea of just trying to enjoy what we’re being dealt. The past few weeks of my life would have been easier if I didn’t have this extra thing to think about and carry around with me. But I do. And the reason that it’s bothering me is because I care about the people involved. Realizing that is important too.

Maybe this whole obstacle/challenge thing is why I’ve always loved street skateboarding. I’m no good at it but I love watching people who are. They’re just skating along using the obstacles in their path as opportunities to do tricks and have fun. They are turning the obstacles into the fun part of the ride. That’s what made that run I did with my daughter fun too. If it wasn’t for the obstacles, it would have just been a boring run. 

If none of this made any sense, just go listen to “Take it as it Comes” by the Doors.

 A friend of mine died today or maybe last night. I’m so tired of people dying. I’m not tired of it. I guess I’m angry about it. And worn out by it. And definitely saddened by it. I am trying so hard to learn and grow and to keep getting better. Any of you reading this stuff know that. I’m pouring my guts out in these words so you know what I’m talking about. But I’m not getting any better at dealing with death. I can actually see the sadness that I feel from all these deaths. I picture it as a big pile and every time someone else I know dies another heap of sadness gets thrown onto the pile and the pile just keeps getting bigger. It’s just sitting there casting its shadow on me. 

It’s making me fucking sick.

I just don’t know what to do with myself. Crying doesn’t make my pile any smaller. Remembering all the good about these people, seeing their smiles, appreciating each fleeting moment even more every time someone dies doesn’t make getting the news that someone else has died any easier or any better. 

I’m sick of it. 

Some of you have read or heard before a story about a farmer and the events that happen to him that can be seen as good fortune or bad fortune. You can read a version of it here. 

The point of the story is that we can not know if something is good or bad when it happens. We do not know how events will continue to unfold.

I was recently reminded of this story and I made a smart ass reply that things may not be good or bad but I know when things are hard or easy. My smart assness stuck with me and as I continued to think about my reply over the next day or two, it struck me that assigning any type of value to events gets in our way of experiencing what is happening and what may happen. By placing a value on an event, even just thinking that something is going to be difficult or easy, we are creating a filter through which we will see that event. These filters, that we create, put space between us and each moment. Instead of being fully present with what is happening in our lives, we are separate from these moments because of these filters. What we are experiencing and seeing is changed because of these filters.

Here’s my own little version of the good/bad valuation game that we play with ourselves everyday.

Recently, at my work, our hours of operation have been cut……………bad?

As the manager, I did not lose any hours so I keep the same pay……good?

But I will have to work twice as many 12 hour shifts…………….…………bad?

But, my other shifts will be shorter. Only 5 or 6 hours………….……..…good?

It’s turning out to be difficult to get my work done on the short shift…bad?

I don’t often open after I closed now (so I don’t know how I’m starting the day)….…..bad?

But I have the nights off before I open so it’s easier to get enough sleep…….…………..good?

I had to go to a meeting on my day off……………………………………………bad?

Since I had the meeting, I left early another day to see my son’s baseball game.……..good?

At first when I found out that I had to go to that meeting on my day off I was unhappy about it. I definitely thought that was a bad thing. I had to work a twelve hour day, I had one day off, and then I worked another twelve hour day. The meeting was on that one day off. Between the meeting and the drive, it would take up my whole afternoon. But as events continued to unfold, I was able to leave early on a day later in the week. Because of that meeting I was able to see another one of my son’s baseball games. So was it bad that I had that meeting on my day off or was it good? Or maybe it wasn’t good or bad. It was just a meeting.

We put a value on the events in our lives but we also put a value on the emotions that we feel throughout the day. I feel bad that the hours at work changed. I have decided that it’s bad that the hours changed and I feel bad. Then I decide that it’s bad to feel bad because I want to feel happy. There’s another layer of filters that I have to see through. 

If we are able to experience emotion without attaching a value to that emotion, the emotion becomes just another event in the day. If we can roll along with the events and the emotions of the day, we can experience life as it’s happening without seeing through filters.

The other day I was driving somewhere while I was eating a pear. It was a really good pear. I realized how good I felt at that moment because I was enjoying eating this good pear. Then I thought about all the different moods and emotions I’d already experienced in that day. That made me think that I was a bit of a basket case, but it also occurred to me that I hadn’t been getting stuck in any of these emotions and feelings and I hadn’t been putting a value on any of these different moods. I had just been rolling along with them so even if I hadn’t been feeling really good all day, it had still been a good day. Just experiencing what had been happening without the filters changed how I perceived the day. Even if every little moment wasn’t exactly what I would have wanted it to be or what I thought it should be, when I looked back on the day, I still felt like it was a good day.

All the thinking and value assigning gets in the way of just being.

I wonder how many of you were thinking, while you were reading the last bit of writing that I posted on here, “Yeah, you’re on vacation. Of course you can recognize the ups and downs and stay calmer about it. Wait until you get home, dumbass!”. That was some good insight to all of you who were thinking that. 

Being able to feel those ups and downs and being able to keep some perspective and stay calmer is definitely harder the more that we have going on, but it was still working for the first few days back from vacation. And there were waves on those first few days. But eventually I did get worn out by the consistency of the waves. On vacation, I didn’t have the stress and demands of work and only had kid stuff and the random annoyances that pop up to deal with. Back at home, it’s all of it all the time. 

I started to get sea sick. It wasn’t just that there were almost constant waves, some of them were big waves. The waves on vacation hadn’t been that big. There was other weather too that made it difficult to navigate calmly. There was fog. 

A few days ago I had a day off from work and it finally wasn’t raining. That should have been smoother sailing. But the day started out with a little squall. Then the fog started to roll in. One year ago was the day that a man, who I had never spoken to before, called me at work to tell me that my mother was dead. That didn’t cause any waves a year later but it still changed the weather. Then I had work drama (yes, I already told you it was my day off) and the waves started kicking up again. And there were winds blowing in from another direction bringing more waves. My father had been in a car accident and I couldn’t really hear all that he was saying on the voicemail he left but he wanted me to drive him around to a couple of places. I couldn’t be sure from the voicemail if the accident had happened that day or not but I thought that it probably had. I didn’t really want to stop my one day off, that I felt like I needed, to go get him and drive him around. That’s a bigger story than I’m going to fit in here, but there’s a lot of complications there and I didn’t really feel like I owed him that. I had plans to spend time with my kids. But it was still on my mind.

When I spoke to my father later, I found out that he had been in a car accident that day. Someone had turned in front of him at almost the last second and he didn’t even have a chance to hit the brakes. He could have died on the same day that I had found out a year before my mother had died. Bam. The clouds started to part and I could see clearer skies. It was just a shift in perspective. All those other waves that had been pushing me around all day seemed smaller when I had that “what if” to compare them to.

It is hard to see that the shit we’re dealing with in the moment is just the same old up and down. It’s especially hard because it’s often constant. There always seems to be something to deal with. Do you ever leave work and just think about how at home you’ll be able to hang with the kids and just not deal with any crap and then you get home and the kids are misbehaving and giving crazy attitude and your spouse is all burned out from dealing with them and you don’t get that break? You have to keep dealing with more. 

Then it’s “woe is me” time. Why can’t I get a break? Why is there always something to be dealing with? It’s all about perspective. It’s easy to forget that we aren’t owed a break and that the ocean is never totally calm. There’s always motion. Finding out that instead of talking to my father on the phone, which in and of itself is uncomfortable and sometimes stressful, I could have been talking to another police officer, telling me that my other parent and last living close relative had died, opened up those storm clouds to let the clear skies in because it shifted my perspective.

This stuff takes practice. This is what it means to be mindful. When we are able to feel the up and downs, the constant motion as natural then we are there. We’ve got our sea legs. When we can step back and realize that the waves may be big but there have been bigger waves and there will be again, and it’s all just part of the flow, it makes it easier to deal with what’s going on in that moment. But damn, I’m getting crispy. Where are the horse latitudes? 

It’s important to be able to recognize when things are going well. We all face different pressures, challenges, and difficulties everyday. Some of them are little things that pop up randomly and some of them are bigger things that follow us from one day into the next. But that’s how it’s always going to be. Having some difficulties doesn’t mean that things aren’t going well. If we’re so busy looking at the tough stuff then we can miss noticing that overall things are good. 

Being able to recognize when our lives are going well is a skill. It’s an area that we can probably all improve upon. It’s a skill that requires some quiet or distance. When we are moving from task to task, from appointment to appointment and we’re focused on our lists of things to do, we have little chance of recognizing anything. When we’re caught up in the rat race and any bigger thoughts are drowned out by the noise, we can’t really see how things are going. We have to step back, out of the whirlwind, in order to be able to see what’s really spinning around. Then maybe we’ll notice that it’s really just little things and what seemed like a big storm is just a drizzle. 

Being able to pull back and recognize when things are going well is only the first part though. We have to allow ourselves to appreciate it. It’s still so easy to get sucked back into the busyness of our lives, our schedule, our worries and issues that we carry around with us. Once we realize that things are ok, or maybe even good, then we’ve got to keep standing outside the whirlwind long enough to feel that and enjoy it. Then we can let go a little, relax, and even smile knowing that all those details only seemed big and important because that’s all we were looking at. Then when we do step back, into our schedules and routines, we’ll be a little lighter.

One of the ways, to be able to step out of the noise, is to remember how fleeting everything is. When we feel upset, we are stuck in that feeling and we forget that it won’t last. We’ll be feeling something else soon enough. Just remembering that can help us feel less upset. Whatever it is we’re dealing with is immediately less important when we remember that it won’t last. 

I just got back from a vacation. Vacation is supposed to be fun and relaxing, right? But it’s never all fun and relaxing, especially when you’re on vacation with kids. Every single day had a rough spot with kids’ behavior. I was having a hard time with that for the first few days. Each time that I was listening to the yelling of a child everything else got drowned out. I was stuck right in it the same way that the child doing the yelling was stuck. We both thought it was the biggest deal in the world. We both were unable to see that it was just one thing and that it wouldn’t last and, for me, I wasn’t able to remember that it’s just part of the process of this little human’s struggle to handle his/her emotions. 

One of our vacation adventures was going out on a boat to go snorkeling. We went a little over three miles off the coast before we stopped to snorkel. On the way out, I was sitting in the front of the boat, with the kids, while everyone else was in the back. It was pretty calm but we weren’t in a very big boat and we were going against the current to get out there so we felt the little ups and downs of the water. The kids were having fun with it. One of them stopped holding on, “Let go, it’s scary but you get used to it!”, laughing. 

Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. It was fun because it really was pretty calm. There was no fear that one of those bumps was going to capsize us or knock one of us out of the boat. We knew it was just a little bump. Just a little “up” before the “down”. We knew we’d come down and we knew we’d go back up again.

Just like every random emotion that we feel throughout the day, just like every difficulty we face in our lives, each little bump of the water would end. There was always another bump ready to lift us back up. Up and down. Up and down. That is the story of our lives. Caught up in an emotion, the emotion passes. Caught up in an emotion, the emotion passes. We’re faced with a challenge or difficulty, the challenge passes. Here’s a new challenge, that challenge passes too. 

After that, the rest of the vacation was so much more relaxing for me. Any time a child yelled, I thought to myself, “up and down”. When things didn’t go our way, “up and down”. When I could remember that it was all fleeting, it wasn’t as important. It was just another bump that would pass to be followed eventually by another. These bumps lose their power to stir us and control us when we remember that they won’t last. They don’t feel as important when we remember that they are not forever. 

Whatever it is we are feeling or whatever challenge we are dwelling on, it will all pass. If we can remind ourselves that it will pass, it becomes smaller, easier to manage, and not so bad. We give these moments their power over us by staring at them and ignoring everything else. When we remember that it’s all fleeting, we deflate it and we can see the whole picture again. Up and down. Up and down.

 

I’ve written before about how we handle our emotions and how we react to the situations that are presented to us throughout the day. A big part of our ability to handle things with grace is our ability to accept these things that are happening. And a big part of being able to accept is our own idea of what we can control. 

Recently, I was talking to my kids about the Serenity Poem. Kids’ emotions are easily roused. They are often upset about things that they have no control over and can not change. That’s why I was discussing the Serenity Poem with them. I wanted to get them to think about whether or not they have control over the things that upset them. And from there, just like the poems states, accept the things they don’t have control over and put in the effort to change the things that are under their control.

But it’s not just kids. Our idea of control or our inability to recognize what is not within our control, is a big stumbling block for many of us. It’s the foundation for so much frustration and anger. We think we are in control of so much. It’s not just the foundation for frustration and anger, it’s the foundation for much of the stress in our lives. If we think we can control something then it becomes our responsibility to control it and that can easily turn into a burden and a source of stress. 

The fact that the Serenity Poem was written points to the difficulty people have always had recognizing that many things are out of their control. We react without evaluating or considering whether we can actually do anything about the thing to which we are reacting. But instead of getting better at making this distinction we are getting worse. Our modern world is all about making everything convenient. We are being conditioned to expect instant gratification. Most of us have so much power over our world and daily lives. Even many people considered poor have smart phones, cars, microwave ovens and flat screen TVs. (I’m not saying that the poor aren’t poor. Our economics and class system are a whole different conversation.)

In many ways, we are likes gods or kings compared to ancient humans. We can drive ourselves great distances. We can cook a meal in seconds. We can be entertained on our big screen TVs and we can do so much with just the small phone in the palm of our hand. Why wouldn’t we think that we can actually control everything? It’s no wonder how upsetting and frustrating it is when something doesn’t go our way. We have all this supposed power but then we are confronted daily with these situations that come up that contradict that power. 

Can we control the other driver who cut us off? Can we control that eight other people are standing in line before us and we are forced to wait? I could spend the rest of the day making this list of things we can not control. 

A large piece, of the puzzle, of how to navigate our journey with grace, is realizing and accepting what we actually can control. If we are able to accept what we don’t have control over, then we no longer have to solve the problem or even be mad at the problem, we just have to figure out how to deal with it. That frees up a lot of our time and energy and focuses us on what is under our control: our reaction and what we’ll do going forward. 

The flip side is that when we start to think about how much of our lives are out of our control it can freak people out. I’d guess that a lot of people would rather be stressed out about trying to control everything than have to admit that they are powerless so much of the time. Just like anything, it depends on how we look at it. We can say the glass is half full or we can say the glass is half empty, but it doesn’t change how much water is in the glass. We can be panicked that so much is out of our control or we can feel freer and lighter. By acknowledging and accepting that this is a big world and that it rolls along on its own, we can move past a lot of negative emotions. We are not responsible for what is out of our control. We can let go of all that and instead focus on the aspects of our lives that we can control.