Motivational words from a 13-year-old

I find words of inspiration in so many places. The works of Shakespeare. The journal entries of Thoreau. The poetry of t.s. eliot and Mary Oliver. Essays by Barbara Kingsolver. Church sermons and motivational speeches. But earlier this week, it was the words of a 13-year-old from Belmont that made me reverse course and do the right thing.

The crux of my role as library volunteer coordinator is to ensure that I’ve scheduled one or two volunteers to cover each classroom shift in the school library to assist the full-time librarian. Usually it all goes smoothly until winter hits, and then random viruses, extemporaneous vacations and bad weather cause my volunteers to start dropping like flies, at which point it becomes my responsibility to step in and do it myself.

In this case, it wasn’t even a last-minute call. This particular volunteer had let me know two days in advance that she couldn’t cover her shift. I’d already depleted all my library substitute resources for the week, so I told her not to worry about it; I could cover it myself. I put it on my Google calendar and promptly forgot about it.

When the ten-minute warning alarm sounded on my iPhone midmorning, I couldn’t imagine what the warning was for. I was in the middle of drafting an article and was sure I didn’t have any appointments scheduled for the day. And it was still hours until I had to meet Holly’s bus.

But when I glanced at the screen on my phone, there it was: 11 a.m. library shift. I’d absolutely forgotten.

Can’t do it, I immediately told myself. Too busy. The school librarian can manage without me. She appreciates us volunteers helping out, but she won’t mind covering by herself this once. I won’t even tell her I was supposed to do it; I’ll just tell her that the usual volunteer had to cancel and I didn’t have anyone else to cover. She’ll never know that it was actually me who reneged on the commitment.

And then for some reason, I remembered an interview I’d done a few weeks ago. I was talking to a 13-year-old named Nelson about his decision to step forward and initiate a fundraiser for the genetic condition from which his brother suffers. This was a big step for this young man. He didn’t normally talk much about the fact that his brother was nonverbal and mobility-impaired. And in the particular group that was looking for a cause to support with a fundraiser concert – the 13-year-old’s afterschool music program – he was new and hardly knew any of the other kids yet.

There was no reason, he had previously thought, to discuss his personal life and talk about his brother’s difficult situation with them. For all they knew, his family life was just like theirs, and he was happy to keep it that way.

But then, he told me during our interview, a thought came to his head. If no one else knew about his brother, it was a sure thing that no one else was going to suggest dedicating their fundraiser to research for this condition. Nelson was the only person in the room who had the set of information necessary to propose this idea – and, he realized at that moment, if he didn’t do it, no one else would. Or, as he put it, “My philosophy is that if you’re the only person who can do something and you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. So I just went up there and talked.”

I thought of Nelson in the moments after my calendar alarm went off. True, I could get away with skipping library duty. No terrible consequence would come of it. On the other hand, I was the only one who knew it needed to be done. In this particular case, it was more my responsibility than anyone else’s in the entire world. Just as Nelson said, if I didn’t do it, it was a sure thing that no one else would.

So I went up to the library and did my volunteer shift. As always, it was easy and fun. Yes, it took an hour out of my workday, but somehow I managed to make up for it by the time the day was over. And Nelson was absolutely right: when you’re the only person who can do a thing, you’d darn well better do it.

Lesson learned, from the most unlikely of places. I love Nelson’s philosophy. It’s a quote you might never see in calligraphy on a wall hanging or inscribed in a book. But it was a fine reminder to me of how to do the right thing, and I feel sure that the words of Nelson Barnett will stay in my mind for a long time – and, I hope, ring out loud and clear once again the next time I’m in a dilemma about whether or not to step forward.

Simple words of inspiration reinvigorate my daily running habit

For the past few weeks, my daily run has been….well, less than ideal.

It seems my pace gets slower and slower. We’ve had some really hot, humid weather already this summer, and our new neighborhood is a lot buggier early in the day than our old neighborhood was; even if I protect myself with a hat and sunscreen, the horseflies cluster around my dog’s ears and annoy both of us.

So even as my daily streak approaches its four-year anniversary next month, I’ve cut back just a little on distance, reducing my typical weekend 5- or 6-milers to just four miles the past couple of weeks, and not even trying to go beyond my weekday 2-mile route the other five days of the week.

But even though I’ve maintained my daily running streak – which is at 1439 days as of this morning – it just hasn’t been fun. In fact, it’s been a drag. I drag myself out the door. I drag myself along the road and back. I drag myself through the paces of running, day after day, without my usual enthusiasm.

And then yesterday morning, I was going through my usual early-morning routine, the one that begins even earlier than my daily run: I write Morning Pages and then check email before I lace up my running shoes.

Normally, waiting in my email box at this early hour is a daily inspirational quote from gratefulness.org. And most days I find this helpful. Some examples are more meaningful than others to me, but I almost always find something insightful, encouraging, educational, illuminating or thought-provoking in the words of the daily quote. But over the past several days, no daily inspirational email had arrived. And then yesterday the bottleneck was apparently broken, and there were five. But none of them struck me as inspirational at all.

“All attack is a call for help. When you know this, you begin at once to look deeply into the question of what kind of help is being called for,” said one, attributed to theologian and writer Neale Donald Walsch.

“Let us accept the invitation, ever-open, from the Stillness, taste its exquisite sweetness, and heed its silent instruction,” wrote the late British philosopher Paul Brunton.

Some days these missives inspire me, but on this particular day, they neither made me feel like going out to live a better life nor like going out for my daily run.

And then on Twitter I found this one, from Maurilio Amorim, a marketing and technology entrepreneur and runner in Tennessee: "Morning workouts help me clear my mind and awaken my creativity."

That’s right, said the ever-present voice in my head. That’s the part I’ve been forgetting recently. Running isn’t just about the physical sense of well-being and strength. Sometimes, on hot humid days or for any number of other reasons, that sense of physical wellness just isn’t part of the experience. But this is the part I’d been overlooking as of late. I don’t run just for the physical power surge it gives me; I run because, as Maurilio Amorim says, it helps me clear my mind and awaken my creativity.

Stop thinking about how you feel, I reminded myself – the humidity, the sleepiness, the ever-annoying horseflies – and remember this part: the mind-clearing part. That’s still the most important reason. Rather than thinking that your muscles are moving slowly, think of the run as the part of the day where you gather together your dissipated mental energy and channel it into the creativity and initiative required for the day ahead.

Those thoughts stayed with me as I headed down my driveway. Somehow in recent weeks I’d forgotten about the mental clarity I gain from running; I’d let the physical aspects, most of which have been negative lately, overrun my consciousness. And it wasn’t philosophers or theologians, motivational speakers or athlete-gurus, who put me back on track. It was one cyber-acquaintance in Tennessee, with eleven words that I needed to hear.

I suppose it goes without saying that running hasn’t felt so good all summer as it did yesterday.

Easier said than done

Yesterday’s daily dose of inspiration from Gratefulness.org was this quotation from Bulgarian philosopher and mystic Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov:

“If you see to it each day that your conduct is impeccable, the following day will be completely clear, and you will be free to carry out your plans, always vigilant that you leave no loose ends. In this way, each new day will find you free and well disposed.”

That’s an inspirational quote? was my initial reaction. It struck me as more of a tautology, or even perhaps a particularly eloquent truism, since to me it translates roughly as “If you can just be perfect, you’ll have nothing to regret.” Well, of course. It’s all easy, if you can just get past that enormous “If” starting things off there.

But in a way it’s just a fancier revisiting of the universally applicable “One day at a time.” “Do things right today, and you’ll have less to worry about tomorrow,” it seems to say. Again, undeniably true if not quite so easy to execute, but still worth keeping in mind.

The general idea behind this somewhat murky quotation reminded me of a list of holistic tips I received recently from a yoga instructor. These were the first two:

1. Every morning before getting out of bed, notice what first thoughts rush in. Are they about the past? The future and what needs to be done that day? Has your mind jumped ahead to next week, next year, retirement?

2. When you get out of bed and go about your morning routine, notice your energy level. Aside from the amount of sleep you got, what did you eat the day before? Be conscious of what foods and drinks leave you feeling sluggish and unhappy in the morning, and what foods energize you for the new day.

Over the course of last summer, I became aware of how often I awoke to a sense of grinding anxiety. There were some specific reasons for this, and there were also some non-specific reasons, but even knowing I was to some degree justified in my anxiety, it bothered me a lot to think that just when I should be appreciatively greeting the new day, my first unbidden reaction was one of moderate panic, day after day. I would think about some of the other women I know and wonder if any of them woke to a sense of panic. I suspected they didn’t, at least not always, at least in the middle of summer. It just felt wrong to me, a clear indication that I needed to be doing something differently.

And it seems to me the same seems to hold true with digestive health as emotional well-being. As the yoga instructor says, what you eat one day should help you to wake with a sense of well-being and wellness the next. I am not always as vigilant about sensible eating as I should be and often wake with a sense that I didn’t make quite the best nutritional choices the day before. Yet indeed, like Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov says, just do things right one day and all will be well the next.

It’s a fairly steep requirement, but it’s also simple. Avoiding the urge to eat ten or twelve marshmallows after dinner, as I so often choose to do, sounds easy compared to making sure everything I say is kind and well-meaning. But it’s a wise guideline nonetheless, whether you use the words of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov or of the yoga instructor as a compass. I will try to eat well. I will try to behave well. And I will gauge my success in both areas by how I feel the next morning.

One last Colorado post: Thinking more clearly west of the Continental Divide

One more vacation post before the week ends. (Yes, our vacation was last week, but rather than announce through an open-access blog that my whole family was out of town, I’m posting about it on a one-week delay.) So, one more Aspen post before I return to the realities of Carlisle…a place that at times is also nearly as bucolic as a vacation. But not quite, because home never is.

Aspen, on the other hand, always feels exotic to me, even though I’ve been spending a week or more there almost every summer since I was born. My family vacationed there when I was growing up; now I vacation there with my children. It’s a longstanding tradition.

I still remember how when I was barely older than Holly, I was aware that I felt different there. Specifically, I felt more creative, though I couldn’t have articulated it that way at the age of eight. I remember countless projects undertaken there as I was growing up that I never would have taken on at home. I read epic novels. I wrote dozens of letters to my friends back home, and to just about anyone else I could think of. I wrote poems and plays.

And it wasn’t just me. My mother would do amazing handiwork projects out there: knitting or needlepoint. My elder sister would take on complicated academic challenges like learning an entire year’s worth of AP bio. One summer when I was a teenager, I devoted most of my time to photography and even taught myself darkroom skills using Aspen’s community college facilities.

Once I was old enough to be aware of this phenomenon, it didn’t seem remarkable to me. We spent four weeks at a stretch in Colorado each summer, and I didn’t have any friends or scheduled activities out there. It made plenty of sense to me that I was more focused on creative projects than at home.

But later, in adulthood, when my vacation allotment shrank to only a week at a time, I was surprised to note I still felt more creative when I was there. I still accomplished more writing and reading, and came up with more ideas in general.

To some extent, this happens to almost everyone when leisure travel takes them away from home. In fact, I read an article recently about the appeal of SkyMall, the in-flight shopping catalog that you find on planes, and the article said that one reason those catalogs succeed is that they carry a range of self-help products – everything from exercise equipment to foreign language tapes – and people tend to be more open to the idea of self-improvement when they are traveling. Out of our usual context, many more changes seem possible.

But in more recent years, I’ve begun to suspect there actually is something in the Colorado air that sharpens my mind a little bit. For one thing, the summer climate is drier than in New England. Humidity tends to make people sluggish, which is certainly not ideal for creativity. Just as at home I feel sharper and more productive in October than in August, the dry, sunny, often cool Colorado air makes it easier to think. And there’s a certain scent in the air: wildflowers and sage. There’s even a sound I associate specifically with Aspen nights: the clip-clop of horses, since a horse-drawn wagon passes by our condo every night ferrying tourists around town.

Besides, I know for a fact it’s not just me. Aspen hosts all kinds of creative and intellectual events. It has the yearly Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference, which I attended last year, and also the yearly Aspen Ideas Festival and the Summer Music Festival. One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was running near the conference center just after lunch during the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was apparently a time when a lot of the conference participants take a break; thanks to the oversized laminated name tags they all wear, I eventually determined that within a one-mile stretch of the running path I’d passed a Supreme Court judge, a former secretary of state, three professors who are household names, a university president, and the director of a well-known think tank. It was a cerebral place to be running.

Unlike when I was a child or a teen, I can’t exactly leverage this rich source of creativity for maximum output anymore. When I was sixteen, I could spend hours sitting on a park bench writing; now family needs take precedence, and I’m lucky if I can find an hour a day for creative pursuits. But it happened again last week. I’d brought a reasonable amount of work with me, and to my surprise I did most of it, and I enjoyed the hours I spent working.

For whatever reason, the muses still call louder than ever once I cross the Continental Divide. Maybe it’s the vacation mindset. Maybe it’s the thinner air sharpening my thought process. Maybe it’s entirely the power of suggestion. Whatever the explanation, I try hard to capture as much of the creative spirit as I can while I’m there, and bottle it the only way I know how – with notes and drafts – and bring it home. Back to my real life, it’s not always easy to maintain the creative juices. We can’t be on vacation all the time. So, just as with the other benefits of vacation – relaxation, good exercise habits, more positive personal relationships -- we take the best of what we develop while we’re away and try hard to make it work for us at home.