Musings

Paul bought me a pint of Guinness at Ned’s tonight.  It was brilliant.  Not my first pint of Guinness since arriving here, but certainly the best.  Apparently, it’s not just about how it’s poured but about how it’s left to settle, then topped off properly and allowed to settle one final time.  I think the man behind the bar would have slapped my hand silly if I would have reached for my glass prematurely.  Nothing to worry about, though, because Paul had my back.

I strolled down to Ned’s with my beautiful lady on my arm.  It was dark outside, and the night air was cold.  A hint of the sea was on the gentle breeze.  The wind smelled crips and clean and just a bit salty as we got closer to town.  Light twinkled on the other side of the inlet.  At one point on the way back home, a ferry slid across the black water.  It was a surreal vision.

At Ned’s people were laughing and talking and having a good bit of fun.  A rugby game was on the TV, in the corner.  Nobody really paid attention thought.  Why would you with so much good conversation around you.  Somebody dropped a glass, and beer splattered all around.  A young man rolled his eyes from behind the bar but came out and cleaned the mess all the same.  Nobody chided, nobody cat-called.  Shit happens, even at Ned’s.  Paul ordered the culprit another pint before the young man from behind the bar got to the mess.  

My lady drank a glass of wine while I enjoyed my Guinness.  She talked to some people.  I talked to some people.  Paul ducked out before we could thank him.  We left early because…you know…there’s stuff to do during the weekend.  I cajoled my lady into walking back up the hill.  She wanted to take a cab, but I so love the walk up that hill.  Besides, I just wanted to spend some more time with her, enjoying the view from the hill, the cold night air, and those ephemeral traces of the sea on the wind.

To think I didn’t want to walk into Ned’s because I felt like I didn’t belong.  Maybe I didn’t; maybe I don’t.  And maybe nobody cares.  Maybe all that matters is that you walk into a place like Ned’s and just enjoy the simple pleasure of spending time with other people.  Maybe keeping it simple makes all the difference in the world.

Happiness comes from simplicity.  Few things are as simple as enjoying a pint at Ned’s.

I had a bit of a panic attack today. I felt like I had no business even trying to do what she was doing. She knows her stuff. She knows these people. She knows what she’s doing. I am not she, ergo I do not belong here trying to do any of this!

The moment passed. But I didn’t feel any better about things. I was unsettled for much of the day.

On the train ride home, I was reading a book that my buddy gave me called “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”. The section I was reading had absolutely nothing to do with me. I got to this one part and…holy crap…the section I was reading had everything to do with me. I hate when that happens. Actually, I love it.

Here’s what I learned today: I am not me anymore. I mean, in a lot of ways I am, but the “me” that I am doesn’t matter quite as much as my human ego would lead me to believe. Some Tolle came with that, along with a healthy portion of Dalai Lama and a side order of Godin. A bit of Buckingham rounded the moment out.

What I mean is that everything that I thought made me “me” at work is 3000 miles away. I felt the absence of all…THAT…today, and I think I lost my nerve for a spell.

The scary moments are always about “me,” but, more often than not, they should really be about…not me. I feel threatened when I focus on me and what I have to lose. Most of the time, I don’t have anything real to lose; it just feels like I do. The truth of the matter is that the loss I fear is imaginary and simply the anticipation of a loss that has not come to pass and probably will not come to pass. Even if it does…so what? Failure is seldom as bad as we fear it will be.

Today I was reminded that letting go of me means that I have the opportunity to be…to simply be. And “being” in that sense will allow me to serve others better. And that’s the whole point.

I have to remember why I am here. There is still so much to learn!

I love the view _______.

 

I can fill in the blank with one of any number of places in my life right now.

 

How about the view down my street?  Or the view from my bedroom window?  Or the view from my kids’ bedroom?  Or the view from the train platform I use every day?  Or the view out the window behind my desk?

 

These views all kick the metaphorical ass of the previous views in my life.  Three months ago, the views in my life were crap.  Empty fields, brown and covered in snow.  Dead yards, yellow and covered in snow.  Asphalt and concrete, 8-lane highways and back-road blacktop, cars and trucks and mini-vans and SUVs…all covered in ice and snow.  What crappy, miserable, ugly views…

 

Or were they? 

 

Maybe any issues we have with the views in our lives have more to do with the viewer than with the view.  Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, right?  OK, so maybe I-55 to I-294 in the Chicago area will always be short on the natural beauty, and maybe the view from my hotel room in New York City last year was wretched in a way that defies conventional description.  The thing to consider, I think, is that there is something beautiful everywhere you look.  On clear days, I could see the Chicago skylines from I-55.  When I turned on to 294 and drove up the merge with 88, Chicago could be seen again in the distance.  With a little patience, the city could be clearly seen, even close, on 294, just south of the O’Hare oasis.  That was always my favorite of the three glimpses I got of the city.  Chicago is beautiful…in a way that defies conventional description.  Whether it be from a distance, while closing in on her further up 55, or from a boat on Lake Michigan, Chicago is very simply beautiful.  I moved there for a reason.  Some day, I’ll move back.

 

What makes Belfast and what I have seen of Northern Ireland so beautiful to me is that I am awake while I am here.  There’s plenty of ugly stuff here to look at; no doubt about that.  However, like those 3 views of Chicago during my old commute, I’m looking for the moments that will give me pause and take my breath away.  At times, I catch myself lamenting that the views here are temporary.  My current lease will expire.  I could move to another town.  Heck, on a gloomy day, there’s not much to see out the window behind my desk.  That acknowledgement just serves to underscore something about which we should all be aware: all of our views are temporary.  They change each day, hour by hour.  They come and they go.  So many times, they are beyond our control.  Our paths take us away from them.  None of the views are permanent.  None of them are guaranteed.  The only guarantee is that each and every one of them will be taken away from us at some point in the future.  So don’t sweat the future and focus on what you’ve got right in front of you. 

 

Anticipating loss in the future is one of the big sins of our lives and a sure sign that we are living far from the present moment.  Being in the present moment is the only way at all to appreciate the view.

 

Tonight at dinner we were discussing divorce.  I don’t remember how it came up; all I know is that we went there.  The conversation started innocently enough.  Well, maybe there was some guilt in there…mainly mine.

I was in trouble.  Why?  Simply: I hadn’t acknowledged that today is the anniversary of my engagement to my wife.  For the newbies in the house: yes, this becomes an anniversary to celebrate.  There will be more, trust me.  As does occur from time to time, I might have forgotten to mention it, hence, I was in trouble.

When I finally told my boys what makes today special to us, my wife added, “We’ve been making each other crazy for…years.”  She and I had a good laugh.  After all, how else do you explain marriage?  My boys didn’t find it that funny.  In fact, my oldest said, “Ohhh…is that why so many people get divorced?  They spend all that time driving each other crazy?”  Sincere.

Crap.  We stepped in it.

You can only try desperately to back-pedal in these situations, so that’s what we did.  We explained all kinds of stuff, going off on tangents about the politics of marriage in medieval times and non-industrial societies, the ways in which marriages bound clans and kingdoms and nations, the status of women in pre-industrial society and the post 1970’s “Women’s Lib” movement…normal dinner conversation for a boy approaching 10 and his younger brother who is halfway to 6.  We intellectualized them into distraction.

Or so we thought.

It’s at the end of the discussion that my youngest weighs in on divorce:

“Do you know what I think happens?  I think that people are all swe-e-e-e-t an’ stuff before they get married because they want to get married.  Then I think after they get married they aren’t good any more.  That’s what I think.”

That about sums it up.  Maybe it doesn’t exactly explain divorce, but I think he nailed the crux of most marital problems right on the head.

Maybe it’s about time for a little more sweetness.

It is impossible to wade in any body of water, no matter how careful we are, without creating ripples. We move through the water, and the laws of physics take care of the rest. It is simple and inevitable and completely predictable. That’s how it works with water. In other areas of life, the ripple is harder to predict. We can study a situation over time and with great care and still get the prognostication wrong. That’s just the way things go. Embracing the inevitability can be freeing, but anticipating the eventual errors in judgment can be debilitating. Both states of mind require a level of awareness and consciousness that comes from being present in the moment. Then there’s the third option: ignorance. Ignorance of the ripples we create is almost certainly a result of self-absorption and of an unconscious departure from our awareness of the moment.

It is unfortunate when our actions create consequences we did not have the presence to anticipate or even contemplate. We can never control all the variables, but we can always maintain mindfulness and seek to be instantly aware of our unintended ripples.

It’s funny how we all process change a little differently. Take my little guy, for example.

My youngest son is just shy of 1st grade. We’re living in a foreign country now, so he’s adjusting to public school in a similar yet very different culture. The kids speak with accents. They use words he doesn’t always understand. Even his teacher takes a different approach to running her classroom than the one to which he is accustomed. Just the other day, she asked him to please sit down and finish his coloring assignment. Being the former Montessori student that he is, his very respectful reply was, “No thank you. I don’t think I want to do that right now.”. And he kept meandering around the room. Thats what he does: he meanders.

But yesterday was a bigger deal. Yesterday was his first day since starting he new school during which they had PE. Even though my son goes to a public school, he has to wear a uniform, so PE means changing out of his slacks and school sweatshirt and into more appropriate PE clothing. Changing in public caused him a bit of grief, just as it has his older brother. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong because neither of my boys are comfortable with being shirtless in public. I don’t know.

Regardless, he was a bit taken aback by the whole experience, and he eagerly related the ordeal to his Mommy when she met his at the school gate at the end of his day. Sensing his obvious excitement she said to him, “Wow, there must have been a lot of nipples,” in an attempt to inject some humor into the moment. I mean, what little boy doesn’t erupt into laughter at the word “nipple?”. Seriously. Go check it out. I’ll wait.

But my son’s response was unexpected. “No, the girls were there, too,” he said. “There were nipples and breasts everywhere!”

Change is something we all face. There is no escaping it. What matters most is how you deal with it. For my little guy, although wrestling with his own challenges adjusting to major changes in his life, part of the process entails confiding in his mother, sharing with her the sources of his turmoil. He has shared with me some of his biggest fears about moving to this new country. The moral of the story is that dealing with change happens only by acknowledging and then confronting the change, the source of the fear. The story was not really about the nipples; it was about finding someone to whom you can relate your experiences. Change doesn’t just blow over, and hiding your fear of change will never get you anywhere.

Tell your story.

Sit! Good boy! Here’s a treat!