Didn’t you get the memo?

I did. I got it so well that I have a copy automatically sent to my brain every single morning and most afternoons. It gets on my ass when I’m tired, it gets on my ass when I’m sick, and it gets on my ass when I sit down with a book.

A book? It better be a USEFUL book!

Dammit.

I’m done. I’m responsible maybe 99.8% of the time. And if occasionally I do most of everything but not all of everything, if sometimes the dishes don’t get done…

it’s a lesson I learned the hard way. I learned it from years of depression and fight and pushing for the A+ instead of the A…
–and the subsequent slide into the deepest, darkest places I’d been, and then back up and then one more time down. And then up. And I’ve mostly stayed up.

So I know better. I know better than to try and do it all.

And yet?

And yet I still feel terrible when I’m not doing it all, pushing as hard as I can, squeezing every last drop out of everything, functioning as the absolutely perfect student or minister or coach.

You know what?

That’s not good living and it’s not good modeling. And so I keep practicing.

Practicing not doing it all.

Practicing letting it go.

Practicing serving my own needs first so I can have something with which to serve others.

And practicing not feeling guilty for calling in sick and staying home when what I need is a handful of Advil and some solid rest.

Not. Guilty.

at least sun;
at least kitten;
at least beginning
there are always beginnings
one falling into the next
at least this.

See writing is the sincerest form of connection
between strangers
I will give you everything you need
to love a figment of my fantasies
and you in return
will trust me to get you there.

If your trust is weak you will read the ending first
and spoil it for yourself
if you are patient you will wade through the fifty stories that don’t do it
for the one that does.

And when you discover that you are breathing faster
after an in-depth discussion of meat eating
foreign to your vegetarian brain
you will know
that I don’t need four-letter words.
I just need
permission.

And from day two or three or seven we are busy learning how to be elsewhere. We move, we talk, cry, listen, see, touch, bring our edges into contact with the world around us. We cast ourselves into others, learn sympathy, empathy, pain, and joy.

Each step away leads us further from direct contact with ourselves. The world gets more complicated by the day. Decisions have to account for everyone. Others’ pleasures become important–as important or more important than our own.

Over years, we might forget. We forget how to occupy our bodies.

And then we’re adults. How do we get back in?

In fact, back up one step. How do you even know you’re out of touch?

Cement was the canary in my coal mine.

It was spring, first year of college. Sky was blue, birds were singing, and this was Minnesota which you know means it was a long winter. I hadn’t left for France which means it wasn’t actually spring term yet, but it was a nice day in March. And because it was college and spring I decided to do something crazy.

I took off my shoes.

Not inside, not onstage or in my dorm room, but right there on the sidewalk between classes, in front of god and everybody. And I put my feet on the warm cement.

You’ve seen the cats that lie down and squirm on warm walkways on spring afternoons? I tell you, the cats know what they’re doing. I couldn’t believe how good it felt. For the first time in untold years, my feet felt alive, like they were attached. I was like a kid with a new toy–I walked on grass, on blacktop, on cement, on linoleum, on slate and marble steps (it was college), on carpet, on dirt trails, anything I could find. Pine needles are different from dirt, and dirt doesn’t always leave your feet dirty. Stone worn smooth by feet that have gone before is almost a religious experience. Sand is okay, but has nothing on moss. (YMMV) Each new surface reminded me again that there is more to feet than walking, that skin covers my whole body, and that touch is an integral part of life. Touch put me back inside my skin.

Once I rediscovered that nerves were for more than pain, it opened a whole world. Skinny dipping, fabrics other than cotton, oils, lotions, and food!

College was in Minnesota, remember. I grew up in a house where fully half a cabinet was devoted to spices. I sought out flavor, read a book on culinary school and picked up the vocabulary of gustatory pleasures. I went to France to study abroad and discovered table setting as art form and two-hour four-course lunches; dinners that were seven courses and four hours easily, prepared from scratch, served in order. I learned that courses aren’t there because people eat more food–they are there so you can savor each dish exactly as the chef intended. Even lettuce was not to be sliced; if presented whole, it was to be folded. Meals were not word scrambles but sonnets and haikus: careful, elegant, and crafted for pleasure.

While in France I also encountered perfumes; to this day the concentrated scent of lilac catapults me back to the streets of Pau, trailing behind a confident and well-composed woman, her essence wafting after her. The pleasure languished for a while until I went to India, where my nose was awakened. Mumbai (Bombay) smells like no other city in the world. Food is only a tiny slice of it. Roses and jasmine and marigolds and low tide and rotting milk and manure and charcoal fires and smog and incense and a thousand dinners in a thousand pressure cookers all singing out from beneath their weighty loads just scrape the tip of the iceberg.

And when I returned, music, I had music again. For a long eight months I had been surrounded by other languages, cadences, rhythms, pitches, and inflections. I arrived in New York and at long last my ears relaxed.

Now when I forget, I call myself back, deliberately, consistently. I make good food, burn incense, seek out touch, go barefoot all summer long.

And you? What do you do?

Does that make you feel better, or more frenzied than ever?

When I was in school, summer was relaxing. The whole point was to STOP working like mad and reattach one’s brain, figure out what was fun, learn to swim or ride a bike or climb a tree or go for a walk or milk a cow. SOMETHING. Anything except sitting at a desk, practicing arithmetic and penmanship. It was easy to feel sad when summer started winding down, but there was so much possibility, even in six weeks, that it couldn’t ever be too bad.

With age comes a different cadence, yes. But summer is still not really a great time to work like mad. For one thing, it’s HOT. For another thing, the kids are out of school, and you might get to see them without homework or soccer practice looming. And another thing–there are a handful of skills that you simply cannot practice in winter. Tree climbing. Unicycling. Paddleboarding. Dancing in the rain and splashing in puddles.

You might think these are only skills for the Unserious Non-Grown-Up. You would be wrong.

See, the secret to productivity is relaxation and play. In my ideal world, no one would need productivity as a motivator, but just in case the pleasure of pleasure is not motivation enough, we are more productive when we relax, when we don’t think too hard, and when we play. We actually DO find answers more easily when we “sleep on it”. Or climb a tree on it, or go skinny dipping.

So if you want to have the Best Summer Ever, you need goals. You need organization. You need a plan. And you need to include time to turn off the analysis and laugh, sing off-key, read poetry, watch fireworks, and play with the dog.

Here are ten tips to help:

1) take stock. How are you doing, doing the things you love? How’s the stress-to-joy ratio? If it’s higher than 1:1 (2:1, for example), time for something to change, pronto.

2) If you are not already doing this, pick two things that help you get a clear, peaceful head; things like writing, singing, meditating, walking, gardening. Set aside an hour of your morning, first thing, for them. Give them 30 minutes each. If you are already doing it, pick one to extend to an hour.

3) make a list of 20 things you always wanted to try (cooking Japanese, learning Italian, camping, calculus, model rocketry, guitar lessons) pick one and do it–find a book, take a class, join a MeetUp or Yahoo group to learn more. Get started.

4) remember that more daylight doesn’t have to mean more hours of work. Use timers if necessary to stop work at quitting time.

5) give out compliments freely. Tell the coffee barista, the convenience store clerk, the bus driver when you appreciate what they’re doing. Tell your loved ones you love them, and tell them what you most appreciate. Smiles are contagious.

6) Focus, focus, focus. It’s SO easy to get distracted, between internet and birds singing and pretty water. If you stay on task, you’ll get done faster and get on to the stuff you want to do without feeling guilty. Try the Now Do This utility (shows you ONLY the next thing on your to-do list; you can make different lists, like one for home and one for work, by heading sections with @home, @work, etc) to help you remember what you were doing before your phone rang/dog barked/tea water boiled/co-worker dropped by with a pile of stuff.

7) make it beautiful. Clear off your desk and put a tiny little sculpture or a beautiful stone right in front of you. Put a postcard of beautiful art in your car (or if you have a Beetle, put real flowers in the vase), frame a pretty greeting card, add a couple of throw pillows to your living room. Beauty touches parts of our brains we can’t really get to with hard facts.

8 ) change up your music. You know you’ve listened to the same itunes playlists or radio station every day for the last six months. Make a soundtrack for the life you’re living toward.

9) build in buffers. Sometimes, stuff doesn’t work the way we plan. If you have a to-do list laid out for every one of the next 45 days, give yourself breaks, days off, and chances to follow the vagaries of fate. You don’t want to be so tied to your schedule that taking advantage of a great opportunity stresses you out.

10) connect! Almost everything is better in community. Offer help, ask for assistance, pitch into group projects, volunteer for a worthy cause, and stay open to the great ideas that come from working together. Spend time with friends, get to know neighbors, have a cookout, go to a barn raising! Do something you could not have done alone.

Yes.

our culture is kind of a mess. Bodies and comfort therein make a tremendous difference in how we approach stuff like sex and love. Is it possible to be unhealthy because one is overweight? Yes. Is it possible that there are other reasons (stress, anyone?) that one might have a heart attack or high blood pressure? Yes. Likely, in fact. And whatever you think you know about someone because of how much they weigh, you don’t. You just don’t. There’s so much you might not know, it’s not even funny. So assuming that it’s lack of discipline or lack of exercise or any other kind of lack in the other person, instead of a lack of open-mindedness on your part, is presuming a level of knowledge that you almost certainly don’t have. What if you assume the person is strong, healthy, and beautiful?

And what if you assume that about yourself?