Living Consciously

The Things We Do For Love

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

I had my left foot on the third step of the ladder, my right foot on the counter, and my left arm braced on the top of a kitchen cupboard (and my, it does get dusty up there, doesn’t it?). With my right hand, I was applying a strip of gleaming white paint along the edge of a ceiling that someone, under the influence of too many decorating magazines, had painted brown.

Focused on my task, I was only vaguely aware of a whirring noise close to my left ear. I finished the strip of ceiling I could reach and shifted back onto the ladder so I could climb down and move it. As I reached for my paint bucket, something hit my left arm.

That’s when I realized that I had been working away in perfect serenity, oblivious to the ceiling fan blades whipping past just inches from my head. I had a quick flash of the news item: “Woman struck in face by ceiling fan and knocked off stepladder. She suffered only a mild concussion and the loss of a couple of teeth, but on the way to the hospital in the ambulance she nearly died of embarrassment.”

I don’t know how someone in full possession of her faculties, wearing her reading glasses, and fully fortified with caffeine could fail to see a ceiling fan literally in front of her nose. Never mind. Sometimes luck is as good as skill, and a narrow escape from injury and humiliation is still an escape.

After that little incident, the rest of the day was uneventful. I painted edges, using a nifty little pad with rollers along the side to help keep even amateurs on the straight and narrow. My friend applied glistening swathes of white with a thick-napped roller. Loaded with paint, it looked like a long-haired cat that had fallen into a milk jug. We worked, and we talked, and we enjoyed ourselves. By mid-afternoon we had transformed three dark-ceilinged rooms into much brighter spaces for the young family moving into this house.

A young family, including two little ones, that is part of my family. As I painted, I could easily see them growing up here. It’s a great family house with a wonderful back yard. But the very best thing about this house is its location. Instead of growing up two states away, these kids will be growing up right here in Rapid City. I’ll get to see them often, along with their parents, who are the kind of people I would like a lot even if they weren’t related to me.

For that, I’ll paint ceilings, with pleasure. It’s one of those things that we wouldn’t do for money (well, maybe—but only for lots and lots of money), but we’re happy to do for love. You know those things; I bet you’ve done plenty of them yourself.

Things like reading the same book over and over to a toddler who memorized it several thousand hearings ago and corrects you if you slip in an extra word. Or trotting up and down the sidewalk for miles, supporting a little kid who is just learning to ride a bike. Or sewing special-occasion dresses with just-barely-adequate skills. Or cooking family meals every day, for months and years and decades. Or—never mind; I’m sure you can fill in the blanks with your own examples.

After the painting was done, I made a quick trip to the library and ran into an acquaintance. When I told her I’d been painting ceilings, she laughed and said, “I guess you know how Michelangelo felt, then.”

My first impulse was to disagree. After all, I was in an ordinary house, painting plain white paint. He was in the Sistine Chapel, painting God.

On second thought, when you’re painting for love, maybe those two aren’t so different after all.

Categories: Family, Living Consciously | 3 Comments

Who I Think You Think I Am–I Think

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

A woman I know has raised horses and been a competitive barrel racer for close to 30 years. A few summers back, she won the barrel racing event at a major rodeo. At the next rodeo, a much smaller one, she didn’t even place.

As she and her son were in the pickup, headed home, she broke the disappointed silence with this: “Well! I guess those girls just didn’t know who I think I am.”

There are a bunch of reasons to appreciate that crack. It’s clever. It’s funny. It deflects the pain of a bad performance with humor that puts a single loss into perspective. You might even call it a classic example of how to “cowgirl up.”

But her smart remark is also true in a larger context. Nobody else can ever really know “who we think we are.” Or who we think they are, for that matter. It’s just one of the many factors that make it downright amazing that we can communicate with each other at all.

If we want people to know who we think we are, we have to let them know. Of course, before we can do that, we have to figure it out for ourselves. It’s one of those lifetime challenges—to be who we think we are instead of settling for being who we think other people think we are.

I think I’ll have to go think some more about what I think about that.

Categories: Living Consciously, Odds and Ends | 3 Comments

In Honor of Earth Day

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

Celebrating Earth Day in the Black Hills this week was a bit of a challenge. For one thing, we couldn’t see any actual earth, since it was covered by ten inches of fresh snow. Not that the snow was a bad thing. After last year’s hot, dry summer and this past mild, dry winter, the earth around here needs all the moisture it can get. We’ll take our April showers even if they have to be shoveled.

Snow shoveling may not be as traditional a way to observe Earth Day as, say, showing up at a rally in your Birkenstocks and “I Heart Mother Earth” tee shirt, but sometimes a woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do. Especially if she wants to be able to get out of the driveway.

Besides, there are other ways to celebrate. Earth Day, like any other holiday or special observance from Easter to the Fourth of July, has come to be marked in that quintessentially American way.

With sales.

Apparently, in the spirit of enhancing our environment and protecting our planet, we’re supposed to drive to the mall and buy more stuff. Stuff to fill up our oversized houses. Stuff frequently made in Chinese factories that seem only moderately concerned about carbon emissions or pollution. Stuff that is transported halfway around the world in ships and trucks using fossil fuels.

But maybe I’m not being fair. The Earth Day sale ads in last weekend’s newspaper were full of things described as “organic,” “sustainable,” and “recycled.” These were Earth-friendly products, folks. Like the “pure and natural” disposable diapers with “fluff pulp from certified sustainably managed forests.” (Just try to say that fast while you’re changing a squirming baby.) I’m sure that fluff will sustain the diapers well through all the decades they will spend inside plastic bags at landfills.

Practically everything in the ads contained “naturally derived ingredients.” If it’s natural, of course, that has to mean it’s good for the environment and good for us. Just like some of nature’s finest substances: arsenic, mercury, and sulfuric acid.

Anything that wasn’t “natural” was “organic,” including yogurt and baby food. There was no mention of whether all the plastic in the single-serving containers was organic, though. The prepackaged macaroni and cheese wasn’t specifically labeled as organic, but it was “made with wheat using organic farming practices.” What the heck; that’s almost the same thing.

My favorite Earth-friendly item, however, was described as “a renewable resource.” The packaging was made from “up to 30% plant-based material.” That wasn’t the individual plastic containers, you understand; just the plastic wrap that held the 24-pack of containers together. The product, by the way, was a classic renewable substance. Water. Hey, it’s Earth Day! Let’s all go stock up on plastic bottles of water! What a great idea!

This deep and profound honoring of the true spirit of Earth Day reminds me of another naturally-derived product. A lot of that particular substance is produced by advertising copywriters. The rest of it comes from bulls.

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Patience? You’ll Find That In Aisle Three.

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

When a snowstorm is looming, half the people in town immediately head for Safeway to stock up. (The other half head for Walmart to stock up.) Not me. I head for the library to stock up. If we have enough reading material, who cares whether we run out of milk?

On the other hand, I do care if we run out of carrots, bananas, or chocolate. On the day before our last snowstorm, it just so happened that our last banana was peeled at breakfast and we were down to one lonely carrot. Despite having an ample supply of chocolate, I ended up at Safeway with the rest of the pre-storm shoppers.

All those other people, of course, were over-reacting to the weather forecast. I merely was the victim of bad banana timing.

Getting close to the dairy case meant threading through an obstacle course of carts. Turning at the blind intersection at the end of an aisle meant risking life and limb—or at least the carton of eggs. I felt lucky to snag a decent bunch of bananas from the dwindling supply.

Then I got to the checkout. There were several carts crowded into each lane, spilling out into the aisle in ragged rows. People who were either still shopping or were looking with misplaced optimism for a shorter line were barely able to maneuver past the carts already waiting.

All this would seem like a sure formula for anger, flaring tempers, and disputes over who was in the uneven line ahead of whom.

I didn’t see any of that. I’m sure some people were feeling impatient and irritated. Some of them, like me, may have been annoyed with themselves for not making time for a trip to the store the day before. But the overall atmosphere was one of camaraderie. People smiled and said, “Excuse me,” after near-collisions in the aisles. They made room for each other. They seemed to feel a sense of unity in the face of a common threat—the snowstorm—rather than seeing the other shoppers as the competition.

The woman ahead of me in the checkout line was busy organizing all of us, moving her cart just here so I could park mine just there and make the best use of the limited space we had. While we were waiting, she talked to the baby in the cart ahead of her. When it was her turn at the cash register, she sympathized with the checker about her busy morning. I was so busy watching her no-nonsense kindness that I completely forgot to be irritated and was out of the store with my groceries before I knew it.

For a little while, that crowded supermarket became an oasis of cooperation and tolerance in a week that desperately needed both. It was a small reminder of the enormous value of practical kindness.

Categories: Living Consciously | 1 Comment

The Curious Case of the Sorted M&M’s

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

Is sorting M&M’s by color before you eat them an endearing little quirk, a sign of artistic awareness, or just a teeny bit compulsive?

I don’t know. It’s just the way I eat my M&M’s. I never stopped to think about it until recently, when we were traveling and listened to the audio version of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The narrator of the story is 15-year-old Christopher Boone, who has what is presumably a form of autism. His favorite author is Sherlock Holmes, so when he finds the body of his neighbor’s murdered dog, he decides to investigate. His detective work uncovers much more about his own life than it does about the dog.

The book was a fascinating glimpse of life from the perspective of someone who thinks very differently from what most of us probably consider “normal.” One of the side effects of it, though, was to make me start wondering about some of my own behavior.

Like taking eggs out of the carton so as to leave a symmetrical pattern, rather than just grabbing a couple. I might start, for example, by taking the eggs out of the top left and bottom right corners. Then maybe I’ll take the next two from the right side of the second row and the left side of the next to the last row. This, by the way, is much easier to do with a carton of 18 than a carton of 12. I prefer to think of it as artistic rather than autistic. You may have your own opinion.

Or sorting M&M’s by color. Of course it’s silly. They all taste the same. But I don’t care for green, so I always eat the green ones first in order to get rid of them. Next to go is usually orange, followed in order by blue and brown. I save either yellow or red for last, depending on which color most appeals to me that day and also the assortment of colors in a particular handful. (Not every bag of M&M’s has the same number of each color. People who don’t sort their M&M’s by color may not know this.)

Then there is that thing I sometimes do when I’m walking on a sidewalk, counting steps and noticing the pattern of how often I step on a crack with my right foot and then my left. One might think of it as obsessive, I suppose. Or one might think of it as a way of exercising one’s brain as well as one’s body. Or maybe it’s merely marching to the beat of a different drummer.

I also keep the stuff in my purse in specific places—my cell phone is this pocket, my wallet in that section, my keys in that little pocket with the zipper. This, I maintain, is simple utility. It’s much easier to find my keys or my sunglasses when I know which pocket to reach for. And, in my defense, I have never lost a set of keys or my wallet. Though I do occasionally misplace my purse.

Worrying about whether your behaviors are compulsive is probably a bit, well, compulsive. Thinking about the different ways our brains work, on the other hand, is merely fascinating.

But I dare you to tell me that, the next time you get eggs out of the carton, you don’t at least think about the pattern you’ve just made. And the next time you have a handful of M&M’s, I bet you’ll pay more attention to the colors.

Categories: Living Consciously, Odds and Ends | Tags: | 6 Comments

30-Second Wisdom, With a Little Help from the Dalai Lama

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

If you had 30 seconds to share one bit of wisdom with every person in the world, what would you say?

This was a Table Topics question at Toastmasters the other day. Table Topics are opportunities for randomly chosen victims—er, participants—to give impromptu talks. They are wonderful learning experiences and great preparation for a wide range of situations from job interviews to holiday parties. This, no doubt, is why most members of Toastmasters anticipate them with such pleasure. Well, except for the 95% or so who anticipate them with dread.

Anyway, back to the question. Now that I've had a few days to ponder, I know how I would answer it.

First, a little background. One day a new member of our club, about to give her first evaluation of another member's speech, asked me for advice. I gave her a few suggestions and finally just said, "Be honest, but kind."

She was both. Her evaluation was gentle, precise, helpful, and encouraging. I was impressed—if I had known my advice was that good, I'd have been using it more often myself.

Now, I try to do just that. So here's what I would tell the world in 30 seconds:

"Be honest, but kind. That way you respect yourself as well as others. Also follow this suggestion from the Dalai Lama: 'Our greatest duty is to help others. And please, if you can't help them, could you please not hurt them?'"

(Actually, that only takes 20 seconds, which leaves plenty of room for a few "ums" and "ahs.")

Some days, "not hurting them" is a lot harder than it might seem. But just think about the world we would live in if everyone simply made an effort to do no harm.

There's my 30-second wisdom for the week. What's yours?

Categories: Living Consciously | 3 Comments

Dance Lessons

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

One, two, three; one, two, three. With its irresistible, sweeping rhythm, the waltz feels like joy in motion. Nothing is more fun than swooping around the floor in grand circles and elegant turns.

My husband, Wayne, was six foot four. His long arms windmilled with such energy when he got into a passionate conversation that his elbows became a public menace. His long legs could cover a lot of ground in a hurry, across a construction site or across the dance floor. During a polka we would lap everyone else two or three times, with Wayne driving and me hanging on for dear life and trying not to lose my shoes.

Our favorite dance, though, was the waltz. Waltzing, Wayne was grace itself in size 15 cowboy boots.

We took dance classes. We went to dances. Once we crashed a wedding dance in Pukwana, South Dakota. For several years, we had great fun on various dance floors. Then, as so often happens, we got busy. His job required more and more travel. Almost without our noticing it, dancing became one of those things that we were always going to do more of—next week, or next winter, or when we had more time.

Then, on September 3, 2002, just before midnight at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, the doorbell rang. Standing on the step were Wayne's business partner, his office manager, a highway patrolman, and a priest. They were waking me up to tell me that Wayne's small plane had crashed a few hours earlier. He and his good friend and employee Chuck Pemble had died in a North Dakota pasture.

The waltz that we considered our special song was one made popular by Anne Murray: "Could I Have This Dance For the Rest of My Life?" We did have that dance. We just didn't realize that "the rest of his life" would be quite so short.

When someone you love dies, that huge loss is surrounded by a great many smaller ones. One of the things I lost along with Wayne was dancing. At first, just hearing a waltz was enough to bring me to tears.

Eventually, time and love and living did their work, and my broken heart began to heal. Even dancing made its way back into my life, with a new partner who also loves the elegant, swooping grace of the waltz.

Life is a dance, done to complex music. Sometimes the steps are difficult, and the rhythm can change when we least expect it. Each of us has our own music, and we never know how long the song will last.

But while the music is playing, we have choices. We can sit to one side and watch because we think dancing is only for the stars. We can become so busy and distracted that we don't even hear the music. Or we can get out there on the floor and dance—for the rest of our lives.

 

In loving memory of Wayne Christopherson. Unbelievably, it's been ten years. Whatever the occasion, wherever the dance floor, a part of you is always there for every waltz.

Categories: Family, Living Consciously, Loss and Healing | 2 Comments

When There’s No “I” in “Sorry”

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

"Sorry for being three minutes late."

As an example of the apology-that-isn't-quite, it was really rather elegant. First there was the omission of that inconvenient little word "I." Nothing so direct and personal as "I'm sorry," or even "I was late." No subject in the sentence at all. Just the breezy, impersonal "sorry" that implies a certain level of mild regret on a vaguely global scale without necessarily acknowledging that the speaker personally had anything to do with whatever may or may not have happened.

The master stroke, however, was the speaker's subtle but unmistakable emphasis on "three minutes" rather than "sorry." This was a delicate but oh-so-clear statement that any transgression that may have inadvertently taken place was so minor and insignificant that no one could possibly be upset by it unless that person were an unreasonable, obnoxious jerk.

This neatly preempted any possible complaints from the five of us who had been standing outside the locked door of the fitness center wondering why the door was still locked when it was after opening time. If we expressed any annoyance, we would be obnoxious jerks. Especially if we were so unreasonable as to point out that we had, in fact, been waiting for longer than three minutes.

This placing the responsibility on the apologees rather than the apologizer was skillfully done. It was almost up there with the classic phrasing from the public figure who really isn't sorry at all: "I regret it if anyone was offended."

I doubt whether those of us who had been waiting were particularly annoyed at the employee's minor tardiness. Certainly no one said so. We knew perfectly well that any of us can be rushed, forget to watch the time, mislay our keys, or for all sorts of other reasons end up keeping people waiting. It's an ordinary, understandable, and forgivable thing to do.

But any of us can also say, simply and sincerely, "I'm sorry." A genuine apology instead of a pseudo-apology builds connections with people instead of brushing them aside. When we take responsibility for our own little human errors, we make it easy for other people to forgive us, because we are treating them with respect. Most of the time, we'll get their respect and quick forgiveness in return.

But even if it doesn't persuade others to forgive us, there's another reason why a genuine apology is a good idea. It just might keep people from posting snarky little rants about us on the Internet.

Categories: Just For Fun, Living Consciously | 1 Comment

The Secret to a Clean Garage

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

"We need to clean the garage." It's one of those phrases that strikes fear into the hearts of organization-challenged homeowners everywhere.

And with good reason.

Suppose you've decided it's time. You're going to take on this task. You're going to march right up to it, look it full in its glaring red eyes, and challenge it on its own turf, with every intention of conquering.

You head out to the garage, with energy in your step and determination in your soul. Then you take a good look at the clutter. You realize you don't have a clue where to start. You remember that all the unsorted junk on the shelves and in the corners is there because you couldn't decide what to do with it last time. You feel your determination starting to leak out through the soles of your grubby old tennis shoes.

Before long, overwhelmed, you remember several very important things you need to do in the house, like finishing the Sunday crossword puzzle and filing your toenails. You slink back inside, with a faint hope at the back of your mind that a tornado will come along and rip the garage off the house—leaving the house itself undamaged, of course—to take care of the garage clutter for you.

Take heart. There is a better way.

Sometimes the best way to take on a big job like cleaning the garage is to sneak up on it. It helps, too, if some outside event pushes you into action.

On Thursday of last week, two guys spent the day in our basement and garage installing a new furnace. In addition to banging and clanging and using power tools, this necessitated moving a cache of vertical stuff standing in one corner of the garage. When they were done, we had an array of skis, ski poles, old mops and brooms, curtain rods, and leftover pieces of woodwork piled on the floor.

On Sunday afternoon, we went out to spend a few minutes putting these things away to make room to put the car back in the garage.

Two and a half hours later, we had two garbage cans full of stuff to throw away, a big pile of stuff to give away, and a lot of other stuff put away. Without intending to, we had cleaned and organized one half of the garage. All it took was something to get us started. With the help of the furnace installers, we had sneaked up on a dreaded task and discovered it wasn't really so bad.

So now we know how to get the garage cleaned. Just start by buying a new furnace, and the rest takes care of itself.

Of course, that strategy only works once every 30 years or so. Somehow, I can't bring myself to see that as a problem.

Categories: Just For Fun, Living Consciously | 3 Comments

There Goes the Neighborhood

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

The first new house wasn't so bad. It went in just up the road and around the curve from us. A nice enough house. Well-constructed, too, based on the illicit walk-through we did one Sunday morning after the walls were up but before the doors were hung.

Then came the second new house. It's hasn't actually been built yet, but the contractors have cut trees and dug trenches and poured the foundation. It will probably be a nice, well-built house, too. The only problem is that it's just across a driveway up the hill from our house. It's closer to us than our mailbox is. It's going to have front windows that face directly into our bedroom windows. It's going to loom. It's going to be—gasp!—visible.

We live in a neighborhood full of hills, gullies, and trees, with one-acre lots or larger. It feels more rural than urban, even though it reluctantly allowed itself to be annexed into the city limits a few years ago. There's plenty of room for deer, turkeys, and mountain lions. Most of us can't see our neighbors' homes very well, and that's the way we like it.

Except that our neighbor to the north, with his small house tucked away discreetly behind the hill, didn't consult the rest of us before he sold the front of his large lot as two separate building sites. The new houses—too close to the road, too new, and too obvious—felt like invaders. They were violating what we considered to be our space.

Then one evening this week, out for a walk, we met a young man with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. He, his wife, their baby, and two dogs are the proud new owners of the house around the bend. As we were introducing ourselves and talking about landscaping and grass seed and other such homeownerly topics, a car came by. The woman driving stopped and told us, "I just came by to see the new house my daughter and her husband are building right next door. She's so excited—she said, 'Mom, there's really going to be a house there!'"

Well, yeah, lady, there's really going to be a house there. That's what we've been so annoyed about.

But as she spoke, I could almost hear her daughter's delighted voice. It sounded a lot like my daughter's voice. Something odd happened during just those few minutes of conversation. All at once, the new houses that were such odious encroachments into our turf weren't merely houses. They were homes. Home to new neighbors.

Yes, we can't see many of our neighbors' houses in this area. But once in a while it's good to be reminded that we can, if we choose, see our neighbors.

One of these days we might have to take them some fresh cinnamon rolls.

Categories: Living Consciously | 4 Comments

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