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Tortoise and the hare

Posted on by Shari Swanson

I’ve been watching Lessons in Chemistry, based on a wonderful book. One part stood out for me last night. A dog character, Six Thirty, remembers why his person, Calvin, said he loves running. Calvin said even when it is hard or you don’t think you can go on anymore, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

“One foot. One foot. And then sure enough, you’ll be home.”.

Isn’t that profound? In this life, we keep putting one foot in front of the other, until we’re home.

Slow and steady wins the race. We get discouraged and stop, or chase after another enticing goal, or turn back. But, if we stay true, we will make progress. One foot, one foot.

Remember the tortoise and the hare? They had a rematch recently:

This is my yopp.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Sometimes turning off the news is the best form of mental health protection.

But then we remember. In times of darkness, there are always those working to light a path, helping, fighting for the common good, making progress.

And maybe we, too, can help.

Maybe not in large, brokering peace kind of ways. But in small ways that, combined together with the small ways of many, many others, may help to right a wrong or turn a tide.

I think of Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, everyone shouting and banging on pots to be heard, but it is the final Yopp of a child that turns the tide, saving their world.

What is your ‘Yopp’?

The formula of gratitude

Posted on by Shari Swanson

What is the formula for a happy life? What are the variables? How do things like gratitude and expectations factor in?

In his essay, The Structure of Gratitude, David Brooks says:

I’m sometimes grumpier when I stay at a nice hotel. I have certain expectations about the service that’s going to be provided. I get impatient if I have to crawl around looking for a power outlet, if the shower controls are unfathomable, if the place considers itself too fancy to put a coffee machine in each room. I’m sometimes happier at a budget motel, where my expectations are lower, and where a functioning iron is a bonus and the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.

Included in, The Way of Gratitude, Readings for a Joyful Life.

He concludes that “Gratitude happens when some kindness exceeds expectations, when it is undeserved.” So, maybe as a formula it would look like “If kindness>expectations= gratitude.” So are our expectations the linchpin variable. To be happy and grateful, we should keep our expectations low? Or is there more to it?

He notes that there are some people who are ‘dispositionally’ grateful:

These people may have big ambitions, but they have preserved small anticipations. As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyper-responsive. This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture. We live in a capitalist meritocracy. This meritocracy encourages people to be self-sufficient–masters of their own fate. But people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion.

Included in, The Way of Gratitude, Readings for a Joyful Life

What a powerful way to look at things. In a very real sense, people with dispositional gratitude are able to see behind the veil into a truer, richer reality, full of wonder and generosity beyond anything any one of us deserves or merits. They are witnesses to the abundance we all share but few notice. Any one of us is capable of dropping our expectations and stepping into a magical world full of abundance if only we have the eyes to see.

The invisible essential.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Not long ago, the world shut down, and most people were asked to sequester and stay home while essential workers reported, still, for duty. It was a strange time, involving so many swiftly moving facts to assimilate and assess forward progress.

But that question of ‘essential’ is an interesting one. Some of the jobs labeled ‘essential’ or not were surprising choices.

How does one determine what is ‘essential’? What of the artist? With so many schools cutting art and music programs as non-essential, I wonder what the world would look like filled just with grammarians and mathematicians. Surely, art, though it puts no food on the table and sets no broken bones, is essential to the human spirit.

Such is the theme of Frederick by Leo Lionni. While four mice toil to set up stores of grain for winter, one mouse collects color, and sounds, and words.

And when winter came, and the mice were cold and hungry, Frederick’s words sustained them.

So lift a glass in praise to the artists, the writers, the musicians. Those who lift us up and sustain us and offer us beauty for our souls.

Strong in the broken places

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Life can be tough. Even the most charmed of lives has loss and heartbreak, disillusionment and despair. Everyone hurts. But buried deep under the hurt and pain is the little waif you used to be, full of hope and promise, enthusiasm and excitement.

As Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue notes:

Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is confidence and tranquility in you.

The intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

Deep in there, behind the daily worries, aches and pains, hurts and disgruntlements, is your soul. Prayer, staying still and letting your mind clear in meditation, will take you there, again and again, a way to connect with both your own individuality and your place in the awesome collective of it all.

You are the Sky.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

You may be in a storm right now–untethered, free-falling, desperate. But the storm does not control you any more than you control the storm. You are apart from the storm.

Have you ever taken a flight on a stormy day? You board the plane, and it is overcast, stormy, perhaps raining furiously. But after take off, you climb until you are above the clouds. It’s shocking to discover that there, above the clouds, the sky is blue and clear.

Remember the storm will fade. You are not the storm. Your essence is still there above the clouds, blue in the shining sun. Hold on. The sun will come out again. (But, just so we follow this analogy to its logical end, you are not the sun either. You may have a beautiful day, but that, too, does not define you.)

You are the sky, the constant, behind the weather, influenced by the storms and sunshine in your life but not controlled by them.

Fighting the good fight.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

It feels like we have fought this battle before. Why won’t it go away? Why are we here again?

Perhaps it is as simple and complex as that there are epic forces of good and evil alive in the world. Evil, whether in the form or racism, misogyny, selfishness, and so on, keeps coming back, even when we think progress has been made. That is the nature of the world we live in.

The answer: to keep flooding the world with good, keep fighting the good fight.

Do not lose hope.

I’m spring

Posted on by Shari Swanson

As I age, I have a new appreciation for those poets like Dylan Thomas raging against mortality. I do not want to go gentle into that good night. I like it here.

Here is a new variation on that theme I enjoyed:

Sorrow Is Not My Name
BY ROSS GAY

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

Loving what’s mortal

Posted on by Shari Swanson

As we age, there is loss. That loss is like a presence that follows us relentlessly like a shadow. No avoiding it. No pretending. We are mortal. The people we love are mortal, perhaps imminently so. This is part of the rules of engagement. And while most of us avoid thinking too much about it, poets like Mary Oliver offer life instructions:

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:

To love what is mortal

To hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes, to let it go, to let it go.

I honestly don’t know which of these three rules is the hardest. Right now, they each seem nearly impossible. But having the courage to follow these instructions feels like the answer.

Her full poem is below.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Just as you are

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Mr. Rogers had a gift for seeing each child he encountered as an individual, a neighbor, someone worthy of respect just as they are. No need to impress him, or to put on an act, or to pretend. He accepted children. Period. No strings attached.

How wonderful.

Do you feel you are enough, just as you are? Sometimes our families, friends, or societies give us the message that we aren’t. That we need to be thinner, richer, smarter, younger, more attractive. Something different from what we are. That we must think the same as they do and fall in line. It’s exhausting.

What a gift it is to accept people, including ourselves, just as is. No one is perfect, so why pretend we are? We each have strengths and weaknesses, things we’re working on and things we’ve got sorted. Instead of finding flaws, we can look at ourselves and each other as complicated works in progress, with value just as we are, giving ourselves and each other ‘the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.’