Category — Uncategorized

Elizabeth Gilbert lost her partner, Rayya Elias, almost a year ago to cancer. When she died, she wrote that Rayya was, “my love, my heart, my best friend, my teacher, my rebel, my angel, my protector, my challenger, my partner, my muse, my wizard, my surprise, my gift, my comet, my liberator, my rock star, my completely impossible non-cooperator, my otherworldly visitor, my spiritual portal, and my baby.”

To be described like that; to be seen and understood and experienced so completely.

So this has been a year of grief, and I read something recently that she said about it that I found really moving:

I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.

I love that because it makes sense.  If we can’t control love, force it to come or leave at our will, how could we ever believe that our control over grief would be otherwise?

In the end, Elizabeth adds: “It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.”  It’s cold comfort when you are in the throes of grief, but it is a truth, too.  Grief can be a statement of love.

I think about friends who have lost children — I think about my own miscarriages — and how the grief never fully goes away.  That is a statement of love.  Our heart holds onto that feeling and shakes us.

I just read about the concept of centireading, reading the same book 100 times.  It’s worth clicking over to that article to understand why a person would read the same book 100 times and what is gained from the experience.  The author gives two examples of centireading, both started for very different reasons and, therefore, the experience is very different for each; implying that there are dozens of reasons for undertaking the endeavour and numerous benefits that can gained depending upon your initial reason.

But I really loved this line: “You can be acquaintances with many books, and friends with a few, but family with only one or two.”

I have one book that is family: The Phantom Tollbooth.  I own about 30 copies, and I have the e-book with me at all times.  I started reading that book when I was six, and I’ve never stopped.  It is the single most important book in my life.

I have books that are between friends and family.  They’re fictive kin.  I haven’t read them 100 times, so they aren’t in the family category, but I’ve read them… a lot.  Like 20, 30, 40 times… a lot.  The Handmaid’s Tale (I like to read it yearly.  No, I’m not sure I’ll read the sequel next fall), Harry Potter (all of them), Candide, The Visit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

And then there are the good friends, such as The Magicians trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Narnia books.  And the acquaintances I’d like to be closer with, such as All Our Wrong Todays.  And the acquaintances I’m just happy have come into my life, but I’m probably not going to invest too much in the relationship now that our time together has passed.

But hearing about centireading made me wonder if it’s time to choose a new family member to join The Phantom Tollbooth.  Which book would be worth reading 100 times?

What do you think of this idea?  Is there a book you could read 100 times and be happy you’re doing it each time?

I read this and immediately wanted to do it: take a midlife gap year.  I never took a gap year, going straight from high school to college to grad school to working full-time.  I traveled a lot during that time, but it three-week-long trips; not a gap year.

I sometimes ask Josh if there’s any chance that we’ll live in Oxford for a year.  For a half-year?  A few months?

But then reality kicks in because my life is very different from Caroline Harper’s life.  I have a career, and I love my career.  While I can work from almost anywhere since I work remotely, I still need to have my bum planted in a seat or be available for meetings for the bulk of east coast daytime hours.  There is no natural break in that timeline to slide in a gap year.

There is Josh’s career, the twins’ education, loved ones I want to see on a regular basis.  There is the question of money, the house, the pet.  The friendships, the committees, the communities.  There are a thousand reasons why this isn’t practical or responsible.  Why doing it would bring bigger drawbacks than any lessons gained.

And yet I still see myself hanging out in Oxford, reading a book on a grassy space.

I like the idea of a gap year.  I don’t know if I’d like the consequences of a gap year.  But if I could take one, I’d definitely head to Oxford.

What about you?  Where would you go?

I am going to blow your mind.  At least, my mind was blown when I read this piece on how to make better big decisions.  Like life-changing decisions.  Like family building decisions.

The idea is that when most people sit down to make a decision, they give themselves two choices and then list the pros and cons of each choice.  They go with the option that has the most pros.  THIS is the problem because sometimes things don’t work out as planned.  And then you’re left feeling like you should have made the other choice.  You think that it comes down to the cons you didn’t consider; that there were two roads and you took the wrong one.

But researchers found that the way to make the best decision is to give yourself more alternatives.  More options.  Not just column A or column B, but columns C, D, and E as well.  That if the decision is down to this or that, you’re not being creative enough or thinking deeply through all the possibilities out there.  If you want to be happier with your decision, come up with more options.

According to the New York Times article,

Over the years, Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.

So how do you come up with the options?  This is a place where three (or more) brains are better than one.  To get more possibilities, ask other people to help you come up with the options.  This is why everyone needs to start a blog; so you have a place to gather these kinds of thoughts.

And then once you have all the options, you make three scenarios for each option: (1) things working out, (2) things not working out, and then (3) things going sideways.  So it’s not pros and cons: it’s stories.

The article continues with other ideas on decision making, and they’re all brilliant.  But that first point?  That first one blew my mind.

P.S. I put his book (Farsighted by Steven Johnson) on my TBR list.  It sounds so good.

No spoilers.  I promise.

The librarian and I both stared at the slim book.  “It’s much shorter than I imagined,” I admitted, fanning through the pages of Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives.

“Me too,” the librarian agreed.  “I thought it was longer.”

It’s the sort of book that you can finish in one sitting, and you probably will because it demands that you devour it.  I’m not really a reading-while-cooking kind of woman, but I stirred the risotto while turning the pages.  I was really blown away by the story.

Without ruining the ending (I promise!), part of the horror for the book is the fear of your personality changing against your will.  Joanna, the main character, is a photographer who fears she’ll change and become like the other women in the town who eschew their own interests in favour of supporting their husbands, raising their children, and cleaning their homes.  She’s a feminist, not a likely candidate for giving up her own beliefs or activities, but that’s the point: She believes the personality changes are outside the women’s control.

Discussing feminism and control will ruin the incredible ending (how did I not know the ending despite the term “Stepford wife” being part of the everyday lexicon?), so I don’t want to go there.  But the middle of the book: that idea that we can be changed against our will and how scary that is, made me think about… what else…

Infertility.

I’m not the woman I was before I started trying to conceive.  I don’t know how you can go through infertility or loss and still be the same person you were before you started family building.  I changed against my will; I don’t want to be the woman who avoids pregnant bellies and newborn babies.  But that’s who I am.

I’ve become someone I’m not, except, well… I am, so this Melissa is someone I am.  If you had told hopeful, excited 28-year-old Melissa that she would someday be this way, she would have never believed you because personalities don’t do a 180.  Except they do sometimes because life changes you.  Big events change you.  I am who I am right now, though I may not always be this way.  If I changed this drastically once, I could change drastically again and return to being a baby-loving, onesie-cooing person.

Part of me wondered about that idea of change as a horror technique when we do all have the potential to have our greatest wish become our greatest sadness.  To lose part of how we define ourselves.  But maybe that is why it’s so scary.  Because we feel like we lose ourselves when life changes us.  I liked 28-year-old Melissa.  I liked her hope and excitement, and I wish she could still muster those feelings when it comes to babies.  But if it wasn’t my love of babies, maybe it would have been my belief in the power of love or my happiness about marriage or my feelings about parenting or writing or publishing or reading.  I’ve gotten to keep those things.

Life transforms everyone.

I was listening to Serial, and one of the people they interviewed for this season admitted that he isn’t sorry for things he’s done because he did them.  Feeling sorry means applying who he is now to who he was then, and that’s not helpful because he can’t go back and change himself any more than we can stop ourselves from changing in the future.  He states that it doesn’t come down to right or wrong; just done or not done.

Maybe it’s easier to not fear change when you like the direction you’ve moved; to chalk up then and now simply to then and now because you’re in a better place.  But I think it’s more peeling back the horror of change and understanding that it will happen, even if we fight hard against it.

Time is a monster, changing us all.