Katy on Wellbeing

Creation and Early Spring

Early spring has arrived in Toronto.  Though the branches and flower beds are still bare, all around we feel the quickening of new life.  A concentration of energy, sucking in of nourishment, and sprouting of hidden shoots, before leaves and flowers burst into form.  Pairs of waterfowl are feeding on the pond in the park (mainly frozen last week; entirely thawed now), enjoying a few weeks of freedom before the commitments of nests and babies.I am feeling spring, too.  I have spent the winter, such as it was, immersed in new ideas and skills.  Learning to experience consciousness as infinite, non-local and generative.  Reading about the emerging multi-disciplinary field of "conscious evolution".  Learning how to create healthier relationships.  Studying the evolution of feminine identity.  Contemplating the development of a management consulting course.  And with spring, like the plants, I feel the energy collecting, pushing to be organized and born in the form of writing.  But also, like the plants, this new growth is still largely unmanifest.  Last week, it was still "soon, but not yet".  When, driven by the building pressure of the energy, and my enthusiasm for the topics, I tried to write about them, the ideas lay pale and fragmented on the page.

I was torn.  On one hand, I looked at the natural world of which I am a part, and saw that everywhere creation is an organic process of allowing what needs to be born to be born.  On the other hand, I am a firm believer in a modicum of discipline, and the wisdom of Karl Weick: "how do I know what I think until I see what I say?"  In other words, "sit down and write, already!"  This is what separates humans from plants and animals: the ability to get tied up in knots about where we are and where we are not.

From last week to this, I see several changes marking the advance of spring in the park.  The ice, I've mentioned.  There are shoots of new, green grass, and a few buds on the trees.  The sun shines warmer, and more birds are singing.  This is the change I've noticed in myself: like rising sap, the words have begun again to flow.  So I will return to the unknotting of big tangled subjects like consciousness, relationship, and evolution.  And every so often I'll get a piece smoothed out enough to blog about it.  And I will do so inside a sense of kinship with the natural world, remembering that this is the season when we are all engaged in bringing forth something new.  We are all engaged in that awesome, timeless alchemy of transmuting energy into physical form.

What is building in you, wanting to be created?

Juicy Fun 2010 - part II

In the last post, I summarized what some of my friends are doing, or planning to do to make this year more juicy, fun, vibrant, and alive than last year.  Here is my own list.  It may not be necessary to do everything, all the time, but I bet it'll be fun to try!

This year, I desire to:

Physical

• Live deeper in my body purely for the pleasure of it (vs. for medical reasons or because "I should exercise").  At a minimum, belly dance classes and a 90 minute massage every month.
• Get strong again.
• Go kayaking.
  
• Wear bright, colorful, fun clothes -- oranges!  greens!  patterns!

Creative

• Write, write, write.
  
• Carry my camera everywhere.  And take a class on imaginative photoshopping.
• Dust off and resume my knitting project (a big, soft, purple scarf).
  
• Develop and teach my new Management Consulting MBA course at Ivey.
  
• Do more crafty things -- beading, painting, etc.

Social

• Say "YES" to more invitations, especially ones involving different people and unusual activities.
  
• Fall in love.  Big love.
• Get to know my friends and family in a deeper, more open-hearted way.
  

Experiential and Intellectual

• Attend workshops that interest me.  Richard Bartlett on Matrix Energetics in Fort Lauderdale in February.  SARK on creativity etc at Hollyhock in September.
  
• Actually read the Economist magazine that arrives at my home every week.  Generally stretch my reading in terms of breadth and depth.  Explore pet passions -- archeology, zoology, mythology.  Fascinate myself!
  
• Do a big cross-country road-trip.  Perhaps out east to the Maritimes, or down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego.

Just reading over this list gives me a happy hum of anticipation.  Because I know I'm standing up for myself imaginatively, and making the creation of a joyful, juicy life a priority.  And even on the grayest and chilliest of January days, I have plenty to look forward to!

What are YOU going to do??

Juicy Fun 2010

Not that I have anything against "I'm going to get in shape / lose 20 lbs / be more productive" type of new year's resolutions.  Goodness knows, I always have a bunch myself.  But it's cold, damp and January.  What I really need is inspiration! 

What I really want to know is what people are doing to ensure that 2010 is more FUN than 2009. So I sent the following question out to some of my friends: "What do you plan to do (or what have you already starting doing) to make this year more FUN, RICH, INTERESTING, VIBRANT, JUICY and JOYFUL than last year?"  And here are their responses:

Being Creative

• Emphasize the creative.  For me it's sewing, knitting, needlepoint -- all with unique, one of a kind products in mind.  I give them to my local charity, hoping that someone shares my pleasure in the product, for a balance of form and function.
• I'm going to try new things!  Not just go to the movies every 10 minutes.  I'm going to check out the theater and explore the city.  Get out of my usual habits and comfort zone.
• I'm opening the pathway to joy!  I'm in the midst of a MAJOR paper purge with all of the things I pulled from storage from my 3-1/2 years in NYC as a writer.  My intention is to let go of the past so I can take hold of my future by living in the present.  Simplifying to enjoy my life.  Clearing space for all my good to flow in.

Getting Out and About

• A long time ago, my wife and I decided we'd take our elder daughter to Paris when she turned 10.  I won't be the last man in love with her to take her to Paris, but I will be the first.  Now it has turned into a family trip.  So .... fun: plane trip .... rich: the Mona Lisa .... vibrant: strolling along the Champs d'Elysees .... juicy: picnic of baguette and cheese in the gardens of Versailles .... joyful: seeing the faces of all my girls as they look over Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
  
• I am excited to reconnect with the magic that is the Pacific Ocean.  Exploring tide pools, birdwatching, seeing otters and porpoises play and whales migrate.  I find the ocean soothing and it's constantly changing, so you never have the same experience twice.  Amazing!
• I plan to travel to Belize and snorkel with my kids and hubbie, ride my bike from Perth to Kingston with a group of powerful women, and spend quality time with family and friends.
  
• I'm attending new events, charities, and meetings for both social and business reasons.  I was asked to be on the board of a start-up company by someone I met at Duke in November.  The board includes people from leading companies such as Google, as well as leading e-commerce technology firms.
  
• I have a list of the best restaurants in what will be my new city.  Every month, I will go to one of those restaurants, and also to a cultural event.  I will also find a reading group and a writing group (both things I already do).  And I hope to dip my toes in the Caribbean .... we're thinking in March ....
• I'm going to make a list of all the adventures I want to have, and when I might do them, and start going down the list.  In 2010 I want to sky-dive!  Every time I see someone jumping out of a plane, I want to do it myself.  I also want to get back to the sports I do for fun, like ju-jitsu.

Cherishing Friends and Family

• We are going to do a family triathalon, maybe several -- train together, tri together, share the moment and the fun
• Finding a really unique gift for our baby brother's 40th birthday -- something that really says 1970 (not bell-bottoms!)
  
• Spending time with my family, enjoying my new job, good meals with friends, and some camping will probably do it for me this year!
  
• Cherishing relationships with our Sister Goddess Group and family, as well as those who are supportive of my goals in building my business.

Flirting, and More

• Tonight at dinner with a girlfriend, I decided to censor myself less with men.  Like our waiter, who I thought was really handsome.  When he asked us what we wanted for dessert, what I wanted to say was, "I'll have a slice of YOU.  With a little chocolate sauce, please."  Of course, I didn't.  But I did get a little flirtier with him, and I'm pretty sure I got "the look" a few times.  Hmmm.  Yep.  I'm gonna start living dangerously and saying whatever comes to mind when I'm around attractive men. Propriety be damned.
• I'm going to resume flirting with my husband, and keeping him juicy.  It's amazing to me that I always need to take the lead and maintain the positive tone at home, but it's worth it, since whenever I stop things get very stale.
• As a single woman now 38 years old, I have always subjected myself to this invisible pressure about what love and my life "should" look like and how that would unfold.  I've decided to give up that pressure for 2010 (and beyond).  So I plan to say YES to love where I find it, or where it finds me!  What I mean is welcoming ALL kinds of love into my life, making more time for friends, family, myself, and not pushing that all out of the way to hold space for something I don't even know what it looks like yet!  I've decided to experiment with the idea that as romantic love comes to me, all that other love is the soil it needs to grow into the kind of relationship I really desire.

Taking Special Care of Themselves

• My long-time modus operandi has been to reach for food or drink as a means of temporary relief or escape, but I am so tired of the way it makes me feel!  This year I am committed to exploring options that make me feel good instead of choosing the comfort and numbing and safety of what I know so well.  E.g. taking time out to exercise during the day then coming back refreshed, taking a break from caffeine and sugar.  I am so excited to see how these new choices create expansion in all areas of my life as I become more present, positive and have more energy.
• I need to pay attention to staying juicy.  I'm going to schedule a pleasure event weekly, which is a radical move for me.  The event might be a massage, or spending some time shopping for clothes, since I like to wear interesting, flattering things, but I never have time to look around for them.
• This year I am committed to equilibrium in all things.  Balance brings more pleasure in all areas, and requires a commitment to SELF which is something that I've been unwilling or too lazy to achieve.  I trust that as I become more comfortable with this process, I won't feel hesitant to say that my choice is for SELF and not simply for balance!
  
• One thing I plan to do is buy a new wardrobe.  I've started shopping, and buying new things to wear to the gym, and reorganizing my closet and drawers.  I saw some great things at St. John and Saks.  I visited Alice's Hair on thursday and had my hair cut and colored.  She did a great job.  I'm indulging in my gym membership 4-7x/week and eating healthy.
• I am using all those terrific Estee Lauder products on my face, taking care of my skin.  I think I see a difference already!
  

Thank you very much to everyone who responded so thoughtfully and generously to my question!!  If you're reading this, I want to hear from you too.  Let's create a great big list of inspiring ideas for a fun, juicy, ALIVE year!  A list we can refer back to when things get dull.  This post is turning into a book, so I'll stop here.  In the next post, I'll say what I'm planning to do!

(Hey, I want to give credit where due.  I created the collage in the pic, but that marvelous photo of the little girl with all the hula hoops is by Dennis Mosner.)

You Do Not Have to Be Good

There is a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver called Wild Geese, that begins:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Imagine that: you do not have to be good.  Words like these start revolutions.  We are used to placing great importance on being good.  What does good mean?  In my life, "good" has three dimensions:

1. Good in the moral sense; the opposite of evil

2. Good in the accomplishment sense; competent, skilled, talented, clever, correct, etc.

3. Good in the social sense; nice, polite, appropriate, not rocking the boat or causing others discomfort

I am a Capricorn.  Eldest child.  Daughter of immigrant parents.  I've got a PhD in business, and worked for ten years as a management consultant.  I tend toward the sensible and reliable.  I exercise regularly.  In short, I've drunk enough of the "good" Kool-Aid to choke me, and to paralyze lesser mortals.

Okay, trying to be good in all its various senses served me quite well in the first half of my life.  The benefits are many, including academic achievement, easy relationships with parents and friends, steady, rewarding employment, and a measure of financial freedom.  But as I move into what is likely to be the second half of my life, I see that something wilder and more internally determined will be required.

Because being good is a heavy burden.  It strangles creativity, spontaneity, and adventure.  It causes you to self-impose unnecessary limitations.  It sets up an infrastructure of expectations that can topple over and bury you at any moment.  It guarantees a huge, unruly shadow side that either eats you from within or busts out periodically and wrecks the place. 

So I decided when I turned 40 to start unlearning four decades of "good".  Saying "no" more often.  Walking out of plays and movies I don't like.  Stretching myself to explore the wild, the frivolous, the erotic, the challenging, the inappropriate, the unconventional sides of experience.  Doing more of what I want and less of what I "should".  Taking some more risks.

And perhaps most important right now, I am learning to give myself permission to do things badly.  Before completing my own, I used to think that people with PhDs must be particularly intelligent.  Now I know the only thing the degree really signals is that the holder is damn stubborn, and refused to go home until it was done.  Similarly, I used to think that writing a book or having my own blog would be evidence that I had something significant to say.  But really it means I've given myself permission to write poorly in public.  And that is, for me, a far greater accomplishment than writing well.  It gives me hope that I may yet take up the tabla drums, knowing that when I'm 80 I might still really suck, but at least I'll be playing them.

Right now, as I begin to think about returning to work, periods of inspiration alternate with paralysis.  I recognize that paralysis is sometimes "good" rearing its tyrannical Barbie-doll head.  So I'm paying attention to Mary Oliver.  So what if my first choice isn't perfect?  So what if I struggle to learn something new?  So what if some people I meet don't share my vision?  Ha!  I declare that's fine, because I don't have to be good.

Dead Sea Scrolls and the Imagination

Indulging my "shoulda been an archaeologist" fantasy, I took my mom to a lecture the other night about the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit soon to open at the Royal Ontario Museum.  Intelligent, funny talk by Julian Siggers, VP, ROM Programs and Content Development.  It lit me up with enthusiasm to see the two installations, which promise to be excellent.  As well as displaying seventeen different scrolls (including such blockbusters as the first recorded books of Genesis and the Psalms), the exhibition will include other artifacts from near by locations which help place the scrolls in their human, historical and political context.  There will also be a series of fourteen lectures by a host of scroll-related experts, covering everything from Conservation and Preservation to the Historical Problem of the Essenes.  I figure that if something interests you, then go to town and explore it from all angles.  So I'm a fan of the way the ROM is approaching this, and offer thanks and congratulations to Dr. Siggers as the project leader.

The talk also reminded me of the amazing story of the Scrolls themselves, and their awesome hold on our collective imagination.  They are considered to be "one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time".  From the ROM literature, they:

• Were written between 250 BCE and 68 CE, and spent 2,000 years hidden in remote desert caves above the Dead Sea.
• Were discovered when a herder boy threw rocks into one of the caves while looking for a stray goat, and heard the sound of breaking pottery.
• Were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near Khirbet Qumran, a monastic Essene community which has also been excavated since the first scroll discovery.  The translation of the Scrolls was not finished until the 1980s, and was an extraordinary work of scholarship.
• Are some of the earliest records of biblical patriarchs and prophets known to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam including all of the old testament books except the Book of Esther, as well as apocryphal manuscripts, hymns, prayers, rules and beliefs of a religious community, and other writings.

Perhaps even more interesting than what is already known are the mysteries that still surround the Scrolls.  Who wrote them, and where?  How did they come to be hidden in the Qumran caves?  Is there any significance to the fact that they were hidden around the time of Christ?

So why am I writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls in a blog about wellbeing?  When I left home last week for a long weekend in Bermuda, my apartment and my days seemed fizzy with life, ideas, possibilities.  When I returned home on Monday night, everything seemed dead, empty, cluttered.  I felt utterly detached from the life that had seemed colorful and bright less than a week earlier.  The thoughts, the people, the stuff, the plans.  In the immortal words of Talking Heads:

"And you may ask yourself / What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself / Am I right? ...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself / My god!...what have I done?"

I realized that I needed to "reanimate" my life, to pick up the connections again, and breathe life back into them.  One important way to do that was through my imagination.  So this week I've been thinking a lot about the role that imagination plays in our wellbeing -- how it helps provide the thread of meaning and interest in our lives.  And I've been looking out for things that spark my imagination, and the connections they help to animate.  The Dead Sea Scrolls bring me a thrill of awe and mystery, keen interest in the scholarship and logistical challenges, and an imaginative connection with my still-new city of Toronto and the ROM.  And somehow they have helped to connect me back into my own life.

What about you?  What kindles your imagination?  Why is it important?