Resolutions

There are a couple of things I do and don't do in my life that, if/when I change them, will greatly enhance my well-being. I've been kind of trying to do them for a while, but it is now time to really focus on them. To move from a LONG list of to-dos and embrace the need to reshape my life to incorporate these two new priorities.

1) Work effectively. I have a lot of projects I want to do. A LOT. And I can work hard. But I also waste time, or don't get things done as effectively as I need to. I've blogged before about ways of becoming more effective at work. Now, I'm taking this as a top priority. I want to jump in and do the work that needs doing, and to work 'til it's done. So that I can then focus on having fun with the same intensity.

2) Regular exercise. I simply don't exercise enough. It has nothing to do with body image, and everything to do with health. I want my heart to be health and keep me going for many, many years. I want my years to be filled with life, not disease. I want to keep calm, happy, vibrant and stress-free. Exercise will enable me to do all these things. I need good exercise at LEAST 3 times a week. Ideally? I would get real exercise every day. I need to do this, and need to do it NOW.

Candlelight

I'm sitting in bed, laptop where it belongs - on my lap, space heater running, gazing at some burning candles. Three tall beeswax tapers sitting in a gorgeous purple glass candlestick holder. They're not dripping - I don't think they're dripless, but I put them in the freezer before burning (I heard it lengthens their burning time).

A year ago, I went down to visit a friend in Washington State. She was getting ready to move so I helped her sort, chuck and whittle down her possessions. She was far more ruthless than I am (at least with my own things) and reduced her possessions to a carful. I can still feel how light that is - how free, to be unencumbered by THINGS and by clutter, to travel only with those things that you love and use and need and choose to have around you.

It's getting colder and darker these days. While I don't like the cold, I love the magic of this time of year. I find myself turning more and more towards the home. It's a time for curling up, snuggling and reading, cooking and eating, cleaning and caring for the space you live in. And somehow, those candles represent it all for me. They are beautiful. Pure and natural. Soothing, comforting, nurturing. Those three candles, and their exquisite holder centre me here, in my room, in my home, in the life I'm living. I can't believe it's taken me an entire year to light them. But now I know, and they will continue to bring me joy and peace for the rest of this winter.

Low energy ... or homebody?

It's been a busy semester, and my greatest joy of late is coming home. And staying home. After a day's work, the last thing I (usually) want to do is leave the house. It's about a 20 minute drive to get into town (i.e., anywhere). It's getting cold and dark. I want to cozy up in some warm pants and do ... anything! Read, watch TV (more than I wish I did ... BBC shows on tape are awesome), clean, sometimes even cook. I'd be happy to have anyone join me here, but would rather not have to go out.

I'd love to get a wave of extroversion and start getting back into some of my old activities - dancing, climbing, just getting out. Maybe when the semester ends my energy will surge again.

Me time

My new favourite me-time pasttime: going through old decorating and travel magazines, looking for beautiful pictures, cutting and pasting them into my beautiful, multipurpose, educational-inspirational-reflectional journal on a rainy day while watching Dharma & Greg on tv.

Space

My sister came to visit and we did a second clearing-out of my clothes. I can't believe how much we got rid of. Clothes I don't like, that don't fit or I don't wear. Goodness, the joy!

The end result: a more compact collection of clothes that I like! I even, perhaps, love. And now all the right things fit together in a pile with everything like them. So I have one pile of T-shirts. One pile of tank tops. And those are both in the same drawer, together with my single pile of shorts. And with all like things together, it's so much easier to find what I want!

The added bonus is space. Things now hang easily in my closet. And I now have empty shelf space. Empty! Nothing in there! It is such a soothing sensation to see that space - there to be used, if I need it, but not being used now. I can breathe more easily knowing I have that space.

It's the same, I think, with having chunks of time-space and nothing in them. The past 6 months have had so many activities and commitments. There was something to do almost every little chunk of time. I couldn't just do nothing. Every weekend, every day, had some bit of work or a meeting or even just fun things like a class or jam session in them. But no nothing. No empty-ness, open to whatever I felt like doing. No whole day or days to let my mind wander, body relax and creativity create.

Both temporal and physical space are essential for me. They allow me to breathe and get to the more fun, creative and nurturing things I want to do.

Out with the old ... in with the new?

Yesterday one of my awesome friends came over and helped me purge my closet. This is a regular ritual for me - I sometimes accumulate clothes quite quickly and sometimes don't let go of them quite as quickly. So I tried on everything hanging in my closet and we got rid of VERY LARGE bag of clothes. Many of them didn't fit quite right. Others didn't have flattering colors. Some just weren't really me.

What a huge relief to have space in my closet now. I can access all my clothes, and they're all hanging nicely on their own hangers. Matching white ones, except for the sloped ones and the skirt/pants hangers.

I find that when I get rid of things I don't really love, it frees me to enjoy more the things I keep and love. A new clarity of vision? Fewer distractions? Undiluted pleasure in my possessions? Maybe the mind can only hold so many clothes in its memory at once. In any case: I feel a renewed enthusiasm for my wardrobe after getting rid of so much.

There are still some piles of things we didn't go through - a big shelf of sweaters and pants; my shoes; jewelry; and a dresser of shirts, undergarments and pajamas. Yes, I have a lot of clothes. I hope to purge them in the near future as well.

Clearing out space means I'm open to receive more. But I want to say, quite firmly, that I don't really want more. I really like and love a lot of my clothes, and feel that I definitely have enough. I have more than enough for the various occasions in my life. I would far rather just continue to enjoy what I own than to buy more, which will only clutter up what I have now.

Saying No

I think I'm burned out. I think I just realized it this morning. I don't like it. I think I should be doing (and be capable of doing) far more than I am. I have big goals I want to accomplish. I think I should be an accomplished person.

But you know what? The reality is that I'm tired. I'm stressed. My hair is falling out. I don't want to volunteer for anything else. The long list of little things I "have" to do is wearing me out. And it's summer - and yet I rarely take a day to simply enjoy it. That is wrong!

I want to do many things. That's nice. But apparently I'm not able to do those things right now. I have an easy time telling other people that they just need to say no. Well, I guess I need to re-learn that magical skill. Even things that seem essential. I am not really needed for the choir to run well. The committee can survive without my excessive participation. I don't need to take on any new projects. I have a lot I'm doing now, and I need to cut out activities, not add new ones. I think that's why my time has been taken with all of my personal business - I need to get things done, finish them off, so I feel unburdened.

Well - back to the reflection and simplification process.

Shiny and new

I haven't polished my jewelry in years. This one pair of earrings I've been wearing since I bought them in high school - getting duller and duller every year. I finally sat down to polish all the silver pieces on Friday night, and what a pleasure that was!

Rather than a toxic silver polish, I used baking soda and water, and an old piece of cloth. Those items are now sparkling, with minimal effort. I love it!

A perfect mess

I've been reading, with a grain of salt, the book "A Perfect Mess." It's a critique of North America's organization/ purging/ cleaning obsession, our mental equation of neat with good, our assumptions that streamlined works better. In contrast, they offer ideas and stories illustrating their main thesis that every system has an optimal degree of mess.

They equate mess with flexibility. Mess = abundance, variety, unpredictable mixing of elements, mental stimulation, and the ability to draw on diverse resources to drive creative thinking. I would not choose the word "mess" for this - I would focus on an enriched, diversified environment and the ability to be flexible, which I think can work just as well within an ordered environment. I can see, however, how rigid plans and goals, particularly at the larger organizational level, can make it hard to shift gears and respond rapidly. Building in flexibility at the bigger level now seems like an important thing to me.

They also emphasize the cost of organization. Organizing takes TIME. It also often takes money. And the organized structures often do not add any value, and in fact, may impede creativity and speed of reactions. This is an important point for me to keep in mind.

They pay less attention to the costs of mess. I know I've discovered I think more clearly in an organized, cleaned-out environment. Mess creates stress for me, and for many others I know. When I have to search for documents, it takes precious time, whereas upfront organization makes it much easier. In short, I am not sold on mess as a good thing. But my brain is now stretched and I am considering, first, that certain levels of organization may simply not be needed; and second, that keeping things around that I might want or need later is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

I love grandma

Today I went to visit my grandma and drop some things off at her place. We sat around and talked for quite a while about a wonderful combination of the good old days, frugality, and crafts. She was telling me more stories about how hard everyone used to work - she worked from when she was 15, 7 am to 7 pm, 7 days a week, with 2 weeks off a year. Crazy! Growing up, they literally walked 3 miles each way to school. 6 miles a day. When she was about 8, her mom taught her and her older sister how to knit. They used to use nails as knitting needles (her dad cut the ends off) and practiced knitting long strips until they knew how to make other things. She started off making scarves, but eventually moved on to knitting sweaters and other things from patterns.

Growing up, there were 12 kids in the family. They slept 3 to a bed, on straw mattresses. They re-used everything. Sugar came in big cloth sacks that her mom bleached and sewed into sheets. Old clothes were made into quilts, or pulled to pieces to make rag rugs. One of her relatives used to buy big old skirts at the Salvation Army and make them into aprons. She crocheted lace that she put around the bottom and the pockets. She sold these aprons for 50 cents a piece. Nothing got wasted.

It's interesting to think about what we can learn from how people lived, just in the last century. Though I love a good mattress, I'm still inspired by the low-waste lifestyles that were the norm so recently.

Home, home, home!

I LOVE home. I am such a home-body. Much though I love seeing the world, my greatest fantasies involve being in one place and creating a life there. An environmental, welcoming, creative life. I fantasize about gardening (well, yes ... it is admittedly currently more fantasy than reality ... but this summer I'll really do it!); about purchasing second hand items and decorating; about arranging things, painting things, cooking things, inviting people over.

Today I'm working at home - reading in the kitchen - just enjoying it all. My dad is refinishing my bathroom, which is a thrill, and I'd love to just drop it all and help. Or do some cooking. Or plan out our spring garden. The pleasures of life, seen small and local.

rrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRICK zkkkZIKK zzzzzzzzzz

Last night I went to a performance by Christian Bok, a sound poet out of Calgary. I haven't been to a lot of poetry events in the past while, and didn't know how much I would actually enjoy it, but I felt up for a new experience. And what a treat it was. Sounds and words, glorious, rolled into my ears for almost an hour. At least half the poems were in the dada form/style - the sounds, the intonation carried the meaning rather than the non-words that were used. Christian opened with an enviable rich and rolling r-sound, shouted whined declaimed and intoned, screeched bellowed and beat-boxed.

Several pieces stand out. A brilliant anagram co-written by he and a friend. An entire poetry book (he read selections from it) called eunonia - with each chapter dedicated to and using only one vowel. But my favorite was a selection from an opera in which he performed - performed at 4 a.m. on a lake in northern Ontario - called the "aria of the three-horned monster." Opening with an insane screech, the aria sent me giggling not from embarrassment or confusion, but from the sheer joy of the sounds. Who has not wanted to screech, holler, scream meaningful nonsense at the world?

The evening was a powerful reminder of the vital role arts and artists play in the health and functionality of society. Arts explore the feeling and philosophy of life that are as vital an element in our sanity and happiness as material needs. These explorations of ideas, outlets for what is hidden in regular life, let us acknowledge their reality, thus giving them a place in our lives while appeasing their potentially violent revolts. By touching the insane, silly and wild in us, they ground us in ourselves, freeing our energy for living.

And that all could be said so much better. Those words above barely touch at the importance of art. But they're all I've got right now.

All My Relationships

I just finished a really great book - Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Life Happily Ever After (Bella dePaulo, 2006). She takes on a raft of myths about single people, unearthing the many ways they are culturally positioned as inferior to married people. Just a few that struck home: financial support given to married couples, while singles are not similarly supported; being treated as less mature and less of an adult than married people; and associating loneliness with singleness. What is interesting is realizing a number of the ways I've internalized some of these beliefs, forgetting that happiness and a full life is ultimately my choice, no matter what my relationship status.

dePaulo writes about the social conceptions of singles as selfish and married peoples as contributors to community. In contrast with this, she cites studies showing that involvement in community service often actually declines when people marry. If you know me, you know I value marriage, so I am not in any way critiquing married people. This does, however, make me think of two things: first, that indeed, as a single woman I feel strongly the social critique of single people as self-absorbed, and am relieved to have some writer publish findings showing the opposite. And second, I can imagine myself how, with my love of home and family, I could become completely insular if I married. This is the opposite my vision of marriage as a vehicle for personal growth and service, and I hope I avoid this.

More than this, though, appreciation of the way we stigmatize singleness opens the way for appreciating the richness that diverse relationships bring to our lives. By recognizing the tremendous value we gain from strong relationships with parents, siblings, friends, children, we can still appreciate the bond we have with a spouse, while reducing the tremendous pressure our society places on that bond to fulfill all our needs. It enables people to reach out and consciously build strong networks of support and mutual encouragement in a way that enriches life.

(Updated Feb. 8/08)

More on coltan

I attended a talk today by Dr. Samantha Nutt - founder of War Child Canada (warchild.ca). She was talking about the interconnected interests and processes that lead to war, and the bad things it brings on every level. Every level - everything, for everyone affected (which is disgustingly large numbers of people) - pretty much everywhere, given the vast number of conflicts.

She spoke about coltan again - the metal that is found in such concentrations in the Congo, that is used, because of its conductivity, in virtually every personal electronic device we use in the west: cell phones, video game stations, computers, the list is endless. Rwanda last year made $250 million from coltan - and they don't even have any reserves of it. That is $250 million just from trade (illegal, I believe). Coltan is big business, and it is a big reason why things are so wrong in the Congo. In one region, one in every 3 women has been raped. 58,000 people are killed every month - and this after a "democratic" election. This is utter insanity.

Her talk left me sitting there thinking, what am I complaining about? And, what can I do with my life? I believe strongly that I'm doing now what I need to do, and that it means something, but I want to have some broader view than just my own tiny world.

I wonder what I have been doing for the past 10 years, and how I can use the next 10 years to do more. And reflecting on the role of raising a strong Baha'i community - how community, guided by morality, is one of the most important ways of building up resilience against these conflicts and the collapse of society.

And I wondered, looking at who I am and my levels of energy and my cravings for security, what can I and what will I do? Really? It is 10 pm, and I am delighted by the thought of bed and a book. How these all fit together, I do not know.

And finally: I felt glad and a bit proud that my laptop is 5 years old, and I intend to use it as long as I can. And not to get a cell phone. I am still not sure about a digital camera. And yet, when my laptop finally gives out ... I will buy a new one, won't I?

What comes first?

In Walden, Thoreau offers the following sentiment: "I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes." He probes our material desires, obsession with all things new and fashionable, and need to supplement new pursuits with all the material accoutrements that can become a pursuit in their own right, displacing the authenticity of engagement in things meaningful and pleasurable.

That being said: I have two new hobbies, and each required a new pair of shoes. I wonder: am I a new wearer of clothes? are these passions making me into that new person?

First was dancing. I've loved dancing since childhood and generally take any opportunity available to dance. In June I began salsa dancing. I quickly discovered that NO shoes in my existing collection would do the job. They were too high or too low, too bulky or not supportive enough, with soles too slippery or too sticky. I decided that my love of dance was worth investing in, and bought a pair of not-so-beautiful but fully functional dance shoes in Vancouver. The first time I danced in them, I knew it was a new era of dance for me. I could fly!

My shoes went missing recently. I attended a latin dance party, and left without taking my shoe bag. At first I thought they were gone forever. I tried dancing in other pairs, but they kept falling off, slowing me down, impeding that optimal dance experience. I soon tracked down the dance coordinator who had picked them up after the event. Almost 2 weeks later, we finally connected and I got my shoes back. And I was back to dancing again.

My friend Naomi took me rock climbing recently at an indoor gym here. As soon as I started, a feeling of joy came over me. The same as dance, since childhood I have loved climbing things, manipulating my body, doing anything acrobatic. Rock climbing was pure joy, complete focus, and completely me. So this weekend in Vancouver, I bought another pair of shoes, this time for rock climbing. I spent two of the best shopping hours ever trying on a variety shoes in stores on Broadway, trying them out on the indoor rock walls they provided. At first I felt quite self conscious. These were highly public places, with rows of customers right behind me checking out, browsing, being outdoorsy. But then I started climbing, and the same feeling of sheer exhilaration came over me. I was climbing. There was nothing else to think about.

I bought the shoes. And I've concluded that maybe these are new clothes; or maybe it's just a new me.

Finding Time

I've been experiencing time crunchage lately. Just hired to teach a new course, it's been pretty intense as I try to conceptualize the course (i.e., create a syllabus I can live with) and plan the first couple of weeks of lectures. And my desire to work on many other projects continues. So: how can I manage my time so as to attend to all my work, accomplish projects I'm personally invested in, and stay calm and happy?

Recognizing that it is one of the big questions, here's some of what I'm doing.

First, I'm working to take time to breathe, pray and be away from work. Deep breaths, reflection on the meaning of life, calling on Divine assistance, and gaining physical distance from work help me get perspective on it.

Another aspect of defining the boundaries of work involves putting time constraints on it. Work can bleed into my entire life, and I don't want that. I want it to be contained, so that I still have things that are not pure work. I found when I was in grad school, I never completely put my projects down, even if I wasn't actively working on them. It's time now to learn the difference between work time and life time. Or even, paid work time and voluntary fun projects time. I am working towards doing job-work from 9-5, and after that, putting down my computer.

A third aspect is organizing myself. I have my folders for different aspects of teaching set up pretty well now. I have my to-do list, my calendar, my supplies at hand. I am ready to tackle what needs tackling.

Which I am now about to do. More on this to follow ...

Recreated

I understand that over a 7 year period, every cell in your body is replaced. I am wondering what kind of a new life I could create for myself if I really tried to build a better me over the next seven years. Primarily, what paths in my brain could I reprogram if I thought only positive thoughts from now on?

This came back to me yesterday as I was collapsing under the stress of a new job. I don't want to do that. And I would love to look back in 7 years and realize I've become a new person with new ways of coping with the challenges of life. I'm going to try. I'm going to work on replacing dysfunctional and negative thoughts with accurate, positive, encouraging ones. Thoughts that allow me to do what I need to do, and to live life with joy. It will take tremendous effort - but I think it will be worth it.