Here's to another year of discovery

Who are you?
Can you answer this question without using a name title? 

You are not a daughter or son, woman or man, a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, a single parent, or a grandparent. 

You are not a supervisor, or a secretary, divorced, or a homemaker, a cashier, or a farmer, and you are not “retired.”

If you aren’t allowed to use these common identities as part of your response, then who are you?

This task is not easy because it means going beneath the crust of our every day existence to the core—perhaps where no you has gone before—and not everybody wants to get to know and give words to who exists inside.

There might be a light and bright side in there or perhaps a dark side, where shortcomings and other self-stuff we’d rather not look at, lay in dusty piles.

I think it would make a great conversation among good friends, who could hold each other accountable to the “rules” that come with the question, but then I’m the adventurous type. 

“Who am I” is the question in my life as I perch on the edge of 2014, still searching purposes and paths, still burying the gone and the dead, and reinventing the living of my life. 

As always, this last column of the year has been my dancing partner for many months. We tango and waltz together through the meandering experiences of everyday life, gathering up all my best lessons of the year, be they hard to swallow or a joy to remember. 

I keep working my way forward—sometimes inching along, sometimes leaping, sometimes stumbling backwards and falling into old patterns. I’m still learning to accept whatever it is I’m feeling and then let it go and then go forward.

Every day I try to make a conscious choice about the “how” of my living—to let go of expectations and be true to myself. I think it’s the most challenging job of my life and will be, lifelong. 

I also continue to endorse that another of my greatest personal challenges is to practice the six little words I often have written about. I think by far it’s the greatest gift a true friend can give another. “Mouth closed, ears open, presence available.”  

I recently read a magazine article where Maria Shriver had been interviewed about her life and I was impacted by the words of advice she offered up about living an authentic life. 

“You have to be willing to let go of the life you planned in order to make the life you’re meant to live.”   

I think I’ve been trying to find my way back to who and where I used to be and maybe I’m not supposed to do that. 
I think I have to admit that the really tough life experiences I’ve had took some of the Beth out of the Beth and I’m not going to get her back. I have to stay open to the newer, refined version. 

The Four Noble Truths encourage us to show up, pay attention, and tell the truth or keep noble silence, and stay wide open to change.

I’m staying wide open. 

Shriver also said, “First, you have to slow your life down to find out if you’re actually living the life you are meant to live. Are you just gliding? Are you a dead woman or dead man walking? It’s your job to know who you are. What do you value? What’s your mission? What makes you happy? It’s your job to figure that out today, because that’s really what you’re supposed to be doing here.”

Who am I? Imperfect, genuine, and very, very lucky to be me. 

Happy New Year everyone. May you go forward getting to know yourself better.  

A backwards day is what you make of it

I’ve never been one to wake up on a Monday morning and lament that it is indeed Monday. I never figured there was much point in that. I suppose it’s my “glass half-full” mentality. 

I also would rather be caught eating a whole chocolate cake by myself than actually look for reasons why I should anticipate being crabby about the day—Monday or not.

My positivity was challenged one recent Monday morning while hopping around trying to get my other foot into my underwear. 

“Get ready,” the voice on the Internet radio station warned. “The most depressing day of 2014 is just around the corner, folks.”

“On January 20^th you are going to have a really bad day,” said the radioman.

“It’s true,” he said. “A math guy worked six factors into the mix and came up with a formula for “Blue Monday.”

“You’ll wake up and realize you’re in debt doo-doo, the sun won’t be shining enough, your holiday spirit will be deflated, you’ll have failed to keep your New Year’s resolutions AND,” the radio voice emphasized, “you won’t have a lick of motivation left to dig yourself out—not to mention there won’t be anymore holidays for three and a half months.”

I stood there in my bedroom with one leg poised to go into the leg hole of my underpants, frozen aghast by the grim brick wall of hopelessness I’d just been handed by the radioman who clearly needed to quit his day job or get a hug from his mother, or maybe both. 

“Prepare for rock bottom, we’ll be cold, miserable, in debt, out of shape, and losers because we’ve flushed our willpower about our New Year’s resolutions down the loo,” he stressed, and then burst into a fit of laughter that made me think the cheese had just slid off his cracker. 

Suddenly I was thrown into a turbine of mixed emotions. This news was supposed to help me? This was what I had to look forward to—before the sun had even risen on that far off January day?

“A formula?” I said with an out loud disgust as I fought with my underwear.

“So that’s it? On Monday, January 20^th I’ll be a Vitamin D-deprived, miserable, dead-broke loser? “What’s up with that?" I squealed.

The only credible formula I was aware of in that moment contained six fundamental forces of the Universe and Blue Monday hadn’t made the list.

They were magnetism, gravity, duct tape, whining, the television remote control, and the force that pulls dogs toward the groins of strangers. American writer and humorist Dave Barry had said so.

Yet suddenly my fine little Monday morning was all shook up with discontented seeds of thought rot.

I was crabby and the crow’s feet around my eyes tightened and sharp flashes shot from my corneas across the room—missing the laptop screen by a hair.

And because I’d been too busy listening to the predictions of how my day would go in 30-some more sleeps I’d ended up with my panties on backwards.

“Attitude is everything,” I told myself as I rushed through the rest of my morning routine, feigning a smile while slamming my pinkie finger in the sock drawer and choking back a few choice words when I realized 10 minutes after leaving home that I’d left my coffee mug on the counter.

By the time I got to work—late—the misery level was rising until when in the loo later that morning I realized I also had my underwear on inside out.

I smiled a winner’s smile. 

Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.”

I’m right. I can wear my underwear backwards and inside out and, still, I can have a good day. As for Blue Monday, I think I’ll eat chocolate cake that day and celebrate.

Warm thoughts on a cold night

As I wrote this column the evening of December 9^th, the thermostat outside read “deep freeze with a side order of wind chill,” just shy of -30C. Nothing is fun or heartwarming about that.

It is the kind of winter weather that demolishes my otherwise fervent outdoor spirit. The bullish cold drives me to overeat and to sleep, two enemies of the seasonal slowing of metabolic body chemistry and two enemies I cannot afford to entertain if I’m to maintain the status quo on this pleasantly curvy Greek figure of mine.

So I guess it goes without saying that I should not have just eaten three of those melt-in-your-mouth little round truffle balls, huh? I take solace in the minimum 43% cocoa content of the dark “Lindt” lovelies.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” is playing on the stereo. It’s James Taylor in a duet with Natalie Cole. The sound of their voices made me swoon, as I popped another truffle and danced solo around the living room.

“Millie” the cat lifted her head from the “spoiled cat” pillow on the sofa and flat stared me as I swirled about, lost inside the song and dreaming about that hot toddy recipe on my holiday celebration “to-do” list.

I danced, smiling, in front of my Christmas tree, its branches decorated with the ornamental history of my life.

I love my Christmas tree.

If it wasn’t so doggone cold outside I would have donned my wool underwear and ski pants, stuffed my toes into my Sorels, pulled on that checkered wool coat, grabbed the leather mitts, a face mask, scarf, and my Cossack hat and made good on my annual peek.

When I was a kid I wished I could hide inside our Christmas tree and gaze at the world through a rainbow of color—the way the chipmunks did in the Christmas cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. 

Sometimes, I still wish I could do that.

Instead, I do the next best thing. One evening each year during the holidays after the tree is trimmed, I get bundled up, turn out all the house lights except the Christmas ones, and go outside.

Then I pretend I don’t live here and peek in the living room window as a stranger looking in on the Christmas of someone else.

I recall doing this when I owned a mischievous dog that I’d left in the house. As I looked from the outside in, he was trying to climb the Christmas tree to reach one of my favorite J-cloth ornaments.  

I taught Sunday school at Knox United Church here in the early 1990s, and along with the students in my class had made a figure of Jesus out of a green J-cloth. He was a folded and wrapped, soft figurine with a hooded robe. 

Every Christmas since, the faceless humble ornament respectively known to me as “J-cloth Jesus” has sat in my Christmas tree among the branches.

And when I think of all the years since that I have not attended church, I am warmed yet again on a freezing cold day by thoughts of the late Patrick Playfair, who had ministered at Knox United Church here years ago.

By 1996 I’d become “truant” from church services. My well-meaning grandmother at the time had pointed this out to Patrick while the three of us were chatting one day.

Patrick turned to me and said, “That’s okay, I’ve been going for you.” 

It was one of the most profound and heart-warming choices of words anyone had ever offered to me.

Above my writing desk is a framed verse that reads:

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers,

None goes his way alone.

All that we send into the lives of others,

Comes back into our own.”

Gratitude for the small things. Sometimes it is enough to get us through.