In Praise of Silence

I am busy these days. Really busy. 

I am working part time in Austin which requires an hour commute each way. I pick up kids after school and cart them to various places. I freelance edit and of course, I am working on revising a finished novel and beginning a new one.  And my weekends-they seemed to be filled with finishing all the housework and things I didn't get to finish during the week.  I am forever trying to catch up and sometimes feel like my head is barely above water.

I don't mind being busy so much as I miss having time to think. You see, I am just the kind of person who needs long stretches of quiet, thinkable time.  Maybe it's the writer in me, after all, good ideas don't come when you are running from here to there. Good ideas come when you have down time.  Ever wonder why so many people say they come up with the best ideas in the shower?  It's likely because they, like just about all of us, have no other time to think.

So the other day as I was sitting in Austin morning traffic, listening as always to a radio show and music, I decided to just turn my radio off. The car was suddenly filled with peaceful, glorious quiet. I let the solitude descend over me and then, I thought. I thought about my next novel. I thought about going camping on Spring Break. I thought about home and my kids and my family. My thoughts fluttered up to the surface where I could turn them over for a bit and let the next ones rise. No trying to make them stop so I could concentrate on my work or go to sleep. They simply had free rein to come and go as they pleased.

And you know what? When I got to my destination, I felt more relaxed than I have in months. It was the most wonderful part of my day.

So now, despite a busy schedule, I get a whole hour, twice a day of peace and quiet and thinking. It's a lot like meditating, if you think about it. Which, by the way, I have been told I need to do because of my unrelenting anxiety. But who has the time?


Wait, now I do! 


Look, I even wrote a blog post, something I haven't done since December...

Abundance

I guess it's not that unheard of to be thinking about abundance during the Christmas season, when we are giving and receiving and loving one another to our heart's content.  But even so, I couldn't help thinking about the other 364 days of the year-how we create or take away from the feeling of abundance in the lives of our families.

About a week ago, I saw a video from the Jimmy Kimmel Show, in which he asked parents, his viewers, to tell their children that they were going to open an early Christmas present. The catch was, Jimmy Kimmel told the viewers to put something quite awful in the gift and then watch their child's reaction.  The result was, not surprisingly, a lot of unhappy kiddos as they opened gifts containing half-eaten sandwiches, blackened bananas, and other inappropropriate gifts for anyone, let alone, kids.  Besides the fact that this was, in my opinion, mean, maybe even cruel, surprisingly the reactions the kids gave varied a bit.

I wouldn't say any of the kids were happy, but some threw all out fits, one made-do and ate the banana, and one offered to eat the  half-eaten sandwich his sister had gotten and was crying about.  So why the variations?

I think it's because some kids have more abundance in their lives than others.  I don't mean that some kids have more things than others, because I think abundance resides in our hearts not our hands.  

Now, I know kids love to get toys. They love to have new things-we all do.  But deep down what kids want, what we all want, is to know every second of the day that we are loved and accepted just the way we are.  To have the time and attention of those that we love. To be connected, involved, understood.  And I would bet, that the kids on those videos who threw the biggest fits (one kid even screamed at his parent, "Suck my balls!" Yes. A kid not older than 10) are the ones who feel the least abundant.

Because kids whose parents habitually put their own needs in front of their children's, who criticize more than praise, who cart them off to other caregivers continuously, who give them things but then tell them to, "go and play", who have never watched a kid's television show with them, or played Barbies (especially when they really didn't feel like it) or catch, or video games, or made them playdough or simply just spend time, every day, with them may always believe, may even rely on gifts, to fill the hole inside them where abundance is supposed to be. And toys will not always do the trick, because I believe that a child who grows up without abundance will grow up to fill that hole with much more dangerous things, like drugs and alcohol.

So this Christmas, give all the gifts you want, I will too.  But take some time to look into the eyes of your children, into the eyes of the ones that you love, and give them not just the Christmas spirit, but yours. 

I wish you all much abundance this holiday.

Stand By Folks...

We are experiencing technical difficulties.The blogging gods or some random internet force has suddenly changed my blog design, altering my title picture from screen size to a mere wallet size. 

I haven't figured out yet how to remedy this, but hopefully I will soon, although I'm sure it bothers me more than anyone else!

Book Bits

Pieces

A bit for someone here.
A bit there.
And sometimes they don't add up tp anything whole.
But you are so busy dancing.
Delivering.
You don't have time to notice.
And then one day you have to look.
And it's true.
All of your pieces fill up other people's holes.
But they don't fill
your own.

~From the Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson


I finished this book last night and it is still floating around in my mind like a really good dream.  The plot is gripping, but I won't go into all that. Because what really got me was the theme of perfection, of the universal need for children to have their parents be proud of them, to adore them, as is perfectly written in the poem above. But often times, that means that children have to be what their parents want them to be instead of what the child herself wants to be. 

Play soccer, learn piano, get all A's.  How often do we really ask our children what they want to do?  How often do we allow them the time to figure that out?

I am no stranger to this struggle as a parent. We want our kids to grow up well rounded, to try new things, to succeed. But it's a fine line we walk when we choose activities for them, when we schedule their days to be busier than even our own. 

Sometimes it seems like we are asking our children to be everything that we were not. To fix our own shortcomings. To live vicariously through them.

So the question is then, how do we communicate to our children that they are perfect just the way they are?  Without getting straight A's, without playing sports, or doing perfect releves every week in ballet class?  How do we tell them they are perfect even when they fail miserably at something? Even when they do something that's right for them but wrong for us?

I guess the best we can do is ask ourselves, is this what I want or what she wants? 

Deep down we know the answer to that question. If we really listen.

Shades of Grey

One of the most difficult things for we humans to do is to grasp that life is not black and white. It is not comprised of boxes that we check off with neat little check marks. Rather, it is made of never ending shades of grey, sometimes subtle nuances, not always easily discernable borders and boxes. 

Because each human experience is shaded by our experiences, our culture, by our family life, by our life in general,  not one of us, can apply our particular point of view to someone else's particular point of view and have it match up perfectly-there are just too many variables.  And the sooner we all accept that, the better off we will be.

So what do we do, if we can't possibly agree on everything, particularly when it comes to making decisions for society, such as a governing body might do? We don't do what our fearless leaders are doing now: bicker about every little thing that they do not get. But it's not only the big decisions that others make for us, (whether or not we get to vote), but the little ones we make, the little arguments between husbands and wives, the small scuffles of kids on the playground, even the dire disagreements between people of everyday life.  What do we do when we can't agree which boxes to check? 

We can compromise, empathize, see someone else's point of view. And most of all, we can be ok with not getting everything we want sometimes.  The more we are able to see the shades of grey in life, the less life becomes about being right and wrong.

As parents, shades of grey are what we need to be helping our kids to see. Kids are notorious for seeing things in black and white, but only because their thinking hasn't grown enough to understand things in a less concrete way. And yet, it seems as if most kids become adults who see no differently, even if they are able.  We need to teach our kids to accept from their parents answers like, I don't know.  Even better, to help kids see another person's point of view-especially during a disagreement.  

If we can do this, maybe the world will be less angry and hostile.  Maybe we can all stop wanting to be right instead of doing what's right. 

Maybe. Because even maybe is a shade of grey.

Vote For Me!

Dearest Readers,


I wonder if you would do a poor, struggling writer, a solid, and visit my latest story on Knowonder?  All I need is one teeny, tiny vote from you!  And what do you get?  You get to read my story! 

What's that you say? You will read and vote for my story? Yay! 

Here's what you do.  You visit the link below, read my story, then leave a comment and/or click on one of the "share" links below it to link to your blog or facebook page.  Then, I give you my most heartfelt thanks.

Easy!

Here is the link:
http://www.knowonder.com/2011/09/16/story-of-the-day-the-rabbit%e2%80%99s-new-garden/

In my last post, I wrote about my addiction to writing my first novel.  I wrote about how much I loved writing, how I found it hard to stop, how I thought about little else. That, my dear readers, was the honeymoon. Now, I have hit the cold stark reality of my committment and I admit, I am utterly overwhelmed by it.

Writing a first draft is easy.  You let go of your inhibitions and write, because one of the first rules of writing is that you have permission to write a really crappy first draft.  So, you throw your internal editor out the window, reach deep down into your imagination and write. 

But once that first draft is finished, you must let your editor come crawling back.  And, let me tell you, my editor says I have a lot of work to do. I need to show more and tell less (a challenge since my POV is in first person).  I need to work on my dialogue. I need to get rid of my purple prose.  I need to fix a major portion of my plot.

This,  dear readers, is where the rubber meets the road, where the pedal hits the metal.  Now is when the real committment comes in, and I suspect, this is where the real writers get weeded out from the wannabes. 

Let's hope I'm a real writer.