Living Consciously

Imagine this scene. A group of people are in a dim, sound-proofed room. They sit in rows of chairs that are bolted to the floor. A few of them whisper to each other. They are waiting.

Suddenly, a bright light stabs through the room from behind them. The front of the room explodes into a riot of flashing images. At the same time, shattering noise bursts from both sides of the room. The people cringe in their seats. Some of them cover their ears with their hands. But the noise continues, shrieking from the loudspeakers, rising and falling, beating against their senses in wave after agonizing wave.

This assault happens to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans, over and over, week in and week out. It doesn’t take place in a prison or an interrogation room. That sound-proofed room isn’t a torture chamber.

Nope. These people are just spending another evening at the movies. The sound level of the film itself isn’t usually so bad. But the advertisements and previews blast out at a volume that is literally, physically painful.

And it isn’t just the movies. It seems to me the world is steadily getting louder. For one thing, we are surrounded by machines that we depend on. All of them—from cars to computers to furnaces to refrigerators—make noise. They hum and beep and whirr and purr and growl and rumble.

Then there are the noises-by-choice that we surround ourselves with. Take background music in stores (please!). It’s been there for years, ever since some marketing genius got the idea that music had charms to soothe more money out of our wallets. But it doesn’t stay politely in the background any more. It doesn’t exactly shout, but its volume has gone up to a point where it can no longer be ignored.

Then there are waiting rooms. Sitting at the doctor’s office used to mean being left in peace to have a conversation or peruse back issues of Gastroenterology Today. No longer. Almost every waiting room, no matter how tiny, now has at least one TV set. It dominates the room, talking endlessly to itself, regardless of whether anyone waiting wants to have it on.

Restaurants are getting louder, too. A while ago I was traveling and had the misfortune to stop for lunch at a truck stop. The restaurant had TV sets in three corners, shouting the latest celebrity antics at each other above our heads. As if that weren’t enough, competing speakers in the ceiling were blaring golden oldies. All the noise didn’t seem to be a problem for the people in the next booth. They just shouted a little louder into their cell phones.

One of the things that bothers me about all this noise is the number of people who don’t seem to be bothered by it. We’re so used to this auditory battering that we don’t even realize we’re being abused. Little by little, we just keep turning up our own volume, until it seems as if the whole world is shouting.

Research has shown that noise increases our stress levels. Our bodies are programmed to associate loud noise with danger, so we respond to it with a burst of adrenaline, ready to fight or flee to protect ourselves. But when the noise is everywhere, we can’t flee. We have no place to go.

Maybe we can’t flee, but we can still fight. I am—in a quiet way, of course—turning into a noise vigilante. Those obnoxious TV sets in waiting rooms? I turn them off whenever I can. In restaurants, I ask the servers to turn the music down. Sometimes they roll their eyes, but they almost always turn it down. And I choose not to spend my money in places—like movie theaters—that assault me with noise. It may not sound like much. Still, if more of us did it, perhaps the volume would start to come down.

Another thing I do is choose to spend part of my days in silence. When I go for my daily walks, I don’t take an iPod or a CD player or a cell phone. Instead, I listen to the voices in my head. It’s a wonderful chance to hear myself think. I wonder about things, I ponder, I have conversations with myself. And, in the blessedness of silence, I have a chance to welcome new ideas. They often slip in quietly, speaking in shy whispers. When I surround myself with silence, I can hear them.

Shh. Just listen. Silence. Can you hear it?

When the phone rings at 4:54 a.m., you hope it’s a wrong number. As you fumble and stumble your way out of bed, trying to pick up before the answering machine does, your mind does a quick roll call: Who isn’t home? Who’s traveling? Who’s been ill? Your heart immediately asks with dread, “What’s wrong?”

The intensity of this litany of fear depends on your family, and the imagined scenarios vary according to whether you have teenagers, a spouse in the military, or elderly parents.

In our household, the instantaneous internal check at such a time goes first to elderly parents. So when I picked up the phone early this morning, simultaneously with the answering machine, all my half-asleep brain heard at first over the recording was something about “grandma.” It took me a couple of seconds to grasp that “Grandma” didn’t refer either to my mother or my mother-in-law.

I had momentarily forgotten one category in my mental checklist—pregnant daughters. Okay, pregnant stepdaughters, if you want to get technical. But when grandchildren are involved, who cares about technicalities? "Grandma" meant me.

Adrien Allen was born at one-something a.m. on January 26, 2008. He weighed nine pounds. His birth took place at home, which was planned, but he was in enough of a hurry that he arrived before the midwife did. His dad did the baby-catching, and very well, too.

This is grandkid number five, with number six due in another few weeks. The middle name honors his grandfather, who will never know this child because he died five years ago. There were a few tears for that, amid my quiet predawn celebration.

My celebration also held a touch of relief. This early morning call brought nothing but delight. No one is ill; no one is hurt; no one is gone. Other changes will come in their time, but today, the family has grown by one. That one is already loved and most welcome.

You have a terrific family, Adrien Allen. Welcome to the world.

Random Christmas observations drawn from personal experience:

If you wait to mail gifts to distant loved ones until a few days before Christmas, when it’s too late for them to arrive before December 25, the lines at the post office are much shorter.

Why is it, that after you’ve bought a gift for one person on your list, you keep finding things in store after store that would be absolutely perfect for that person?

In my shopping the last couple of weeks, Christmas and otherwise, I’ve noticed that store clerks everywhere (well, okay, in the six or seven stores I’ve shopped at) are saying, “Have a nice day,” instead of, “Happy Holidays,” or, “Merry Christmas.” Is this an attempt to avoid the whole who-do-we-offend-this-year political correctness issue? Or are they, by the third week in December, simply sick of the whole holiday routine?

When I buy Christmas wrapping paper, I judge it by two criteria: First, of course, it has to be on sale. Second, its design needs to include some straight lines both horizontally and vertically. This is a great help in cutting straight edges when I’m wrapping gifts. Despite this particular obsessive quirk, my wrapped gifts generally look as if they were done by an eight-year-old who was using dull scissors and who couldn’t find the tape.

But no wonder you can never find the tape when you need it. The label says it all: it’s “invisible.”

Blessings to all those of you who actually write, print, and send out Christmas letters—before Christmas, yet. Even though I’ve never done one, I love getting them. It’s great to hear about your year.

Luckily, each year, about three-fourths of the way through my Christmas shopping, I wake up and remember that giving gifts is simply another way to say, “I love you.”

May your Christmas be a wonderful time of celebration with those you care about most.

It’s time for my annual rant about the increasingly outrageous expansion of what used to be “Christmas” into a two-month extravaganza of over-eating, over-scheduling, and over-spending called “the holiday season.” Let’s focus for just a moment on holiday stress.

If I see one more article about coping with the stress of the holidays, I just may scream. Not, you understand, that I am stressed or anything. I will admit to being profoundly irritated, though. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to complain about holiday stress when so much of it is self-inflicted.

My own suggestion to reduce stress is to employ, early and often, one short word. No, not that word. Admittedly, it may have its place—such as when it’s 11:47 p.m. on Christmas Eve and you are attempting to put together something that the directions blithely assure you can be assembled “in 15 minutes with a few simple tools,” and you’ve been working on it for three hours and you have several small parts left over. In such a situation, feel free to use whatever words come to mind, as often and as emphatically as seems appropriate.

And no, although it certainly can be useful, “no” isn’t the word I’m suggesting, either. The word I recommend using lavishly at this time of year is “why.”

“I have to bake six dozen cookies for the cookie exchange at work.” Why?

“It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving; we have to put up the outside Christmas lights.” Why?

“The Christmas letter has to go out by December 15.” Why?

“I have to get gifts for all 47 people in the extended family.” Why?

“I don’t care what the in-laws want; we have to get together with the whole family on Christmas morning.” Why?

I’m certainly not suggesting you should turn into a Grinch and skip Christmas altogether. It can be a wonderful time of sharing traditions with the people you care about most. Just stop and think about why you do the things you do this time of year. Consider whether the activities are enjoyable, whether they are important to someone in your family, or whether they matter enough to you to be worth doing at all.

If writing a Christmas letter or sending out cards to a long list of relatives and friends is fun and helps you keep in touch with people, then fine. If it’s a hassle and you hate it, why not skip it? You can keep in touch just as well with a spring letter or a summer one—or better yet, emails and notes throughout the year.

If you truly love baking Christmas cookies and want to have dozens of them, that’s great. But if you make them because you assume you should, or you know you’re going to eat too many of them and hate yourself for it, or you end up throwing half of them away because they get stale—then in the name of Saint Nicholas, Rudolph, and all the elves, why do them at all?

By all means, participate in the events and traditions you enjoy this time of year. But before you commit yourself unthinkingly to a list of seasonal shoulds, stop and ask one small question. “Why do this?”

If the answer is, “Because I want to,” then go for it. Have a wonderful time—and a Merry Christmas.

According to that wise philosopher Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being green.”

Kermit didn’t know the half of it. The difficulties of being a green frog are nothing compared to the challenges of being a “green” human being.

You may or may not recycle. You may or may not use energy-efficient light bulbs or buy organic produce. You may or may not believe global warming to be a problem. But I would be willing to bet Al Gore’s electric bill that you would agree with the statement, “We need to use our planet’s resources wisely.”

One way to do that is through “green” buying. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as you might think.

The other day I got a catalog in the mail—printed, of course, on recycled paper. This company advocates “less wasteful consumption.” They sell all sorts of conservation-minded stuff like solar panels, battery chargers, energy-efficient light bulbs, and composting commodes. I’m sure a lot of their products are quite useful and genuinely “green.”

Then there are the more dubious things. Like the clothes and household stuff made from organic cotton and bamboo. True, the flannel bathrobe made from organic cotton costs $89, plus shipping, as opposed to the $19 you might spend for a flannel bathrobe at Wal-Mart. But you can feel so much more virtuous when you wrap up in the organic one. Never mind that both the garments are imported from China, traveling halfway around the world via ships and trains and trucks that use lots of good old-fashioned fossil fuels.

Or you can order fire-starters to use in your energy-saving wood stove. These are made from recycled church candles. You can be green and ecumenical at the same time, since the starters are 30% Lutheran, 30% Catholic, and 40% other denominations. Of course, you could eliminate the cost of hauling candle stubs back and forth if you just stopped in at a local church and asked them to save their used candles for you.

Then there are the decorative composting containers, designed to fit under your sink or sit with eco-pride on your kitchen counter and hold up to a week’s worth of scraps. They range in price from $17 to $42, plus shipping. A recycled ice cream bucket or yogurt container would serve the purpose just as well—but where’s the green glamour in that?

Green buying can even extend into the afterlife. You can return the remains of your beloved pet to the earth in an eco-friendly manner with a bamboo pet coffin. Not just any bamboo, either. No, these are made from “fair-trade-certified bamboo”—a variety, by the way, that pandas do not eat. They are hand-woven in a small family-run factory in—guess where? China.

If you chose a less ostentatious but no less eco-friendly way to return your pet’s remains to the earth, you could just bury it in the back yard in a cardboard box. With the $350, plus shipping, you would save by not buying the bamboo pet casket, you could donate a lot of food to your local animal shelter.

My favorite item in the whole catalog, however, is the “Ellie Pooh” brand paper. You can get a narrow notebook, perfect for your to-do lists, for only $9, plus $6 shipping. The same price gets you a cube of 100 4-inch-square sheets in a cute little cardboard box.

That seems expensive, you think? Ah, but this isn’t ordinary paper. This is made—without bleach or acid—from 25% recycled paper and 75% elephant dung. Organic, of course, and no doubt gathered by hand. When you think of the labor involved just in collecting the raw materials, not to mention the processing, the prices seem quite reasonable for such a unique end product.

Too bad the “Ellie Pooh” company doesn’t make stationery, but maybe people were reluctant to lick the envelopes. Of course, you could just make your to-do lists on the back of recycled junk mail envelopes, but then you’d miss out on the self-satisfaction of having helped the elephants of Sri Lanka.

If you think it’s important to use the Earth’s resources well, you could certainly order products like this from catalogs like this. Or you might try a different approach—not as eco-trendy, perhaps, but at least as eco-friendly. It’s simple—stop and think before you buy. Don’t assume that buzzwords like “organic” or “green” or “recycled” automatically add up to wise purchasing.

Think before you spend. Otherwise the only “green” in your purchases might be the color of the money that gets recycled out of your pocket and into someone else’s.

Customer service is not necessarily about efficiency. It is not necessarily even about getting a problem solved—although that certainly is a nice bonus when it happens.

Customer service is about treating the customer like a person.

First case in point: Two young clerks, on different days, at the same store. Both of them were undeniably competent. They rang up my purchases and processed my debit card with quick efficiency that got me through the checkout line with commendable promptness. Yet I wouldn’t give either of them a passing grade in customer service.

The young woman said all the things she was probably supposed to say—hello and did you find everything and please sign here—but with no more courtesy than a robot would have shown. Her only sign of humanity was her response when I asked her if she had already put the receipt into the bag with my purchases. Her “yes” was impatient, with a touch of eye-rolling “duh—of course.” Not being her mother, I didn’t appreciate her tone.

The young man, a few days later, simply didn’t talk to me at all. No greeting, no acknowledgement, not a word until he printed out the credit slip and said, “I need you to sign this,” with utter disinterest. I was tempted to sign my name “Darth Vader” just to see if he would notice.

Second case in point: An equally young clerk at a different store, who said “hello” and “did you find everything” as if he meant them, who looked up a missing price with a “no problem” attitude, and who joked about having only 17 minutes left on his shift—“16 and a half, now.” We were both smiling as I left.

Third case in point: I called an airline to find out whether they had any sort of emergency fare that might help out one of my friends who needed to get home after having a vacation interrupted by emergency surgery. I was, of course, answered by an automated system. Holding firmly onto my patience by its back hair, I made my way dutifully through the menu of choices until eventually I was connected to a living, breathing human being. No, she told me, there was no such fare.

It wasn’t the answer I wanted, though it was the answer I expected. What I didn’t expect was her warmth. “I’m so sorry,” she said, sounding as if she meant it. “We probably should have that type of fare, but we don’t. I’m really sorry I can’t help you.”

By the time we ended our brief conversation she was passing along her best wishes—sincere ones, I am convinced—for my friend’s swift recovery. Even though she couldn’t do anything to solve my problem, she responded to me as one human being to another. I felt treated with consideration and respect, so I hung up the phone with a positive impression of the airline in spite of the negative answer.

Of course, I don’t expect to exchange life stories or meaningful conversations on a customer service phone or in the supermarket checkout line. I understand that greeting customers must become formulaic, routine, and largely mindless: “How are you today?” and “Did you find everything you needed?” and even the dreadfully clichéd, “Have a nice day.”

It just seems to me that extending courtesy and warmth must make a sales clerk’s job much more enjoyable as well as pleasing the customers. It doesn’t take much, just a brief acknowledgment that there’s another human being on the other side of the counter.

There’s nothing wrong with clichéd conversation, especially if it’s offered with a genuine smile. Because there’s another cliché involved here. The one that says, “The customer isn’t an interruption of your job; the customer is your job.”

Have a nice day.

I didn’t follow any of my usual routes that morning when I went for my daily walk. Instead, for no particular reason, I headed in the opposite direction and circled through a less familiar neighborhood.

On my way back, I approached a house where an elderly man was standing out in the front yard. I said, “Good morning.”

He returned my greeting, then added almost brusquely, “Come here. I want to show you something.”

Now, following strange men into their back yards isn’t something a wise woman, alone in a neighborhood not her own, probably ought to do. But the man was elderly, there was nothing frightening in his manner, and whatever he wanted to show me seemed important. I went.

When we reached the back yard, he gestured and said, “See that tree?”

Behind the house stood a lovely old elm. The wide, low fork where its trunk divided into two spreading branches seemed just made to climb into. One sturdy branch was worn smooth, evidence that a swing had hung there for a long, long time. But the tree was badly damaged. A jagged split through the trunk exposed a long gash of raw wood, and the branch where children had swung drooped so low that the end of it brushed the grass.

“It was that wind storm the other night,” the man told me. “I’m just waiting for the tree guys to come take it down.”

He went on to tell me, in a few brief sentences, about the tree. How he and his wife had planted it almost 50 years ago when they bought the house. How it had grown to shade the back yard. How the kids had climbed it and swung from its branches and built tree houses in it. How the grandchildren had done the same. And how, ever since his wife had died last year, things just weren’t the same.

I listened, and I nodded, and I said almost nothing in response. There was nothing I needed to say. This man, in showing me his damaged tree, was expressing his love for his family and his grief over his losses. He needed a listener that morning—and I came along just at the right time, before the tree guys got there with their saws and chippers.

Maybe my choice of an unaccustomed route that morning was a coincidence. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was that he needed someone to talk to and that I was there to be that someone. I felt deeply honored to be trusted with that role.

I don’t know whether I believe in celestial angels as messengers or agents of God. I am sure I believe in earthly angels. We all can be angels for one another, sometimes in ways we don’t understand or even notice. I believe my listening presence that morning was a gift to this man. I know for sure that his sharing was a gift to me.

I just have one question. Which of us, on that particular morning, was the angel?

When it comes to good old-fashioned food preservation (i.e., canning), I am a newly-fledged “expert.” In other words, I’ve done it once. Well, twice, actually—one large batch of chokecherry jelly back in August, and one small batch of salsa this week. Every jar of which sealed properly, thank you very much.

The jelly, or at least the two jars I have personally consumed, was just right. The salsa is perhaps not outstanding, but is certainly acceptable. Or so I am informed by those who eat the stuff. Personally, I’ll stick with jelly.

These modest culinary successes please me greatly, but they are also slightly embarrassing. The embarrassment stems from the fact that for years I never even considered trying to make jelly or can anything. I thought it was too hard. It seemed to be one of those complicated, arcane processes that other people knew how to do but I would never be able to master, especially considering my less-than-stellar abilities in the kitchen.

This belief persisted despite—or possibly because of—all the times as I kid I watched my mother produce batches of jelly and jar after jar of pickles. Or possibly it was based on my experience as a bread baker. Today, I make genuinely excellent bread, but that was a hard-won skill. I remember too many loaves that turned out two inches high and impervious to the sharpest knife, because I used water that was too hot and killed the yeast. They weren’t exactly edible, but they would have made excellent paving material.

So I’ve always assumed canning would require many similar failures and a long apprenticeship. (Of course, there’s always the possibility that it does, and that what I’ve accomplished thus far has simply been beginner’s luck.)

In truth, though, the processes of canning and making jelly aren’t as complicated as I thought. Time-consuming, yes. Messy, absolutely. But not really that hard, particularly if you have a mentor available to answer questions and give helpful advice. (Thanks, Mother!) Once again, I’ve discovered that a new and seemingly mysterious project isn’t as difficult as it seems from the outside. It merely requires starting at the beginning and following the directions, one step at a time.

Salsa, anyone?

It’s September. The extra depth of the blue skies seems especially designed to show off the golds and reds of autumn leaves. It’s an invigorating time, when the warm days and crisp evenings foster grandiose plans for finishing all those summer projects that seemed like such good ideas in June but somehow got stalled about mid-July.

And, in our part of the world, it’s the time when it’s finally safe to be outside.

All summer we’ve been warned about the hazards of the summer sun. Unless we’re slathered in quadruple layers of sunscreen, it’s a no-no to go out in the middle of the day. Melanoma, after all, could be only one bad sunburn away. Early morning and evening are the only safe times to be outside.

Okay, that’s fine. Except for the other, contradictory warnings about mosquitoes. They’re not just an annoyance any more; they carry West Nile virus. This is an unlikely threat, but still a genuine one. One of my friends is recovering from a bout of West Nile that left her out of commission for three weeks. And, of course, the time that mosquitoes are most active is early morning and evening. At dusk and dawn it’s not wise to even go out to get the newspaper without first saturating yourself with bug repellent.

Combining sunscreen and bug spray is always an option, I suppose. Except what if they cancel each other out? Or, as some study is sure to prove one of these days, maybe the combination produces some chemical or other that’s deadly to the human liver.

The other choice is to take advantage of the small windows of time in between the sunburn risk and the mosquito risk—maybe from 8:03 to 8:26 in the morning and 6:12 to 6:39 in the evening. It’s a challenge to get all your yard work, swimming, bicycling, and picnicking done in that amount of time.

The third choice would be simply to give up and spend the summer indoors, watching television and playing computer games. Then we could be assured of staying safe—at least right up until the time we expired from morbid obesity.

But for now, we can forget all these worries and warnings. We’ve had the first frost. The sun is shifting to the south, and the mosquitoes are gone until next summer. It’s fall. It’s beautiful outside. Enjoy.

We all know it’s important, but nobody ever said going to the dentist would be fun. Or even comfortable. Reclining in a chair with your jaws gaping wide, desperately needing to swallow but unable to because your mouth is jammed with the dentist’s fingers, the hygienist’s fingers, and six separate implements of torture—it’s just not anyone’s first choice for a way to spend a relaxing hour.

At least not as long as other options are available. Watching back-to-back reruns of The Brady Bunch, perhaps. Or cleaning out the gunk under the refrigerator. Or trying on swimsuits in the company of a much skinnier friend.

Still, there are limits. My dentist just exceeded them.

Today’s appointment was supposed to be the final one in the process of having a broken molar replaced by a bridge. The previous visit was a two-hour session of drilling and scraping, capped by the delightful experience of having to sit still for several minutes with a mouthful of disgusting molding goop that tasted like clay. Today should have been a simple matter of taking out the temporary bridge and cementing in the permanent one.

Things didn’t go quite according to plan. Taking out the temporary bridge turned into an extended session of prying, yanking, and rocking. Every time something touched the rasped-off exposed tooth underneath the bridge, it hurt. The dentist’s occasional “sorry” seemed to lack sincerity. Or maybe it was just that I kept thinking of the scene in the movie Marathon Man where Dustin Hoffman’s character is tortured by the drill-wielding former SS dentist.

At long last the temporary bridge came out. Then the real fun began. The dentist couldn’t get the permanent bridge in. He shoved it. He wriggled it. He rasped its edges. He rasped edges off my neighboring teeth. He shoved and wriggled some more. Every time the bridge scraped across the exposed supporting tooth, I winced and thought of Dustin Hoffman.

Finally, the dentist acknowledged defeat, numbed my throbbing jaw, and made a new mold so the lab could make a different bridge.

All of this was, if not precisely enjoyable, at least endurable and forgivable. Mistakes happen. Things don’t always go right the first time. I can live with that. I can handle discomfort. What I can’t put up with is discourtesy.

The dentist was obviously frustrated and angry over the bridge that didn’t quite fit. Fair enough. I wasn’t exactly happy about it myself. But he wasn’t professional enough to keep his anger out of his fingers. The longer he worked, the rougher he got. He seemed to take the problem as an affront to him personally. He never once apologized for the inconvenience, pain, and frustration it was causing me.

Nor did he trouble himself to explain what was wrong or what he was doing as he busied himself in my mouth. The last straw came when he shoved a tray full of cold goop into my mouth without even the courtesy of a warning. Then he held it so tightly while it set that his fingers were digging into my jaw. With my teeth stuck together, I couldn’t even say, “Hey, would you ease up a little?” When he finally took the mold out, he didn’t bother to rinse the gunk out of my mouth.

By then, I was no longer thinking of Dustin Hoffman. I was wishing instead that I could get my hands on the Nazi dentist’s drill. And I knew just where to start using it.

The dentist could have apologized. He could have empathized. He could have accepted responsibility for the mistake—if, indeed, a mistake even had been made. He could have reserved his anger for the lab instead of literally shoving it into my face. He could have made me a partner in this misadventure. He could, quite simply, have treated me like a fellow human being.

He didn’t. He forgot that the bridge in my mouth wasn’t the only bridge he needed to build. And that’s why, as soon as that bridge is finally in place, I’m finding a new dentist.