MoxieLife

Lazy Days

It's funny how weather effects our moods so easily. It was rainy and cold all weekend and the lack of motivation was thick like honey. We just nermaled around the house with our plans for doing outside/renovation projects out the window. The interesting thing is that I didn't feel compelled to replace the time with some more doing - I just didn't want to do. I didn't want to really go anywhere, talk to anyone or make something. I did some cooking (homemade enchilada sauce and Julia Child's pistou soup), read a little of my Pema Chodrin book, and played some Angry Birds - not the most productive weekend.

And then the guilt - why wasn't I doing something? Writing poetry, working on the painting I am doing for my husband, organizing something? Why didn't I go running even though it was cold and damp.

What is it about Americans that we feel the need to constantly do something. If we aren't working we should be doing - putting something out there. Why can't we just laze in the warmth of the heater and loll around the property doing nothing? We work really hard to rush to do that on vacation, but to do that in our own lives is not productive.

But maybe it is. Maybe we don't need expensive vacations to tropic islands if we slow down in our own life and just gaze along our own horizons. Maybe we could relax enough to get off the doing train enough to just hang out at home. Maybe that is exactly what we should be doing. At least it felt right to me this weekend.

Photo is from Sunday looking over the low water bridge on our driveway.

Japan On My Mind

Moving to TV Land

One of our major indulgences has always been TV. My husband and I grew up watching tons of reruns, prime time and PBS. We can hum the tune to Gilligan's Island with the best of them and name the kids from Brady Bunch. Granted, we limited TV for our daughter, but we never gave up the love of the genre. Generation X is truly a TV generation - think back to who and why MTV was started, that's right, for us!

Anyway, it got me thinking about which show I would like to live in. Would I prefer the homemaking tips from Leave it to Beaver's mom, the adventure of Lost, the crazy shenanigans of Lucy, or the sucking fear of True Blood?

I think, for a lot of reasons, I would choose Big Love. Sure, the idea of a plural marriage is not exactly mainstream, but that has never been my goal. And their lives are a little to drama filled for me, but in theory it seems great. You get to have help with your children (granted you have to have as many as you are possibly able) from the other wives, your husband can have safe sex with multiple partners (oh, come on, don't roll your eyes - if they could have more sex that would be great for them, and for you), and you get to share your life with a group of people focused on the care and success of family. Not a bad idea, in my book.

Sure, you might prefer the shopping excess of Sex in the City, the crime fighting life of any of the many crime dramas, the wife of the president in the West Wing or the prairie with our favorite family the Wilder's.

So, what is it for you? What TV world do you want to live in?

Photo Credit: Big Love - HBO Drama

Saturday Check In

I am such a total dork. Yesterday I woke up really early because I knew at 5PM I was going to start the Couch to 5K Program. Seriously, I woke up 12 hours prior to my self decided time to start this training program and was so excited and happy that I just couldn't sleep. I am like 9 year old!

This week was interesting in a lot of ways:

Meetings: What is it about men (ok some women, but mostly men) that they come to meetings, "lead" and don't take any of the work on. They just want to pontificate their ideas, which are always stellar, to the group. This dynamic is beyond frustrating and not productive. My husband says I should tell people that I charge $75 to attend meetings that can be refunded if there is value, but if not the person/group calling the meeting would have to pay me. I bet I wouldn't be asked to too many meetings - which, really, would be fine because most of them are not satisfying and don't get anything accomplished. And don't shout out your really great idea without taking in consideration who can actually do it, who will pay for it, and how it can be measured. In other words, if you aren't willing to get your hands dirty sit on them.

Food CoOp: I have been wanting, for 8 years, to belong to a food buying coop and last night it finally happened. A local family is expanding their coop to include new members and I get to be part of that. This is HUGE for my family because we believe in buying bulk and managing our pantry in a homestead fashion - it was that year living at an intentional community that had us swayed! When they were talking about disaster preparedness after the horrific tsunami in Japan and off the coast of Hawaii they said to have 3 days of food available - we have at least a month, without using the freezer, that we could eat and drink clean water. Yep, we are those kind of people. Must also be because my best friend was Mormon growing up and they had 6 months of reserves always.

Couch 2 5K: For those that don't know, it is literally a program that take a couch person (raising my hand here) and in 9 weeks they can run a 5K. The work outs are incremental, building upon each other to reach the final goal. For the first work out I warmed up by walking 5 minutes, ran 1 minute, walked 2 minutes and repeated 9 times before a cool down walk at the end. In all it is 40 minute work out. I am actually going to repeat the first day on Sunday because I felt rushed - to go to the Food Coop Meeting - and didn't plan enough time for the cool down portion. But I started and I am SO proud of myself. This has been a goal of mine for over 3 years. I finally just purchased the App for my iPhone and went for it. My husband thinks it is too structured, but I like that.

So, looking over this I say I need to figure out a way to let people have room to explode thier ideas without feeling responsible for DOING them, am looking forward to healthier food, and have started something I wanted to do for SO long that it makes me giddy with excitement. Not a bad week, not at all.

Photo: I was featured in the Celebrating Women special section in our local paper. A nice honor.

Stop Organizing Start Living

I think an inordinate amount of time is spent organizing life. When, exactly, do we get to live it. Granted I manage a household, a part time job and a full time freelance career - so there are a lot of pieces. And I like organizing. I do, but sometimes it feels as if most of the day is spent shuffling through papers, updating spreadsheets, and writing lists - not a whole lot of time just being in the moment.

Is this what being human means now? Just organizing our time, papers and stuff?

Where is the time for day dreaming, hiking and creating something new?

How are you handling all of this?

Photo: Emmy "helping" me organize.

Are You An Ice Skating Judge?

Two days ago I had a little fit. Just a little one. It was the usual: "What the F is wrong with people." Yep, my usual refrain that my poor husband has to hear too frequently. I am constantly flabbergasted at the behaviour that people display and hope that I do not also show this rude/careless/mean spirited self very often. Because, really, no one deserves it.

I do community organizing as a part time gig. I love it. I enjoy 99% of what I do for our community. It is a national program, it has good components, I offer great resources, I listen, I am helpful...

And I do it all for very little money and a lot of time.

But I do it because I believe in it. I believe that raising all boats makes the world a better place. I believe having an advocate helps people have a voice. I believe that our organization can give meaning and make people generally happier about the work they do every day.

But then there is this one guy.

You knew there was that guy.

And that guy isn't one guy, it is one person on any given day that doesn't get what I am doing and has to be rude about it in a public way.

That drives me crazy.

I am FINE with you not liking me, not liking the organization, not wanting to be part of it, not being interested, not caring, not getting it - fine with that. In fact, I won't pester you to join. I won't bother with you after you have told me you aren't interested. Really.

But when you send a blanket email out to the whole group about something I did not being up to your standard, well, I get angry.

How COULD You have handled that? You could have called me. You could email me directly. You could come to the monthly open meetings that I hold. You could talk to any one of our volunteers. You could have shut up. But no... you needed to be mean.

And that is what drives me crazy.

My husband says we are all the Ice Skating judge - we have to have a comment or critique the amazing jumps, flips and costumes - like we could do it better.

My question is why? Why are we becoming a people who complains but doesn't do anything. Critiques, but doesn't help out. Is rude, but doesn't understand that people are receiving those words.

What happened to us? And what are we doing to reverse the trend?

Flickr Photo: Shifted Librarian

Life's Speed Bumps

I heard yesterday, during Talk of the Nation, on NPR, a story about a former professional football player who had become an opera singer. He was sharing his story and what it means to stop doing something you are good at and moving into something at the beginning. And he said something that stopped me in my tracks:

"We often don't look at our lives unless something goes wrong. We need speed bumps to reflect and assess where we are going." (paraphrased)

And he is right.

We don't reflect on what we could be doing differently if everything is going fantastic. It is only when life is throwing us curve balls (the only sports metaphor I could think of) that we start to really think about what we might be doing wrong, where we are going, how we can approach something differently. When things are going good we just enjoy the moment - we really are creatures of pleasure.
 
Speed bumps, tragedies, hard times, difficulties - if you are thinking about it in these terms - are there to move you forward. Or at least stop you long enough to think about what next step you are going to take. Granted, no one likes to hurt. I certainly don't. And I often tell my daughter that life does continue to challenge you - even when you are in your 40's. (An idea that makes her groan, thinking that it might just get easier once she is out of college and her 20's.)

So what if instead of whining (guilty), complaining (guilty), running away from our problems (guilty), or banging our head against the way (guilty, figuratively) we approached life as an experiment or investigation and got really curious. We could see potential problems as opportunities or challenges to overcome.

I know you are shaking your head and saying that in theory that sounds great, but in the midst of a crappy day when everything goes wrong it isn't as easy to practice "curiosity". But what if we gave ourselves a little room to try. To slow down and take the time to acknowledge that even though it is hard it might just be pulling us in a direction that is ultimately better.

I know that there isn't one hard thing that I would want to relive and when I even think about them tears well up in my eyes, but I don't regret any of them because those inconvenient, painful, heart-wrenching moments shape who I am. So, I'll slow down a little for the speed bumps of life and take the time to reflect and choose the next road I am going to take. At least I'll try.

Flickr Image: veggiefrog

Yelp a Help

Yesterday started out so good. I was up at 5AM with a full list of things to get done. I took a shower, talked to the dog, made coffee, and got ready to work.

Then it wasn't good.

I rely, pretty exclusively, on Google for my work. All of my email is forwarded through Gmail, I manage  Ad Words campaigns for clients, I have docs in their cloud, I read my news/blogs through Reader and it is my go to search.

And yesterday, for 5 hours, it wasn't working. I thought at first it was my internet so I called Verizon my broadband provider and we realized that it wasn't them - it was Google.

And here is the thing, you can't call Google. There is no tech support - sure you can use Yahoo to search for support issues with Google, but it takes you to Google pages and if you can't get to those for some reason there are no answers.

So, I turned to Twitter and put out a general help and three amazing people chirped back trying to help me figure it out: @RichardPosey (who I have gotten to know because his college age daughter is looking at UofA), @BeckyMcCray (who is a rural tourism expert and who recruited me to speak at the #140 conference last year), and @FUHNAHTIK (who lives in AR and is a Mac/iPhone cheerleader).

These three people, who I didn't know before Twitter and only one I have briefly met in real life, talked me through some possibilities, listened to me whine, and calmed me down - I wasn't handling the loss of my work world very well, so much for my Zen Work...

So, what is community? Where do you find it? Who do you turn to when you are struggling? For me the answer immediately was my Tweeps - they are tech savvy, business smart and I am cultivating real relationships with them. it is a strange world when an avatar can seem closer than the people down the street.

My world came back together at 10:45AM and I resumed my busy day (considering back up plans or ways to let go when the world comes crashing in), but I was left with the feeling that we are never really alone if we don't want to be. We just need to yelp a #Help out there and someone will chime in - and for that, I am grateful for the world that we are building that connects each and every one of us.

Photo: Emmy, my constant office companion on her new office chair - she was so cool in the face of a melt down yesterday. Apparently, I have much to learn from her.