Category Archives: Journaling

About The Happiness Equation

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I’ve already said this: I am a fan of Neil Pasricha. My admiration started with his podcast Three Books and then I realized I had heard of him before – I had even slipped a copy of The Book of Awesome in one of my son’s stockings one Christmas. I fangirled so much over Neil’s kind and endearingly nerdy interview style on his podcast that I left a voicemail of appreciation. Then one day in the car, as I was catching up on episodes, to my surprise I heard my voice coming from my radio. If you’d like to hear it, check out Episode 89 after Neil interviews Zafar the Hamburger Man (at time 50:17).

It would make sense that I would then want to read all the books that Neil has written. But while The Book of Awesome and its spawn are New York Times bestsellers, I prefer to stick to his more prescriptive books, starting with The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything.

The book is full of good advice which humorously ends with the caveat: Don’t Take Advice. This is #9 – you need to read the whole book to understand why – but basically, the book is filled with information that resonates and makes sense. Although it seems weird in a book whose very title suggests it will teach you what you need to be happy, the very first section tells you to Be Happy First.

Wait, what? Is it really that simple? Think it, do it?

Actually, the important part of that mini-sentence is the DO. In the first few pages of the book, Pasricha outlines 7 Ways To Be Happier RIGHT NOW as verified by the field of positive psychology. Here they are:

  1. Three Walks – We all know that exercise makes us feel better, if not while we’re doing it, then for the benefits after. Research backs that as little as three 30-minute walks a week will activate pleasant feelings – a.k.a. happy feelings.
  2. The 20-Minute-Replay – If you’re happy and you know it, write it down! Writing about a happy experience lets you relive that experience as you write it down and every time you re-read it.
  3. Random Acts of Kindness – Hold open a door. Shovel someone’s sidewalk. Pay for coffee for the next guy in line. Five kindnesses like these a week help you feel good about yourself and thus, happier.
  4. A Complete Unplug – Periodically – be it after supper, for a weekend or during a vacation – disengage completely from social media, the internet and incessant texting. In fact, Pasricha is a proponent of landlines – if people really want to reach you, they can call you at home. (No one every does.)
  5. Find your Flow. Engage in a personally challenging activity that makes you forget everything else.
  6. Meditate – FOR TWO MINUTES. 2-minute-meditations on a regular basis increase compassion and self-awareness and decrease stress. All for the cost of TWO MINUTES.
  7. Be grateful. Once a week, write out three to five things you’re grateful for. As Pasricha says, “If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.”

Sounds good to me. And easy. But hard. Because in the end it’s up to us to DO these things – no one else can make you happy. It’s all part of the equation.

About Why I Keep Blogging

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Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

It’s nearly birthday time for me and since I started this blog on my birthday two years ago, it’s time for my annual checkup: How’s the blog doing? Am I still enjoying it? And maybe, most important: Do I keep going? Or in a paraphrase of Dr. Phil: How’s it working for me? Although I’ve had the occasional blank mind in the last year when it came time to write my post of the week (resulting in one of my Throwback Thursdays) I would have to say that the blog IS working for me. Or maybe I’m working for it. Either way, the writing is getting done.

I will keep blogging because it’s good for me. The every-week self-imposed deadline makes me write AT LEAST one blog post a week. I am trying hard to establish a healthy writing habit but the daily-ness escapes me. I’m working up to it. The blog lets me say, “Yes, I’m still writing!”

I will keep blogging because I believe in the written record. It makes me unreasonably happy when I read something I wrote twenty years ago that I would probably never remember if I hadn’t written it down. It’s why I keep writing erratically in several journals at a time and keep ridiculous notes on my computer. It all might come in handy someday, even if it’s just to reminisce when I’m one hundred years old, at the tail end of my journey of a century.

I will keep blogging because it keeps the pump primed. I’m working on a book and as I said before, sometimes it’s hard to get my writing in. While it may seem counterintuitive to write something else when I should be working on a chapter, the blog keeps me honest. It legitimizes my desire: I write, therefore I am a writer. Therefore, I should be able to write a book. Whether or not I ever get it published, I have to keep going because it’s in me and it wants to get out. I just need to trust the process that all this “extra writing” is part of the process not unlike the gardener who plants an extra zucchini seed or the photographer who takes a thousand pictures to get “the one” or Connor McDavid who just keeps practicing every single day.

I’m thinking in the next little while this blog may evolve a little. I might narrow my focus, I might spend a little more time on the bones and the makeup and make it look a little different. It’s worth spending the time on it because it gives so much back to me.

I will keep blogging.

About What’s Saving My Life Right Now

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Photo by Teigan Rodger on Unsplash.

At the end of Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, the author lists a number of things that are “saving her life right now” – intuitive, instrumental and illuminating things that are life-giving in organic and maybe unorthodox ways – a little different to what she conventionally taught from the pulpit for years as an Episcopalian minister. Things like: teaching at a college, living in relationship with creation, and encountering God in other people.

At the end of every one of her podcasts, Jen Hatmaker borrows this same question to ask her guests – What is saving your life right now? – and the answers are not usually spiritual or abstract. More often what is saving someone’s life right now are ordinary things like reading a poem a day, eating ripe in-season strawberries or watching the latest Brian Regan special on Netflix.

I thought about this last night when I donned my eye mask before going to sleep. It’s usually still light outside when we hit the hay in this house and all the sleep-gurus strongly suggest that when it comes to sleeping better, darkness is your friend. I’m not that great of a sleeper these days – at least not during the second half of the night when my water habit wakes me up. It took me awhile to get used to it, but I think my eye mask is saving my life right now, helping me to get back to sleep a little quicker than usual.

But then, when I wake up in the morning, coffee is saving my life right now. Well, really, coffee has been saving my life for a long time, since I starting making cups of milky instant Nescafe to help me study for final exams in grade twelve. However, I sometimes get a little overzealous in my coffee habit and it becomes more of a havoc-maker than a life-saver. A visit to a doctor a few months ago instigated a stint on a very strict hypoallergenic diet to identify any foods which were causing my post-menopausal body more grief than they were worth. Happily – and maybe the reason I was able to sign on to such austerity – was that I could still drink my beloved coffee. But only two cups a day. It turned out to be such a good thing, because I’ve returned to the delight of really relishing those two cups, so much more so than the 4 or 5 I was glugging down.

Walking in the morning is saving my life right now. I love walking year-round but in the summer, there’s nothing so wonderful as being able to walk out the door in the early morning, knowing I’ll be greeted in sound and scene by all the friendly flora and fauna that love the early mornings, too. (Of course, there are some enemies as well: swooping gulls and rumors of bears in the park – but I’ve learned to avoid their usual hangouts.) And during our record-breaking “heat-snap” last week, morning was the only time that a long walk was tolerable.

Intermittent fasting is saving my life right now. Or I.F. to those in the club. For those of you not yet inducted, it simply means waiting a little longer than usual before you eat your first meal of the day. For me that is anywhere from 10 to noon for a total of 14 to 16 hours without food. (I do get to have my first cup of coffee because I drink it black during this window.) It cuts down my calorie intake for the day a little, which is good since Mother Nature decided that older women need to burn less. This doesn’t help when you’re used to eating three squares a day. Plus snacks. Plus dessert. Plus plus. I.F. has given me some reins to pull on the horse I call my appetite and by the time I do eat “break-fast”, I feel hungry and a good-emptiness in my tummy.

And, of course, reading (as always) is saving my life right now, but more specifically: reading other writer’s journals. So far I’ve read May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and I’m over halfway through Madeleine L’Engle’s four-book Crosswicks Journals. Both women were writing from “about my age” in these journals, contending with everything from a raccoon who regularly breaks into the house every night (Sarton) to a mother’s last visit and then death at Crosswicks (L’Engle). And all the while, they were trying to keep up with the business of writing and managing a household, while also not getting as much sleep as they would have liked because of raucous raccoons and aged mothers. It’s a good reminder of the quote that “everyone is fighting a hard battle.” But in the midst of the battles are loveable grandchildren and velvety donkeys, burgeoning gardens and restful walks to the stream: things that were saving their lives right then.

It’s also a good reminder that it’s the little things that really make that difference. What’s saving your life right now?

About 100 Dreams

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Photo by Benjamin Sow on Unsplash

I am a big believer in writing things down and a lover of lists of all sorts. So when I came across an idea from author Laura Vanderkam last year, I knew I wanted to try complete it: a List of 100 Dreams. Well, not complete it in the sense of get everything on the list “done”, but first just try to actually write down 100 Dreams.

I’m not talking about the visions – or nightmares – that visit you at night. This list is about writing down all the things you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet – no holds barred. And like a lot of things, it’s easier said than done.

I first heard about the idea from Vanderkam on her podcast Before Breakfast – she’s known for time management and working from home – two things that were especially hot in the work world after March last year. And she likes to address not just the working side of a person, but the other rest-of-life person, too. All work and no play makes for an unhappy person all round.

And so, The List of 100 Dreams.

The first thing I did was cue up a world map on Google and I systematically wrote down all the places I would love to go: Italy, France, Ireland, Poland, Hogwarts, the Shire. Remember, this was before regular people (a.k.a. not Alberta MLAs) had to shut down all travel plans. But it was a list of dreams and therefore perfectly okay to write down even the most frivolous desires of the heart.

On the one hand, I dream about travelling. On the other, my dreams are things that can be accomplished for the most part at my desk at home: write a memoir, write a novel, learn Greek and Latin, read all the books. I haven’t finished my list yet – there’s a lot of things in between going and staying – and I plan on writing a full 100 in my new 2021 planner. But even though the list’s title gives me permission to dream with abandon, I still find it hard to Dream Big.

It all comes with getting older, I think, and more…realistic? After all, I’m over 53 now. It’s not exactly Over the Proverbial Hill, but let’s just say, my age precludes any Olympic aspirations yet unmet. Reasonably: I don’t have that kind of time. Or, that kind of bod.

But that very reasonableness – or wisdom – is actually a gift. When we’re babies, we can dream all kinds of things: become the first woman to live on Mars, finish Netflix, read the Wikipedia, become a hermit, become famous. But getting older, we are able to filter out the things that are just Frankly a Waste of Your Time to Dream. For you. Because everyone gets to decide what dreams they want to cherish and what dreams are just downright Cuckoo-For-Cocoa-Puffs. For them.

The other gift of getting older? An awareness of your own mortality. Not in a morbid kind of way, but more in a way to galvanize your sorting: this thing matters, this thing doesn’t. And there’s nothing like your impending death to make you sit up and say, “Wait! I just need to get this one thing done first!”

You get to decide what to dream and to express what dreams still lie in your heart that you never did decide on – they were always just there. It is never to late to Just Dream.

About School Lunches

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As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)

There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)

Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.

Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.

When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.

School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.

So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.

When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.

I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.

My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.

There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.

By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.

Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?

About the Austins

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And now back to our regular un-Pandemic programming. Sort of.

I’m reading a lot lately. I mean, I always have one or two or three books on the go but Pandemic reading has taken on a new slant: my library and favorite thrift shop are closed, I hate e-Readers and I can’t spend all our money on Amazon orders. Because: Pandemic snacks are more important.

So I’ve been re-reading, shopping my own shelves. Actually, pre-COVID-19, I had a plan for My Reading Year (yes, I’m one of those people) that I would do a great deal of re-reading. It all comes from the moving thing: packing up all my books, shedding the ones that are no longer anything more than dead weight (that I didn’t want to move to a new house) and musing over the favorites that I really should re-visit. And this year I wanted to focus on writers I love that write/wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Madeleine L’Engle falls into that category. Most everyone who recognizes her name would associate it with her Newbery Medal book A Wrinkle in Time – or the recent Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon/Mindy Kaling movie offering of the same name. A Wrinkle in Time is a seminal book that is often lauded by writers of children’s books. Or sometimes, as in another Newbery Medal book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, it is the backdrop of another story. (A very good story.)

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties before I even heard of Madeleine L’Engle. (I know, right?) A teacher friend lent A Wrinkle in Time to me, plus all the ensuing Murray family books, aghast that I had never read them. And so a L’Engle groupie I became.

Whatever story L’Engle told, her framework was always a moderately conventional family and I think that was a big part of her appeal. The families were like none I knew – ones that discussed physics and tesseracts while their mother cooked stew for supper over a Bunsen burner in their attached-barn-converted-into-a-laboratory. Or where another mother – an ex-opera singer – played classical music records while she cooked supper. Or where the family sat around and discussed theology with everyone from the 5-year old to Grandfather contributing to the conversation. Really, Madeleine?

I haven’t got to a lot of her published journals or non-fiction offerings yet, but any biographical information I’ve read about her suggests that it was exactly the kind of family she was in herself. Minus maybe the space travel and alien abductions. I assume. And Ms. L’Engle always asserted the importance of every person in her fictional families, no matter what their age or how much they misbehaved.

Grandfather, is in fact, one of my favorite characters in Meet the Austins. A retired minister who exudes wisdom, he lives by the ocean in a converted horse stable: the individual stalls are especially conducive to bookshelves that hold Grandfather’s copious book collection. His granddaughter Vicky describes him as a bibliomaniac. (And then parenthetically, tells the reader to ‘Look it up!’ Such cheek!)

Grandfather doesn’t just keep his favorite words in his books or in his head: the most meaningful to him he has transcribed onto the very walls around him. In his bedroom, a quote from Hildevert of Lavardin circa 1125, reads:

“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

This quote is so obscure that I couldn’t even Google it. But L’Engle brings attention to a medieval mystic’s words as effortlessly as Hermione Granger waves her wand and pronounces ‘Alohomora!’ to a locked door. (Look it up!)

In the loft, where the children sleep, a poem by Thomas Browne is painted:

If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, ‘This is not dead’,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, ‘This is enow
Unto itself – ’twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.’

Have I – pre-slow-and-crawling-days-of-Pandemic – been too full of ‘shrewd activity’? Or even now, with my books and my phone and my TV am I ‘replete with very thou’?

There’s something about the writing on the walls that strikes me, the constant reminders of things that Grandfather believed and wanted to remember. In the bedroom, where the first quote is, he has no other pictures except the picture window, because no picture could complete with the ocean view. But the simple juxtaposition of words reminded him of Whose view it was and Who made it.

What do I write on my walls? What do I want to be reminded of?

Besides hanging pictures or words on my walls, I have a way of remembering some of the lovely things I find in books: I put them into another book. My siblings can attest to how I used to cut and paste and make scrapbooks when I was young, sometimes much to their chagrin as ‘the making of many books’ consumed me – and all the homemade flour paste that Mom could make.

I still cut and paste and draw:

It helps me to remember the things that are important:

And not to mistake the wonderful things:

Good writing and good writers can teach us so much, remind us of what’s important and show us what is possible before it happens. The wonderful things can’t last forever but we can remember them and look forward to different, wonderful things.

About Gratitude: An Old Book Review

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When I went looking this week for books about thankfulness, one of the ones that isn’t aimed at children is already on my bookshelf: Ann Voscamp’s One Thousand Gifts. An inaugural attempt by the author, it spent some 65 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Not bad for a “farmer’s wife” (which is basically saying that she’s a farmer, too) from rural Ontario.

Despite the fact that it was wildly popular (apparently), it’s not a real favorite of mine: the author’s breathy, metaphorical style is not one that resonates with me – I do better with a little ironic humor thrown in now and then. Instead, I find myself squinting at the page, trying to decipher the meaning behind “all things wooden-hard giving way to the sky” or “the clay eyes shot red for the sacred seeing.”

What I did find inspiring was the author’s attempt to crawl out from a pit of despair and gloom by engaging in a dare: to make the mother of all gratitude lists. Voscamp kept a gratitude journal, just a simple coil-bound scribbler, open on the counter and moment-by-moment recorded the lovely and memorable “gifts” she witnessed in her everyday life.

243. Clean sheets smelling like wind.

513. Boys jiggling blue Jell-O.

904. First frost’s crunch.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say under the entry ‘Gratitude Journal’: One of the early research studies on gratitude journals…found that “counting one’s blessings” in a journal led to improved psychological and physical functioning. Participants who recorded weekly journals, each consisting of five things they were grateful for, were more optimistic towards the upcoming week and life as a whole, spent more time exercising, and had fewer symptoms of physical illness. Participants who kept daily gratitude journals reported increased overall gratitude, positive affect, enthusiasm, determination, and alertness. They were also more likely to help others and make progress towards their personal goals, compared to those who did not keep gratitude journals. 

Wow! If writing down five things can do that, just think what one thousand could do! Granted, Voscamp’s list wasn’t made all at once, but the practice of gratitude did its trick. Which was to turn her eyes away from the despair in the heart and toward the world around her with the simple physical exercise of writing good things down.

The secret of gratitude is learning this: it’s not about us. Those many things that we can write down in our fancy gratitude journals or old scribblers are not things we are owed or that we deserve. A stream of geese in the air, a child’s sticky kiss, a Thanksgiving plate piled high – these are at the same time both magical and ordinary. Our only duty is to recognize them as the gifts that they are.