Fizzling

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Lin Ennis

Seems most of us coming up in the world aspire to SIZZLING. We want to be…

  • good looking
  • sexy even
  • smart, possibly the
  • life of the party

Do we make it? Do we acknowledge it? Do others tell us about it—give us the feedback, possibly for a stretch of 40 years—that we indeed SIZZLE?

aaa

We’re just back from celebrating Dad’s 95th birthday. Actually, it was less of a celebration than a scolding. “Dad, you have to have more help in here during the week.”

“No! I don’t want to be invaded!”

“Then you’ll have to go to an assisted living facility.”

“No, I’m not leaving my house and I’m not allowing anyone to invade my privacy.”

“Then you’ll have to sign up for Life Alert, and promise to wear the necklace at all times.”

“OK.”

It was depressing. Dad couldn’t explain why he carries a half pound of keys in his pocket every day, even though he leaves the house for only an hour one day a week, and needs only two keys to lock up and get back in (none for the car…finally stopped threatening every driver and pedestrian in his part of Los Angeles County!).

He was stupefied and a bit perturbed by finding a beer in his fridge, even though three adult children arrived with food and drink for a birthday luncheon. “Where did this beer come from? I didn’t put a beer in the fridge!”

Though it’s difficult to see a parent or parent-in-law, or any friend or neighbor near, or over, 90 lose their faculties—they may have been a famous actor, a war hero, a renowned author, an award-winning artist—and now they are the pitiful, shuffling refuse of their former glorious selves.

Could it be the worst part of this all is that they know it?
aaa

I think about when I’ll be in the same boat, except I have no children to try to save me from myself.

aaa

Do we all wither—fizzle—after a lifetime of aspiring to SIZZLE?

Other than staying healthy, I have no options that I know of. But today, it is not about me. It’s about all my 90-103 year old friends and family…

Reality is setting in. (Is ‘reality’ something we say after a certain age?)

aaa


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My Life Passed Before Me, But I Wasn’t Dead

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Lin Ennis

My life flashed before me, but I wasn’t dead – or dying faster than anyone around me.

Humorously – and mercifully – I’ve seen glimpses before. For example, I brought color into my yard, and the two 12-inch painted tin butterflies were wonderful—five years ago. So I added copper animal-topped plant stakes, brightly-colored flowered pots, wing-flapping giant dragonflies, and tin art forms that look like flowers in a picture frame. My neighbor admired how I brought the yard to life, but the summer sun is brutal and beauty rarely lasts a year in Arizona.

I foresaw my landscaping become a hodgepodge of faded birdhouses, feeding stations, ornaments and wishful thinking. I won’t become a “cat-lady,” but I will be an old woman peering out from a yardful of discolored ornaments that, to me, look as bright as the day I brought them home.

This week something changed. It hit me like a ton of bricks, though, gratefully, I’ve not yet been hit with even half a ton. Here’s what happened. Even before we bought it, this Frank-Lloyd-Wright-esque house appeared to have little storage room. Moving in proved that correct. Living here nine years has emphasized it. We’re regularly packing away cherished books, clothing and other items into our “short basement,” at 5’7″ technically a crawl space.

Streamlining, we sold our carpet shampooer at a fund-raiser, but living as we do, not exactly in a dust bowl but in the desert, I decided we needed serious professional help cleaning the bedroom and den carpets. I surveyed contractors, called one to book an appointment, and learned we’d need to move “little stuff” off the floors we wanted steamed.

In my mind, each room needed only two or three small things carried out for the carpet cleaning the next Tuesday. But as I relocated those few things, I saw more and more…five, six, eight trips I made from each room with armloads of stuff into the “short basement.”

However, my first trip down that single step into the so-called “crawl space” shocked me. The aisle through was blocked by a tower of boxes that had fallen over. I didn’t know from where or how, but it barricaded passage. Suddenly only two more days to move little tables, plastic plants, ornamental chairs, stacks of books—stacks and stacks of books—lamps, chairs, the sewing table, ad infinitum, seemed too few.

And there it was. My life flashing before me, in a more profound and final way than when I surveyed my two-dozen aging lawn ornaments. This house—all of a sudden I saw with all its tiny rooms 20 years from now with books and magazines and knickknacks and crafts and projects on every flat surface and piled knee deep from the floor up.

I indeed had not become a cat lady but a stack lady. Stacks of ideas to consider, stacks of books and papers to remember, stacks of fabrics with which to create, stacks of materials which might come in handy, stacks of sheets and towels that didn’t fit this decor, racks of clothes that didn’t fit this body – nor the last one I had…

That is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing the end of my life. I’ve fantasized being vigorous till 84 and wise till 92–possibly alive beyond that. I’ve thought about my fans and niece and nephews collecting my writings and publishing my incredibly amazing thoughts so that I become posthumously famous (I would have to be alive after death to appreciate this).

What I had not considered was leaving behind a vast wasteland of stacks and racks and packs of stuff of questionable usefulness for some one or ones to sort through or simply hire a hauler to take it all away.

This was the first time I felt so mortal, so close to the latter part of my life, definitely over the hill and on the side of it where gravity pulls all manner of things and stuff into my sphere so that I am surrounded by and encumbered with all of the things that were once important to me and things I kept because they might become important to me…ever full of hope, optimism and dreams for the future…

My life flashed before me, and I still have 20 or so years to pare down my hopes and dreams. That’s tough. When you save something, you don’t think about how ridiculous it may seem to someone after you’re dead, because you do not even contemplate not being here. You collect and revere and save and store and stack stuff to prove you are here and that you will always be here, until you are not.

Then what?

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Suffering

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Lin Ennis

Do all people torment themselves about what they have not done, or should do or cannot do?

First, we may have to eliminate people who are at a bare subsistence level. Or do they question themselves, too? I should have grabbed that cup of gruel from that old woman. She couldn’t have caught me. Then I would be eating. She’s probably going to be dead by tomorrow anyway.

Of course, I can think of people who to me appear to be grossly inadequate and yet I don’t hear them questioning themselves. I remember the guy who was in my Ventura Publisher class when I taught at Learning Tree University in Los Angeles. He did not know the software (a thousand dollar program back in the days when virtually nothing was more than $250). I had written two volumes on it that were licensed for use by the State of Illinois for a sum that would still be a lot of money today. He planned to charge $65 an hour for his work. I, the instructor, was billing $25 an hour, and happy to get it, because people still thought print shop desk clerks were graphic designers.

Yes, I have met people whose egos seem to keep them from questioning themselves.

Being a woman, I’m more in tune with how women suffer, and, believe me, we can do it in more ways than you could itemize in a week!

  • We suffer when we think we aren’t good enough. And we suffer when we are so good that others feel bad they are not as good as we are.
  • We suffer when we do too much and physically compromise ourselves. We suffer when we do more than those around us and are in psychic pain. We suffer when we do too little because we believe we should have done more.
  • We suffer when we start something and wonder whether we should have begun it. Then we suffer when we have inklings we should abandon it. What about the people depending on me? What about sticking to what I started? And what will people think of me if I quit?

We also suffer when we’re working hard to accomplish something, pulling ourselves through a keyhole as it were, and people around us are saying Do what you love. Don’t try so hard. Believe and the Universe will support you.

Perhaps we suffer just a tad more when people around us are doing what they love, and prosperity attends them, and we cannot see when they paid their dues. Did they? Did they have a period of struggle while they honed their craft and found their niche? or did they just go out there and ask for it and believe and it fell in their laps? That really burns.

When I think about these people by name, the few I know, I tell myself they struggled at another time, when I wasn’t looking. They paid their dues. We all must, right?

Does that make you feel any better? because it doesn’t do much for me!

People are built differently. Some of us who grew up with the Calvinistic work ethic think we must earn every good thing that comes to us. Other people believe they do not have to earn anything. If they be, they be enough.

I wonder if we switched places, and Believers had to become doers and Doers had to believe and all would be well…I wonder whether each of us in our inimitable self-torment might find a way to suffer even more?

Win, lose or draw, we’re still alive. Whitney Houston is not.

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Chopping Wood

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Lin Ennis

When we traded our apartment in Los Angeles for what we affectionately call ‘affordable housing’ in the resort town of Sedona, Arizona, we looked forward to chopping wood and hauling water–filling our days with work romanticized to seem simpler, and therefore purer, more esteemed, perhaps even more spiritual than commuting, working, commuting, sleeping, commuting, working…

We’ve chopped a lot of wood over the last nine years. We’re in our fifth winter of heating primarily with free wood (the last four years almost exclusively). We enjoy the exercise. I get to use the chain saw and carry wood. I have only recently been able to wield a wood maul after more than two years off because of a shoulder injury I sustained at the gym. I missed the splitting. And stacking and restacking (a good way to work through anger or impatience).

Recently while meeting someone new at a regular Saturday morning discussion group, I mentioned it was a difficult commitment to be there every week, because otherwise, I’d be chopping wood and hauling water. He asked whether I meant that literally or figuratively. We’ve done so much of both–literally–that I’d almost forgotten it was first a metaphor for being grounded, for doing humble things, for addressing with excellence the tasks lying nearest.

Chopping wood…whatever that means to you…

  • forcing words onto paper
  • folding clothes for your family
  • forging new relationships, whether personal, political or professional
  • serving on committees, because you’re capable, and someone has to do it

I won’t claim any great zen insights from these mundane tasks. I enjoy the sheer physicality of swinging a sledge hammer, maul or axe with all my might, often then facing a test of strength to extract the tool from an unforgiving stump. But it’s oh so sweet when the log splits perfectly, revealing that beautiful grain and seductive fragrance. Or when it flies into three parts on one blow.

When were we ever charged to appreciate life and its chores in a certain way? Is it not enough to put one foot in front of the other, and continue life’s tasks—whether the right one first or the other one first. How do you know So-and-So who said there is a better way—and a lesser way—to live knew anything at all more than you know? Whatever you believe about that is something you decided in your own mind.

Have you just thought of some mind wood that begs chopping?

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Cleaning House – Dr’s Orders

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Lin Ennis

Yes, my kitchen cupboards are painted purple inside--what color are yours?

I heard an old wives’ tale a few years back, and it made some sense to me. The saying was, “Whatever state of order or disorder you are in as the new year rolls in will predict your entire year.”

I’m superstitious about some things and not about others (there’s a whole blog post right there!). I was not frightened or superstitious about that bit of ‘grandmotherly guidance,’ but I deemed it a good enough idea to incorporate ever since.

So sometime between a couple weeks before Christmas and New Year’s Day, I take my dresser drawers, one-by-one, to a TV tray in front of the – you called it – the TV — and sort them out while I watch favorite shows. I refold scarves, reorganize jewelry, recycle worn socks and unwearable T-shirts. It’s a call to pack away shorts and tank tops and fill the drawers with turtle necks and sweat pants.

When I’ve been especially industrious, I’ve carried over this straightening up to the bathroom. Drawers and cupboards and bins of toiletries are sorted, thinned as needed, and reorganized into an even better schema than last year.

Sunday, December 18th–right in the key cleaning up field–I amazed myself by taking on the kitchen cupboards from top to bottom. First, there were the brightly colored and seldom used, mostly ornamental bowls and pitchers sitting atop the cupboards, organizing their own dust disguises for at least the last six months. All were cleaned or washed and repositioned.

One by one I delved behind cupboard doors, top shelf to bottom, removing all contents, dusting or washing the shelves, as needed, and returning – or washing and returning – the dishes. A little reorganizing, a little gaining space. Up and down the two-step stool I went, in a frenzy of polishing and making the kitchen gleam.

I didn’t stop there. I did all of the drawers–washed the flatware trays, returning the nested spoons and forks to their respective compartments.

Next drawer: sharpened all of the knives while clearing and cleaning.

Next: Re-sorted and realigned placemats.

Then that most horrible of all drawers – the one with the over-sized utensils and the measuring cups and funnels…Many serviceable items were retired to covered plastic storage bins, awaiting a shift in gourmet preferences.

Moving left, there were kettles and baking dishes and storage containers and mixing bowls and glass measuring cups – all to be sorted, decided upon, and their pull-out wire baskets removed completely for thorough cleaning underneath. I won’t bore you with the plethora of kitchen items. They’re the same ungainly lots as yours, I’m sure. Each 3-4 items has a completely different shape, unsuited for nesting or compact storage.

I didn’t stop here. I polished the counter tops, scoured the sinks, mopped the floor. All of this for what?

Because my doctor put me on Estrogen therapy, so instead of caring about only myself and my jewelry and my clothes, I went on a deep-seated pre-evolutionary kitchen binge, leaving me barefoot, knowing where every pot and spoon is.

Oh my gawd. I’m not going to get pregnant, am I? Because then I would really need to address my closet!

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Writing

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Lin Ennis

I love to write – and I love to edit.

There was a time when I preferred editing. I found it easier to correct, sharpen or “improve,” (according to the Bible of “me”) someone else’s brilliantly-crafted ideas.

No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone elses document. —H. G. Wells

I’ve just come off a three-month ordeal that required a lot of writing. The whole project energized me, but especially the writing. What I dislike most now that it’s over is the vacuum where a must-communicate demand used to be. I whipped out web pages and promotional emails as easily as drinking water. And for me, apparently, just as refreshing.

Writing is especially compelling when there’s an urgent message to convey or a mind-blowing insight to reveal, not so much that people’s lives would be changed as that they would see one (me) as an embodiment of wisdom or enlightenment.

That’s pathetic. But it’s also the reality of many a writer.

I’ve known since I was in the 6th grade and won a poetry contest (probably the only entry in my age group) that I wanted to be a writer. I’ve since spent decades doing other things—many involving writing in some ancillary way, such as developing brochures for organizations that had no idea what they needed to say to their not-yet-adoring public.

Most fun for me is when I do see an idea from a new perspective. I want to write about it. Because possibly even more than writing I love teaching. Either way, I’m compelled to communicate to change someone’s mind. Persuasion. How to win at that is another topic for another day.

When we’re children, we fancy people who mirror our thoughts—we both love grape soda, so we must be best friends and find two straws.

As a young adult, I noticed I liked to sit on the edge—observe the group from almost outside the circle. Inside enough to understand them; outside enough to bring in ideas that did not already exist in the group. Like a painter, I portrayed a recognizable scene with colors and emphasis that were all my own, giving new life to old ideas.

I’m not the best writer, not a Pulitzer winner, not a great or even compelling poet. What I think I am is clear. Creative enough to keep your attention (you read this far already?). Do not own a golden keyboard. But insightful. Passionate.

What about you? What passion of yours have you shared this week, and how did you do that? Did you create a new dish, bead a bracelet, plant your fall bulbs, tune up your car?

What have you done for you lately?

.

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Invisible Servant

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Lin Ennis

raise your hand and volunteerWhen you volunteer to serve on a committee, commission or in the community, you tacitly surrender your own opinions, your ego and your survival of the fittest instincts. You may retain your education, life experience and perspective—all of which you must release if others on the committee, commission or in the community think your contribution less useful than sawdust.

Some people do this well; others cannot do it at all and fight tooth-and-nail (often loudly) to make their voices heard. (One wonders where in their lives they feel so unheard.)

I’ve gotten better at letting go. When I was less mature, I could be so sure my way was the best way (sometimes it was) that I would defend and promote it relentlessly. OK, no one likes anybody or anything that is relentless, unless it is lots of money coming in or decadent zero-calorie food!

Here are some reasons to let go:

  • Share the responsibility! Don’t you have a lot of other things you wish you could be doing – or you should be doing – besides this little corner of a project many people are participating in?
  • Be a leader by stepping back and ensuring others get the opportunity to lead.
  • Commit to doing it badly. If you do not complete this project/committee/whatever imperfectly, you will not be able to do it at all. Because no one is perfect (though you may come closer than those other people on the committee—or so you think!).

Servanthood, like philanthropy, contributes best when invisible…unless you want to make sure you and your foundation’s name gets scattered amongst many other not-for-profit organizations!

The invisible servant is like an awesome office or industry manager. That is the person who supports his or her team members in succeeding magnificently – and imperfectly, remember imperfectly! – in accomplishing the thing the invisible servant is responsible for.

Tips for the Invisible Servant

  • seek to be edited, overrun, voted down on your suggestions/creations
  • praise the people who replace your notions with ideas of someone else, because – based on your starting point – they are probably spot on
  • run with these new ideas (which replaced yours) as if they were even better than your ideas (they probably are!)

If this plan does not work, start over with new ideas and, please, run through the same process (because you’re a rock star!).

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What Do You Do

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Lin Ennis

Does your occupation define you or do you define your occupation?Our Western society is tied to asking people, “What do you do?” Knowing another’s profession gives us a place to pigeon-hole the person, to attach to him or her all we’ve ever known, suspected or feared about people in that same occupation. It’s a social short-cut, a way of pulling together the CliffsNotes to establish a baseline for understanding. Getting a handle on the other person calms us, soothing our anxieties and opening a window into how much we have in common–how simpatico we are.

But I’m not asking about your occupation, your trade or cap and gown. I’m asking what you spend your time engaged in, what you live your life for–regardless of what you claim your occupation or life to be about. What is it you spend your time on? Are you an investment banker who spends more time watching football than stock tickers? Are you an outside salesperson who spends more time on your novel than on your beat? Are you a writer who pours herself into housework rather than into the blank pages before her?

Are you selling widgets but would rather be working in a nursery–or a zoo? Should you be writing music or poetry or fiction? What goes on in your head when you are alone with yourself?

Let’s tease that person out…the one who has a vivid fantasy life of doing or being or saying or living certain things or certain ways.

What is holding you back? Perhaps a desire for what you do not have anyway, even though you let it hold you back?

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What Does Anyone Know

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Lin Ennis

You’re heard the saying People see what they want to see. Or its variant hear what they choose to hear. I’m not going to argue about the concept of choosing what we see or hear, but I am convinced we do not perceive the world the same way as anyone else.

When we were children, my brother and I were often scolded for not doing something our mother told us to do. We knew she had not told us what she said she did, because in the black and white world of youth, we knew our memories were flawless and hers, belonging as it did to a middle-aged single mother was not. I vowed that I would not swear I had or had not said, done or seen anything if there were any doubt.

If we were all a little less certain of the “rightness,” the factualness, of our experiences, we would have a lot less to argue about. What you experience is your truth and what I experience is my truth. But what are the facts? What does any one of us know?

Not much, and I can prove it! 😉

I just read a series of police accident reports that are related to a hotly-contested safety issue in my town. There was one accident in particular I wanted to read about, because I’d heard the pedestrian…

  • stumbled off the curb, or
  • bent over to tie his shoe, or
  • staggered into traffic

Here’s what an on-duty police officer reported: “I then observed male and female dressed in dark clothing crossing the roadway…The male pedestrian was in the lead.”

Here’s another eyewitness account: “We were walking across the street from the hotel we are staying at…to purchase some groceries. We were halfway across the street. He said, ‘Stop the car is coming too fast.’ We were both waiting but I was a few steps ahead of him. He was about a yard behind me.” This account is from the wife of the male pedestrian.

In the world we think we know, there should be only one place for the man to be. He was physically behind his wife, beside his wife or ahead of his wife. There should be a X that could mark the location.

I walk fast. If someone were to ask me, “Were you ahead, behind or beside your partner?” I would probably know I was ahead.

Should we believe the wife? She was there and experienced it. Or the police officer? He was a trained observer.

We have to believe both of them. Each told his or her own truth, what was real to them, what they saw and experienced. What I don’t have to believe is what I heard on Facebook. I can discount stumbling off the curb (he was in the center, two-way turn lane, not near a curb) or bending to tie his shoe.

My point is, we cannot often “know” another person is wrong. Nor do we dare be too sure we are right.

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Pomodoro

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Lin Ennis

A few days ago, the Pomodoro technique was introduced to me by Lifehacker. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The technique was invented in the last century, 1992 to be precise.

Similar to Interval Training for optimal physical fitness, the pomodoro technique uses bursts of focused activity, separated by mandatory breaks, to improve productivity. The timing must be precise. If you have to stop mid-Google, you do it! If going to the bathroom and opening a beer takes longer than your five-minute break, adjust and be more precise next time. The rules drive you and force you to forget about what time it is and how big the task at hand is.

You can download a little tomato-shaped utility for your computer (which has me lusting for a plastic, tomato-shaped timer like the one pictured) for jobs that must be performed away from the computer.

On paper, you keep an inventory of tasks you want to get to, a few of which get copied to a daily to-do list. On the day’s list, you estimate how many pomodoros the job (or slice of it) will take. It becomes a game to finish within the pomodoro. But you cannot finish early. If you do, you go back over your work to see how you can improve.

Even if 10 minutes into a pomodoro (25 minutes long), you feel the urge to get up and walk to the kitchen looking for a nibble or something interesting to drink, you realize that you can contain your urge for 15 more minutes, when you will be forced to take a five minute break (or every four pomodoros, a 20-30 minute break).

As a self-employed person, I’ve often felt I didn’t have time to manage my business, especially now that I do everything online. There is so much to learn each month. So many new, helpful products to review and possibly buy to accelerate success each week. Plus relationship building and social media. And the relationships that make life more worthwhile.

I downloaded the eBook, a worthwhile read because it also details how to handle interruptions – both external and internal. That is a huge time-saver!

I may tire of the pomodoro technique in a while. Don’t you find we constantly need new practices, new metaphors, new goals, all to keep us fresh and interested in life? –to keep us interesting!

But in the meanwhile, I’m looking for a windup timer that looks like a tomato!

_____
Picture from WikiCommons

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