How to be happy

Look closely at the sky.  Every day.  Take pictures.

Walk outside no matter what the weather.

Listen to a song on repeat (lately, for me, it’s One Day by Matisyahu but others have been Fix You by Coldplay, Kite by U2, Just Breathe by Pearl Jam, Universal Child by Annie Lennox, and The Story by Brandi Carlile).

Lie in your bed (preferably with all-white sheets) and read, or nap, or just look at the ceiling.

Paint your fingernails a bright color.

Have a friend who can write lists like this for you with your child (their godchild).

Read poetry.  Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard are all good choices.

Write a birthday card to someone you love.  Or any kind of note.  But the real, paper kind.

Sit on the floor and play Guess Who or Blokus with your kids.  Without any distraction.  Just let their joy seep into you.

Cry if you want to.  Maybe hard.  Maybe often.

Use the silver.  Or the china.  Or wear the dress, put on the shoes.  Stop waiting for the right occasion for these things.

Go through your bookshelf, or your closet, and fill a bag for Goodwill.  Take it there.

Sit in the back of a church, or in any place that is sacred for you, and just listen to the silence, to your breathing, to what is and what is not.

Buy fresh flowers for your kitchen.  Peonies and ranunculus are my favorite.

Go out of your way to tell someone something you think is great about them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a close friend or an acquaintance.  Just tell them, sincerely and authentically, something that you like and admire about them.

Please tell me … what makes you happy, no matter what?

Inspired by Jen Lemen‘s beautiful How to Be Happy Come Hell or Highwater (and, really, by everything she writes)

thank you

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I thank you god for this most amazing day.

Thank you….

… to the lovely, loving crowds that made my 92 year old grandfather, celebrating his 71st reunion, smile more widely than I’ve ever seen

… to the rain for holding off.  The absence of biblical flooding was unnerving (at the 5th reunion we literally wore trash bags), but in a good, good way.

… to the people who came up to tell me that they read this blog.  I cannot possibly convey how much hearing that means to me.  At all.

… To my friends, who so generously talked to, played pool with, and posed for photographs by (and with) my children.  You are family.

… To the seniors who gave Grace, Thacher, Cade, and Ava a hundred or more high fives as they walked in front of us, leading our class, wearing costumes, holding signs, and demonstrating true spirit and pride.

I’m praying my favorite – and only – prayer tonight (and Meister Eckhart’s):

thank you

Trust Tending: Asking for help

Kristin Noelle’s site, Trust Tending, is one of my must-read blogs. Kristin writes lyrically about her efforts to live a life beyond fear.  She shares conversations (I was honored in January to participate), music, and open, honest reflections on her yearning to trust the universe.  The essential journey that Kristin is chronicling and sharing is from a “worldview of despair” to a “worldview of hope.”

It’s my pleasure and privilege to have written for Kristin today, on the topic of asking for help.  Please go read what I have to say about how asking for help taught me how to live my life.  And while you are there, enjoy Kristin’s beautiful site.

From the first

From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Princeton takes reunions very seriously.  Very.  This weekend is my 15th.  This will be Matt’s 3rd reunion and for the first time, we are bringing the kids.  The centerpiece of reunions is the parade on Saturday – the P Rade.  All of the alumni classes put on costumes and parade through campus, while the rest of the gathered alumni stand by the sides of the road and cheer.  You heard me right.  At his first reunion, my 5th, Matt turned to me incredulously and asked if he had unwittingly married into a cult.  Why yes, honey, you did!  I smiled and answered, and then promptly returned my attention to my friends and the orange-clad groups of alumni, ranging in age from 100+ to 22, parading past me.

The P Rade always makes me cry.  It has something in common with why the World War 2 veterans walking in the Fourth of July parade in Marion make me cry.  The first class to march in the P Rade is the 25th reunion, and after them comes the Old Guard, is the oldest returning alumni (of which my grandfather is now a proud member).  These men are elderly, some of them walking, some riding in golf carts.  There are always some widows in this group, who come back in their husband’s honor.  The embodiment of how much a place can mean to a person brings tears to my eyes, as does the visible evidence of time’s relentless forward turning.  For these men, I’m certain, it feels like mere moments ago they were the graduating class, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, singing bawdily, rowdily into the spring air, more in touch with their futures and their promise than they ever would be again.

I know, because that was just me.  Mere moments ago, I swear.  And now I’m in the thick of the pack, among the strollers and toddlers and grade schoolers.  This year I’ll have my own children walking beside me, holding my hands.  Both Whit’s godmother and one of Grace’s will be walking with us; simply writing that makes me cry.  How to capture or express the feeling when the past, the present, and the future are all animate in a single moment, in a place that was – and still is – home to me as nowhere else ever has been?  I can’t even begin to do that.  I’m emotional about and nostalgic for a moment I have not even lived yet.

The P Rade is tradition exemplified.  Our fierce commitment to it speaks, I think, of the deep human need to feel a part of something.  It is authentic, the love that swells through the crowd on watching the Old Guard and the young graduates and everybody in between.  There are always many tear-soaked cheeks, and even the most sophisticated or cynical of my friends give themselves over to the rolling pride and belonging and nostalgia that is tangible in the air during the P Rade.

I’m reminded, as I think about this weekend, of how I too loved Princeton from the first time I set foot on its campus.  I visited with my father, Labor Day weekend of 1991, and within an hour of our wandering around I knew I wanted to go there.  Somehow I half-grasped the significance the place would have for me and in an instant made a decision that would alter the course of my life forever (to withdraw my early application elsewhere and to pursue the magnolia-strewn road I’d precipitously, and firmly, decided I wanted).  For someone who makes most decisions cautiously, who is only now learning to trust the voice of her soul, this kind of instinctive, impulsive change of course was distinctly out of character.  And how extraordinarily thankful I am about that to this day.

Sailing together, weather be damned

(1997: our first reunion)

I’m going to be with the women who are closest to my heart this weekend.  The brilliant, wise, intelligent, kind, loving, loyal, hilarious women who created for me – finally! – a place I felt I belonged.  We have come so far from those sun and beer-soaked days 15 years ago when we graduated, when we stepped into the stream of our lives, confident that the water ahead was bright; we could see the sun bouncing and glittering on it.  The path hasn’t been as any of us expected, of that I’m sure.  There have been switchbacks and unexpected detours, heartbreak and fear, as well as sudden, startling joys.  We are so essentially changed, with children and marriages and divorces and JDs and MDs and houses among us.

And yet so much is the same.

More than anyone, these women are the ones I return to. They are the women who knew me as I was becoming who I am.  They are my dedicated fleet.  And how inexpressibly, overwhelmingly grateful I am for that simple fact.  And nobody’s ever said it more beautifully than Kelly Corrigan, in this essay from several years ago.  It still makes me weep.  Read it, and then call one of your pigeons.  You won’t regret it.

*****

I turned 40 a few weeks ago. I tried (twice) to make a toast about friendship but both times, I blew it. I wanted to say something about my mom and her friends, who call themselves “The Pigeons.”

There were once at least a dozen “Pigeons” (I believe the name was a self-effacing twist on Hens) but in the past few years, they lost two of the greats, Robin Burch and Mary Maroney, to cancer. On the pigeons go, though, like women do, limping one minute, carrying someone the next. They started in the 60s, in suburban Philadelphia, with bridge and tennis and chardonnay (ok, vodka) and, over time, became something like a dedicated fleet, armed ships sailing together, weather be damned.

For me and women of my generation, it started with playdates, cutting carbs and meeting on Monday mornings in workout clothes to do awkward moves with large colorful balls. And I can see exactly where it’s heading.

We’ll water each other’s plants, pick up each other’s mail, take each other’s Christmas card photos. We’ll confer about jog bras and contractors and pediatricians. We’ll gossip about babysitters, teachers, neighbors, in laws. We’ll speculate about who had a shot of Botox, who cheats on their taxes, who cleans until midnight. We’ll implore each other to read this book or see this movie or listen to this song. We’ll persuade each other to bake, sell, recruit, fold, stuff, paint, clean and write checks for our favorite non-profits.

We’ll celebrate each other’s achievements –opening an exercise studio, a corner store, a jewelry business. We’ll celebrate our kids’ achievements – making the traveling team, singing in the choir, learning to use the potty or speak French or play the flute. We’ll borrow eggs, earrings, extra chairs, galvanized tubs for a barbeque. We’ll throw birthday parties for each other and stain the rugs and shatter the wine glasses and mark up new counters with the odd slice of lemon. We’ll worry about who seems down, who looks tired, whose drinking more and more. We’ll say things we wished we hadn’t and have to find a way to regain each other’s trust. Things will break, they always do. Many will be fixed.

We’ll fret over our children—too shy, too loud, too angry, too needy. We’ll brainstorm ways to help them become more resilient, patient, forgiving, light-hearted. We’ll protect them—fiercely—pulling little bodies from the deep end, double-latching windows, withholding car keys.

We’ll bury our mothers and our fathers—shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red eyes, telling each other stories that hurt to hear about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person come into the world as it is to watch a person leave it.

People will drift in and out. Book clubs will swell and thin. We’ll write someone off and they’ll reemerge later and we’ll remember both why we loved them and why we let them slip away but we’ll be softer and we’ll want them back, for nostalgia will get stronger.

We’ll admire each other for a fine crème brule, a promotion, a degree, a finished marathon. We’ll commiserate about commutes, layoffs, mortgage rates, bosses, unappreciated toys. We’ll confide in each other about feeling anxious or angry or uninteresting or uninspired or how many pieces of Halloween candy we accidentally ate from our kids’ bags. We’ll confess that our husbands don’t really listen to us or that we should be having more sex or that we yell at our kids every day. We’ll admit that we believe in God, Jesus Christ, Heaven and Hell, or that we don’t.

We’ll give up things together—caffeine, catalogs, Costco, social smoking. We’ll take up things too—morning walks, green tea, organic dairy, saying grace.

We’ll throw potlucks and take each other to lunch and give each other frames and soaps and bracelets. We’ll check each other’s heads for lice and examine new bumps and moles and listen to lists of symptoms. We’ll diagnose each other’s brown lawns, torn muscles, basement odors. We’ll teach other how to set a ring tone, make a slide show, download a movie.

We will call and say “I heard the news” and whatever the news is, we will come running, probably with food. We’ll insist on taking the kids, finding second opinions, lots of rest and the best surgeon. We will face diseases, many kinds, and will—temporarily—lose our hair, our figures and our minds.

Eventually, someone whose not supposed to die will, maybe one of us, maybe a husband, God forbid a child, and all this celebrating and sharing and confessing will make certain essential comforts possible. We’ll rally around and hold each other up and it won’t be nearly enough but it will help the time pass just a hair faster than it would have otherwise. We will wait patiently and lovingly for that first laugh after the loss. When it comes, and it will come, we will cry as we howl as we clutch as we circle. We will transcend, ladies. Because we did all this, in that worst moment, we will transcend.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say.