Born to be Wild!

My stepfather had been outside for what seemed like hours while I had been inside, dragging my camping stuff out of the closet and packing for the weekend. My younger sister and brother and I lugged our stuff downstairs to the kitchen, overtaken by mom, chaos in the form of coolers, and the classic rock station playing some song by Bad Company, which my sister switched to the R&B station on the way out, my brother switched to the Country station on the way in, and I switched to the Indie station as soon as he went the other way.

At some point, we began to drag our gear out to my stepfather's pickup truck, and I was startled at what I saw. He had taken the back seat out of the Dodge Caravan and was hard at work binding it to the back of the cab. He was using rope, bungee cords, and there may have even been some chains and padlocks involved.

"What are you doing?" One of us asked him.

"Well, you guys need a place to sit," he said, "and it's against the law to ride without seatbelts, but we've gotta take the truck to go four-wheelin'," he said. "So you're gonna sit back here."

The three of us looked at each other, and I thought I could see the same excitement in their eyes that I felt. Little brother, being only 8 or 9 at the time, actually expressed the excitement, while little sister and I, both well into our teens, exhibited mainly detached mild disinterest.

An hour later, we were strapped into the back of a Dodge Ranger without the cap, the little brother squeezed in between me and the little sister. We were doing at least 70 up I-91 into Vermont, so the fuel economy must have been lousy. The three of us were screaming along to 'Born to Be Wild' as we watched the cars approach in front of us, move into the next lane, and pass us by. I'm not sure why we chose that song. I don't remember if it was playing on the radio and we could hear it through the opened rear window. I don't know if it was the last song we had heard in between the time when mom had said, 'leave the radio alone!' and switched it back to the Classic rock station and when we left the house. My hair was whipping in my face and I was wishing that I had thought to stick an elastic in my pocket before we had left. The smell of late spring was in the air as we screamed at the tops of our lungs. For a little while, it was the three of us just having a good time together.

Years later, I'm driving through central New England along a state highway, on my way home from work, and enjoying the beauty of fall. My fingers happen to land on the radio dial and I hear a familiar song. 'Born to be Wild,' plays on the radio in all of its Steppenwolf-ish glory. I smile, roll down the windows, and scream along for a little while. Now that my sister is a mother to six, my brother is reveling in the ups and downs of young adult life, and I spend much of my time driving all over creation, our times together are infrequent. There is no screaming in the back of a wannabe pick up truck. The three of us would never be able to fit together in that Dodge Caravan seat now. But it's still nice to be able to shift back to that time, a time when all that any of us really needed to do was sit and scream at the tops of our lungs.

Meditating and Thinking

I meditate twice a day. I do it when I first get up in the morning, and then again before I get ready for bed. Over the past few months, when mentioning this in conversations with friends, the most frequent comment I've heard has been something along the lines of, 'I've tried to meditate/I'm interested in meditating/I wish I could meditate, but I can't stop my mind from thinking.'

When I hear this, I say something like, 'that's kind of the point.' Then I get funny looks, which I've just had to get used to over the years for a number of reasons.

I want to talk about this comment in more detail, because it demonstrates that a lot of people don't know a whole lot about what meditation is, or what it's supposed to do.

Meditation, in the way I use it, is a type of brain training. There are many different ways in which to train one's brain. We train our brains in acquiring information, applying information, thinking critically, and comparing and contrasting, just to name a few. When I use meditation, I'm doing it to cultivate the ability to watch my thoughts and see how they affect my experience of the present moment, and of life in general. From that place of witnessing and knowing the thoughts, I can later work on understanding the role they play in my life and go about changing them or letting them go if that's what I want to do.

One of the most amazing things for me to discover, when I first sat down and began to meditate back in my teens, was that I was thinking all. the. time. I also thought that the point of meditating was to get your brain to stop thinking, and when I couldn't do it, I figured that meditating just wasn't for me and stopped doing it. This was untrue. All of those thoughts that I was having were the means through which I could acquire some awareness and insight into what I thought, how often I thought, and what happened if I shifted my focus. I started to investigate whether all of my thoughts were useful and were working for me, or if there were some thoughts that I could do without. Were there thoughts that were more persistent than others? Were there ones I didn't want to let go of because I enjoyed the emotional state into which they seemed to place me? Yes and yes. Part of meditation is experiencing the thoughts and their associated emotional states thoroughly, without getting stuck in the feelings or caught up in the thoughts, or mistaking it all for meaning something other than me being a person with a brain, and that my brain was just doing what it had learned to do over the years.

Through the process of meditation, I've learned that my thoughts have power. I've witnessed firsthand in myself how quickly I can get caught up in a spiral of negativity by thinking about situations in my life and drawing conclusions about how I have to act because of them. If I'm getting ready to do something new in my life, maybe I have thoughts like, 'I can't do this,' which cause me to feel afraid, or 'This is something I can learn,' which causes me to feel confident.

I have also learned that my thoughts are not all powerful, and am at the very beginning of understanding that my thoughts do not make me who I am as a person. I can think many things about myself, but the content of those thoughts isn't me, and not even the grouping together of those thoughts is 'me'. The part of me that's aware of what I'm thinking is as much 'me' as the thinking is, maybe even more so.

As I restarted my regular meditation practice a year and a half ago, I was initially unimpressed. I'm just sitting here and wasting time, I thought. I noticed I was thinking, and just watched the thought, feeling the restlessness and impatience that came with the thought, and it went away. Then it came back. It kept doing this for a week or two, every time I went to sit. Then something interesting started to happen in my day-to-day life. I noticed that I was going into situations that had previously been highly stressful and overwhelming but was no longer reacting so quickly to what was going on. I noticed how I was relating to challenging situations with a more balanced perspective. Joyful situations brought delight, but also the awareness that it would also pass. I noticed during meditation that I was sustaining chunks of time where I was not thinking...and then realize that I was thinking again. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful during the day as I kept this place of stillness in my life, this place where I could practice noticing thoughts and letting them move on through once I'd brought my full acceptance to them.

A few months ago, I decided to add a meditation session in the morning to my practice, and have learned a great deal about how old habits of negative thinking like to try to weasel their way in as early in the day as possible and take over. When I sit with them in silence, not judging them, not resisting them, but just realizing that brains are like computers and need to be re-programmed with new thoughts when an old program no longer works, I can become aware of the thoughts and then work on changing the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose. It is a process. It's not magic. But it brings me a great sense of calm, stability, and peace of mind that was not part of my life a few years ago.

So if there's anyone reading this, thinking they want to meditate but that they just can't because they think too much or don't have enough time, I encourage you to take 10 minutes a day (or whatever you can handle), sit down, and try it. Don't let the thinking stop you, because it's the thinking that will help you to learn how to meditate. From there, a new relationship to your thoughts, feelings, and life experience can form.

Taking Yourself Seriously. Or Not.

Making New Choices

The thing about teaching independent living skills is that, once the kid has the skills, they have a choice. If the kids never learn the skills, they don't have a choice. --My supervisor

If you're run by your mind, although you have no choice, you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will therefore force you out of your unconscious state. --Eckhart Tolle

I heard the first of these quotes during day two of our two day start-of-the-year staff meeting and annual hazing ritual at work a few weeks ago. It was the end of the day, and the group was discussing the importance of independent living skills, especially for high school students with visual impairment. I won't say that I wasn't paying attention, but I will say that it was 2:45 in the afternoon and visions of lattes were dancing in my head when I heard my supervisor speak in such a way as to send me reeling out of my Whatever-Generation stupor. Hey, I realized, as my thoughts abruptly shifted from Grande Iced Caramel Macchiato-land, that's true, and not only for blind kids!

The second quote was channeled directly into my brain from Eckhart Tolle himself less than 24 hours later.

I'm kidding about this, of course, although I continue to marvel at how iPod earbuds feed sound into my ears in such a way as to occasionally confuse me into thinking that the contents of books such as The Power of Now are arising from my own brain. I will confess that I am loathe to jump aboard the Eckhart Tolle bandwagon on principle. I'm the kind of person who resisted Harry Potter forever, who didn't watch The West Wing until the series was over, who has never seen Pulp Fiction or Forrest Gump, except for maybe a few minutes here or there. I don't have cable television and I generally don't pick up the home phone (this means you can stop calling now, people who want my money). On one fateful day, however, I got curious, started listening, and found myself struck by much of what Tolle says, especially what he says about the concept of choice and how it relates to spiritual growth.

A lot of modern-day spiritual paths, especially those with something of a New Age or New Thought slant, examine how changing one's life for the better occurs through the knowledge and understanding that choosing one behavior over another is a matter of simply making a different choice, the idea being that a person's life can completely transform if they start to make different choices. We might be able to see very clearly that someone else we know and care about seems compelled to behave in a way that makes little sense to us. We may try to talk some sense into that person, try to get him or her to see it our way, and convince that person that they have a CHOICE, and if only they would decide to MAKE that choice, they would be able to lead a life filled with joy, peace, rainbows, and butterflies. We might also look at ourselves and doubt that we can change the fact that we're so judgmental, or that we just don't care about anything. We may wonder why the hell it's taking so damned long for us to notice the areas of our lives where we do not feel like we have choices and to see what new choices we could possibly make.

The problem with these ways of thinking, which I think both my supervisor and Eckhart Tolle allude to nicely, is that people are inclined to learn when they are children. It is second nature, and it is how they are able to grow so quickly and remember new information so well. If you have somehow learn along the way that you do not have a choice about something in your life, either through lack of exposure or active disapproval, you eventually come to firmly believe that you do NOT have a choice. As an adult, once this learning is ingrained, it takes some time to recognize that we have more opportunities for choice than we may have thought, and it takes more time to practice making the new choice.

I think this is all helpful to remember when dealing with the issue of making new choices in life. We're fighting old patterns of behavior and old conditioning, and it takes time to notice that, accept that, let go of that, and acquaint ourselves with a new way of being.

By treating ourselves with kindness for our perceived shortcomings and failures through all of this, we can gradually help this learning process along by making it all right to try something new, fail at it, keep trying, and move forward into a way of life we may have always longed for but haven't really thought could be possible.

Throwing Paint on Walls, and Other Creative Pursuits

Are you artistically inclined? Do you wish you were, but can't draw a straight line to save your life? Do you think that creativity is for people with loads of leisure time? It's my opinion that people can't really afford to avoid creative expression, regardless of how uncreative they may assume themselves to be. It is such a pleasure and a joy to get creative, and helps those of us who are inclined to stick around in our heads too much to shift out of that and loosen up a little.

I had decided that I wasn't really the artistic type up until about three years ago. I was decent at music, having played trombone since fifth grade and having participated in a variety of bands and ensembles. I knew that writing was a strength. For the short time that I was involved in the professional ballroom dance world, I expressed my creativity through movement. From time to time, I would even put together a scrapbook, but generally only did it for people who I was completely certain would not laugh at my use of fluorescent colors with light-reflecting stickers (I cannot help but think that my students with Cortical Visual Impairment would have a field day). Yet I didn't think of myself as particularly creative.

So when I stood in the middle of Michael's one day, wondering what on earth I could possibly do for a new project, I had the most peculiar impulse to buy a bunch of painting supplies. I got the cheapest oil paints I could find, some canvas, and the cheapest bunch of brushes. I figured that going cheap would make the purchase hurt less if I later decided that I wasn't that interested. Also, I was certain it was going to look like crap, and at the time, I couldn't see how I could possibly value a painting if it was going to look like crap in the end.

I found out later that oil paint takes an eternity to dry, but no bother. I had completed my first painting! I had managed to get completely lost in a creative activity for the first time in quite awhile, and it turned out that losing myself was beneficial, because the painting was beautiful. I think that this first painting is still my favorite.

Nowadays, I continue to paint when the mood strikes. Yet I also find it extremely soothing to paint when I am going through a stressful time or grappling with an issue that just won't let go.

Since I finally own my own house, I'm delighted by the prospect of painting the walls however I want to paint them. There is the possibility that Josh might veto paintings featuring monsters or other scary creatures, but he was excited to hear that I wanted to take each wall of our kitchen island and paint a different picture for each season.

Summer was inspired one evening not too long ago by an issue that just wouldn't let go. I put on some music, turned on the very cool decorative lights that line the edge of the kitchen island, and went to work. Several hours later, I had summer on my wall for year-round enjoyment.


A few days later, the weather had changed, and I was struck with an inspiration to paint for autumn. The leaf in the foreground was saved from last year's painting because the spouse really liked it. The rest of the painting is far superior to last year's, probably because I was just having a good time and not caring whether or not it looked crappy.

Creativity is so crucial in helping us all to shift our perspectives on life, especially when we can let go of the fruits of our creative energy as being something upon which to base our worth, success, or status. If we have something that we can pour creative energy into -- music, writing, sports, dance, art, theater, dress-up with the kids, building tree forts, whatever -- it can shake us back into the sense of wonder and delight that we had as kids when we got ourselves truly immersed in play.