Today is the Day!

He said, 

“There are only two days in the year 

that nothing can be done. 

One is called yesterday 

and the other is called tomorrow, 

so today is the right day 

to love, believe, do and mostly live.

~Dalai Lama

He saw me before I noticed him.  By then it was too late.  Shocking red and blue lights swirled in the dark of night as I steered my car to the side of the road.

The officer approached. “Good evening, ma’am.  Do you know the speed limit here in this part the canyon?” He quizzed.

“45?” I said.

“Yes.  And do you know how fast you were going?”  He asked.

“45?” I said.  

[Officer laughs.]  “Well, now I wouldn’t be standing here if you were going the speed limit, would I? Let me help you out. When I first saw you, you were doing 57… and then you sped up! [More laughter.]  Where are you off to in such a hurry?"  

I think I was more surprised than he; still, I had no real excuse.  I was tired.  It was late.  I had worked all day and was coming home from a board meeting at Children’s Hospital.  My husband and wonderful canine companion waited for me at home. But what was the hurry? What was so important that I would go 20 miles over the speed limit without any awareness of how fast I was driving?  For that matter, I didn’t even remember the last 7 miles or so. Apparently I had navigated the familiar curves of the dark canyon just fine, but I couldn’t will myself to remember. Had I been in a trance?  I pondered this while the officer checked my license, registration and insurance.

He lectured me on the dangers of going too fast in the canyon—wildlife and fatal accidents and such—and he made me promise to “slow it down,” which I did. Then he let me go with a warning.  

The rest of the way home I minded the limit, conscious of my surroundings and the beautiful starry-night sky.  I turned off the radio.  I thought about the way we tend to rush from one thing to the next, never truly enjoying the present moment, the silence and beauty, because we’re focused on some future event, like what we’re going to do when we get home, or we’re thinking about something that already happened, a phone call or conversation.  We're zoned out, missing the strange and wonderful once-in-a-lifetime moments before us;  moments that could be filled with awe and gratitude but which, once spent, we can never get back. 

I’m reminded of this as we move into the holiday season, where the tendency is to spend our time in a planning state: checking things off our to-do list and watching the days on the calendar bring us closer to “the day.”  When you find yourself in this state, STOP!  And remember:  TODAY IS THE DAY… To make it happen… To give up who you’ve been for who you can become… To make your dreams come true. . . to LIVE!  

Today is the day.  Be glad and rejoice!

Still, I Fall

Black is the color

of my true love’s hair

His face is like

A rose so fair

He’s got the sweetest face

And the strongest hands

I love the ground

Whereon he stands…

~ Black is the Color

Irish Folk Song (modified for “him”)

Ah, Amore!  The agony.  The joy!  The blush of new love, the rush of romance; thinking of your beloved each moment of the day, imagining his hands touching every part of your body; anxiously awaiting the next conversation, the next kiss.  Falling in love is the easy part—any fool can do it—but staying in love, I think, calls us to fall in love again and again over the lifetime of our togetherness.   

I want to remember it all—each moment of awareness, each insight into his depth, each time my heart breaks open, just a bit wider, softened by the light of what’s real and true and vulnerable between us.  Like these five moments that pulled me in a little deeper, reminding me why I fell for my sweetheart; f-a-l-l-i-n-g in love all over again.

1. It’s both.  When he met my Grandmother I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  But there he sat, knee-to-knee with the matriarch of our family, as she fired off question after question in her gentle, southern way.  “What do you do for a living?” “How long have you two been courting?” “Who are your people and will we like them?”  He answered each question with patience and care, and when she asked, “Is this a real thing or a play thing?”  He responded, “It’s both!”  Yes, he was serious about our relationship, he told her, but we also played and had a lot of fun together too.  Hearing this, my 80-something Grandmother took his hands in hers and just laughed and laughed. I. Fell. Madly. Deeply.

2.  Bald for a cause.  A participant with St. Baldrick’s Foundation, my sweetheart has been shaving his head to raise money for child cancer research for more than seven years.  This year he will be anointed a Knight of the Bald Table for his many years of service.  I love his philanthropic nature. I’ve known this about him since we first met while volunteering at Children’s Hospital.  But last spring as I watched him on stage getting his head shaved before a cheering crowd of friends and supporters, he glowed.  In that moment I understood what my friend Jenna meant when she described another as being made of “wind and light.”  He was.  It made me love him more.

3.  Minding the mundane.  We had big snow that day so I worked from home.  But under pressure of a big deadline at work, he ventured down the canyon in the dark of morning where he stayed all day.  Yet, after a tiring day at work, traveling in hazardous conditions, he stopped at the market for groceries and picked up dinner before heading back home.  As he helped me unpack the shopping bags, stocking our fridge with fresh organic produce, my heart melted in adoration for the Man who takes such good care of me. They say, in love, we each feel like we're the lucky one. I knew that I was. He minds the mundane with a patient and glad heart. I will never take that for granted. 

4.  Spooning the Furry.  I heard him in the bedroom one Saturday morning, speaking in low tones.  I thought he might be on the phone.  I had been in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast and as I started towards the bedroom I saw them together, lying on the floor spooning.  “You’re such a good doggie,” he said, stroking the Furry’s head; “We love you so much.”  The dog was in bliss! I stood there watching them, bathed in sunlight from the open window, just hanging out together, until he saw me in the doorway and gave me a smile. I thought my heart would break.

5.  The brightest light.  For our first married Christmas together, I found a fabulous tree.  I had been busy that day decorating and making the house more festive when he took off for town.  He returned a while later with excitement.  “Look what I found,” he said, unpacking his shopping bags and lining the counter with two-dozen soft white LED candles.  Then he carefully placed one in each window of the house, even the super high windows close to the top of the cathedral ceiling in the living room that required a ladder to reach.  As I watched him move about with enthusiasm, to me, he was the brightest light of all.  I could not have loved him more.  Or could I?

Day by day, in a thousand ways, still, I fall…

Stepping Into the Future

The future is something which everyone reaches

at the rate of sixty minutes an hour,

whatever he does,

whoever he is.

~C.S. Lewis

Mooghaun Hillfort - Dromoland, Ireland
(MHopkins 2013)

People speak of “putting the past behind us”.  But where else can the past be put?  It has only one place it belongs and, once there, can only be a reference point for the future.  Yet we make it a part of our present by clinging so tightly to our experience.  We go round and round in our heads, remembering some conversation, slight or injustice, real or imagined, and we stay stuck in that feedback loop reliving it again and again, often exaggerated and out of context because now we’re focused on some isolated aspect of our otherwise fading memory, giving it life, meaning and a whole host of expressions that perhaps never were.   Imagine what we miss while running around the same tired circles!

Can you see it?  How clinging to an aspect of our past might prevent us from seizing something wonderful that is available to us in the here and now?  Consider this: 

A new form of clinical psychology known as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) stems from the understanding that a great deal of our psychological pain comes not so much from the experience itself, but from the words we use over and over to describe our experience.  Instead of getting stuck in our heads and avoiding any real forward movement, ACT encourages acceptance of the situation, conscious choice of direction and action, bringing more meaning and psychological flexibility into our lives in the process.

In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, author and ACT co-founder, Steven Hayes, suggests that we can actually repeat a troubling word or concept over and over until it loses meaning and power in our lives.  Take the word grass, for instance.  Hayes recommends repeating the word over and over for 49 seconds.  Grass, grass, grass, grass, grass, grass…  The theory is that at some point, your mind will stop associating ‘grass’ with the luscious green stuff and observe it as a meaningless noise.  This disconnect between words and reality will allow us to drop those mind movies that have been tormenting us.  Why not give it a go,  beginning with ‘grass’ or some other word of your choosing and then moving on to the more emotionally charged descriptors that unnerve you, like ‘rejection’ or ‘failure’ or ‘broke,’ or any other parade of horrible that you can conjure.  The idea is to rub out the sting these words carry so that you can deal with life free from the fear created by your internal dialogue from the past.  Sound feasible? 

Diagnosis, they say, is half the cure.  But we’re best careful with how we use our diagnosis lest it becomes the story we tell about our life, the reason for why we can’t have or be or do what we want.  For just as understanding the root of our problem paves the way for setting it right, so too can it provide a ready excuse for not living our best life.

Is there something that you’re ready to put down, let go of, and leave behind?  Are you ready to reach for something new and make it real in your life?  As you move into a great new year, now is a perfectly fine opportunity to trade what torments for something more solid and real so that it becomes part of your future.

Wishing you all the best in 2014!

LOOK WHERE YOU WANT TO GO

Why would you give your precious life energy . . .

to something you [don’t] want?

~Dr. Wayne Dyer

The Road Less Traveled
Connemara Region, Ireland © 2013 MHopkins

While learning to ride her motorcycle, my mother decided to practice in their neighborhood.  Having made the loop, she topped the hill and came to a stop, preparing to make a left turn.  That’s when she saw it—the neighbor’s mailbox just across the way—and though she tried not to look at the mailbox and, instead, focus on the road before her, as she turned left, eyes still on the mailbox, she veered off course and crashed…into the neighbor’s mailbox; the very thing she wanted to avoid.

There is a golden rule of motorcycle riding that says “look where you want to go.”  Though she knew it in theory, my mother learned this the hard way.  There are many long and complicated theoretical reasons why this rule of riding might be true, but none that make any real sense except the idea of target fixation, which says, in essence, that what you focus on expands. 

And so it is in our every day lives.  How often do we repeat some aspect of the past or dwell on the negative parts of our situation and then find ourselves faced with more of what we don’t want, instead of giving attention to what we would most like to create and then taking small steps each day to make that vision our reality?  Maybe we’re unhappy in our relationship or we dislike our job or we don’t like the extra weight we’re carrying around like a spare tire, yet instead of creating a positive plan of how to get from here to there we focus in on what we don’t like, complaining or feeling sorry for ourselves, repeating the same bad habits, or avoiding the discomfort of change, and so we keep driving our proverbial motorcycles around and crashing into the same mailboxes. 

It is impossible to be angry and laugh at the same time.

Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive

and you have the power to choose either.

~Wayne Dyer

Choice is the essence of our free will, and it is through our choices that we direct the course of our lives.  While we may disagree with the actions of others and even dislike our own circumstances, we have the right, power and opportunity to make choices every day—the attitude we adopt, how we respond to the world around us, where we place our attention, the thoughts we entertain, what we take responsibility for, the meaning we give to the events of our lives, and what or to whom we give our power.  It’s all energy, and the lightness or heaviness of that energy determines much about our physical, mental and spiritual health. 

Take another look down the road you're traveling.  Do you really want to go there?

Bridging the Gap

Here's to the crazy ones. 

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. 

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. 

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. 

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough 

to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

~Apple, Inc.

I think most of the time what we really want is a little bit of peace and quiet, a little bit of tranquility, prosperity, understanding, relaxation and just the feeling that we’re okay.  And often what we get is a whole bunch of aggravation, irritation, confrontation, conflict, difficulty, challenge, and, well, one sort of problem after another despite our desire for comfort and ease.  Before we know it, this dis-ease pulls us this way and that in conflicting directions.  So we have to ask ourselves, am I going to take the bait and allow this to consume me, or am I somehow going to rise above it?  Yet, even when we do nothing there’s this nagging feeling that we cannot do what we would like to do about these factors, which exacerbates things quite intensely. 

On the one hand we may feel that we want to make a clear and determined move to do something about “it”—drawing a line in the sand, making a point and saying, no, I don’t want to have this anymore; yes, I want to sort this out; I want to move on from this; I want to clear this up and I want to change something that can’t possibly continue for another moment in its current form.  This desire for change is both admirable and appropriate, because it’s what spurs us into action.  The opportunity for change always exists when we leave the door open. Yet the speed at which change can come about is the unknown factor.  If we push too hard too fast, not only do we face extreme burnout and disappointment, we’re likely to miss something critical to our long-term success; maybe we leave behind someone or something that ought to come with us on the next leg of our journey.  Perhaps we end up with dissent instead of support.  On the other hand, if we do nothing and they do nothing and we just sit around waiting for change to happen, it will most surely continue to elude us.

Keep this in mind as you consider your own goals, resolutions and, perhaps, shortcomings in the new year, and as we look to our leaders to make it all better following the Fifty-Seventh Presidential Inauguration and the swearing in of President Barack Obama to a second term in office.  

Real change—thoughtful change—takes time.  It doesn’t happen without some effort.  The longer I live and the more I experience of the world the more I tend to side with the science fiction writers who have long maintained that time is not necessarily a linear thing.  We see it as something that has a beginning, middle, and an end; we see the past as something to move away from as we step into the future.

But perhaps time isn’t such a straight shot.  Maybe it’s more of a circular thing or a twisty swirly thing and instead of darting ahead, trying to get from where we are now to where we think we need to be by forging the quickest, most direct path forward, we should be looking back to our past, to our history, and re-examining some things that we thought were done, re-reading some case files that we thought were closed, to see what else might be there for us to learn from; with the goal of understanding how by re-writing our history or changing our perspective from what’s gone before we can empower ourselves, individually and collectively, for the future.

So take a deep breath and another deep breath and then one more.  Never mind about moving anywhere quickly.  We must ask ourselves, what can wait?  Why can’t it wait?  What must be handled right now?  I’m not suggesting a course of apathy or retreat, but rather that we pace ourselves and get it right.  Remain calm.  And put our confidence into something that we have every reason to be confident about, namely, about our ability to bring about the right kind of change at the right time.  We may not get it all at once but great change is attainable when we’re committed to finding a solution.