Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

Tao te Ching

——————

Misery is a cruel but faithful lover.

The most popular addiction in the 21st century seems to be not drugs or alcohol but good old fashioned despair. People cling to their misery like a worn but beloved security blanket. They take pills and spend endless hours on therapeutic couches in a vain attempt to kill the beast, but turn around and sneak him treats between the bars at every opportunity. Feed the beast, for if he leaves you, you might truly find yourself alone! cries the Voice. The most creative minds in history kept him as a pet. He makes you special. He is your destiny. Be secretly proud he has chosen you.

Each of us has a Voice we listen to. The Voice is a mélange of all the lessons we learned in childhood, the realities we created to make sense of the world. The Voice is our deepest Truth, and we filter everything we see and hear through its endless advice. The Voice is our perception of the universe.

The bad thing is that the Voice lies. A lot. And the greatest secret is that the Voice belongs entirely to us, and we can change its message at any time.

Most people are so used to this constant companion that we no longer hear the whispers. Or if we do, we believe that this is the expression of intuition, or the gentle guidance of god, or simply axiomatic common sense. It never occurs to us that what goes on in our own minds is within our control. It can be guided. It can be changed.

Another secret: everything goes on in our own minds. All of it. Every dot and tiddle, every thought and feeling, every little thing we experience. It’s all in our heads. Where else could it be?

The world around us may not be within our control, but how we perceive it, taste it, judge it, understand it? That is entirely our domain. You are god of your own understanding. Scary thought, no? If you have that much power, victimhood loses some of its sparkle. If we are merely players, strutting and fretting through our own self-written dialog, “woe is me” starts to look rather banal and flat. It’s safer to believe in the clockwinder, or in destiny. Besides, who wants to play Pollyanna when Ophelia gets so much more applause?

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” says Marianne Williamson. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.”

And so we protect ourselves from this knowledge. Inside us is a series of filters, like glass windows through which we see reality. They are the speakers of the Voice. They are our truths. They are the things we believe about ourselves and the universe. They are our moral compass. Their Voice whispers through them as we walk through our world. The chatter drowns out everything else. We listen and we obey.

We’re so accustomed to these filters that we fail to notice how smudged and dark they have become. These filters were often put in place as childhood survival mechanisms, and we don’t always recognize that what saw us through the darkest hours of our most vulnerable years becomes a hindrance in adulthood. If we could remove these filters and see the world as it is, I believe we would spend most of our lives laughing at the simple beauty and the beautiful simplicity of it all. On the other side of that glass is the silent, voiceless song of joy. No wonder people are terrified. Joyful people are rarely tragic heroes. They’re so… pedestrian. And so we cling, and look through a glass darkly.

“Life is shit!” we cry. “Nothing good ever happens.”

While it would seem intuitively obvious that all of us would want to clear the feces from our eyes, it seems that shit is addictive. Anything that threatens the reality of our filters is quickly rejected as heresy. We press our faces to these cloudy windows, protecting them from harm. If you’ve ever had a friend with a perception problem that was antagonizing them, you’ve probably already seen this phenomenon. No matter how gently you try to lead them to a place of personal power, they fight to stay in their safety zone. When asked to explain their thoughts and feelings, they spout of a series of maxims until they eventually reach a place where there are no more defenses and truth gets shaky. At that point you can count on a well-timed subject shift or the last resort of the specious: “That may be true for YOU, but that doesn’t work for me. We’re all unique, you know.” Then they reach for a vodka tonic or a pill, or put on their sad music or write tragic poetry. Anything that highlights the crystalline beauty of their own melancholy. Feed the beast. Gotta keep him fat and happy.

When in this situation, all I can do is throw up my hands and simply hope that there is a new, tiny crack in their perception, maybe even big enough to let in the light of their own personal power. Besides, who am I to lead anyone through the dark night? I carry my own filters with me. We all do. Until I stand in the full glory of my own godhood I doubt my ability to guide anyone else through the murky forests of false victimhood.

And so I work on the beam in my own eye. I watch for patterns. I use my emotions, not as a thermometer that measures “good” or “bad” in the world, but as a legend indicating how I’ve painted truth. Things that frequently irritate me are a sign screaming “Here there be dragons!” An immediate dislike of another person usually points to something inside myself I don’t want to see. A blue note in the song of the world? Why did I play it so? If I’m not happy, then it’s time to redefine happiness and the path to getting there. As each filter falls, I step around the broken glass, smile at the new colors around me, and keep an eye out for the next shimmering wall. Sounds too simple? The greatest truths usually are.

I’ve tried to share some of this Truth with my daughter. She thinks I’m insane. She’s still in the school that proclaims “we are who we are.” You can’t change your mind like you change your nail polish! “I can’t change my BRAIN!” she yells.

Of course, she’s only 17. I figure I’ve laid a foundation, and the first time she shifts perception on her own, the light bulb might click on. I hope she doesn’t spend too many years locked in her own prison before discovering her fantastic leverage on reality. I know I did.

Archimedes was wrong. The lever that can move the world is smaller than a flash of insight. A moment’s epiphany can kill the beast and silence his Voice.

Shhhh…

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Are we living fresh-sealed for our own protection?

Man follows the earth.
Earth follows the universe.
The universe follows the Tao.
The Tao follows only itself.

Tao te Ching
————————–

A frighteningly large number people live in Tupperware.

For too many of us, the longest time we spend outdoors on any given day is the walk across a paved surface from our cars to the door of the next building we want to get into. And we park as closely as possible to the entrance to avoid too much time in that wide open space. The only growing things we see are planted in carefully controlled structures and meticulously pruned. It’s a wonder we aren’t a planet of agoraphobics. Or maybe we are, and nobody notices.

We live in houses, work in office buildings, exercise in gyms. Much of the food we eat may never have seen the light of the sun – from animals raised in boxes to vegetables grown in green-houses to food chemically produced in laboratories. We are hermetically sealed in the modern age.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that depression, anxiety, and social apathy are also on the rise.

As much as we try to avoid the fact, we are biological creatures. We are of the earth. The food we should be eating is of the earth. From earth we were born, to earth we will return. Why are we so afraid of our eternal mother?

I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to find that still, peaceful place within themselves without regularly making contact with the Source of all life. All the yoga classes and meditation rooms in the world cannot make up for ten minutes spent with your feet firmly planted in the sand or the dirt or the grass, digging your hands through soil, or wading through the waves or across the rocks of a river. Although our skies these days might not contain the purest stuff, a single lungful from outdoors is more refreshing than a day’s worth of breathing recirculated, artificially cooled, rebreathed air. The path to being “grounded” is as literal as they come.

Whether your goal is mental health, spiritual well-being, personal growth, or just a modicum of happiness, the first step to achieving it might be right outside your front door.

Try to spend a little time each day outside. Fifteen minutes will do. An hour is better. Rain won’t melt you. Snow won’t kill you, at least not too quickly. Heat may be oppressive, but there’s something healing about the sun on your skin. Bugs might be disgusting minions of the devil or the offspring of evil brain-melting aliens, but most of them aren’t deadly (so I keep reminding myself).

Ideally, outdoor time should be spent in as “natural” environment as possible. If you live near a natural water source, even better. Get your feet wet. Bend over and feel the water. Dig your toes into some wet sand or mud. If there is no river, lake or ocean in your immediate surrounding, find a path in some woods, or through a meadow, or on a hiking trail in the hills or mountains. Touch something living. Smell it. (Try to avoid poison oak because I don’t want that kind of guilt on my hands, but I’m sure a nice tree, flower, or fern will do.)

Now stop for a moment. Close your eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. If you can, take off your shoes and feel the dirt under your feet. Plant yourself for a moment. See? You didn’t die!

If your neighborhood doesn’t border on some untamed wilderness, even a park will do. Walk on the grass. Sit under a tree and listen to the world. Run your hands along the bark and remember what “real” feels like. Bring a picnic of fruits and vegetables. Taste life.

If worse comes to worse, get out on your patio or deck and dig your hands into some soil by planting something in a pot. Tilt your head up to the sky. Look for a bird or a butterfly.

If you don’t even have a patio, at least walk around the block. I’m willing to bet that somewhere within a mile of your house is a living, growing thing. Go greet it. Check on it each day and see how it is doing. Are the leaves budding? Turning golden? Are there flowers? Is it dry? Give it some water!

If you can, find a place where your vision isn’t halted by walls or buildings, a place where you can look out over the rooftops or across a body of water until the world disappears into eternity. Look up at the stars in the night sky. Sit somewhere and watch clouds go by. Breathe. Feel your breath. Notice it.

It only takes about a week of communing with the Source to feel a difference in your life. Your posture straightens. Your breathing eases. Sleep is purer. It can be better than 2 glasses of wine. Almost. Unless the wine is really, really nice.

In the morning, I love to take my coffee and walk the two blocks to the beach. I’ll bring my kindle and read a while, and then just watch the boats going in and out of the harbor. It’s a magical time. You’d think I would do this every day, just because I can. Yet here it is, 10:00am on a Saturday morning, and I’m sitting on the sofa in my pajamas. I have a lovely deck not two feet away from me. I can hear my wind chimes singing back to the breeze and the sound of the ocean in the background and the finches laughing at the trees. The sun is shining, the cloudless blue sky is visible through the windows, and the cool air is beckoning me through the screen door, and still here I am. Sitting in my Tupperware house. Feeling anxious about everyday, worldly things. Ridiculous.

I think it’s time I went outside and visited my Mother.

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You’re an idiot and this hinders my enlightenment

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.

Tao te Ching

——————-

As long as stupid people roam the planet, I will always be a failed Taoist.

There are many brands of stupid, but there is one particular subset of humanity that makes my jaw drop and builds a case for selective breeding.

I call these people “Oblivee-ohs.”

Oblivee-ohs are a liver spot on the hand of god. They are a stain on the genetic future of the race. They are the scourge of my existence.

Put simply, oblivee-ohs are the people who wander the planet, bumbling along like pinballs in slow motion, completely unaware of their actions or how they impact those around them.

You can’t really pick an oblivee-oh out of a crowd by appearance. At first sight, they might look like perfectly normal, functional human beings. Unfortunately, they can’t even self-identify. Oblivee-ohs aren’t aware of their dangerously deviant natures. If they were, I’m confident that their behavior would cease immediately.  They’d be so humiliated they’d either work very hard to change, or they’d kill themselves on the spot in an altruistic gesture to save humanity from their poisonous effects on the gene pool.

Although I’m sure my general readership would never fall into such a category, there’s always a chance that one of them snuck in here while the doorman wasn’t looking. Just in case, here’s a little self-test to determine whether or not you are in need of a radical self-improvement/elimination plan.

You are likely an oblivee-oh if you:

• get off of an escalator and immediately stop at the bottom to “get your bearings,” backing people up behind you like a colon on a high fiber diet.

• Do the same when exiting an elevator

• Do the same when leaving a crowded building. Especially movie theaters. God I hate those people. That includes the ones who stop en masse to discuss the film (which they likely didn’t understand) right at the exit. Yeah, why should I mind standing all night in a room that smells like urine-soaked popcorn and flatulence so you can figure out why the eagles didn’t just fly Frodo to Mount Doom?

• Wait in line at the grocery store until all of your groceries have been rung up and bagged, only then to think of opening your purse to rummage around searching for $112 in loose change.

• Leave your grocery cart all akimbo in the middle of an aisle while you wander slowly around the store, gathering your goodies in your hands, occasionally wandering back to dump your load and forage anew. Keep your cart with you. At all times. Usually I like to take those abandoned carts, purses and all, and move them to the personal hygiene aisle right in front of the condoms. It’s fun to watch you panic, and frankly, you could use the hint.

• And while we’re at it, how hard is it to sound out “corn” on a can label? Grab what you need and move on! If the labels are that confusing, maybe you shouldn’t be eating food with labels. Your ass DOES look kinda fat in those jeans, after all.

• Drive slowly in the left-hand lane on the freeway. “Slow” may be a subjective term, but here’s a test: if there are no cars in front of you and 10+ cars on your bumper, all giving you the finger, MOVE TO THE RIGHT! You’re not just an oblivee-oh, you’re a left-lane hog. Double sin, double debt to humanity. Driving is a not a privilege, it’s a social responsibility. Your very selfishness exposes you as an evil baby-killing fascist. You probably kick kittens, too.

• Drive 10 miles an hour down the road trying to find your destination or next turn. Pull over! Look at a map! Or better yet, if you can’t get GPS, get on Google and plot your trip before you set out with your addled mind behind two tons of steel.  And if you can’t see the signs, how are you going to see that little boy who just ran into the street? Or is that just one more acceptable casualty on your road to uselessness as a human being?

(Jeff Foxworthy aint got nothing on me. Obviously I could go on for hours on this subject. It might just be the subject of my break-out novel. I see a Pulitzer in my future.)

To all  you oblivee-ohs. You are not only impeding the forward momentum of the planet. You are, through your continued existence, personally preventing me from achieving enlightenment. How can I learn to love myself if I can’t love humanity? How rude of you!

And just in case you learned today that you are, in fact, an oblivee-oh, remember kids: it’s up the road, not across the street!

Maybe I’m a little cranky. It’s early and I need coffee.

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When they stop being sluts

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Tao te Ching
——————–

“She’s way too fat for that skirt.”

Up until about 10 years ago, any pretty young thing walking by was immediately grabbed by my mind’s eye and held under the microscope of my scathing criticism. “Doesn’t she know how ridiculous she looks in that color?”  “Who does her HAIR? Ewww!”  “Does she put that makeup on with a trowel?” “She’s got a freezer mouth – everyone puts their meat in it.” “Desperation, party of one!” “Oh yeah, there’s a Macintosh girl: she’s user friendly. Skanky slut.”

The insecurity of young women is buttressed by their jealousy, rivalry, and bitterness. For some reason, the green-eyed primordial ooze that makes up the lizard portion of the female brain tells us that other women are our competition for survival.

Women who are now entering middle age grew up in an odd time. The cultural revolution was just starting. Housewives and mothers were still the role models in our entertainment fare, but women like Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King were tearing down walls and changing definitions. Baking cookies and burning bras competed equally for our attention.

We should be the first generation to know better. Somehow, though, we didn’t get the right message. We still  instinctively went to battle against anyone who might be younger, prettier, thinner, or sport a larger cup size. We sharpened our nails and our tongues and ripped apart the enemy, making sure that she looked undesirable in the eyes of our caveman rescuers.

If only we’d spent that same energy empowering each other. Imagine the cooperative force of women united, building each other up, giving each other support, basking in our collective beauty. We might have freed ourselves of the self-imposed shackles of insecurity and dependency.

Yeah, I’ve heard that same speech for 40 years now. Maybe in a happy shiny world where rainbows dance and clean fuel alternatives make the flowers grow under a haze-free sky.

Sit down among a group of 20-somethings now. Little has changed. They fidget with their hair, meticulously check their lipstick, and slit their eyes in cruel examination of any girl unlucky enough to enter their scope of attention. “MUFFin top,” they whisper at each other. “OMG, 1990 called. They want their hairstyle back.” “Peanut butter legs – easy to spread.” They feed on their loathing like John Pinette at a Chinese buffet.

Around 40 though, if you’re lucky, something changes. While there is still a percentage of the older population that thinks that “cougar” and “MILF” are desirable designations, most of us have learned that trying to rule the world by our tweeties is a waste of our much more powerful resources.

Nowadays I see those young things walk by in their little skirts and their perky boobs and I want to run and grab them. I want to throw my arms around them and reassure them. I want to shake them into realizing how gorgeous they all are. Every one of them. Fat, thin, tall, short, they’re all so beautiful. They sparkle with it. They are far more lovely than they realize. The very fact of their youth makes them shine – dazzling my eyes with memories and hope. The world is at their feet, and there is a clear path to the horizon. I pray that nobody dampens their light. I pray that they realize their power. I pray that they grab hold of and ride their future with the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces. I hope they revel in their beauty and then celebrate the better things to come after youth calms down its hormonal hold on their consciousness.

I wish all women could see youth this way: as the building material of future greatness rather than a lost treasure. I wish we could all put down the push-up bras and just roll up and pin our boobs under our arms or tuck them into our waist-bands like the universe intended. Step away from the scalpel and just get yourself a good moisturizer. Leave youth to the young. Enjoy them, at a distance. If you are competing with these girls, you’ve lost sight of the prize, because no man who wants them has a chance in hell of getting into my elastic-waisted pants. I’ve already won all the glory that youth and beauty had to give. I’m working on broader horizons, now.

Do yourself a favor, ladies. Go hug a skanky slut today. You’ll feel better for it.

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Writing is a form of flatulence

True words aren’t eloquent;
eloquent words aren’t true.
Wise men don’t need to prove their point;
men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

Tao te Ching
————

Every man loves the smell of his own farts.

Apparently that’s an old Icelandic proverb. I heard it for the first time long ago, and although I have learned and forgotten many valuable things in the intervening years, that one sticks with me. Go figure.

As tempting as it might be to go off on a diatribe about the relative olfactory values of flatulence, I’m instead going to focus on something slightly more metaphorical, and equally personal:

Writing.

Writing bubbles up within us. Words and expressions can build up in us until we have no choice but to vent them. They are the output and excess of our daily input. Without relief, our words and ideas can create unbearable pressure. And so out they come, through one path or another. You could even say they are the unavoidable offgassing of our brainwaves, but that would be kind of obvious and eye-roll-inducing.

So we write. And we sniff. And we like what we smell. It’s delicious, no? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve patted myself on the back after a particularly pithy phrase, only to notice the not-well-disguised wrinkled noses of my intended audience. Oops! Pardon me.

I’m guilty of what my mother calls “purple prose” and my mentor calls hyperbole. I use adjectives like cheap toilet paper, regardless of the fact that the need for an adjective usually indicates a poorly chosen word in the first place. Verb tenses are chameleons under my watch. They change as quickly as my mind. I forget transitions, because the subject has already progressed in my own head and I’m sure everyone will dance along, hopping to the next ideas right with me. We don’t need no stinkin’ bridges.

I know, of course, that there’s this magical and wondrous process called “editing” that might actually turn some of my diatribes into something more readable than the phone book. I try. I really do. But somehow once a word has been typed, it’s like a red-headed stepchild. I cease caring for the ones I’ve already released and there’s this great pressure inside of me to let the next one out.

I’m reminded of the sad reject auditions on American Idol. So many of those people believe they can sing. They’re sure that someday soon their great talent will be discovered and they will be loved by millions. Simon is clearly a moron for not seeing that brilliance immediately. Each time I see them, I cringe. Not for their squeaking, howling, wailing tunelessness, but because it forces me to realize that there’s a good chance that I’ve avoided my own truth: my farts, metaphorically speaking, might actually stink.

But still I write. Rainer Rilke was talking to me when he wrote those letters. I’ve been writing, journaling, and penning purple prose since I first gripped a well-chewed #2 in my grubby little hands. I am a writer. Maybe not published. Maybe not well-read. But I love the scent of my own hyperbole and I’m not likely to stop any time soon.

Oooh wait. Do you smell that? MMMMM. Heavenly!

no animals were harmed in the production of this post.

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My inner Sweeney Todd cries out

Know the personal,
yet keep to the impersonal:
accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,
the Tao will be luminous inside you
and you will return to your primal self.

Tao te Ching

——————-

I want to kill a chicken.

At first sight, that confession may seem like a good anecdote for the true-crime novel that might someday be written about my life. But there is actually a wholesome and pure motivation behind my bloodthirsty desires.

I believe we are dangerously disconnected from our food. And if I’m going to be a meat eater (and yes, I am, have no doubts) I need to truly understand the source of that meat. Its origins. Its holy place in the revolving circle of life. Many of us city-folk are so separated from the source of our nourishment we believe that meat comes neatly packed in Styrofoam and plastic wrap, as cleanly prepared as a bag of frozen broccoli or a box of crackers. I find this profoundly disrespectful to the animal that feeds us. It’s criminally callous.

My need to acknowledge and participate in the food chain in a more intimate way started almost 10 years ago. When my daughter was 8, she said she wanted chicken for dinner. When I pulled some from the freezer, she said “No, that other chicken. The steak kind.” I realized that for her the word “chicken” was synonymous with “meat.”  I carefully explained the difference between chicken and beef based on the animal it came from.

She was understandably horrified.

She had never known what meat really was. She vowed eternal vegetarianism (until a few weeks later when she was visiting with her dad and he taunted her with the smell of cooking bacon). While on one hand it’s kind of an amusing story of childhood semantics, it stuck with me.  She was so saddened to know that meat was animals. And I realized that for many of us, although we can identify “beef,” “poultry,” and “pork,” we are almost as poorly educated as to the true meaning behind the names. I had been deluding myself, keeping myself from facing the reality of it. I just never thought about it. Intentional ignorance may sooth the soul, but it’s as valuable as good intentions for keeping us from hell.

And so I feel I must kill a chicken.

If I find myself unwilling to face the animal and cleanly end his life, then I must also find myself unwilling to enjoy him (broiled or baked) on my dinner plate. I have a responsibility to the universe to cherish the life enough to admit it exists in the first place. If I refuse to do that, I am more cold-blooded and heartless than any sociopathic killer. I am merely a profiteer, benefiting from those who are willing to get their hands dirty on my behalf, while metaphorically and literally keeping my own clean. Shameful.

Many folks would simply advise vegetarianism as an alternative to murder. But as I examine my incisors, my canines, and my molars, not to mention my single-stomached digestive system, I have to recognize that I am designed by the universe to be omnivorous. I require lipids and proteins. And as I will discuss in a future blog, artificially synthesized versions of any food are as far removed from healthy eating as Styrofoam and plastic wrap. You might as well just eat the packaging.

Besides, as long as there is filet mignon topped with melted blue cheese, as long as there is the smell of turkey roasting in the oven, as long as apples and onions can transform pork into manna, and as long as rosemary grows for the sole purpose of turning my chicken into an aromatic heavenly delight, I will be an eater of meat.

We’ll leave my leather shoes for another debate.

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Good Enough

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

Tao te Ching

——————-
Pigs are perfectionists.

I love generalizations, don’t you? They sit there in all their platitudinous splendor, FEELING true and tidy and summed up like perfect little equations on the blackboard of reality. Axiomatic.

But really, show me an incredibly disorganized home and I’ll show you a perfectionist almost every time.

I speak from experience rather than judgment, here. The pig is me.

Throughout my twenties and thirties, my world was chaos. I let dishes and laundry accumulate, the mess in my car overflow the floor wells, the papers on my desk grow like unstable high rises built on a fault-line. The chaos of my surroundings reflected itself in my emotions, my relationships, my parenting, and my work. The guilt of not “getting it right” ate at me and fueled ongoing feelings of inadequacy, sleeplessness, and the inevitable short temper.

I feared that my daughter was growing up thinking it was normal to have fast food for breakfast because there was no time to shop or to cook. Her homework may or may not be done, because I never modeled completion in my own tasks. Completion? I couldn’t imagine what complete looked like, I just held some vague image of a perfectly organized world, as misty in my mind as the peaks of Mount Olympus. And as I looked around at the impossible ungodly clutter, I could never even find the place to start. Hopeless conundrum.

Secretly I knew that with all this disorganization as her influence, she would grow up to be the parents’ worst nightmare: an epic failure, a beacon forever casting light on the truth of my bad parenting.

Something had to be done.

By nature I am a problem solver. Each time I would gaze upon the chaos, I would plan amazing and wondrous organization systems that would solve those problems forever. Periodically I’d throw myself into action, cleaning a kitchen until every surface sparkled, every bit of glassware was placed in the cabinets in perfectly spaced crystal rows, the drip trays under the oven coils were shining like mirrors, and the floor was spotless enough to invite a visit from Mr. Clean and his sexy bald head

Or I might tackle the laundry, not only washing every bit of dirty clothing that had accumulated over the weeks but also emptying every drawer and hanger and rearranging the closets until my wardrobe hung by order of type and season (not to mention weight-loss intentions… “by January I’m sure this dress will fit again, and by May…”).

Or I might create a multi-colored filing system complete with tickler files and prioritization tabs and sort every bit of unopened mail into its perfect vertical resting place.

I believed I had turned over a new leaf and life would now be better… even perfect.

My daughter would be surrounded by activity, cleanliness, and efficiency. By osmosis my newfound perfection would immediately turn her into a straight A student who makes her own bed and flosses her teeth. If I could only maintain my new inner June Cleaver or Martha Stewart, her teen years would be destined to be spent with the two of us giggling together over boys she liked, shared dreams for her future, mutual manicures, and the general goodwill experienced between mothers and daughters in a happy shiny world.

Right?

But after each herculean effort I’d fall back exhausted, never having enough time in the day to live up to the system I’d created. Who could?

I practiced visualization techniques. I imagined this woman who keeps up a perfectly organized life. I deluded myself that if I imagined her well enough I would become her? Her kitchen is always spotless. Her size 6 clothes are neatly pressed. As she surrounds herself with her perfectly cleaned and organized things, she has time to take up painting and poetry while cooking 4 course meals and sipping tea from delicate china cups on her spider-free veranda.  Because of her consistent and patient parenting, her children proudly march their perfect report cards before her loving eyes. They would be living legacies to her charity, her kindness, and her never-ending supply of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

However, as I held her in my inner eye, envisioning myself slipping into her reality, I pretty much wanted to kick her in her meticulously waxed nether-regions with my pointiest shoes (which were, of course, buried in my closet under a mound of too-small clothing which I was sure one day would be cleaned, pressed and donated to charity). I really hated that bitch.

I wish I could point to a moment in time when it changed. I want to be able to sum it up in a perfectly tidy little story of personal growth, inner awareness, and maturity that will inspire future women to lay down the mantle of oppressive perfectionism and rise, free of their shackles, to live lives of peaceful self-acceptance and competence.

Therapy helped. Therapy always helps. Those who fear therapy and its stigma need to realize that great therapy is like a spa treatment for the mind.

The only moment I can pinpoint is when my therapist said two words to me. Two liberating, life-altering, magical words that rung like incantations in the air around me.

“Good enough.”

She was talking about mothering. I had been weeping over my failure to be the perfect SUV-driving cookie baking soccer mom, and she assured me that my mothering had been “good enough, and good enough mothering is a hell of a lot better than most kids get.”

My insecurity should have rejected it immediately, but I sat transfixed by the potential inherent in those two words. Good enough mother… good enough friend? Good enough housekeeper? Good enough employee? Was it that simple? Was it possible? Could I be “good enough” and be happy?

Through fits and starts and trial and error, I put “good enough” into action. Giving up delusions of Mount Olympus took conscious effort and some mourning for what I still wished could have been. But I was willing to try.

And slowly, against the odds, it worked.

I discovered that a “good enough” filing system with just a few folders puts an end to paper avalanches. A “good enough” laundry system means that clothes can be washed and put away, as long as I am willing to let shirts touch slacks and blues can be hung next to reds. A “good enough” kitchen gets you cleanly wiped counters and plates you can find and eat from without fear of botulism.

While my inner anal princess still wishes the glasses in the cupboards lined up, like with like, in little military rows, I’ve learned that it’s ok if a coffee cup sits next to a water tumbler. The world does not tilt off its axis and go spiraling into the sun. Who knew? It took time to accept this good enough world, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that there were no mounds of dirty clothes, no stacks of unwashed dishes, and I actually had time and energy to run through with a dustrag to make a “good enough” pass at the furniture. Miraculous!

And most miraculously of all, “good enough” parenting can actually produce a child who finishes school, isn’t strung out on drugs, and only has piercings in places that aren’t too frightening or questionable in intent. And if there are any tattoos, I don’t know about them and that’s “good enough” for me.

I still hope that dress fits by May, though. You can’t lose ALL your dreams.

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It ends. It begins.

…the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

tao te ching

————————–

There comes a time when your children cease their role as major players in the story of your life and wander in to their own stories. For years, all your attention has been placed on this fascinating thread and then abruptly the thread is cut and they are relegated to inconsequential mentions in a holiday or a random memory flashback.

It’s likely that their role fades gradually, but our fascination with their subplots and themes is so all-encompassing we never notice their diminishing place and it seems more as if we turn a page and suddenly their names disappear from the text.

I suppose the most successful of us pick up the dangling ends of our own story arcs and rebuild them into a new and exciting narrative. But in that moment when you realize your children have rightfully taken up their place as their own heroes and heroines, the temptation to close our own book and follow theirs is overwhelming. It is a crossroads of mortality, the internal struggle between the pull of eternity and choosing to plant ourselves fully in the present and recapture our own spotlight, ignoring the fact that to the outside world we are merely fading divas.

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