Week 11

Last week was about:

11. Realize what's getting in the way, where you're stuck, etc. with respect to solving a small problem or working on a big project. Because addressing those obstacles can leverage a LOT of progress--and forgetting to look for them can blind you to possibilities, and leave undone or unsuccessful work very much stuck.

On a big decluttering tear, of life- and home-changing proportions, I've (re)realized that company and accompaniment--both physical and psychological presence--are huge helps in working on the things that feel overwhelming. Just the realistic thought of getting help has given me energy for the things that are more in reach, b/c it doesn't feel as much like "there's just too much, it will never get done".

And, I've moved to actually get some flesh and blood companionship in the clutter war between good (spaciousness, having only what you find to be beautiful or know to be useful--thanks William Morris!) and evil (the endless encroachment of toomuchness): First, on an online parenting forum I frequent, I joined a "let's declutter in November, set goals for the month, and report weekly on how we're doing" thread that spontaneously arose in the last 24 hours. Second, I just sent a contemplated-over-several-days email invitatation of sorts to a dozen girlfriends who I believe to be the kind of people whose good company, kindness, and smarts will be constructive for me--whether it's just for parallel play or also for hands on help.

Is the company of good people low-hanging fruit? Well, no. And yes. No, it's not just a little thing--it's a big thing. In the some ways, the biggest thing--our relationships with each other. And it's often hard to ask others for help, or to know who to ask. But yes--often, the people in our lives want to help us, and have the ability to do it--that help is right there for the asking. You know the feeling when a friend asks you to give her kid a ride somewhere and you're, like, "Sure, no problem!" and she says, "This is a total lifesaver, thank you", and you hear the relief in her voice, and you realize with pleasure how sometimes a thing that is small for you makes a big difference for someone else? Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes, the help you need is something that someone who you are connected to can provide, and is happy to. 

Especially when the help is that very connection.

So, thanks in advance to the dozen of you. And while I'm on the topic, let me raise a glass to the wonderful womenfriends who, nearly 7 years ago, each spent a couple of hours with me on one of the Wednesday nights in the first few months of the twins' lives, when Ben was gone for a couple of hours each night and I was alone with two infants--and who said, "When can I have a chance to come back?"

One of them was my dear brilliant friend Elizabeth Mark z"l. Her husband Mel died this past week. The end of an era, of the marital team of the erstwhile college student then named Betty Wyner and the handsome grad student who fixed his eye on her.

May we all be blessed with good, good companionship--in love, and in life at large.

Week 10

I've got chicken soup in the fridge for Shabbat, boneless breasts defrosting in the fridge.

I made lunches for the twins for tomorrow.

The dishwasher is running, and the counter is clear.

I don't know how long this will last, but I'm enjoying the ride.

Oh--and, there's a plastic bag hanging from the armrests in the front seat of the mini-van.

Weeks, uh, 6-9?

So, it's been a while...

Lots of big things have been getting in the way of focusing on the little things. That sounds like the opposite of the usual problem--kind of like, "For want of the kingdom the nail was lost..." But the truth is that there are times in life when the personal change engine needs to take a rest, when self-improvement has to ride in the backseat b/c Jewish holidays-a-gogo, big work and family demands, and the like are taking turns driving the car.

There, there, low-hanging fruits. You'll have your chance.

From last time:

10.  Trash bag always hanging from the arms of the two front seats: it's there. It works. Haven't been so good about keeping the spare bags around, so right now it's full and hasn't been taken in in a while. There's been some overflow onto the floor. Plus, 4-hour-each-way car trip this weekend with the twinlets. 'Nuff said. The Husband and I are going to clean out the car in a few minutes.

Jon the Boss has started using this format for meetings with his direct reports: a. What have you been working on? b. Where are you stuck? c. How can I help? The whole diagnosing-where-you're-stuck thing is truly a sine qua non of any kind of change, small or large. What's getting in the way? What obstacles--familiar, or unexpected--are you encountering?

It's too easy to go from point A (problem!) to point C (frustration with persistence of problem) without stopping at B (what's contributing to problem?)--which can often let you bypass C entirely and divert you to D  (Oh! Get the bags from the "way back" already and keep them up front at all times! You know that bin under the passenger seat? etc.).

I don't know about you, but I suspect I'm not the only one who jumps right to getting mad at yourself, frustrated at the universe, annoyed with family members...beating up on yourself, or (even in your head) somebody else. Fruit of the Week: when feeling annoyed about something in my world that I presumably have some control over but am completely frustrated with, depressed about, etc., let those feelings serve as a reminder to say: "OK. Back-up. What's getting in the way of you solving this?" And, if I've got some energy left in that particular session d'introspection, "What/who do you need to marshall to solve it?"

Because sometimes, sure, it will be professional help, a day off, or a family meeting that will be needed to make real progress on a given challenge. But sometimes, it will be something as simple as: Oh. Yeah. The plastic bags. Move 'em to the front. Done.

Week 5--Out of the Mouths of Babes

First of all, re: last week's post--rookie mistake: Capitalizing on momentum is a good thing in a given moment, but returning each room each day to the way the cleaner's left it? Uh, something good to aspire to, but anything that makes me say, "Not going to be easy" is not low-hanging fruit. However, I'm going to keep in mind momentum as a general operating principle--e.g. before ending a particular task or kind of activity, or leaving a room, think whether there is one additional thing I could do before ending.

Ditto on the "have the right food around to whip up a several-course meal without actual cooking on a moment's notice b/c your last minute guests are allergic to a key ingredient in the simple main dish you were going to serve your family".  But when shopping for Shabbat or a holiday, buying a few extra things to round out a meal just in case? Within reach.

Ok, so here's some real low-hanging fruit. I tend towards messy car. Actually, "messy" is on a good day; our family does an unfortunate amount of car eating, and the food detritus is not pretty. One of the sweet kids in our carpool said to me--yes, I'm taking decluttering advice from 10-year-olds; no, not humiliating at all, why do you ask?--"You know what my mom does? She hangs a plastic bag from the arms between the front seats." At the time, I was thinking, "Uh, thanks hon, having a bag for garbage, which I already do"--OK, not all the time--"is not exactly revolutionary advice...you must think I'm really impaired..."

But after Dr. Husband packed up a a bunch of plastic bags into one, I took it out to my minivan, put it in the trunk (the way way back), and hooked one on those seat arms. (In a car, I hasten to add, that had gotten cleaned--well, cleaned out, vacuumed and wiped; carpet cleaning is for the next round--for the school year, that was not a disaster!)

And you know what? It makes a difference. Because the trash bag is in easy reach of the driver's seat, not on the floor. It is conveniently located for the kids in the middle seat. It's even easy to reach for carpool kids in the back seat when they get out of the car--or, again, for those middle-seat kids to have trash handed up to them. Basically, it's kind of brilliant. And I've become, in short order, a fanatic about making sure all trash goes in that bag, and making sure everybody picks up trash (as well as anything else on the floor) when they get out of the car. (When it's full, it goes in with me to whatever is the next building I enter, unless it's at home in which case it goes right into the garbage can--when I get back into the car, I get another bag from the huge stash in the way way back.)

Damn, it's momentum again. The car was cleaned up, and I've found a way to keep it that way--b/c of a 10-year-old's suggestion and a bag of spontaneously-reproducing plastic shopping bags. Now that's low-hanging fruit.

Thanks, Rina.

Week 4--A New Year

Rosh Hashanah always gets the personal-change juices going.

This week's low-hanging fruit:

8. Capitalize on momentum. Momentum is like free energy from the universe, not to be squandered. If a room has, say, just been cleaned by the cleaners, don't mourn that it's going to be trashed in one evening--make a mental picture of what it looks like and put a few minutes into returning it to at least that state each night. If you're feeling unexpectedly energetic, jump up and go! Lather, rinse, repeat.

9. Be vigilant about throwing out bad things from your refrigerator, so that everything in it is potentially usable on a moment's notice, and keep a few not-spoiling-quickly no-cook edibles in your fridge (e.g. packaged guacamole--surprisingly tasty, with big chunks of avocado; goodhummus--to be jazzed up with olive oil and paprika; smoked salmon...). Plus, keep some cooked pasta around. And fresh vegetables for a salad. Because when you have, say, 5 unexpected guests for lunch, the ability to pull together a lovely meal--inspiring a 9-year-old girl to say, "You said, 'It'll just be a simple lunch'--this is simple??", which makes you melt--will make you feel very on top of things.

Oh, and keeping a frozen vegan treat around for when other guests with egg allergies stop by? Another good host moment.

Having a well-stocked kitchen can make all the difference. Yay us.

Week 3...ish

(I clearly don't have to worry about those extra 4 weeks in this 100 weeks project...they'll be eaten up here and there.)

I think I had better start numbering the "low hanging fruits that could change your (that is, my) life". Good to keep track of 'em. The roundup of previous items (this is the last time I'll do a full one, for now) will take us into this week's Dramatic Trip to the ER.

1. "Never regret, always learn". A touchstone, to which I keep returning..

2. "Eat only food that I enjoy". A small but profound example of making more space for the moment of choice. It helps.

3. "Bed by 11:00 pm". Let's just list this as a laudable goal.

4. "Drink a lot of water...". Been doing better! I abhor warm water but love cold, cold water! It can be found!

5. "Slow down [more] gradually at intersections. [Be careful to stop] before the crosswalk at a stop sign [even if no one is there]. In general, realize the ways [I often feel rushed] when I drive that don't get me there any faster..." Life is too short to do anything but drive safe.

6. "Arrive places early...instead of 'Don't be late!', remember how nice it feels to have two minutes... In general, embrace what there is for me in doing something [different]...instead of what I have to give up..."

So, I am a person who struggles with lateness. A possible combo (in mysterious proportions) of likely ADD (says my doctor), possible passive/aggressiveness against the universe in a diffuse way (as chronic lateness is often said to be), and God knows what else. I hate it, but obviously, as my mom the therapist would say, it serves me in some capacity. We're working on that stuff.

Anyway, speaking of therapy...last week, for the first time probably ever, I was EARLY. I was one minute from my therapist's office, and it was four minutes until my appointment. I was feeling prih-tee self-satisfied...thinking how nice it would feel to sit outside her office and just be for two minutes.

And then my cellphone rang. Those of you who are FB friends of mine are familiar with the bones of this story, but the really barebones version is: b/c of a restaurant error, Shana--who is allergic--had a nut exposure, and after initially subsiding symptoms, had a larger reaction which required use of an Epi-Pen and a four-hour stay in the ER. (She is fine, thank God, and handled it like a trooper.)

What's the learning here? Well, a lot of things--and Pizzeria Uno is going to be learning a thing or two from me--but the low-hanging fruit piece is:

7. Keep your phone charged, and keep chargers close at hand. (Being easily reachable meant that I could turn around immediately and pick-up Shana, who Ben had determined by phone could wait for me instead of calling 911 for an ambulance, and that I could talk to her twice on the way to make sure she was still OK waiting and knew I would be there soon.) Too often, my phone is not charged, making it not so useful for reaching me in an emergency, or for my own use in an emergency.

But since I lost my iPhone--temporarily, I hope; are you out there? (no, there's no point in calling it, it has long since lost its charge, plus I've transferred the service to a loaner)--I've been carrying the small wall charger in my purse with the borrowed phone (thanks, Harvey!), and keeping the iGo adapter in the phone so that I can use it in Ben's car as well as my own.

You know--"for want of a nail..." It's silly to let small *easy* things get in the way of using Helpful Electronic Life Tools.

I decided early on that anything that felt big and overwhelming (or multi-step and murky, or...) or made me feel anxious was not going to "live" on this blog. This is a place for bringing to mind, consolidating, and reflecting on the remarkably large group of things that can improve life and are not very hard to do--*if* we, if I, grab the opportunities for awareness and for small actions that leverage larger living better, living with more ease. So, this is not going to be an ode to disaster preparedness, for example. But it will leave me with an open question: What small things have I not been managing to do, that I really could easily be managing to do, that would make my life better?

(BTW, dear reader--if you're out there--you are warmly invited to offer your own answers to that question--whether in describing past revelations and changes or proposing future ones!)

***

[Wild: After composing and posting this blog post, and mentioning it in my FB status update, I saw that my friend Judy has posted this article

http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2009/09/why-might-small-comfortable-changes-work-better-than-radical-steps-.html

by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, about why and how "small comfortable changes" can be the most effective. Quel coincidence. Excuse me while I go meditate on that.--SPF]

Week 2: Just in under the wire...

So--I never planned necessarily to blog every day. I hoped for at least once/week and ideally many times more/week. But, life, perfection being the enemy of the good, and other assorted Mental Clutter got in the way. So, we move forward. And try to get this one in under the wire of Day 14 [i.e. on 8/30/09] so that Week 2 has something.

I'm going to post, then edit, just to make that happen. Cheating, you say? An elegant solution, I say.

---

OK, I'm back. And I'm noticing that b/c I saved some notes as a draft on 8/18, it looks like this was posted then. Crap.

Oh well, onward and upward.

I wonder if, after Julie and Julia, it is possible for any blogger to be (anachronism alert) typing a post, and not, on some level, think of herself as Amy Adams, the eye of the camera watching as she considers, continues, and finally, hits "publish"?

Of the hopes in and advice-to-self in my previous post:

"Never regret, always learn": kinda getting into this. It's simmering, marinating. It's helping, a bit.

"Eat only food that I enjoy". This has been somewhat of a revelation--interrupting the eating of what's handy and making just the tiniest bit of greater effort to get something I actually want. It's so ridiculously true that introducing consciousness and a moment of choice into the many small acts of daily life--even if the net choice isn't always different--changes things. It really does.

"Bed by 11:00 pm". Dismal failure. But having articulated it, I'm in relationship to the goal, always ready to be drawn back (even though there's no "back" to start with) like a rubber band, needing to relearn my bounciness but knowing it's possible.

"Drink a lot of water...". Uneven, but better. Bought a big water bottle, and a nifty, slim, front-to-back holder of five bottles for the fridge, from the Container Store (my place-of-worship away from home)--the idea being, it's there, you grab, you go. Finally got it all out of the car and into the house--and even filled the bottles with water. They sit there chilling, waiting to be grabbed.

My friend Lucy wrote to me on Facebook: "Have you checked out the Happiness Project?...Find the Starter Kit for HP groups; it has a lot about this kind of thing, providing a structure for making resolutions that work, personal 'commandments', this kind of stuff." A good jumping off point for me to say something about what this is blog is not.

At this point, I don't have any intention of setting up some formal resolutions or goals and seeing how I stick to them over time. No systematic promises here, just the doable-seeming thoughts that come to me and seem worth trying to pursue now, based on living 48 years (and change) in my skin. There are lots of Big Things that I want to work on, and many of them won't ever find their way here in any systematic way, b/c experience tells me that that is a recipe for, among other things, flight and failure.

Also, against popular wisdom, I will probably name here many things that I'm trying to change. "Don't beat yourself up, eat better, sleep more, and drink enough, and that's only the beginning? Are you crazy, woman?" you may want to ask me. The beginning of my answer is this: It's my firm belief that, simultaneous with working on bigger stuff that takes more time and more work, that feels more private, that is higher stakes, there is actually quite a bit of low-hanging fruit that, even if I can't pick it all at its peak, eat tons of it and make jam out of the rest, I can still take some delicious and--here's where the metaphor breaks down--instructive bites of. Low-hanging fruit that will bear fruit. Small things that I've been thinking about or mulling over below the surface for a while, for which naming them out loud, here on the intertubes, might be a tipping point, if not the tipping point.

In general, I'm learning that less is more, in many many ways. And yet, here, there is a way in which--right now, and within reason--I'm tending towards more is more. We'll see how that goes.

Tonight's fruit:

Slow down gradually at intersections. Make sure I have enough room to do so behind other cars when there is traffic. Stop before the crosswalk at a stop sign. In general, realize the ways I'm rushing when I drive that don't get me there any faster but make things feel more rushed--and potentially less safe.

Arrive places early. Part of the whole thing I learned from a friend who's trying to eat healthier--instead of focusing on what she should eat less of, concentrating on what she wanted to eat more of, figuring that if she eats more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, at least some of the "less of"s will take care of themselves. So, instead of "Don't be late!", remember how nice it feels to have two minutes before I need to get out of my car, to be able to gather up my stuff and walk in slowly and feel calm even though I need to be somewhere. In general, embrace what there is for me in doing something in a given moment against type, instead of what I have to give up or stop doing.

And now, I am going to embrace some water and a pillow, and call it a night.

Neither Julie and Julia, nor Spice and Spirit

Every time I am approaching a birthday, I think about the goals I'd love to achieve, first by the birthday, and then--when it passes without achieving so much as an extra load of laundry folded--by the next one.

This year, my husband turned 50. And it occurred to me that that meant that in two years, I'd be 50 too. I--who feel (cliche/triteness alert) like I'm just a couple of years out of college, who remembers what it was like in grad school when the woman cashing my check asked, "Are you an undergraduate?" and I felt like, "Hello, I'm 30, I've earned these years!"--am approaching 50. As in, even with good luck and good health, we can assume that my life is more than half over. Gulp.

But right now, I don't care about how much is left. I just want to make sure I'm not letting the years I've got pass by without so much as a major issue tackled, a long-dreamed-of mini-adventure unpursued...or, on a smaller scale, a NIA class unexplored or a bad eating habit unexamined.

When I mentioned on Facebook, the new public square, that I was contemplating some kind of "100 weeks" project for the two years leading up to my 50th birthday (I figured, 50 weeks a year with two weeks for vacation), I got some modest encouragement. A friend jokingly suggested I cook my way through the Lubavitcher kosher cookbook, Spice and Spirit. (I did love Julie and Julia in both book and movie form, but I wasn't looking for a random yet pleasurable project to give my life meaning. I was looking for a chance to slowly shape--and even reshape--my life by taking care of what's already, at least in theory, on my plate.)

So, here's the scoop. I'll be recording here things I want to work on (not all of them, but some of them; some will as usual be between me and my therapist, others between me and my imaginary journal--kind of like an imaginary friend, but without the funny name and the place at the dinner table) as they occur to me. As both my mother and my boss (hi Jon!) will probably be reading this, there won't be TMI, or at least, not too much TMI. And I'll be talking about how the work is going, if at all, and how I feel about that. 

I warn you--some of this might be just a little too prosaic. (Fancy talk for "boring".)

I promise nothing systematic, although there may be some of that. I promise not to lie, though I don't promise to tell the whole truth. I promise to publicly be a person in progress. For now, that's about it.

For starters, the things I'm thinking about tonight go something like this:

Never regret, always learn. (Wish I could come up with a catchy acronym for that.)

Eat only food that I enjoy. (That means, if it's not what I want, put it down and find something I do actually want, even if it requires the carbon footprint of a Yeti.)

Bed by 11:00 pm. (Whoops--please ignore the time this is posted.)

Drink a lot of water--seltzer, lemon-enhanced, whatever, but hydrate.

That's enough for one night.