check it at the door December 14, 2008

In an attempt to avoid studying for finals, I decided to catch up on an episode of a TV show that I actually don’t usually watch. I have seen maybe two or three episodes recently, and they have each been quite good.

The show is NBC’s Lipstick Jungle. The show follows the lives of three women each in different circumstances. Currently, there is Brooke Shields as a woman in a difficult marriage with a musician, Kim Raver as a widow trying to find her way, and Lindsay Price as a never-married but hopeful designer.

The last episode contained an interaction between Wendy (Brooke Shields) and her husband Shane. Shane was offered to go on a concert tour as a keyboardist. This opportunity would take him away from their family for four months. When Shane told his wife about the offer, she immediately shot it down. She looked at the negative of him being away immediately and didn’t give an ounce of energy to congratulating his accomplishment. His young daughter, however, didn’t think twice and told him he MUST go.

This is a classic case of optimism. It is also a classic case of someone reigning in an optimistic view by immediately jumping to practicality. That is something I have never had much tolerance for. I detest when people limit my dreams and happiness. The character of Shane said it best when he said that his wife had “poisoned” the idea from the beginning.

His daughter, a child, had the wisdom to see the opportunity as it was. That is another thing I wish us all to be able to hold on to. The optimism of childhood allows us to be excited. And why shouldn’t we be? There are a lot of good things to happen and a lot of good experiences to be had.

Too often I think we are trained or fall into the habit of quenching fires before they can illuminate.

I liked the language used in the show – that seeing the negative side of the opportunity was poisoning the experience. So true.

Check negativity at the door, I say.

Piece of the Puzzle December 10, 2008

There’s something really soothing about jigsaw puzzles.

When I was little, I had this puzzle of two puppies sitting in a mailbox that I would put together over and over again. I found it a couple of days ago when my family and I were digging through boxes and putting up our Christmas decorations. I’ve always tended to be the slow-mover in my family, I often take a lot of pitstops along the way (for things I deem more important). I can’t help it that those times happen to be when heavy lifting of a Christmas tree from the attic is the course I veer from.

Anyway, I decided to take a break and put together that puzzle. I started thinking about why anyone does this. It’s really simple, but fantastic.

I like to think about life as if it were a great puzzle. I am a puzzle, the world is a puzzle, the universe is a puzzle. The whole point of this journey is to keep finding the pieces and putting them in their place. Believe me, all pieces have their place. Especially those total pain, jig-jagged edged, one color pieces that go somewhere in the endless middle. What is interesting is the different ways we approach solving puzzles. When I was little, I took to that puppy dog puzzle as if it were something I had to put together. The pieces would make it whole, and I was in charge of bringing them together. I notice in my own thoughts, as I start to grow older, that I see many challenging situations as something massive that I have to take apart.

I think that is what a lot of us do when we grow older. No longer are we at ease with incompleteness. We see it as a negative and something we must break down even further to try to understand so that we can build it up again. I guess to put it simply, as children we spend our times building the puzzles and as we grow older we change direction and spend time breaking them down.

It’s not always true, but I do think it tends to happen (and in a lot of important situations – love, career, planning for the future). We make things more complicated than they are.

I will mention that age takes an obvious affect on some people. My older sister completely destroyed my puzzle once I had finished. Maybe we haven’t grown up at all.

Hi, what’s your name? November 9, 2008

When I was little, my brother was always playing baseball. I would have to tag along since I was so young, and while my parents would watch the nine innings, I would find a playground or a sandbox, or anything at the park to keep me occupied when I couldn’t convince my mom to buy me some nachos at the snack bar.

Luckily, I was usually not alone in this. I could always count on there being at least one other younger sibling who had no interest in watching a baseball game. The thing I remember most about those nights spent at a baseball complex was how easy it was to make friends. I was very shy, but I had no problem walking up to almost anyone and asking if they wanted to play on the jungle gym.

I did, of course, have a very strict screening process before becoming friends on the playground. It went something like this. “Hi, what’s your name?” They respond. “Cool. How old are you?” We exchange numbers (age that is) and are ready to play. That is all there was to it.

I have often thought about this, sometimes longing for the simplicity of connecting with another person without any preconceived notions or judgments about who we are or where we came from. It is something I want to bring back to the forefront of my life. It is not always kosher to be so upfront with people you have just met, and that is a norm I do not understand but have and probably will continue to abide by. Hopefully we can all break down those walls.

My favorite musician, Natasha Bedingfield, has a song on her second CD entitled “Backyard” and it explains so well the thoughts I have put forth here. I was looking for a way to add it to the blog and found this clip from a live show where she explains thoughts similar to mine…how easy it was as kids and how we can carry that with us into our adult lives to make the world a better place. The quality is a little shaky, but I thought it best to hear her explanation to her own song from her. Take a look.

Remaining and Regaining September 2, 2008

With a college graduation date looming and uncertainty constantly running through my head like my blood through my veins, I find myself forced to decide what I want. That certainly seems easy enough, a simple question. It is true, there are simple questions in this life – questions like, chocolate or vanilla? (for me, chocolate without a doubt), do you want to fall in love? (yes, and I am waiting – at times not so patiently), would you like fries with that? (of course), would you rather be hot or cold? (definitely, I would rather be –”) Hold up. No, that is not a simple question at all. It is much like the current question facing me upon my chartered wave of mustered confidence that I hope seamlessly delivers me to a more stable state of adulthood.

The intricacies of the hot/cold question have always fascinated me. People often respond something like, “Well, I’d rather be cold, because then at least I can cover up with layers and warm myself up.” However, that sort of response does not answer this particular question at all. The precise question is which state do you find more bearable? We must consider this regardless of possible ways of escaping said state or improving upon it. A state is something stable and unchanging in and of itself. Changing from one state to another is entirely possible due to the forces of the world surrounding us, but I am concerned now with choosing a state that is most adequately equipped to remain in light of changing landscapes. With this in mind, the hot/cold question really does not seem simple anymore. These states are unchanging – hot is always hot. It cannot become cold, because that is an entirely different state altogether.

The same analysis of the hot/cold question must be applied to my current situation. To answer the question of “What do I want out of life?”, I would have to provide some sort of roadmap filled with a list of accomplishments, all of which are subject to enablement or disablement by the everchanging possibilities that inevitably accompany any future. It is again not so simple. Instead I must answer a different, more precise question – What do I want to be? By answering this, I can strive towards a stable state of being that is able to roll with the possible punches of the future.

After much – well, actually – after not all that much consideration, I have discovered that I wish not to become anything, but to regain and remain something I have always had within me. I wish to retain the spirit of who I was at the beginning of this whole thing (the fantastic, maddening, and inspiring thing called life), and that is a child.

I do not want to grow up. Doing so is too often associated with a loss of childlike wonderment and insatiable curiousity about our surroudings. So in order to remain a child and also to regain some of that spirit I may have already began to lose, I am making a promise to the me of my youngest years that I will find her again, learn from her, and never try to improve upon her enlivened view of the world within her childlike state. I owe this to her, afterall, she made me who I am. In order to do this, over the next few months I will engage in childlike behavior with the enthusiasm of my earlier self. I will reflect upon the wisdom that can be gleaned from this state of being. I have already known these things that are available for me to learn through this, so I guess it will be a time of rediscovery. On the verge of growing up, I am packing up and taking everything that got me this far along with me.