Ten Dollar Thoughts

If we’re going to get right down to brass tacks about it, I’m materialistic.  It’s certainly not my best quality, but we all have traits that rank below the 50^th percentile.  It’s true, I love they way a nice leather handbag feels on my shoulder.  I love the way the mattes on the watercolors over my living room mantel match the wall color perfectly, setting off both the frames and the paintings.  I love having 15 lipstick color choices when I open the makeup case in my purse each morning, allowing me to select a shade that matches both my mood and outfit.  I like these things, and countless other things in a similar vein. 

I don’t admit this easily because it carries with it all kinds of implications.  There is a common belief – and not altogether erroneous – that materialism is bad.  Period.  Materialistic people are shallow and vain and inconsiderate.  Right?  Maybe not.  I think that materialism isn’t as big a sin as we might be inclined to believe.

In an interesting (and somewhat biologically-based) article on The Huffington Post last week Dylan Kendall wrote an article about whether or not objects can make us happy.  She aptly notes that, “… objects have stories and the best ones we carry with us our whole lives. Like our grandmother’s table lamp or the baseball with which we hit our first home run, objects have the power to become more than just ‘things.’”

We can all relate to the significance of these kinds of objects.  Like most people I have objects of varying value that are priceless to me because of what they represent.  But for the purposes of this discussion I’m more intrigued by the objects that have no particular emotional underpinning, but which we enjoy.  Take my handbags as an example.  I have close to a dozen and they were all moderately expensive.  Do I need nearly a dozen handbags?  Absolutely not.  But I use and enjoy each one.  I switch bags several times each week.  I choose one based on my clothing and take pleasure in the way they are functional and stylish at the same time.

This leads me to wonder about the line that we all want not to cross – the line between caring about our belongings and caring only about our belongings.  To what extent is it acceptable to have and enjoy our possessions even if they lack a higher level of sentimental meaning?  And when do we enter the territory of wanting things just to have them, rather than for their value via form or function?  Further still, how does the collector (of stamps, tiny commemorative spoons, or even cars) factor into this moral landscape?

I suppose I would draw that line in the form of a pie chart.  I have and enjoy all kinds of objects.  Some of those objects are practical, like my food processor or a nice pen.  Others are less practical, like artwork or lipstick, but still bring me pleasure.  But my enjoyment of these kinds of things should only take up a certain portion of my life and my focus – a relatively narrow sliver of my pie chart.  I should also spend time focusing on mental and spiritual growth, maintaining relationships, helping other people, and behaving charitably.  As long as those things are bigger priorities in my life then I’m comfortable that my enjoyment from material possessions is not overblown.  But the moment that my little equilibrium tips in the direction of objects over everything else is the moment I need to reevaluate my priorities.

This is the story of two blogs and a cookie. 

A couple of weeks ago fellow blogger Jane reposted a piece she wrote last winter about a Random Act of Kindness.  The second time around Wordpress picked it up and featured it, driving huge numbers of readers to Jane’s site and leaving their own RAOK stories.  It was really inspiring.

I wanted desperately to jump on this do-gooder bandwagon, but the deck seemed stacked against me.  I simply couldn’t find the right opportunity to inject my goodness into the world.  I saw an old woman walking home from the grocery store on an especially hot day and offered her a ride.  She gave me the sign of the cross and said, “Bless you” in heavily accented English, but turned me down.  I rarely go through drive-thru windows where I might pay for someone’s order.  I didn’t see elderly people needing help crossing the street.  I was striking out left and right.  I decided to stop obsessing.

Then last week my sister Anne wrote an impassioned post about how a simple coconut macaroon helped her through an especially difficult year of graduate school.  I was moved by her post and decided that I needed to make my own batch of macaroons.  Later that day I got an e-mail from Anne which was a forwarded message from my 90-year-old grandfather.  A reader of her blog, he thought her macaroons sounded delicious and asked for the recipe.  Having made them myself I recognized that this was slightly more complicated than your average cookie recipe and potentially out of the culinary reach of a man who has probably never cooked anything more complicated than a bowl of oatmeal.

And then it hit me!

The recipe made nearly 30 cookies.  GAP is not a coconut lover and had no interest in the macaroons.  I have no business eating 30 cookies by myself.  And I could only in good conscience allow IEP (who, it turns out, is a coconut lover) to eat little bites here and there.  The answer?  A care package.

I transferred several macaroons to a Ziplock bag, wrote an accompanying note, and went to the UPS Store.  A couple of days later a truck pulled up in front of Granddaddy’s house and handed him a box that he was not at all expecting. 

That evening I received an e-mail from my grandfather which said, in part, “I couldn’t imagine what it could be as it wasn’t Xmas or my birthday and I hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon.” (As an aside, I just love that my 90-year-old grandfather e-mails and shops online.) “Imagine my surprise to open it and find it was a macaroon package from my oldest grandchild.  I had one for dessert and it was delicious.  In fact I had to make a big decision whether to eat another or not – so they would last a little longer.  Thank you so much.  I think this is the nicest ‘unexpected’ present I have ever received.”

It wasn’t anonymous.  It wasn’t for a stranger.  It wasn’t even entirely random.  But I think it captured the spirit of the little movement that Jane started.  Thanks, Jane, for providing me with such inspiration.  And thanks, Anne, for speaking directly to my sweet tooth.  You were both unwitting accomplices in making an old man very happy.

I’m always looking for ways to improve myself and here in the world of blogging it’s easy to get lost in our heads.  We think lofty thoughts.  We analyze and distill the world around us.  We mull and ruminate and ponder and probe.  But the blogosphere doesn’t always offer opportunities for us to act on all of the thoughts we think and words we write.  So today I’m skipping the Ten Dollar Thoughts and offering ten one-dollar ideas for things we can do that might help us end the day a bit better than we began it. 

1. Open the door.  Chances are that at least once a day (and with only mild inconvenience) you have the opportunity to open or hold the door for someone else.  Do it, it might make their day.
2. Drink a smoothie.  Most of us don’t come close to eating as many servings of fruits and vegetables as we should each day.  The following recipe contains three full servings of fruit as well as lean protein and calcium.  Put into your blender: 1 sliced banana, ½ cup plain nonfat yogurt, ½ cup plain soy milk, heaping ½ cup frozen blueberries, heaping ½ cup frozen strawberries.  Blend until smooth.
3. Pick up some trash.  Whether it’s a water bottle or a candy bar wrapper, when you see a piece of trash on the ground pick it up and put it in the nearest garbage can.  You can leave the world a little better than you found it.
4. Word of the day.  Dictionary.com allows you to register for their Word of the Day.  Expand your vocabulary one day at a time. 
5. Take a walk.  Most decent television shows are in reruns right now.  This evening instead of curling up on the couch take 30 minutes and walk around your neighborhood.  You’ll burn some calories, stretch your legs, and maybe have an interesting conversation with a neighbor.
6. Floss.  There are all kinds of health benefits to flossing.  See for yourself.  Besides, flossing is easy and it only takes a minute.
7. Go to bed early.  We are getting less sleep than we used to, and there are some important benefits of sleep.  So get some extra Z’s and thank yourself for it.
8. Pay a compliment.  We all feel better when someone says something nice about us.  Say something nice about someone else and know that they’re probably happier than they were before you opened your mouth.
9. Five Dollars.  Chances are you’ll pass someone today who has fallen on hard times.  If you can swing it give them a $5 bill.  It’s more than most people give and could buy them the first hot meal they’ve had in days.
10. Be the new kid.  Visit a blog you’ve never read and leave a comment.  You will be an unexpected perk in someone’s day.   

After a 10-day break from blogging I am rested, but I’m also struggling to hit my literary stride again.  My mind has been busy with much reading, but I have found that being on the receiving end of mental stimulation is much easier than producing it.  I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, but to some extent it does.  I didn’t expect my time off – filled with books, magazines, and conversation – to slow the spinning of my mental wheels as much as it did.  But as I struggle today to organize and articulate my thoughts I can only help but feel that I’ve been quite lazy over the past couple of weeks.  This feels like my first trip to the gym after two weeks on the couch. 

As I’ve thought about this little phenomenon I remembered a chapter I read earlier this summer in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  He discusses the process of lying fallow – leaving land unplanted between crops – and the ways in which it can augment or detract from agricultural yield depending on the crop.

Here in the United States we grow crops that can drain the soil of its nutrients if the same crop is planted on the same land year over year.  Eventually the soil will be so depleted that the yield will suffer and possibly fail altogether.  Farmers have long worked around this problem with crop rotation and fallow periods.  Letting a field lie fallow allows the soil’s nutrients to replenish, making the next season’s planting more productive. 

Early Americans applied this practice more broadly than agriculture, though.  As the school year was designed there was a period of lying fallow built in for children.  Today we know this period as summer vacation.  Kids are allowed to rest their minds, relax, play, and take a break from all that thinking.  As is the case in farming, the idea behind this was that the rest would prime them for more efficient learning during the school year.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Chinese also applied their agricultural practices to their beliefs about education.  What makes this parallel fascinating, though, is that because they grow rice their educational system looks very different from our own.  Rice, unlike wheat or corn, benefits from more planting.  The more batches of crop that can be planted each growing season, the better the yield.  Lying fallow would be detrimental to the productivity of the land.    

In chapters eight and nine of Outliers Gladwell addresses the well known mathematical superiority of Asian students over Americans.  The details he identifies are compelling and I won’t attempt to recreate them here because I’m no Gladwell and if you haven’t already done so you should read the book yourself.  But the net conclusion is that the American agricultural premise doesn’t hold up when applied to education.  That is, our minds become better with use, not rest.  Rice farming is labor intensive on a scale that dumbfounds me.  As the old Chinese maxim goes, “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”  That attitude applied to education created Asian school years that range from 220 to 243 days long (as compared to 180 days in the U.S.).  And students who are in school up to 35% more days per year than Americans have lots of smarts to show for it.

So I sit here, feeling rested but not particularly sharp.  My grey matter is a bit mushier than normal today and my quick wits have slowed.  I am inspired by the idea of constant learning, but a bit overwhelmed at the same time.  You see, I liked my break.  And, mental laziness aside, I think it was good for me.  Because if I am completely enervated I’ll have nothing left to give to my little mental escapades here.  I doubt I’ll ever go on a three month hiatus from reading and thinking and learning.  But I still contend that a week here and there do more good than harm.  Besides, it’s July which means that it’s hot and humid and utterly miserable outside.  I liken a mental break to a big glass of ice water – delicious and refreshing, but also essential for survival.

I don’t think I have to go too far out on a limb in saying that I value education.  It’s not an especially risky position to take.  I am the fortunate product of a good education, a family of readers, and a marriage filled with challenging ideas. 

These things suit me, but beyond that, I believe they make me a better person.  I believe that I improve myself every time I learn something, whether it’s the result of extensive reading or a quick Wikipedia search.  I also believe that learning and education are not exclusively achieved by enrollment in colleges and graduate schools.  They likewise come from independent reading, engaging with people, exposing yourself to new environments and cultures, and experiencing things firsthand.

Having said all this I am fully aware that there are plenty of ignorant people in the world.  Some of them yearn for better opportunities and broader experiences.  But plenty of them are content to meander through life with the knowledge they’ve already obtained, along with whatever else happens upon them without too much effort. 

It is this second category of people that GAP and I discussed over dinner Saturday night.  He has a low level of tolerance for people who don’t engage their minds.  Not for people who are uneducated.  Not even for people who aren’t very bright.  His beef is with those who don’t try; people who could ask interesting questions and think interesting thoughts, yet choose not to.  They exist in all circles of society: urban, rural, middle class suburban, wealthy, and poor. 

I am inclined to give these people a pass, of sorts.  There is a part of me that believes that their choices are not my business.  If they are happy enough in their current lifestyle, who am I to assume that my own approach to personal growth is right for them?  Additionally, ignorant bliss aside, for many of these people additional knowledge or analytical insight may not measurable improve their lives in any tangible way. 

Yet I have said it: I value education.  I think it is important.  So how can I reconcile that belief to only some subset of my society?  I would never state that vegetables and exercise are only important for people who already enjoy them.  I would never concede that open-mindedness and generosity are only valuable in people who care about those traits.  So why would I parse words when it comes to education?

I suppose it is that when it comes to advocating mental muscle there is a risk factor for snobbery that scares me.  Particularly given that I am well educated I fear that being outspoken about education (formal or otherwise), intellectual curiosity, and other aspects of knowledge and learning will imply judgment that I truly do not mean to convey.

There is a line from The West Wing (probably my all-time favorite show) that comes from a senior White House staffer in the midst of an election cycle.  The sitting president is an educated liberal from a prestigious family, fighting against a challenger who comes from more humble roots and is gaining ground on his platform of being a regular guy.  As the president grapples with how to leverage his own intellectualism the staffer says, “Before I look for anything, I look for a mind at work.”

I have always loved this line because it succinctly communicates exactly what I value.  He doesn’t say, “Before I look for anything I look for a post-graduate degree” or “a high iQ” or “analytical genius.”  He looks for a mind at work.  The range there is so broad.  It allows for so many versions.  A mind at work includes library books, The History Channel, and conversations with quirky and interesting people, as well as diplomas that read Summa Cum Laude. 

I suppose what I’m here to say is that I don’t care whether or not you have a college degree or even a high school diploma.  I don’t care if you’re a savant-like genius or a dim-witted fool.  I care if you’re trying.  I care that you get up each day and put your thinking cap on.  I care if there’s a mind at work.  And that, I hope, is a fair position to take.

Today’s post is the second in a two-part series in which I’m exploring some of the best advice I’ve received from my two best female role models – my mother and my mother-in-law.  You can find the first installment here.

My mother-in-law, E, gives advice freely.  However, her advice is as likely to be nonsensical as serious.  Her most repeated refrain in life is, “That’s what you get for marrying a man.”  This statement is almost always offered as a response to my frustrations at GAP having done something stereotypically male, such as forgetting that we already made plans for this weekend, or not brushing IEP’s teeth before bed.  “If we’d all married women our lives would be so much easier.  I warned my daughters but they married men anyway.  You’ll have to do a better job if you have daughters.”

So there you have it:  E’s words to live by blazing a path to worldwide lesbianism.  Clearly, she has a sense of humor.  But there is so much more to this woman whose words deal predominantly with fun, but whose actions address a full menu of more substantive qualities.  And so it has been by the power of her example that I have come to learn a lot about life from E. 

My favorite thing about E is not her boundless energy.  It is not her insatiable thirst for her grandkids.  It is not even her willingness to sacrifice her formal living room to a big screen television and a Wii.  It is her confidence.  E is a woman who exudes confidence in a way that I’ve never quite seen in anyone else.  She does it without apology, but also without arrogance.

At least in my experience confidence is often coupled with some undesirable bedfellows: cockiness, abrasiveness, unchecked ego, and a lack of regard for other people.  E, on the other hand, somehow manages extreme confidence in herself without looking down her nose at anyone else.  She doesn’t care a nit what anyone thinks about her, but this never influences how she treats others.  I am accustomed to people without the insecurities of perception using their confidence to barrel through life with a “take no prisoners” attitude.  They are unconcerned with the collateral damage they cause because the effects to their reputation are irrelevant to them.  But E has shown me (unwittingly, I suspect) how to free myself from the weight of worry about other people’s opinions while still conducting my life with empathy and humanity. 

The result of this kinder, gentler brand of confidence is a happiness and lightheartedness I’ve known in few other people.  Because she feels no need to prove herself E is not defensive.  Because she doesn’t concern herself with other people’s judgment she approaches everyone with equality and magnanimity.  Because she is free from the burdens of insecurity she finds the best in nearly everyone she meets.

Women are so prone to insecurity.  We are so inclined to worry whose career is more prestigious, whose skin is more flawless, whose jeans are a size smaller, and whose children are more perfect.  I am particularly susceptible to those burdensome (and shallow) concerns myself.  But in the eleven years I’ve known my mother-in-law I’ve come to see that there is another way.  And bit by bit I’m adopting that way in my own life. 

PS – Happy Fourth of July!

Earlier this week Jane posted a challenge to her fellow bloggers: write the commencement address that you would give.  I’ve sat through several commencement addresses, and most of them have been pretty worthless.  The one such address I’ve ever heard that I found worthwhile, or at least thought-provoking, was actually a Baccalaureate address.  I’ve thought a bit about what philosophical brilliance I might impart on young graduates, but after much mulling over I’ve decided that intangible insights are not what we need most as we embark upon the real world.  So, rather than stumble my way through something that would almost certainly be no better than those speeches I’ve heard in my past, I’m providing a list of real-life lessons I think would be most valuable to the new college grad.

The Financial

• Pay yourself first.  When you sign up for direct deposit at your first job, divert a set amount straight into your savings.  If you never “have” it, you’ll never miss it. 
• Plan to retire.  Want to work until you’re 70?  If not, put at least 10% of your salary into your company’s 401(k) or comparable plan.  If your employer doesn’t have one, set up a Roth IRA.
• Credit card debt will be the death of you.  Pay off your credit card every month.  No matter what.

The Practical

• Buy machine washable clothes.  I’ll never forget my first really big dry-cleaning bill.  I had to pay $90 to get my clothes out of hock and literally cried because it was such a big (and unplanned) chunk of my entry-level income. 
• Change your oil.  No matter what fancy-pants synthetic oil they put in it.  Even if they tell you it only has to be changed every 7,500 miles.  Change it every 3,000 miles.  It will do wonders for the life of your engine.
• Don’t go to the dealer.  Car dealerships pad their service tabs with unnecessary services.  Find an independent service facility that specializes in your brand of car. 
• Exercise.  You may not like it, but your metabolism is slowing down.  Establish a regular exercise routine now and maintain it.

The Personal

• Meet people.  Rooming with a friend from college?  Great.  But meet new people in the “grown up” world.  Have lunch with a coworker.  Go to church.  Join the Junior League.  Surround yourself with new people and make friends who give you room to grow beyond your college self.
• Harness your strengths.  We all have strengths and weaknesses.  Rather than spending a lot of time trying to be something you’re not, work on playing to your strengths and working around your weaknesses. 
• Do things alone.  If you have the courage to do it, outings alone can be one of the most freeing experiences you’ll have.  Go to a movie alone.  Go out to eat.  Sit at the bar and chat up a neighbor or bury your head in a book.  Besides being liberating, it’s a valuable life skill. 
• Get regular checkups.  You are young and you think you’re invincible.  But regular check-ups, teeth cleanings, and (if applicable) gynecological exams are crucial to long-term health.

The Professional

• Don’t apologize for not knowing.  More than any other time in your life as a young professional it’s okay to say “I don’t know.” Take advantage of your neophyte status and use it to ask countless questions and learn as much as you can.
• Don’t be afraid to switch gears.  You don’t have it all figured out just because you donned a mortar board.  If your first foray into the working world doesn’t turn out to be a fit, remember that your career ship hasn’t sailed.  Your entire adulthood is in front of you.  Find something you love!

With that, I would politely sit down and let the kids go out to enjoy their lives.

Happiness has been on my mind a great deal lately.  It was one of Momalom’s Five for Ten themes.  It is the sole subject matter of Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, which I’m currently devouring.  And it comes up on track 12 of the soundtrack from Wicked which has gotten significant airtime in my car since we returned from New York nearly three weeks ago.  While all three of these venues have addressed the topic admirably, it is the last one which has crawled into my mind and been poking at me with irritating regularity. 

I’ll spare you the context for track 12 (which is properly entitled “Thank Goodness”) because for the purposes of this discussion it really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Glinda (“the good witch” as most of us know her) hits on an uncomfortable truth.  Gretchen Rubin would probably tell us that these lyrics address the “arrival fallacy” of happiness (p. 84 in THP, for those of you following along at home).  And she would be right.  But for me these lyrics hit me at more of a gut level than an academic one.  I care less about why they scare me, and more about the fact that they do so in the first place. 

That’s why I couldn’t be happier
No, I couldn’t be happier
Though it is, I admit
The tiniest bit
Unlike I anticipated
But I couldn’t be happier
Simply couldn’t be happier
(spoken) Well – not “simply”:
 ’Cause getting your dreams
It’s strange, but it seems
A little – well – complicated
There’s a kind of a sort of… cost
There’s a couple of things get… lost
There are bridges you cross
You didn’t know you crossed
Until you’ve crossed
And if that joy, that thrill
Doesn’t thrill you like you think it will
Still – With this perfect finale
The cheers and ballyhoo
Who wouldn’t be happier?
So I couldn’t be happier
Because happy is what happens
When all your dreams come true
Well, isn’t it?
Happy is what happens
When your dreams come true!

So there you have it: the one minute of a four-ish-minute song that I’ve listened to over and over and over again for three weeks, trying to understand why it’s plaguing me.  After much head scratching I’ve come to the conclusion that these lyrics bother me because they are true.  Glinda addresses the fact that when we get what it is that we think we want, we may be surprised at how the experience isn’t just as we pictured it.  More bothersome still, Glinda’s approach to this truth – skittish and furtive – almost says more than the words themselves.  She almost goes there – to that place of full-bore disappointment – but stops short of it, not treading past the allusion.

This is a frightening truth to broach.  We want to believe that when we achieve whatever goal we have set for ourselves that happiness, pure and unadulterated, will pour forth into our lives.  Yet rarely is this the case.  My friend Aidan touched on this very phenomenon in a post of hers just last week, causing me to contemplate it further.  This whole premise feels much more frightening when someone you know personally (rather than a witch in a musical…) is experiencing it in real time. 

I have goals and dreams and ideas about my future.  Naturally, in my head the attainment of said goals and dreams comes equipped with clouds parting, angels singing, cartoon birds sitting on my shoulder (a la (500) Days of Summer), and sickeningly sweet bliss at every turn.  With a finish line like that on the horizon, why wouldn’t I run full speed ahead toward my goals?  But understanding that actual finish line may be something more bittersweet I pause to think carefully about the goals I have set.

I turn back to Gretchen Rubin for a life-line.  She writes:

The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,” in the gradual progress made toward a goal, in the present.  … the arrival fallacy doesn’t mean that pursuing goals isn’t a route to happiness.  To the contrary.  The goal is necessary, just as is the process toward the goal.  Friedrich Nietzshce explained it well: “The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the meolody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.  A parable.”

And so it turns out that the means is the end.  Leave it to Nietzsche and Gretchen Rubin to explain this fearful premise in a way that makes me feel as though I’ve been handed a gift with a bow on top.  Now someone just needs to explain this to Glinda.  Perhaps it is the kind of philosophy that would resonate better with Elphaba.

On Friday morning I got a call from my mother.  I was on my way out the door and, after confirming that my Aunt B (who’s been feeling poorly) was okay, I hurriedly asked if I could call her back once I got in the car.  She assured me that Aunt B was fine and that I could call her back.  Then, more like ten minutes later when I was finally out the door, I pressed “M” on my BlackBerry and rang her cell. 

The reason for her call was not urgent, but was tragic.  A series of events had led her to phone a friend of hers that morning who informed her that she (the friend) would, later that day, be attending the funeral of a childhood classmate of mine.  It was shocking news, given that he had no known health problems and the cause of death, while known to be natural, is otherwise a mystery.  I was saddened to learn of his passing, as well as a bit shaken at being abruptly reminded of my own mortality. 

I wouldn’t say that I felt grief.  I hadn’t seen him since I transferred to private school after seventh grade.  But I felt sadness.  Sadness at a bright young life being snuffed out unexpectedly.  Sadness for his mother, of whom I have fond memories as a warm and vibrant presence in my childhood.  And sadness for his friends and colleagues who had much affection for him.

My memory of him is colored by the injustices of childhood and adolescence.  Our names were alphabetically adjacent, and so we were frequently seated next to each other in classes, line-ups, and other organized activities.  But beyond that, our paths didn’t intersect very often.  He was very cute, very athletic, and very popular, and I was (though I’m sure I didn’t understand it this way at the time) intimidated. 

And what do we do to people who intimidate us?  Sometimes, when we are young and insecure, we minimize them in the privacy of our minds in order to feel better about our own inadequacies.  To the extent that these things mattered to me at the time, I allowed myself to assume that he was uninteresting, not very nice, and not very smart, none of which, it turns out, was true.  And it is this fallacious perception that has been nagging at me since Friday. 

After our lives diverged for good at the age of 13 he was a part of my past in the most neutral sense.  I bore him no ill will, but didn’t miss him either, and in fact rarely thought of him at all.  Until I talked with my mother on Friday I hadn’t heard his name spoken in at least ten or 15 years.  But in the time since that phone call I’ve thought a lot about him.  I was particularly struck by these few sentences from his obituary which forced me to confront the long-forgotten assumptions I’d made about him as a child.

[He] loved his family first. Second was his fiery passion for sports, music and history that paired with a great smile and a better laugh made him an easy person to befriend and an easier person to love. He was not a musician but he had more knowledge, appreciation, and love for the art than many who perform. He was no longer a competitive athlete, but recognized, praised and admired those that were. He never fought in the Civil War but he knew the roads the soldiers took to battle and understood both sides’ reasons for combat.

After reading that description I couldn’t help but think, “This sounds like I guy I’d really have enjoyed!”  He clearly had a curious mind and an affecting spirit.  Then I got on Facebook (we have a number of FB friends in common) and found my homepage littered with condolences, memories, and tributes to a man whom I could tell was beloved.  And it was then that I realized how wrong I’d been, probably from the very beginning.  But my epiphany accomplishes nothing now; it is too little too late. 

I believe the assumptions we make about people are always colored by ourselves; by our biases, insecurities, defenses, and pride.  So often we see what we want to see.  When looking at people whom we love and admire we see strength of character, keenness of mind, and generosity of spirit.  When looking at people who threaten or intimidate us we see any number of qualities that vindicate us or make us feel superior.  But if we were to harness true objectivity, even for a moment, we would see that each portrait contains nuances we’d previously overlooked.  We would see that there is more to the story than we may care to admit. 

I was far from the most popular girl in school.  As a kid I lamented (usually privately) the fact that my insecurities and neediness masked the super-coolness I was sure lived just beneath my surface.  The cool kids just didn’t see me for what I truly was.  But I see now that – at least in this case (and probably many others) – I was guilty of the same offense.

Back in January Arianna Huffington (of The Huffington Post) went to sleep. 

Well, more appropriately she went to sleep at a decent hour, and woke up at a decent hour.  Apparently this was a big change for her.  In fact, it was such a big change that she adopted the buddy system and invited Glamour’s Cindi Leive to help her out with this paradigm shift.  And in fact such a change would be a paradigm shift for most American women. 

In this article on her blog she explained the rationale for this sleepy experiment.  To grossly oversimplify her position, she asserts that women, in an effort to compete with male counterparts in the workplace, have sacrificed all work-life balance, the final component of which has been their sleep.  We stay up late to work from home, catch up on house work, enjoy 10 moments of quiet, or indulge in our favorite TV shows.  As it turns out, working single women and working moms of young children are the most sleep deprived, averaging six hours nightly, as compared to the recommended minimum of 7.5. 

I look at this statistic and it astounds me.  I average 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep per night.  I certainly have nights that only offer me six hours of sleep, but I know that I couldn’t sustain that sort of a schedule for more than a couple of nights at a stretch.  I’m prone to wonder if this is because I’m hopelessly spoiled, or just a brilliant time manager.  Frankly, I know that neither is true.  It’s more likely that I’m just fantastically lazy and that my sheets are extra soft and irresistible.  And that I inevitably catch a cold when I get too little sleep.  I’m not noble.  I’m just a bit of a bum.

Here in the blogosphere we often lament the elusive nature of balance.  We strive for it daily, but for many of us it remains just out of our grasp.  For all of our scheduling, planning, and other attempts at organization we feel frazzled and overwhelmed by our lives.  We admit that amidst our harried routines of to and fro exist moments of sheer joy; moments when we see through the fog of obligations and exhaustion and truly appreciate the fullness of our lives.  And what glory that is!  It is mind-boggling, I think, that so many women can be this tired and still sit down at the end of a day and feel grateful, rewarded, and happy that our lives are so full.  We start many days running on coffee and adrenaline and still feel blessed by the snuggles from our babies, spouses, and pets.  Even when our reserves are depleted, we’re forces to be reckoned with!

But I wonder how our lives might feel different to us if we entered them rested.  This thought rings particularly true to me this morning.  Last night I slept about 6.5 hours, and I already feel the day hanging over my head with weight and reluctance, rather than with energy and optimism.  (On mornings like this I am prone to wish I were a coffee drinker…)

So what is it, then, that keeps us off kilter when it comes to sleep?  Why do we struggle to prioritize this one simple (and free!) thing that so many of us would admit wholly changes our outlook, energy level, and capabilities?  Countless words have been written about the value of self-care.  We understand that we can care for our families better when we care for ourselves.  And yet we leave ourselves in the dust in an effort to keep up with the whirlwind around us. 

Today I will ponder these things.  I will ponder these things along with the challenge of how I might sneak a nap into my day without being noticed by my coworkers.