Revisiting Old Haunts and Themes

Here’s what’s happening right now. The husband is scraping pumpkins with his fingernails. Why? Why, because we were so lame and laggard about buying pumpkins that the only ones he could find were painted. Consequently, he is scraping off the paint, in preparation for carving them. And I am watching. I mean, after handing him a scrubby and a steel wool pad to try. I’m not completely unhelpful, just ultimately so.

Last weekend was a long weekend for us. It kicked off Thursday morning, when one of us, I’m not saying which one, because it would be cruel, microwaved the butter. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that this was special, European (French) butter, imported in an aluminum foil wrapper. As A. A. Milne might have written, this person “did like a little bit of butter for [his or her] bread.” And wanted it softened. Didn’t remember, at the unseemly hour of before school began, that metal and microwaves don’t mix. The result was a noticeable pop, and a ball of flames inside the thousand-year-old microwave we’ve moved six times.

As is so often the case, especially with people, nothing seemed wrong with the microwave when you looked at it. However, mid-morning, when I wanted to reheat my coffee – I know, yuck, reheated coffee; what kind of connoisseur am I? Answer – no kind – the defects became apparent.

I’m liking this damaged people, damaged microwave analogy. I could really run with it. But is it what I want to get into? The point is, if there is a point, that once you get to know even those microwaves that look fully functional, those microwaves with deluxe features, even those combination convection oven-microwave ovens, their defects become apparent. So while you’re busy crossing the street to avoid those microwaves that are shouting obscenities and weaving in your path, the ones that usually cause the most trouble are those ones that short circuit from the inside. If you don’t unplug them, they’ll burn down your house.

Dark.

Anyhoo. Off we went to Boston, to visit colleges and friends. The trip to Boston was a success on several levels. One important one was that we all survived the weekend at our friends’ house without having any horrible intestinal illnesses.  I was kinda anxious about descending upon our friends A & T for the weekend, since we are four, and they are two. And the bathroom is one. But the real anxiety was the traumatic stress I suffered the last time we four stayed with A & T. To wit, the current 11^th grader was then in preschool and her sister was still sleeping in a Pack ‘n Play; some time in the late evening, the preschooler commenced vomiting, which she continued doing every forty-five minutes or less until we managed to load ourselves into our car and head back out the Mass Turnpike at 7:30 in the morning.

I have never recovered from this terrible experience. The guilt of inflicting ourselves on our friends. The whole thing was just, you know, yucky.

So I had residual apprehension about the four of us going there again, even though, mirabile dictu, this didn’t cause our friendship to end, even though A & T remained undeterred in their decision not to have children. Perhaps this episode underscored for them the rightness of this choice. I can’t say. What I can say is that, while since then, I have slept under their roof and they under ours, this particular sleeping arrangement had not occurred in the intervening twelve or thirteen years. 

Now, we have cancelled out the past, with a successful visit, during which nothing untoward happened, unless you consider the children observing the adults acting like, uh, children, children who drink lots of beer, untoward. 

All of this dwelling on the dark and negative, Readers, has a point. The point is that sometimes negative thinking can lead to success. I was reminded of this by a recent piece in the NYTimes, “The Problem With Positive Thinking.” This piece reminded me of two things I’ve learned. One, that an idea worth writing about once is worth writing about repeatedly. It’s worth revisiting, like Boston.  Or your fears. This is good news, don’t you think? I do. Two, this idea that “the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook,” has often prevented me from feeling like I can succeed. You see, I have a bit of a problem with the cultivation and doggedness of optimism. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that I am, at heart, an optimist. And I may, indeed be. However, I am learning that this buried nugget of optimism is not what my closest and dearest friends associate with me. It may be too well-buried.

For example, just this weekend, gathered ‘round the dining room table with our friends, spurred by a glass or two of Italian wine, I remarked that I think I’m fairly optimistic.

“You are?” One of my so-called friends said, in an insulting tone of incredulity.

I said, “Well, it’s true that the husband and I often have different reactions to the same stimulus.” Well, those weren’t my exact words. Who can recall exactly what one says when one is drinking Italian wine? More or less, I said that for example, when I see our dog lying with his head on his paws, I’m filled with a terrible feeling that he’s bored and unstimulated. “Look at that poor, miserable doggie,” I’ll say, and feel that I have to do something to make him feel better. The husband, on the other hand, comes into the room, looks at the dog in the same pose and says, “Look at how happy he looks.” Then he goes off to play the piano, or do a crossword puzzle, without a nagging feeling of guilt and failure.

I have felt much shame about that negative tendency in myself, thinking it has doomed me to failure. However, the beauty of this article was that it revisited this idea and declared it untrue. It turns out that positive thinking can cause a person to relax , to lose energy, and therefore to lose motivation.

Now, this idea isn’t actually new. Two of my favorite psychologists, Carol Dweck and Heidi Grant Halvorsen, PhD, her onetime protégé, are big into how your mindset affects your ability to achieve success. HGH, PhD, in particular, has examined the ways that accepting your tendency towards pessimism can help you attain success. In other words, if you’re going to be a negative thinker, use that to your advantage, by figuring out what obstacles may interfere with you reaching your goal, and how to overcome them.

According to this new article in the NYTimes, the best approach to a goal is twofold, a technique called “mental contrasting.” In mental contrasting, you balance positive and negative thinking. You envision a positive outcome; but you also consider the potential obstacles. You are, in short, hopeful, but also realistic. I think I’m that. Maybe. After my morning affirmations.

One key to the success of mental contrasting as a tool, however, is that you must be going for “reasonable, potentially attainable wishes.”

Hmmmm. How the heck are we to know what’s reasonable and potentially attainable for us? Beats me. I guess that’s another article. C’mon, NYTimes, help me out!

By the way, I lasted five days without a microwave. Three of those days we were out of town.

I Regret Nothing - With Name-Dropping

Product of Good Parenting

I recently passed a diverting lunchtime with a writer friend revisiting some of the opportunities we failed to grab, back in our twenties. Turns out we have a couple of doozies. For example, I offer my tour of the The New Yorker, about 20 years ago. Through a connection I can no longer recall - something to do with his mother - Louis Menand gave me a tour of The New Yorker. Yes, that Louis Menand, who writes regularly for the magazine. He gave me a tour. Through the offices. Of The New Yorker. 

What was it like, The New Yorker? What was Louis Menand like? I hardly know. I doubt I had a better notion then. It’s as if I were led, blindfolded, on that tour. I have one memory, a glimpse into a small office space. It was empty, but showed signs of occupancy. Which famous writer worker there? I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe it was a plebe’s office. Who the heck knows? As for Louis Menand – I have only the recollection of the sensation of being with a person. I wouldn’t recognize him now, and frankly, I wouldn’t have recognized him a week after that tour. I don’t know that I ever looked him in the face. He was with me – beside, ahead, behind? – the way any authority figure was throughout my childhood, a shape or a bulk of anonymous but indisputable existence with which I could expect no real interaction. Like a coat rack draped in an overcoat. Certainly not like person with whom I could (ought to) communicate as an equal.

Looking back, I see the whole thing as a failure of imagination, not of courage. I wasn’t nervous. I was simply unable to consider my proximity to Louis Menand and that tour as opportunities for career advancement.  It’s possible I stood on a point of honor: I didn’t want to be like everyone else he toured around The New Yorker on his mother’s request and then ASK something of him, career-related. It’s possible. And stupid. More likely, though, my muteness sprang from seeing him as an authority figure, and seeing myself – or not seeing myself at all.

So why was he an authority figure? And why was I – a child?

This where I indulge in a little parent bashing. I don’t really like to do it, because, now that I am one, I understand that parents are mere humans, full of insecurities and fatal flaws that can obscure our good intentions. Nevertheless, I have to say that some responsibility for the stupid lack of imagination I showed then lay with my parents. For who else but they were supposed to teach me how to see my possibilities? I came across this bit by none other than Martha Stewart, in which she says the best thing anyone ever taught her was that she could do anything she put her mind to – and the person who taught her that? Her dad. She says, “I think it really often is up to the parents to help build confidence in their children. It is a very necessary part of growing up.”* (Then she applies another layer of decoupage to the birdcage she's making out of strips of six thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets for her gazebo.)  

Now, Martha's run the gamut from model to mogul to jailbird and back. Whatever you may fault her for, you can't fault her for lack of imagination for where she could be and what she could do.

It never even occurred to me that my tour with Louis Menand could be anything other than that, a tour. I never for an instant considered myself equal to anyone working there. Even though there were people my age, people from my high school class, working there around that time, I just felt different from Those People. They were on some other existential plane. So that’s the bottom line.

I left Louis Menand and The New Yorker, and I returned to my stultifying data entry job and my novel in progress, and never followed up. If Louis Menand noticed I didn’t write him a thank-you note, I hope he didn’t tell his mother. It never occurred to me, not because I was rude. I wasn’t. I was raised to write thank-yous. I had a supply of cards with my name printed on them for this purpose. No, I didn’t think of writing him because I didn’t imagine I had registered on his brain. He was one of Those People. 

So, my point, Readers, is that it’s necessary to imagine yourself using your talents and skills for work you want to do, and it’s important to help others imagine these things for themselves. Not unrealistic things. Realistic things. Who’s to say what’s unrealistic? That’s where imagination kicks in – imagining seemingly out-of-reach places reachable. Like taking advantage of an in at The New Yorker to explore how you might fit there. If it’s too late for you, then do it for your kids, or for your niece. Do it for your mentees. You might help shape the next Martha Stewart – or, if that gives you the heebie-jeebies, the next Louis Menand. You want people to believe you could be a contendah, and you gotta do that for them, too.

My friend has a doozie of a regret story. It also involves The New Yorker. I won’t tell it here, because it’s her doozie. I’ll just say it might beat mine.

*Martha on the best advice she ever received (in LinkedIn)

My Mayan Apocalypse Blog Post

So. Bad week. End of the world feel to things, huh? The 9th grader came home yesterday looking like she needed to say something. There was a rumor going around school that someone is planning a shooting for this Friday. Apparently the chatter amongst the students was so great that teachers discussed it in class. Then the principal made an all-school announcement that these rumors have been investigated and are unsubstantiated. Understandably, she was upset. What could I say or do? I said it’s very unlikely. I said it's probably just somebody's idea of a joke. But I also said to take a look around each of her classrooms tomorrow and scope out the closets. If anything ever happens, get down and run for the closet. What else could I say? 

Anyway. Bear with me, because this is not unrelated. (Litotes -understatement for emphasis.) The other month, I came across a journal called The Intelligent Optimist. I had to buy it. Partly because I was looking for places to pitch an idea about meditation, which I still haven’t done. Partly because the title is an oxymoron. Or rather, because I was raised in the kind of atmosphere that considers an optimist a moron, which would make the title an oxymoron. I grew up under Murphy’s Law. Remember that? Anything that can go wrong, will. Something like that. Sound familiar? 

So the idea that the title is not an oxymoron is refreshing. It’s a definite step up. A moron’s a moron, and an oxymoron is a contradiction, but in this case it’s a paradox - a contradiction that may in fact be true. Therefore - insert geometic symbol for therefore, which is maybe a triangle  - no, it's three dots in the shape of a triangle, so I was close - therefore, it’s possible to be both intelligent and optimistic. 'Cuz that’s what I’ve been aiming for. And, frankly it’s been working, overall. Despite the terrible massacre in Connecticut, despite my sadness, despite my anger. 

I also bought The Intelligent Optimist because it had a cover story about persistence and success, which is, you know, up my alley, so to speak. It’s my bailiwick.

Lots of vocabulary words today.

Talk of the end of the world has a certain tang considered in light of certain events. I don’t want to write about that. Leave it at horrific. My point is that inside The Intelligent Optimist were various articles about this supposed end of the world, all amounting to this idea: that this time in history has been earmarked by various cultures or religions or traditions as a time of change. There’s an interview with a psychologist and shaman who says that Dec. 21, 2012, “means the beginning of a new era in consciousness.”  He says the Hopi described this time as “the great turning.”  Then there’s another article about a Tibetan Shambala Buddhist prophecy about “coming darkness and the summoning of the warriors.” Since this sounds a little glum – perhaps not the aim of a magazine about optimism – the author goes on to say that the warriors will “look like normal people,” but using their powers of compassion and insight, they will “go into the corridors of power to dismantle the beliefs and behaviors that are destroying life.”  She suggests that we ordinary folk may in fact be these warriors.

Compassion and insight. Yay, meditation! And psychotherapy.

But it’s not just possibly flaky fringe scholars in a possibly flaky fringe magazine reporting this transition/end of the world stuff. On one of my favorite podcasts on public radio, On Being, I heard a naturalist talking about our era being described by various cultures as both “a great turning” and “a great unraveling.” The unraveling is of our industrial culture, which is destroying the climate, but it is also creating opportunity to turn itself into a “life-enhancing” one.  On a different day, I heard a philospher whose latest book is about his idea that humans need to amplify their understanding of “being,” because he believes there is a purpose to our being and the world, and that they are related, but unless we can bring our full awareness to the scope of our brain’s potential, we won’t get it.

Awareness and brain power. Yay, meditation and science!

But it's not just possibly flaky fringe scholars on a possibly flaky radio show talking about the symbolic end of the world.  Last weekend's New York Times devoted a whole page plus to “It’s the End of the World.” There was poetry and a short introduction that said, “Predictions vary: it could mean that all mankind will undergo a spiritual transformation, or that the Earth will collide with a black hole or the planet Nibiru in which case, there’s no need to finish all that Christmas shopping.”  That statement pretty much sums up my feelings, which I will parse for you, Readers. 

• A. The kerfluffle is kind of funny. 
• B. There are plenty of things that make me think of doom and destruction. 
• 3. However, there are plenty of people who are looking beneath the surface and are examining the Big Questions, and this can only be good.

What does this have to do with me? Well, I’ve occasionally wondered, as perhaps you have, too, Readers, why I am going on and on about success. Is it because I want to have a nice stock portfolio when I head into Nibiru? Or is it perhaps that I am a symptom of the more positive reading of the times?  Maybe my delving into this topic of success, which has led me into subtopics of "meaningful life" and "happiness" and "fulfillment" is itself a symptom of this turning. Maybe my blog is one tiny emblem of the movement to counterbalance the terrible things that have happened to people and of the terrible things that some people do to other people. As terrible as they are, they aren’t the sum of all that people do. People also struggle with ways to live meaningfully and to improve the world. Maybe, in my way, I am part of that?

This is reminding me of yet another episode of On Being that I listened to, this one last week.  It was an interview of a sociologist named Brene Brown, who studies vulnerability and it’s opposite, bravery.  One of the things she said was that “hope is a function of struggle. Hope is not an emotion. It’s a state of being.” I always prick up my ears when someone talks about Hope, because Hope is me, after all. Ever since I learned in Latin class that hope (exspectare) is a verb that means means waiting or expecting, I’ve had this weird cognitive dissonance about my name. We moderns define hope as optimism, when really it is what BBrown says, it’s a state of being. Optimism is looking on the bright side, but hope is always about awaiting a result. There's the possibility of a negative outcome and the hint of dread, but it's all potential. You’re in a state of pre-fulfillment. That’s perhaps a curse, but while you’re in that state, there’s opportunity.

Does this mean that I don’t despair of our culture and of our politicians? No. I often do. But I look for positive signs, and I see them. People are talking about a re-awakening, and enough of them are doing it that a mainstream newspaper mentions it. No doubt, some scary shit has happened. Now, though,  there’s talk of gun safety legislation. And there’s evidence that radical, conservative Christian Evangelicalism is on the wane as a powerful political force. Global warming is in the conversation. So there’s a lot of unraveling, and a lot of struggle, and frankly, I wish it didn’t take a massacre, a prolonged siege on human rights, and the flooding of New York City to bring out the warriors, but I think they’re coming. We’re coming. We’re here. 

So I've done my shopping. Most of it, anyway. My kids have gone off to school,  they'll go on Friday, and unless I'm totally wrong, I won't be sorry. These rumors of a shooting are probably just rumors passed by invincible-feeling teenagers. I no longer feel invincible. I think that passes by around age 25. So I've called the police just to let them know I'm another parent who wants to know if they're beefing up security. Meanwhile, I'm betting against Murphy.

Expectations and Success, Part Deux

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It's one thing to feel a terrible pressure to go to law school because your father wants you to, a pressure so strong that you have to let yourself fail out to convince him to let you choose your own career (true story - not mine); but what about the people whose parents, families, friends expect little or nothing? Or say little or nothing?

Did you read Jhumpa Lahiri's article in the New Yorker about her start as a writer? How she disappointed her parents' expectations for her, and that even with all the success she's had, she has struggled to feel successful?


Lahiri notes that her father never read fiction, and though her mother did, she read in Bengali, and kept her stories at a distance from her daughter. She says, “But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down.”  So that when she became a reader and a writer, she felt she was “trespassing” and “defying” them. Guilt. Treading into territory that wasn't meant to be hers.

What they most wanted for her was steady, reliable work--becoming a professor was good, assuming it would lead to steady, reliable work. So when she went into a creative writing program instead of continuing her PhD, her parents remained "neutral." A devastating neutrality, for sure.

She writes, "Even after I received the Pulitzer Prize, my father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on, and that I must always be prepared to earn my living in some other way." 

If this is how Jhumpa Lahiri feels, well I can just put down my peeler and leave that carrot alone. 

What strikes me in what she writes is how much of what she incorporated into her sense of what her parents wanted was unspoken. Simply by remaining "neutral" about creative writing, her parents sent her a loud message. 

Remember the 1960s PhD candidate who dropped out before writing her dissertation, despite her star status, and despite the respect of her peers? She disappointed those expectations. Consider, though, the societal expectations for a woman at that time. It’s possible to view her decision to leave her program as fulfilling a more common expectation for an educated woman then. Perhaps her parents never expected her to have a career in academia--though surely they expected her to excel in school, and supported her education all the way. So perhaps she bowed to an unexpressed expectation that spoke through silence.

Trying to fulfill someone else's idea of how you should succeed is one kind of challenge. The flip side of great expectations to live up to, is none, or low.

It's hard to conceive of great expectations for oneself if others don't have them for you.

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My own parents adopted a studied silence on most aspects of my life after college.

I could rely only on my own interpretation. To me, based on our rocky relationship during my adolesence, their silence registered either disapproval, or a fear that if they spoke out one way or another, I'd likely choose the most perverse road imaginable, so they'd better not trigger me.

Sort of a don’t wake the baby feeling.

I've come to see that there was a sense, conveyed to me through silence and intuition, that people were just hoping I'd "make it." I call it the "poor Hope" phenomenon. Sort of a sense that my parents took a look at this damaged goods they were educating, feeding, and sending off to therapy, and every so often they lobbed an idea at it to see if it would stick, but really the idea was just to get this package up and out, and make sure it earned some kind of paycheck and wasn't a burden on society, and that was really about all you could expect from it. 

Other people who were more supportive or encouraging also reinforced this "poor Hope" phenomenon. Trying to be helpful, they would say, "Look how well you've done, considering." Considering the dead mother. Considering the challenging stepmother. Considering the restrained father. 


I always listened to this kind of talk with a mix of self-pity and irritation.


Yes, I would think. Yes, yes. Poor me. I don't have a mother, I have a shrink. But on the other hand, I have food, clothing, and medical attention. I have the best education money can buy. I live in the United States. I've never experienced war. Many others have been through much worse and succeeded. Why should the traumas of my early childhood define me? 

What were the silent or negative expectations you faced? Which ones are you passing on to your children? 




*http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#ixzz1SSYiLawd