Monday, November 28, 2011

There was thanksgiving


“Why do we have to be so nice to each other?” my brother demands as he comes in the door on Thanksgiving. “Why don’t we pick fights like those families on TV? I’d like to see a real fight, and you know what? It should end up with a food fight!"

He is joking, of course. Or is he? Five minutes later he collars me in the dining room and vents about something that is going on in the living room. He is genuinely angry. Fortunately, the episode is confined to my brother and his wife and me; the living room is just out of earshot.

Ruffled feathers are smoothed by mealtime and we all proceed to be nice to each other through the bounteous meal and desserts. I breathe a sigh of relief, of thanksgiving.

Later I find the butternut squash with brown-butter sage and almonds languishing in the microwave—the only casualty of that confined, pre-dinner conflict. But it’s not the first time I’ve forgotten a dish.

Is family pleasantness a veneer? I choose not to think so. I choose to think of conflict as the exception, not the rule. Rather, I try to make it the exception. I grew up in a family that argued. We loved each other, for sure, but we didn’t say so. Instead, what came out of our mouths was good-natured teasing, liberal criticism, and a lot of argument. Over the years I have discovered, sometimes painfully, that the family culture created a default mode in my own manner that is not very helpful in building good relations, either within the family or outside of it. I’ve tried to become nicer, warmer, not so quick to argue. I don’t believe in covering up genuine differences. But I am trying to be more openly affirming than critical, to cultivate love rather than grow the seeds of conflict that are always there. And it's not just me. My brothers have become sweeter, too.

What I believe is that there is as much truth in love as in conflict and one can choose where to put one’s efforts.

In the days before Thanksgiving, the listserves produced tips on how to talk about conflict-laden topics like global warming around the extended family dinner table. Only one instruction made sense to me—to listen, listen, listen. Nobody is persuaded by fact and argument. Everybody already knows what everybody else thinks and one dinner discussion isn’t going to make a difference. Instead, it’s a time to pull out whatever genuine love and affection may be lurking beneath the surface.

Still, the kerfuffles can come out of left field, as this one did. Everything else I’d been worried about before the feast turned out to be a non-issue. The fleas seem to have disappeared; the babies were well, adorable, and adored; and the forgotten squash went into the freezer. Vic will take it to his men’s group Thanksgiving dinner this week. Saved him some cooking time, anyhow.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Hearing again


Yesterday I got a hearing aid. The other one broke when the audiologist was programming it. I’ll pick it up today or tomorrow.

Even with only one there is a marked difference. I hear the clicking of my typing, the swish of my pants as I pull them up, loud crunching when I eat my toast. My footfalls sound the same because the aids don’t enhance the low sounds, where my hearing is normal. But I hear every squeak of the floor. The turn signals on the car tick loudly. The little song at the end of the wash cycle chirps merrily, quite audible from a floor up.

I didn’t say “What?” to Vic once in our, as usual, minimal conversation last night. Most remarkably, however, I sat in the sauna last evening at the Y and followed a whole conversation between two girls without looking at them once. It was the usual low, mumbled, fast teenage talk, which I am sure they have adopted unconsciously to keep their elders out of the loop. But I understood nearly everything. It was all I could do to keep myself from interjecting, “But I think you have to go to medical school to become an anesthesiologist.”

My powers of speech comprehension--which is a matter of attention as well as hearing--have been sharpened by the years of hearing loss. In fact, the audiologist told me when she gave me the test that my 80-85% speech comprehension was remarkable, given the degree of my loss. So I have regained the sharp ears (ear, today) that helped make language learning easy for me in the past. No wonder I had trouble understanding African French last week, which used to be easy for me. I’m sure I could pick it up much quicker with the aids.  That is the great gift of good hearing, which I was losing, the ability to understand other people’s languages, whether it is Teenage English or heavily accented French. And with it, the ability to eavesdrop.

I love to eavesdrop. It is part of my nature. I am a born observer, a quiet hider in corners, watching the world pass, trying to understand it. I am an Enneagram 5. I have grown out of that shell, of course, and become an active participant in the world. I can be outgoing for long periods of time. I am happy to be in charge, a better hostess than guest. But I still find comfort and pleasure in being the silent observer. It’s my default mode—either downright solitude or solitude in the midst of society. It’s why, in years of going to the Y, I have never struck up a friendship there. I’d rather indulge my penchant for watching people. And now, listening to them as well.

I broke that pattern of solitude-in-company the other day at the Y. Rather, someone else broke it for me. I was wearing one of my bike trip T-shirts and a lithe, gray-haired woman spoke to me as I was walking down the hall.

“Do you bike?”

We talked for 15 minutes and exchanged email and land addresses. We will bike together next season. Well into the conversation, I noticed that she was wearing hearing aids, the all but invisible kind I was about to get myself. I could see them only because her hair was clipped very short.

I think I’ll let my hair brush the front of my ears just enough to hide the tiny, transparent tubes. Although I am telling anyone who cares to read this blog that I wear hearing aids, I’d rather be stealthy about it in public. I want them to be invisible. I, too, want to make myself invisible from time to time so I can eavesdrop.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

The color orange


Last night I dreamed that I had bought myself an orange dress and orange socks. They were as bright as the new Chicago Bears home uniform (which I don’t much like; I miss the midnight blue). 

Nevertheless, it was the only thing I could think of to wear. I was looking for the dress and socks but I couldn’t find them. I was soooo disappointed.

Apparently my soul is yearning for orange. Orange for me represents passion, fire, warmth, out-thereness—even brash exhibitionism. I see I chose a peachy shade of orange for this blog, where I write warmly, I think, and in an out-there way.

But I am not feeling much fire and spirit these days--more matronly and humdrum, more practical than mystic. Hence the dream: I couldn’t find that orange dress and socks.

Recently a friend reported dreaming my daughter, granddaughter, and me standing in a store window, dressed in reds and oranges. Where did that come from? It is true that my daughter loves orange both for herself and Hazel.


Joanna in orange before Hazel had any orange clothes


Hazel in orange, with lemon.
 
But I am not much of an orange person. My friend was dreaming an exhibit of spirit and passion in all of us that I’m not experiencing right now, but it may be potential. How might I get more orange into my life?

I will interrupt this writing to get ready go to church. I was waffling on church this morning. The Chicago church is usually more orange-spirited than the local one but it is many fossil-fuel miles away. I was thinking of staying at home and working on a grant proposal I’m doing for a friend but that does not feel at all orange. So I will go to local church and out to lunch somewhere with Vic and report back.

Later. So we walk into church and of course there is orange everywhere. The altar is draped in orange (tasteful rust, actually) with a cornucopia full of orange gourds and flowers. Shades of orange glow in the magnificent Tree of Life fabric art that permanently graces the apse. My friend Barbara sits in front of me in her brown and orange jacket. The preacher of the day wears an orange-striped tie. (The best I could do from my own wardrobe was an amber necklace.)

And I am moved by the service—the music, the sermon, the prayers, the brief conversations with new friends afterward. I had been set up, of course. I went reluctantly, puzzled, and with low expectations and, wouldn’t you know, Spirit shows up everywhere.

We have lunch in a Chinese restaurant decorated in red-orange, come home, and light an orange fire. Later we'll watch the Bears in their orange uniforms.



Friday, November 18, 2011

Will there be Thanksgiving?


All my Thanksgiving plans are threatening to unravel. Most of my family does not know this yet, but I can already see it happening.

First there are the fleas. Are they gone? I think so but I’m not sure. Lalo-cat has been treated twice. I’ve cleansed, vacuumed, put clothes in the freezer or dryer, sprayed cedar oil, and banned the cat from all upstairs bedrooms. I’ve done as much of that as possible downstairs and draped the living room furniture in sheets, to keep any stray fleas out of the upholstery and reveal telltale creatures.

Every time I think they’re gone I see one, just one, but it sends me on another round of all of the above.

Every time the cat seems flealess I brush him and one or two dead ones fall off. They’re still coming from somewhere. He is banned from the garage when he goes outside, and it’s 30 degrees at night, and still. Every time he goes for a day without scratching and biting I dare to hope—and then, like just now, he sits in front of the woodstove and bites and scratches.

This would not be so touchy if there weren’t babies coming for Thanksgiving. One is a 6-month-old who is learning to crawl. She was here a few weeks ago, the first time I thought I’d eradicated the fleas. We put her on a blanket on the living room floor for 15 minutes and a flea found her pale, warm, fuzzy head. AAARGH. She was here for a few days but got no floor time after that. (And apparently no more fleas, thank God.)

The cat had made himself scarce during her visit. I’m thinking that any fleas would have made the cat first choice if he’d been around, so keeping him penned in the basement is no solution—his treatment makes him a flea-killing machine. But he also apparently sheds some live ones. AAARGH.

But like I say, no visible live fleas for days now. Less scratching. Cold temperatures outside at least. I’m not ready to call off TG because of fleas.

Another problem is that the other baby who is coming, granddaughter Hazel, is low-grade sick. She’s been coughing for three weeks. She and her parents won’t come if the cough isn’t better, not with the other baby, who is our daughter-in-law’s niece and whose parents are in Bloomington, IN, for a few months, in the house for four days. The whole point of this gathering was to get the Ann Arbor family, the Oak Park couple, and the Bloomington family together for a few days for some good times while everybody is temporarily, more or less in the neighborhood--the Midwest.

Scratch that (indeed!) if Hazel is still sick.

Beyond that, there could be a whole layer of tensions around child-rearing and illness-treating philosophy if everybody does come. Suffice it to say that our son is a radiologist and our daughter is way into alternative everything.

But hey. Whatever happens, there will be enough turkey. I had ordered a fresh, organic, free-range turkey from the Amish CSA. Then yesterday my local farmer friend offered me one of her fresh, organic, free-range turkeys in exchange for helping her write a grant proposal. I couldn’t say no to that. So I’ll have an extra turkey to go into the freezer for the next family gathering.

Or maybe two.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Baby love


I’m missing my granddaughter. I saw her three weeks ago and will see her next week and she sits still enough to Skype with me for a few minutes every few days but still. This baby love is like big romantic love. It sits in the chest, leaving a hole there in the absence of the beloved.

I felt this way about my own kids and still do, to a certain extent. But the love for the adult child has shifted, like married love shifts, to solid, forever affection. The baby is like teenage first love. Every time I think of Hazel Violet, I grin.

I think, for example, of how, when she was learning to walk, she raised both fists to the sky and toddled off in all directions in sheer exuberance.

I think of all the things she could already do to “help” when I last saw her, at 15 months:

Peel garlic
Put her diapers in the trash
Put bottles in the recycle (and take them out again)
Carry sticks to the bonfire and throw them on (closely supervised, repeating “hot-hot”)
Clean up the floor, crumb by crumb

I think of her two dimples and her thick, shiny, dark hair.

I remember her astonishing appetite.

You shouldn’t talk too much about your grandkids, just like you shouldn’t talk too much about your romantic interests. You must know that the impulse to talk about the beloved can exceed the listener’s capacity to smile and nod.

I can only hope that everybody has the chance, sometime in a lifespan, for big love like this. A partner, a baby, a pet, a place.

Someone, or something, you miss dreadfully when you are separated. Someone, or something, you can’t help talking about.

Monday, November 14, 2011

A fossil fuel diet

In the first five days of my no-burp diet I have lost somewhere between 2 and 4 pounds. It’s really hard to tell with these electronic scales that give you one reading after another. But the direction is definitely downward and, for me, swift. I’ve never been able to lose more than about a half pound a week. I don’t expect this rate to continue but, nevertheless, it is remarkable and a bit puzzling.

I am not hungry. I do not permit myself to be hungry. When I am hungry I eat a little and then stop. I stop not by willpower but by paying attention to the feeling in my tummy. Feeling just a little full? Whoa! The next bite threatens heartburn! I am learning to hate feeling too full. I am learning to embrace the feeling of enough for now.

The learning has been swift—almost instantaneous, in fact. As soon as I identified the feeling I hated and the feeling I enjoyed, I made the switch. It’s the perfect example of the Heath brothers’ image of the relationship between the Elephant and the Rider. The Rider is reason and knowledge, how we understand the problem, what we know we should do, how we strategize to address it. The Elephant is emotion—that big beast that does the actual moving toward the goal or away from it. The beast that needs skillful direction by the Rider but can’t simply be told what to do. The beast too big to control only by logic. Somehow my Rider got my Elephant turned and moving in the right direction.

Another way of saying this is the energy has shifted. Perhaps the shift of energy may be responsible for the instantaneous and dramatic weight loss. It may also have to do with not waiting for the daily weigh-in for feedback but following the energy flow hour by hour, even minute by minute. This kind of shift affects your mentality and mentality affects metabolism. Stress, as we know, affects metabolism, often promoting weight gain and sometimes unhealthy weight loss. It does this not only by influencing appetite but also by affecting hormone balance, especially cortisol. I have a feeling science is only beginning to uncover the relationships among what we are thinking, how we are feeling, and how our physiology behaves.

Where else can we make such instantaneous switches? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our society could develop a sudden revulsion for fossil fuel? This is already happening for many of us. We are learning to hate the excess trip, the belches of dirty diesel from the aging truck, the overheated and overchilled apartment buildings, our enslavement to the automobile, and above all the gouged pits and crushed bedrock that result from trying to squeeze out more, more, and still more. We are curbing our individual appetites for fossil fuel. We are embracing the beauty of the bike and the sun and the wind. With a little help from national infrastructure, we could easily go on a no-fossil-fuel diet.

But we do need help on this. There is only so much we as individuals can do. Until our leaders, too, feel the revulsion in their guts, our policies will keep force feeding us what, all too recently, we thought we wanted. It’s time to say, Enough oil! No more gas! I can’t take another bite! (B-u-u-u-r-p).

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The no-burp diet


Day one of my no-burp diet. I weigh in at 164.2.

I will violate social norms and write frankly about my weight and the embarrassing topic of burping because, whether you have my problems or not, my struggles might provide insight for some of yours.

As I grow older and gain weight, my digestive system has become more sensitive. I have frequent bouts of gas and heartburn. I’ve advanced from Tums to store-brand Prilosec and still, yesterday afternoon I was emitting loud, braying belches. Fortunately I was alone in the house.

At the same time I was listening to a little lecture about personal change based on the Heath brothers’ latest book, which also prompted yesterday's musing, Switch: How to Change When Change is really Hard. And I was thinking about how I might try once again to shed a few pounds. That summer of biking, for all its rewards, had not shaved off more than five pounds, though it probably replaced some fat with muscle. And the rather lazy month of October had already put four of those back on.

Now here was Chip Heath, suggesting that I find some kind of positive emotion, a reward, to stir up my motivation for change. Well, I knew about all that. The picture on the refrigerator, the camaraderie of the group sessions, the snug pants in the closet, the regular weigh-ins showing the (hopefully) dropping numbers.

They don’t work for me, not reliably and not for long. I needed something more powerful, personal, and immediate.

As I was listening to this you-already-know-this lecture, I was issuing those awful belches every few minutes. I knew why. It was because for lunch I had eaten two bowls of a delicious lentil soup I’d made for myself instead of one.

I noticed how uncomfortable I was. I started timing the space between burps, thinking how nice it would be in a few minutes or hours to be free of them. And suddenly I knew that I had found the feeling I needed for changing my eating habits.

I knew in my mind and my gut what needed to change. Tiny portions, more frequent meals or snacks, total avoidance of some foods like ice cream, and cutting way back on others like wheat. I wouldn’t even need to think about this diet. I would just need to pay attention to the burps and get myself burp-free.

I could have burp-free contests with myself, burp-free marathons, my own Guinness Record on burp-free days. I could even imagine a burp-free Thanksgiving! Suddenly, the upcoming pumpkin and mince pies were losing their appeal, and I could imagine the tiny scoop of my luscious stuffing on my plate next to a moderate slice of turkey thigh, a mound of green kale, a dollop of bright red orange-cranberry relish, and no potatoes at all. And good heavens, no seconds! I could imagine this without a hint of regret or anticipated suffering. The feeling was there.

I know from past dieting experience that I can learn to enjoy the feeling of less. I can go to bed feeling empty—not stomach-growling hungry but slightly hollowed out—and enjoy that sense, go to sleep on it. But I can lose track of that feeling and go back to overeating in the evening, which is my main downfall: seconds on dinner, snacking afterward. What happens is an emotional change: the joy of emptiness somehow gets replaced by a feeling of never-enoughness. When I lose the joy of emptiness I can’t control my eating. And when I lose the feeling I don’t know how to get it back.

I believe I have stumbled on the trigger, the path back to that feeling of being in tune with my body’s needs. My aging body has given me an instant feedback mechanism, the uncomfortable, embarrassing burp. My body is speaking to me--rather loudly, in fact--and, finally, I am listening.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

When information is true but useless


Another part of my job is to collect true but useless information, abbreviated as TBU.

Both the collection of such information and the use of an acronym are characteristics of so-called policy work. Policy work itself is based on the presumption that the development of policy, that is, change at some kind of official level, is based on information. It is based on the assumption that you have to have a lot of information to make it happen, and once you have the information, it will happen.

I have to ask, Is this really true? While the process of collecting and disseminating information leads to the proliferation of acronyms in the world, does it truly lead to change?

If the above paragraphs sound convoluted and cynical, they are. I am feeling convoluted and cynical this morning.

I get the TBU acronym from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, who wrote the clever and compelling book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Really Hard. They say simply, no. Information is not why things change. Change is propelled by emotion. This is true, they say, of all kinds of change, from the personal level to the level of society, including “policy.” Therefore you can spend all the time you want collecting TBU and nothing will change. You will understand the problems really, really well but you won’t solve them.

Deep in my heart I know this is right and yet all around me my colleagues continue to collect information and I help them do it. I have created a whole website full of fascinating TBU, and I feed another page of such information on another website. Traffic on these sites is not high but I am often told that I am providing an essential service to the environmental movement by gathering this TBU.

Actually I don’t think true information is totally useless. But it is true that information alone does not create change when change is really hard. Information is essential to clarify the problem. Information tells you what you need to change, and which direction the change needs to take. Information is essential background to change. Information can be shaped to provide the path to change. But it is emotion that pushes you along that path and makes the change stick.

In short, information can provide both the why and the how for change.

The Heath brothers outline a path to change that has worked in many cases. They base their methods on solid sociological and psychological research—that is, on information that provides the how. Much of the information I seem to be collecting, however, provides the why—that is, defining the problem. Many of my colleagues are stuck in the why. Too much why and not enough how makes information TBU.

Meanwhile, the evidence on climate change is piling up. New discoveries are being made about how harmful pollution is to our health. Yet another instance is uncovered of corporate pillaging.

All of this is TBU unless we use it to shape the path to change.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Chaos and creativity


Dr. Andrew Weil says our brains are not made for the 21st Century. In an essay in  Newsweek, “Don’t let chaos get you down,” he points to the lower rates of depression among the Amish and the Third World and concludes that “there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression.”

Aside from the fact that the Amish may be less likely than us English to admit they are depressed, and depression in poorer countries may likewise be underreported, we all know what he’s talking about.

It’s the knot in my shoulders after a whole day of emails and phone calls trying to coordinate a schedule for a Congolese pastor visiting next week. And trying to post things on the website for work but finding the site unavailable on my usual browser. And after that, vacuuming the rugs and furniture once again because my son-in-law reported fleabites on his ankles after visiting last weekend, though I thought I’d nipped the infestation in the bud (ten loads of laundry, vacuuming everything the week before; I’d missed a flea treatment for the cat). And skyping with my daughter and seeing little Hazel droopy and coughing, poor baby! And am I really going to spend that much on hearing aids? I hear my husband cringe over the phone, though he claims not, and we argue about that, if not the hearing aids. And oh. Have I written in my blog recently? Brother Dale, who skyped me accidently yesterday because he was trying to figure out his computer problems, wants to know.

Watching the woods turn from yellow to skeletal drab on a gray November day, I know better than to feel sorry for myself. The only thing to do is write it down and laugh about it. My life, compared to others’, is pretty tranquil.

But things get lost among the chaos, just like those fleas hiding somewhere and targeting my son-in-law’s ankles. I had a dream that may be relevant.

I was at a conference that included a writing retreat led by my favorite writing teacher. My attention was divided between the conference and the writing. I missed the first writing session and perhaps others. As I dipped in and out I noticed that other people in the writing retreat had beautiful, antique-looking notebooks. Where was mine? At the end of the retreat I discovered that I had one, too. I opened it from the back. There were personalized greetings to me on printed pages. There were writing exercises, including some loose, torn-up paper that seemed to be part of an exercise. The notebook was meant to stimulate creativity but I had missed the instructions on how to use it.

In our distraction we can miss our own creativity. 

Still, I wouldn’t give up any of it. Except the fleas.

 Hazel Violet discovers the recycle bin.