Happiness is My Choice, 16

I make my own frame of mind, and therefore, I choose to be contented. I want to be a force for Good. If I am dependent on others to determine my level of contentment, I will lose my serenity when (not if) they change their moods. I will cede my desires and my capability of being a source of Good, and follow the whims of others. That is not how I wish to live, nor how I see my role on the earth.

Driving, with happy thoughts. © JustHavingFun

Yesterday I tried an experiment. I drove toward home after an appointment. The sky glowered, low and gray, and the wind whipped up a chill. From inside my cozy car, I decided to bless all I saw. I thought about each person I saw and stated something positive aloud:

• A man sitting on the bench at a bus stop, huddled over: “Stay warm.”
• The UPS delivery van driver coming toward me: “You help so many people.”
• A group of teens standing at the corner after school: “Have fun with your friends.”
• Someone getting into a car: “Drive safely.”

At each utterance, I felt a frisson of joy. I was sending good wishes, blessings, into the universe! I changed the world.

HaSameach b’Chelko: One who is happy with what he has. © JustHavingFun

Focusing on the pleasant readjusts my attitude, too. I could have been vexed by the pokey driver who was somewhat erratic, seeming to pull over then come back to the center of the road. Instead, I said kindly, “I can understand your confusion, but next time, please use a signal.” I do it other times, too:

• Hearing sirens in the distance: “I pray nobody is ill or in need. Please help them and may the responders be protected.”
• Seeing a flock of birds whirl above: “How beautiful your flight is.”
• Commenting on a person’s appearance: “Your hair looks so nice.”
• A helicopter circles above: “Let the police be assisted in their duties.”
• At an intersection: “I am glad all cars stopped and drivers are patiently waiting.”

Our words have power. When I choose to focus on the pleasant, or on the condition of others, not only do I change myself, but I also let loose power in the world. We understand that the Creator used words to create everything. Modern science shows that our thoughts change our brain biochemistry. Nothing is random, it is all connected.

So for today, I choose to manifest Goodness and Pleasantness. May my comments inspire others to be positive, embrace serenity, and be happy.

Dance with Spikes

I saw these men’s shoes that reminded me of a bulldog’s collar a few weeks ago at Mondawmin Mall. Stores at this shopping center cater to a primarily African-American clientele. Even taking differences in culture into account, aren’t these shoes a bit… extreme? Are they the product of fun and delight or an abominable show of déclassé style?

Spiky shoes. Ouch! © JustHavingFun

Whoa! I thought. Who would wear that? Spikes and pyramids spangle a black glitter background. These shoes look mean! Or… something. I don’t know how to interpret them! Through my middle-aged white-lady eyes, they are hideous and mysterious, ostentatious and camp. They made me laugh. They shout c’mon! Let’s go!! 

I guess I’m not the “going” type.

There’s no accounting for tastes in fashion. Call me a fuddy-duddy but I believe young men’s underwear should be on the inside of one’s pants, contrary to the popular (amongst some) “sagging” style. Likewise, I’m still shy about visible bra straps and form-hugging fabrics that show EVERY bump.

Still, I had to go into the store and photograph this display. While there were similarly spangled women’s stiletto-heeled pumps across the aisle (women’s shoes having been torturous and outrageous for a long time)*, these male styles boggled my mind.

New Arrivals; Ready to Party! © JustHavingFun

I like a good amount of glitz however, and I’m always up for a celebration! So when I went inside the store, I saw that the bulldog collar shoes had cousins that were ready to party! The multi-colored glittery ones, third from the left, attracted my eye. Any guy wearing these shoes has to know how to have fun, F-U-N! Now I’m ready! Let’s go!! I want to dance with Mr. Sparkly Toes.

Have you seen any “extreme” fashions lately that have captured your imagination? Let me know in the comments.

——–

*(I have some real strong opinions on women’s footwear, but they are for another time.)

Happiness is My Choice, 15

How do I react when disasters occur? What is my response to adversity?

WBAL news reports flooding in the Baltimore area, July 2018.

When nature doesn’t seem so natural, when events confound me, when a roadblock is placed in my way, do I panic and flounder about, or do I go forward by choosing a different route?

So many events, even daily occurrences, do not go the way I expect them to go. Surprises can create joy or terror. By their nature, surprises are… unexpected. We do not foresee them, changes in routine disrupt comfortable patterns of action, and we can become amused, befuddled, or even crippled. Some reactions are beyond control; the aha moment upon seeing fireworks and the pain of a broken bone force themselves upon us equally, though not equally desirable.

Surprises follow a spectrum. Good or bad. Big or small. Delightful or horrid. For some reason, we mostly focus on the small, bad, everyday experiences. These events captivate us and take over our thoughts. Our emotions cascade in response to the little things, and they build on each other. Predictably, some of these “bad” things may be somewhat within my control. I think that’s why they are so annoying.

Roadblocks. Most of my “bad days” start with small roadblocks:  I forget that the coffee supply needs to be replenished, so I may be unready to face the day. Like many people, my morning coffee—the anticipation of inhaling that sharp aroma and sipping the warm liquid—can propel me into the world some days. When I don’t get what I anticipate and desire, my 3-year-old self may emerge. All due to a small, unpleasant surprise. The jar was empty. Someone (i.e. me) did not put it on the shopping list.

And if I let it, the bad day can continue. I get drenched in a rainstorm walking from the parking lot to my business. I could have checked the weather report but missing my coffee threw me off, so I didn’t have the foresight to carry an umbrella. By the time I got to work, the heavens opened and the deluge splashed around me. Naturally, I wore sandals, so my feet got soaked, too. Then once in the office, while drying off, I missed the call saying the 11 o’clock meeting was being moved up to 10. At 10:15 I notice the department sounds quiet and nobody is around. Glancing at my online calendar, I see a flashing notice asking me where I am. Yikes!

Affirmations for positive thinking.

Late for the meeting, the boss glares at me when I slide into my seat. I fail to pay attention to the presentation and missed the project update. After the meeting I realize I left my lunch in the refrigerator at home. I nibble on some crackers I keep in my bottom drawer but they don’t appease my hunger. Then my computer reboots in the middle of a calculation and I hadn’t saved the file. It’s all lost! Worse and worse. I’m in a brown mood the rest of the day after that. I just cannot get caught up. Everything snowballs into a big mess. By the end of the day, an acid ball roils in the pit of my stomach and I can’t wait to go to bed. It’s still raining when I leave the office and my feet get wet again. Say goodbye to that lousy day. But wait! I forgot to stop by the market and buy more coffee!

I can rewrite the scenario above, change my outlook, with the following directions: stay calm, be peaceful, get centered. I can control my reactions to today’s challenges.

Catastrophizing the lack of coffee, beating myself up for having forgotten to purchase it, started my descent into a “bad day.” How could I turn that around? Isn’t it inevitable that would trigger the events of the day? Any one of those little adverse events could confront me on a given day. On a catastrophic “I didn’t have my coffee” day, they become mountains to scale, larding my mood with the foulest of weightiness. Drawn down further and further, I see only the bottom of the hole. That thinking certainly is not compatible with serenity.

Frustration Ahead!

Happiness is my choice. Lighten up. It’s coffee, not surgery. We take everything so seriously so that when a stumbling block appears, we trip.

Here’s what I would do to change that day: There’s no coffee. I’d reach for a pen and scribble it on the shopping list mounted on the refrigerator door. Or more recently, I speak aloud, saying, “OK Google. Add coffee to Shopping List.” After listening for the confirmation, I would reach for some tea. Sipping it, I would notice the sky looks gray, or listen to the weather report. Changing out of sandals and grabbing an umbrella, I would leave the house for work. And so on.

Not quite what I wanted, but it will suffice. It will suffice. The world will not stop spinning because I don’t have coffee. It’s not the end of the world. I can get coffee later. I can go to a drive through, or stop in for a cup somewhere if I need it so badly. Living with life’s little disappointments—living life on life’s terms—makes my day manageable, pleasant even. Fewer worries. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Roadblocks are blockages, not necessarily solid barriers. We find alternate routes, travel different byways, employ substitutions, and there’s no need for panic or dismay. Putting things into perspective allows us to cope, weather the storms, and live a more comfortable, pleasant existence. Happily.

Oh Fear, Disappear

Oh Fear, do disappear
Disappear from my eyesight, my doorstep, my home
Take back what you gave me: the shivers, a chill
That sense of impending doom
And hie with your tail between your legs,
A whipped cur slinking back to his den.

Oh Fear, you cunning traitor
Who sets my pulse ajumping,
one hundred beats per minute or more
Whose icy chill drips down my neck
and voice rasps “no victory” though
the opposing army’s boots retreat across
smoking battlefields,
while you gnaw on enemy bones
stripped of flesh.

Fear, you lie and deceive and spread
tales to shock the feeble heart, rend us
wan and faint. You say we cannot paint in
rainbow colors, you quench the songbird’s delight.
Your talons scrape through diamond-tough skin
but never quite pierce.

You no longer walk beside me, Fear; be
stranded, hang from the precipice,
drip your ichor, nurse your bruises.
Lick your wounds in silence and agony, waste
your few remaining days in grief.
Oh Fear, do it now Fear,
Go. Disappear.

Night Terror. ©JustHavingFun

Jury Duty Duty

Juror 4067

I prayed for more snow and school closures. Dismayed there were only 2 inches of snow at 11 p.m., I reluctantly set my alarm for 6-ish a.m., knowing I’d snooze it after tuning in to WBAL radio to learn if the City Courts would be closed. My first Jury Duty in Maryland loomed ahead in the morning—a morning after Baltimore suffered an attack of snow.

Handicapped Ramp looking north, uphill, to St. Paul Street

Baltimore does not react well to snow. Whether it’s due to being full of Southerners who become panicky at the first flake of the white stuff, or the fact that people are used to driving recklessly (i.e. ”normally”) and get frustrated because icy conditions force them to think twice about passing a right-turning vehicle on the right for a change, driving here after a storm can be fraught with danger and obstacles. Although I thought I’d built in enough travel time to arrive at the Courthouse—after finding the parking garage—by the 8 a.m. call time, I did not factor in how impossibly choked the beautifully plowed I-83 would be at that hour.

Woe, how naïve l am. I’m glad I had a thermos of strong coffee in the car.

“Accessible Entrance on Fayette Street” sign

Jury Duty was still ahead of me and I was worn out from the trip! Less than 10 miles from town, it took me the better part of an hour to get to the parking garage. Waze failed finding an alternate route; actually my phone is on its last leg (phone fail imminent!) and kept shutting down mid-calculation. Fortunately I’d looked at the original directions before leaving home so I wasn’t entirely lost. That is, I wasn’t lost until I started heading toward the Courthouse. I pulled up a map, and intrepidly started the trek … only to find myself four blocks northwest of my destination and panicky because it was 8:35. LATE! will I be fined? Jailed? Told to come back another day?

And then the phone battery died. Again. Time for a new phone, for sure.

Drizzle dappled my non-compliant phone screen. Happily a woman told me which way to walk as her son had been on jury duty last week.

Limping due to a sciatica flare up, I found the building and the Fayette Street entrance with a ramp (which the Jury Summons instructed to use; the building’s address is on Calvert Street). The clerk told me to go out, walk up the block and around the corner, to the St. Paul Street entrance.

St. Paul Street Courthouse Entrance

A statue of Cecilius Calvert, Baron Baltimore, etc. (see link for entire title), graces the St. Paul Street entranceway. So does a familiar blue Handicapped Entrance sign—at the bottom of a dozen-or-so steps—directing one to the first entrance I’d tried! I pulled myself up the first flight using the cold, wet handrail. My coat’s belt set off the metal detector, but luckily the sandwiches in my bag passed. I muddled anyway to the jury assembly room at 8:50. I had arrived!

The Jury Summons had assigned me Reporting Number 4067. Happily, by the time I entered, 4000 through 4100 had been invited to line up, check in, and get paid. $15 will cover the parking and the $1.50 diet Pepsi I bought from the machine in the Jury Assembly “Quiet Room.” With a bad case of “dead phone-itis,” I whipped out my extra-long phone card and charger I’d thoughtfully packed, found a plug, and settled down. Hmmm, no wi-fi. Sigh. Now that my “duty” had been done, I was ready for Jury Duty.

Or was I, I wondered?

Cacophony

Just viewing the photo makes my ears ring! The cacophony of car horns, traffic, and the swirl of people on an average day in midtown Manhattan makes me woozy. It’s too much: too much noise, too many people, too much aggression, everyone vying for their place.

NYC at Noon. © JustHavingFun

When I lived in New York City I learned to walk with arms akimbo, elbows out, so I could have my own space on the sidewalk and not be run over by some mindless drone looking at his cell phone screen while zooming down the street.

The endless jockeying and competition, the noise pressure, and the thump thump heartbeat of the City are a siren song for some but alas, not for me. When crossing the street became an art form as skilled as ballet, when maintaining my four-square feet of personal space became an obsession, when the subway became my greatest source of entertainment, I knew I had succumbed. I was indeed a New Yorker.

Ya gotta love it! Or hate it! But nobody can stay neutral about it: New York. Everywhere you look something new pops out. One day you may see performers, the next day pigeons, then the glitz of Broadway and Times Square, and the next day homeless people, but something always catches the eye.

But oh, the sounds! The noise. The cacophony of car horns and trucks backing up, scratching against the strains of street performers and buskers. The subway cars that sound like the opening strains of “Somewhere” from West Side Story: There’s a place for us…. Yes, there’s a place for us going uptown.

I took my fingers out of my ears and held up the decibel meter when the train approached the platform. It routinely topped 85 dB. “Mom, you look silly,” my children decried. “Nobody does that.” “I do,” I countered. My hearing and tinnitus thank me for blocking some of the extraneous sound.

Nowadays, out of the New York zone, I swallow fewer headache remedies, don’t need earplugs except when running my blender, and my ears are buffeted by the sound of rain drops hitting the pavement on my porch…

…and fire engine and police sirens of the uneasy urban soundscape which comprises Baltimore’s night.

New Beginning

Last month I started a new career. Finally after a long time searching, I became another full-time busy bee in our economy. I am so very grateful. G-d is putting me in a place where I can help others and strengthen our community. I will have a chance to make a difference in peoples’ lives. And I work with some swell people.

Monarch Butterfly on Zinnia. © JustHavingFun

I’m feeling rather enlightened. The non-profit agency I work for does way more than I’d imagined. So many dedicated people pour their hearts and souls into the various programs. Their creativity sparkles. Caring blankets their work. People from various backgrounds pull together for one cause: betterment of peoples’ lives. As I pore through the agency’s historical documents and learn about the ongoing and future programs, I’m proud by association. Look what a small group has been able to accomplish and view the future through expansive eyes as more can be helped.

This boon fell upon me as millions of people suffer: Houston’s victims of Hurricane Harvey; Florida, Cuba, and Caribbean islands from Hurricanes Irma & José; wildfires in the western states; an 8.2 magnitude earthquake in Mexico; and daily murders here in our charming Charm City. It would be easy for anyone to sit back and refrain from doing anything in this troubled time. We feel there is little we can do—even sending dollars to help the needy doesn’t feel like enough. Helpless, overwhelmed, and confused, we watch the news as it informs of another catastrophe.

I have an answer to that feeling: Do Something. Not everyone has the good fortune of working in an agency like mine, but that should not be a deterrent. Maybe she can’t help Puerto Rico, but she can volunteer in her community: driving seniors, reading to the blind, stuffing envelopes, knitting for charity. Perhaps he has skills sufficient to tutor children, repair bicycles, or make phone calls.

If everyone took on one “charitable” project, what a world of difference it would make! Just like the butterfly effect, where the proverbial butterfly flaps its wings in one hemisphere and affects weather in the opposite one, our positive acts can effect worldwide changes.

A single positive action from each one of us can change the world. I’m so fortunate that I get to see positive actions accumulating favorable results every day. Talk about new beginnings!

 

Possibilities

Today I’m focusing on what is possible. We control an amazing force—the potential to do something! In physics, an object’s potential energy relates to its proximity to other objects. How will it act? What will it be capable of doing? What factors act upon it?

Possible Sunflower. © JustHavingFun

As we age, we find ourselves conveyed into increasingly narrow channels. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. We become specialized. Certain decisions will collapse other options. If you turn right, you obviate the choice of turning left. If you choose fish for dinner, you will not have eaten beef. And so on.

Here’s a career choice example. You start school as a blank sheet of paper. Then you take a full slate of classes—biology, art, sociology, and computers—and one will pique your interest more than the others. In college a course in developmental biology seems fascinating. You end up working for a professor who studies chick embryo neural tube development mutations, which leads to your Ph.D. research in genetic defects that cause spina bifida. You didn’t start out to become a research scientist. You simply liked biology class and decided to pursue that area of study. At some point, access to time and resources for delving deeper into art history, organizational hierarchies, or computer natural language development, say, becomes less available. Few people have the wherewithal to pursue a second field with the same verve as their first. Or, they wait until later in life and take it on as a second career—or not at all.

But the potential still exists. Possibilities don’t vanish completely as long as intellectual curiosity propels us forward.

Every choice we make hones us and refines us in ways we can’t imagine. That doesn’t have to make us narrow people. The rhythm by which we live is not a steady, monotonous drumbeat. The rhymes we repeat to ourselves don’t all end with the same syllable. The songs we sing have more than one stanza.

Possibility opens us to different ways of looking at things: a ball of yarn becomes a sweater, a calendar photo becomes a vacation, an appeal for charity becomes a passion. Our personal potential becomes expressed because of the choices we’ve made, the roads we travel down. But the other roads still exist.

Stem cells are plenipotent; they have the capability of becoming any type of cell in the body when they mature. So, too, are humans. We are born plenipotent, able to become any type of person and fit any career, following manifold interests. The beauty of humankind though, is that once we do fit ourselves to some mold, we can branch out. We can explore our possibilities. We can expand our world to include aspects outside of our immediate circle of knowledge. We can let other aspects into our consciousness, work on them, enjoy their possibilities.

The sunflower has no choice but being a sunflower. Its fate is predetermined and set. We, however, can enjoy the variety of knowledge, reflect upon the various possibilities that the world presents us. Just because we research spina bifida doesn’t mean we’re excluded from writing songs. Our rhymes are not squelched; rather, they are enhanced by the bits and pieces that total the world of possibilities.

For today, it is possible for me to break out of my mold, to incorporate various possibilities into my life song.

 

 

Happiness is My Choice, 14

With all the noise and clatter of today’s world, the incessant advertisements and social pressures, the still small voice of the authentic self—our souls—can be easily drowned out. We are sensual beings, experiencing the world through our skins.

Red Maple. © JustHavingFun

Listening to birdsong can lift my heart if I allow myself to pause, and recognize the miracle that it is. Birdsong is a gift. How can it be? A creature the size of my fist has the power to fill the air with song! Birds have a syrinx, a special organ to produce that multi-note trilling. We don’t have them. Do we lack?

What about the cricket song symphony of a summer’s afternoon? How is it that stridulations of an insect’s limb or wing, multiplied by a thousand, can blanket the air with sound? If I stop what I’m doing, I realize they are singing. It’s only in my silence that I hear their songs.

What message do the lightning bugs encode in their evening travels? I’ve watched them shape the dark with Morse code-like flashes. Their travels define a unit of space, their paths as distinct as a fingerprint; their flashes stutter a secret pattern as they fly through the night. To think as a child I trapped them in jars, quieting their dialogues forever.

And flowers, oh the abundance of flowers! Colors, textures, scents, foliage. From early spring to the beginning of winter, these bursts of color elicit deep sensations.

Hydrangeas. © JustHavingFun

When I desist from my busyness and resist the lure of my phone, screen, kitchen, and bed, I turn to the sky. The moon in her brilliance, the clouds in their majesty, the rustling of the wind in the trees gain my attention. My soul gets nourished by nature’s caress. My authentic self can breathe a bit deeper and savor the sensations.

Happiness doesn’t come from things. Rather, it’s events, experiences we share—or not. I relish simple pleasures like breathing deeply in fresh air, feeling heat prickles when I enter my car in summer,  the sound and feeling of snow crunching underfoot, the breeze ruffling the fine hair on my arms—things I notice when I’m not distracted.

I recall the scent of peonies and the fuzz on that juicy peach tickling my nose. The sounds of trains rattling down nearby tracks stitch through the night’s darkness. And the succulent sourness of a fresh-cut lemon puckers my lips. These pleasures have been described in ancient literature and we can still relate to them. They rely on nothing save our senses taking in the beauty of the world. They  speak to my soul, refreshing it, and bringing it back safe to this body for another day.

Simple pleasures? Yes.

Universal? Yes, oh yes!

Can’t Go Back Home

“Bacchus/Dionysus” Apartments, Regent Square. © Just Having Fun

Back home. All memories seem bright until you get there:

Pittsburgh, my home, isn’t home anymore. Buildings are shabbier, streets more narrow, stores smaller, pavements more broken up, lawns weedier, properties needier. Store facades lack pizzazz, fashions seem grayer, people walk bent over, and hairstyles belong to the 1980s. Indeed, mullets haven’t died out there, and jagoffs still crowd the Parkway.

I don’t live there anymore. Home livens my dreams, though. I spent so much of my life there; it formed subterranean parts of me. But now I live in another place, sipping another culture, another state of mind.

“Home” speaks my vernacular. Home wears the gown of happy memory. Home sidewalks remember my skinned knees. Home parks have water fountains where I slurped away my thirst. Home benches remember nights I sat there looking across the river at the shining city. Home playgrounds hold my childhood.

Duquesne Incline from Carson Street. Image: Dan Buczynski, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Away: We’re away from the inevitable aging, concrete crumbling, roadways growing potholes. We forget the annoyances of overflowing sewers, flooding, and road closures. Traffic cones move from site to site, an ever present landscape feature, but we lose our way among the newly created maze—new to our minds at least. “Remember where that big pothole was that they didn’t fix for a couple’a years?” We dodged it every time, and now just ride over the smooth street, the pothole a trouble only in the past.

Local politics, local concerns, don’t interest me because I’m not a part of it anymore. The hallmarks of the community, saying “yinz” and wearing shirts emblazoned with Steelers or Pirates logos, color the culture. Familiar local landmarks take on an importance they never shone with when I lived there. Pointing to repurposed buildings we remember aloud, “That’s where Isaly’s used to be;” or looking toward South Side, “J&L used to cover that entire shore of the river, before the Cheesecake Factory.”

Taylor Allderdice High School, Aerial View, circa 1930-1945 approx. Image: Boston Public Library collection, CC BY-NC/2.0

I can’t go back home. The people aren’t there anymore. The “kids” I hung out with are spread across the map. They’re getting ready for retirement and buying condos in Florida. My high school’s awe-inspiring facade hides behind a blocky addition; my university has new buildings across campus. Downtown features newer, brighter buildings. Even the subway stretches to new distances, under the Allegheny River to the North Side and the stadium.

This is not MY Home anymore, but it is an extension of it—another dimension, say. If I lived there still, I would not notice the changes in the ways I do now. I would be a part of the rerouted traffic, commuting to my job without comment, or grumbing about PennDOT like everyone else. Local problems would not seem so exotic or notable the hundredth time we encountered them.

I can’t go back home, but I can look at it again like a many-faceted jewel—preserved in a museum showcase, or worn proudly on my finger—and see the lights glinting from within.