Tag Archives: Perspective

anxiety, Living

Call in the Astronomers

I hate a whole week’s worth of list staring at me.  Seven entrées marching across the menu of my life.  A calendar scattered with to-dos and appointments bookended by trips to and from the  bus stop.

A thousand grains of sand – insignificant events – piled up to smother me.

I cannot compartmentalize, tackling one manageable item at a time.  Trivial, minute tasks threaten to overwhelm me simply because they come all at once.  Like a student with an IEP, I need my work broken into more manageable chunks and fed to me one at a time so I don’t choke.  But I don’t have a case manager.  I am my case manager and I can’t ignore the subsequent steps I know are coming for the sake of the present one or my sanity.  Just like I can’t fall for the set-my-clock-fast-so-I-won’t-be-late trick.  I always subtract the minutes and fight against that clock trying to fit squeeze every second for what it’s worth.  I see right through the subterfuge.

And then I remember the words of a visiting priest this past Sunday.  He reminded us that there are millions more stars in the sky than all the grains of sand in the world.  If even the mass amounts of sand are dwarfed by the all the stars in the sky, how small are we?  How infinitesimal our blip on the radar of the universe.  How trivial our concerns and worries and to-dos that seems so life-altering when we encounter them.

This is not unlike the advice my therapist gave me a year or more ago, which still proves relevant: The 10-10-10 rule.

Will this matter in ten minutes?

Will this matter in ten months?

Will this matter in ten years?

Yes, in ten minutes, I’ll probably still be worrying and obsessing over it, but in ten months or ten years?  Doubtful.

Our visiting priest also quoted a South African astronomer, who when a world war was imminent and battle lines were being drawn, told policymakers and strategists, do not call politicians or soldiers to solve the world’s problems, call in the astronomers.  How much grander is the universe than our little corner of it?  How petty even multinational concerns in the grand scheme of all creation?

I have a newfound love for astronomers.  I think we should employ them in all things personal and global.  What a different world it would be if we gazed heavenward from time to time instead of always being bogged down by the drudgery of the corporeal.  After all, we are all made from dust and to dust we shall return.  And we all know dust is way outnumbered by stars.

 

 

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Literacy, Living, parenting, Poetry

Lessons Learned from Shel Silverstein

I am a late convert to the school of Shel Silverstein.  While my peers cut their literary teeth on his silly and sentimental poems, I had never read them.  My mother hit all the other required lending from the library – Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street, Richard Scarry – but I had never cracked the spine of Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Until my first grader came home singing its praises.  Her teacher had read it aloud to her class and she was hooked.  A week or so later when we signed her up for the summer reading program at our local library, she went straight to that book as the first she’d ever check out with her own library card.  Her nose stayed in that book like a bloodhound to a trail – except when she’d call me over to read a particularly silly poem or look at a contorted pen and ink drawing that she found equally funny.  And from there, she guffawed through Runny Babbit, onto A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up.

It blows my mind to be here at the exact moment when my child becomes an obsessive, voracious reader.  I know I’m one, but I can’t even say that I remember exactly when it happened (though it was most likely on my mother’s lap at bedtime).  Where the Sidewalk Ends is her gateway drug.

Harry Potter hit at the outset of my teaching career.  Then and many times since, I’ve heard people disparage its literary quality (which I don’t necessarily agree with), but applaud its ability to get kids hooked on reading.  I am not drawing parallels that bring Mr. Silverstein’s work into question, but having never been privy to the mania surrounding his work myself as a kid, I can’t say I understand it.  But, hey, it has lit that part of my child’s brain that makes her interested in an author, a genre, amassing a body of knowledge – it’s literary gold as far as I’m concerned.

And tonight, I mined for gold even further when I held up two books for she and her sister to choose from for bedtime reading, one of which was The Giving Tree, knowing full well which one they would choose (her sister is also becoming enamored with the idea of Shel Silverstein just by hearing big sis talk about it all the time).  The Giving Tree is actually the only Silverstein book I’m familiar with, having received it as a gift for the girls (no doubt by one of my contemporaries who has fond childhood memories of biting into it) when they were smaller.  I remember reading it in a hormone-induced haze and choking through my words at the end of it.  Man, it got me.

But the simplicity of it got me even more tonight.  And the message that it has for all readers – young and old alike.

I was reading it with a different eye, tuned into the words in light of the poetry my daughter has been reading.  Spread across multiple pages, the beginning is actually an extended stanza.  I could see the line breaks and hear the cadence across the creases.  But then the boy grows older.  And things get more complex.  There is an up-tick in language.  A problem.  Discussion.  Back and forth.  A one-sided decision.  And the tone of the story remains at this elevated level until the boy returns as an old man, weary of the world and its ways, and ready to embrace what he already knew as a young person.

So, tonight, as a thirty-three and seven-eighths year-old woman, I learned a lesson from reading Shel Silverstein; one that I couldn’t possibly have learned had I encountered him for the first time in first grade.  By keeping things simple – our language, our needs, our desires, our interactions with others – life is more enjoyable for everyone.  It is only when we want more, we expect more, we demand more, that things gets muddled and more difficult, especially when we look for those things in inappropriate places.  Being totally appreciative of what we have and honoring those who help us get it is a place to start.  And perhaps we wouldn’t be so very tired at the end of it all if we remembered these things.

Who would’ve thought that I would’ve learned such a profound lesson by reading a bedtime story to my children?  Certainly not I.  So a big shout out to Shel Silverstein tonight, wherever you are – for opening my daughter’s eyes to the wonders of reading and giving me new eyes to see.

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anxiety, Living, motherhood, postpartum depression

No Use Crying Over Spilt Whatever

Pinch, pinch, pull.

If my daughter’s preschool teacher can inspire twenty-five four year-olds to use this technique to open their pint-size pouches of fruit snacks, you’d think I’d be able to employ it to open a bag of pasta.

Not so.

Employing said technique, I managed to send dozens of uncooked Ditali skittering across the counter.  Surprisingly enough I caught myself before a torrent of curses loosed from my mouth, which is usually what would happen.  I pressed my body up against the impending avalanche and managed to keep all but a few Ditali from dropping.  I gathered the rest up by the fistful, after seeking out a few strays, and threw them into the boiling pot, shepherding the lost sheep to lead them to the slaughter.  And the overused idiom came to mind.

There really is no use crying over spilt whatever.

If I had flipped out (as I said I’m wont to do), what purpose would it have served?  I’d give my two year-old a few more choice words to add to her repertoire of words bound to be repeated when least desired?  I’d pump my blood pressure up a few points?  I’d push even more pasta over the precipice with my spastic gesticulations?  Really, there’s nothing positive that ‘crying’ would have added to the situation.  I’d still be a few Ditali short of a pound.

Not unlike the time I decided to bake Christmas cookies with all three kids.  Though the ‘baby’ was fifteen months old and I should’ve been ‘recovered’ from postpartum depression, I still got stressed very easily, had very little patience, and hated anything that made my job harder.  In this case: candy sprinkles.  Each time a candy-coated ball hit the floor, my rip-shit meter went up another notch.  Then Bella picked up the bottle, gave it a good shake, and the whole flippin’ lid flew off, blanketing the floor in a layer of rainbow-hued ball bearings.  I felt the wave of anger swell up inside me, but like some out-of-body experience, I stopped it before it crested.  Somehow, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter.  Let them throw candy around like confetti, for goodness sake – couldn’t get any worse now, could it?

This is not to say I’m happy when things like this happen.  Very often, you will find me cursing when I find myself under the dining room table on my hands and knees in the middle of dinner mopping up spilt milk.  And stuff like this is just one more thing threatening to push me over the edge in my already heightened state of stress.

I try to be Zen.  I try to employ my relaxation response.  I apologize to Jesus for taking His name in vain – again (something I never did until I had the third kid, by the way).  But like there’ll always be stressors, I’ll always be striving to keep it on the down low.  Just like I’ll be finding those flippin’ candy sprinkles under the stove each time I pull it out for the rest of my life.

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