Into Focus

This is the fourth year I’ve taken part in the “One Little Word’ Challenge popularized by writer/artist Ali Edwards. As Ali explains it, “….the idea is to choose a word….that has the potential to make an impact on your life….a single word to focus on over the course of the year.”

I always choose my word, and consequently write about it, in mid-January, once I have a feel for the New Year but still close enough to January 1^st to feel like a New Year’s ritual. But I always start looking for my word a little bit earlier. And this year, as I tried to think about it, I found that I kept thinking of the two-word phrase “rabbit holes.” As in “Don’t go down so many.”

This was problematic for many reasons. First of all, it’s two words, not one; but more importantly, it’s a negative, not a positive. The reason it stuck in my mind was not that I wanted it to guide me, as has been the case with past words I’ve chosen – “succeed”; “possible”; “walking”; “radiate” – but that I wanted to avoid it. And choosing a word as an admonition rather than a guidepost just didn’t feel to me to be in the spirit of the One Little Word exercise.

Then it occurred to me what the positive corollary was for the thing I was trying to say. “Don’t go down any rabbit holes.” Too negative. The positive version? “Focus.” Yes, that’s it. That’s my word. “Focus.”

It’s not the prettiest word: not like many others on the extensive list of words that participants in the challenge have sent to Ali Edwards. Her list brims with beautiful, alluring words like “serenity,” “balance,” “joy,” “simplicity,” “breath,” “acceptance,” “resolve,” “intent.” My word, by contrast, feels plain and ordinary.

But it’s “focus” for 2015 nonetheless, because my goal for this year is to overcome some of my distractedness. I’m distracted in tangible and obvious ways, like devoting too much time to social media and email; and I’m distracted in more elusive ways, like accepting opportunities I don’t really want and then having to follow through on them. My mission for 2015 is to pare down the distractions – stop going down the rabbit holes – and stay attentive to that which I mean to do. Focus on food when I’m cooking. Focus on my children when I’m devoting time to them. Focus on writing – and not Facebook – when I have an assignment. Focus on saying “No thanks” when I’m asked to do something I don’t want to do and don’t have to do.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that earlier today, I couldn’t even summon the focus to make a pot of coffee without interrupting myself. I measured the grounds, thinking about how I would write about the One Little Word Challenge, and then got the notion that maybe I could find quotes about focus. In the middle of making coffee, I hurried over to my computer to Google quotes.

It was the wrong thing to do, but it just proves there’s room for improvement. A lot of room for improvement. And the Google search that took me away from making coffee affirmed for me that many finer minds than mine have pondered the question of focus, from Henry David Thoreau to Steve Jobs. All of them affirm its importance; all of them also affirm its occasional elusiveness.

So I have my work cut out for me if I want to learn to be more focused this year. But that’s the purpose of this exercise: choose a word and weave it into your daily life. Focus. Do one thing at a time. Finish what you start. Pare away the extra stuff and avoid the rabbit holes. Like The Little Engine That Could, whose sole focus was on getting up the hill, I think I can. I’ll try, anyway.

The view from the passenger seat

I am not fond of driving. Not at all. I’ve often said that the singular drawback to living in Carlisle is all the time we spend driving places. Whether it’s for work, school, socializing, recreation, dining, or culture, we seem to be forever taking up a position behind the wheel.

Still, I never expected I’d have my own driver. I don’t even have regular cleaning help; the idea of someone to drive me around on errands or appointments was well beyond my imagining.

And yet that’s just the situation I’m in right now. My son Tim is in that narrow six-month time frame between receiving his learner’s permit and earning his driver’s license, an interlude in which the rules stipulate both that he must gain as much driving experience as possible and that he must do so under the watchful eye of a licensed and experienced driver.

So these days, Tim drives. He drives me to the supermarket and the drugstore, the post office and the library. He drives when we visit my parents. He drives when we drop off or pick up his younger sister from school or playdates. After three full decades of driving myself around, I now have someone whose assignment, and indeed whose pleasure, it is to drive me places.

This is not a developmental phase of childhood that I foresaw. I assumed Tim would want to learn to drive eventually, but as that benchmark loomed, I saw it mostly as a source of anxiety. How would I teach him the rules of the road? How would I explain how much room to give a car when passing, or what the perfect angle was for parallel parking?

But rather than being anxious, as I expected, I’m enjoying Tim’s company along with his chauffeuring services. He stopped wanting to join me for grocery shopping or other random errands at least ten years ago; given the choice, he would always opt to stay home. It’s fun spending more time together again. Moreover, it’s fun merely to see his enthusiastic response when I ask if he wants to go somewhere with me, even if I know that in truth his enthusiasm is more about the driving practice than about my company.

It’s not a time for intense mother-son dialogue. I don’t bring up college choices, or current events, or the moral and ethical dilemmas that teenagers typically face. He’s supposed to be concentrating on the road. But in a way, that’s what makes it so peaceful. It’s just the two of us, spending time close together without an agenda to cover or decisions to contemplate. It reminds me a little bit of the hours I spent roaming the neighborhood with him in a jog stroller or baby backpack when he was an infant. I was never one of those mothers who chatters nonstop to her small children. On those long, quiet walks or runs, it was all about the proximity, not the discourse.

So many developmental phases with children and teens are about growing apart, letting them finding their independence, allowing them to forge their own way. This period of driving together is one milestone that brings us closer together, even if more by regulation than by Tim’s choice. It’s a brief, tightly circumscribed interlude: only six months altogether, if he earns his license on the first try, and half of that time is already gone.

So I’ll just enjoy my chauffeur until the day he turns sixteen and a half. It’s nice to be driven around, and knowing it won’t last much longer, I’ll savor it all the more. He’ll eventually get his license, and then he’ll drive on his own, just as someday he will probably live on his own and spend even less time with me. For now, I’ll take all the time together that I can get. To me, it’s quality time, even if as far is Tim is concerned, all we’re doing is following the rules of the road.

Not finding time

I confessed that I had not read the book my mother was recommending, but that with luck I soon would. “Now that all my December deadlines are behind me, I’m hoping to find time to do some reading,” I said as our Christmas dinner conversation rolled onward.

“We don’t find time; we make time,” my father admonished gently.

He’s right, and I’ve been thinking back on his words ever since.

Surely that’s not a sentiment new to me, but sometimes when someone says just the right words at just the right time, they seem to increase exponentially in impact. I’ve been thinking about time management for my entire adult life. I’ve read books on time management, attended lectures, perused articles, interviewed experts.

But sometimes it’s the simplest words – even wrapped in the form of a father’s admonition – that carry the most weight.

“We don’t find time; we make time,” I repeated to myself as I cleared the dinner dishes and started measuring coffee grounds.

Even that act seemed to align with my thoughts. I love coffee, and I love it best of all the way I make it. If I want a perfect cup of coffee, I thought to myself, I don’t wander around hoping to find one. Hey look, maybe someone happened to leave a cup of coffee in my kitchen! No, of course not. I take out a filter, measure the grounds, pour cold water from a clean pot. Even choosing the right mug becomes part of the process.

I’m not sure what the parallel to choosing the right coffee mug is when it comes to time management, but the idea of making coffee just the way I like it rather than hoping to chance across it brought my thoughts back to my father’s words. Time won’t just appear like a magical cup of coffee in my kitchen. I will have to make it for myself, every bit as deliberately as I make coffee every day.

And what I want is specific: not endless amounts of time, not days or weeks, just a half-hour or so every day to devote to reading fiction, something I never seem to do enough of.

There are ways that I can make that time, I told myself with determination. I can get more efficient with housekeeping. I can consolidate my errands a little better. I can spend less time dabbling in social media or paging through catalogs and magazines full of products I never really intend to buy.

We don’t find time; we make time. I’m trying. The new year is less than a week old, but I’ve already managed to carve out some reading time every day. It didn’t find me; I created it. Dad was right; it’s a matter of agency. If I want time to read, I need to create it myself.

And then I’ll be able to savor it the way we savor anything we’ve made from our own hands and our own will, knowing it’s a gift not of chance but of effort. A little bit of time. What a gift to craft for myself, if I can just somehow track down the materials I’ll need to make it.

Blog(va)cation

On a blog-cation. Posting again next week!

Not so frazzled after all

My 12-year-old had invited ten friends over for a pre-vacation Christmas party that she had planned herself. It sounded like such an empowering idea at the time – she’s almost a teenager; if she wants to have a party, leave the planning up to her.

And yet there I was, putting the gifts the girls were handing me at the door into a basket for their gift exchange, baking one last batch of snowflake-shaped cookies, mixing up white frosting for decorating the cookies, sweeping a drift of flour off the kitchen floor, moving a pile of boots and shoes from the front doorway to the mudroom as fast as the girls could take them off, and assuring Holly that yes, the hot chocolate would definitely be made by the time she was ready to serve refreshments -- even though I hadn’t started making it yet. Holly was rushing around trying to light candles as her guests shrieked and hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other in six months rather than the four hours it had actually been since school let out.

In short, I was frazzled. And not just everyday-frazzled, but holiday-frazzled, which seems to come with a sticky powdered sugar glaze covering every possible surface.

And then the doorbell rang and another young guest arrived, walking in along with her mother, Elizabeth.

“Everything looks so cozy and Christmas-y!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “And the cookies smell so good! I haven’t even started holiday preparations yet.”

Like slipping on ice – or, perhaps more relevantly, on spilled flour – her words jolted me into a different perspective. Through her eyes, and because of her words, I noticed not the spills on the floor and the dishes in the sink but the smell of cookies baking and candles burning. Not the pile of boots the girls had left in the entrance but their joyful voices as they exchanged gifts and guessed who had given each one. Not the sound of the dishwasher beeping to signal it was ready to be unloaded – again! – but the Christmas carols Holly had pulled up on her iPod before the guests arrived.

This, I now understand, is what Christmas season is like. Not perfect and magical, but not solely chaotic and stressful either. It’s both, because that’s what it means to be an adult during the holidays, at least to be an adult responsible for children’s or other people’s holiday fun. Yes, it’s true that I don’t remember any stress whatsoever during the Christmases of my childhood, but that’s because I was just that, a child. Someone else was in charge. I remember thick snowdrifts, a hot fire, a tall decorated Christmas tree, the smell of a delicious dinner cooking. But I didn’t have to shovel the snow, or refill the firewood, or arrange for the arrival of the Christmas tree, or check the temperature of the roast.

Now it’s my turn to re-create this kind of carefree holiday for my children. Holly will remember this party for the cookie-decorating, the snow-globe-making, the general hilarity of ten girls who are just a few days from being on Christmas vacation. They won’t notice that the hot chocolate wasn’t ready until hour two of the party.

Elizabeth’s words were simple but eye-opening. Walk into someone else’s house, and you don’t see mess or frazzle; you see a lovely holiday ambience. I would probably feel the same way if I went to her house at this moment.

But I’m at my house, and so I should just enjoy the aroma of my own cookies baking. There will always be more dishes to wash, but Christmas week won’t last long at all. Best to enjoy every moment of it while it’s here.

Middle-aged

While running this past weekend, I listened to an interview with a novelist who has recently received a lot of literary attention. At one point during the conversation, she commented that she wasn’t yet comfortable thinking of herself as middle-aged. “I know I’m not really young,” she said, “but I certainly don’t feel middle-aged either.”

Based on a couple of things the writer had said earlier in the interview, I inferred she was in her mid-thirties, and I remember feeling the same way ten years ago – surely this can’t be considered middle-aged! So I was surprised a moment later when she said she was forty-four. When I realized she was just four years younger than me, I suddenly had less empathy for her qualms about the term “middle-aged.”

“But you are middle-aged,” I thought to myself. “I am, too. Being middle-aged now, if you take it literally, means we expect to live to be ninety. Surely you don’t think we’re at less than half our life span at this point.”

Even though the term itself has negative connotations, I have to acknowledge that I’ve been comfortable with it for a couple of years now. In fact, I specifically remember the first time I applied the term to myself, in an essay in our local newspaper. The day after publication, the father of one of my high school classmates said to me, “You can’t possibly be middle-aged! Because if you’re middle-aged, so is my daughter, and she cannot possibly be middle-aged!”

I was a little puzzled by his protestations. His daughter and I were both forty-five. Was he assuming we would both live to be over ninety? That’s certainly possible, but not something I would readily assume.

Regardless of actual chronology, it’s simply a term whose overall mien I’ve become comfortable with as of late. Because indeed, I do feel these days like I am at many midpoints. As a parent, I feel precisely in between the phase of of raising children and the phase of looking back on it. My children are 12 and 16; it feels as if that puts me right at the midpoint between a parent-to-be and being a parent of grown children.

Career-wise, too, I’m fine with the idea I’m in the middle. It took me a while, but I’m at a pretty good point right now with my work; there’s a tremendous amount I’d still like to accomplish, but I think I’m okay with the thought that there’s about the same amount of progress yet to be made as already covered.

And in so many other ways, too. As far as world travel, I like the thought that geographically speaking, I’ve covered about half the ground I’m ever likely to cover. I’ve visited many interesting places; if the same number of forays into the world lies ahead as behind, I’m happy with that. Even physically. It took me four decades to become someone who could run a half-marathon. Now I’m at that point, but I don’t expect to stay there forever. I’ll start declining in my physical abilities eventually. But for now, where I am feels fine.

Middle-aged. It’s an un-lyrical word with unappealing connotations, and maybe that’s why the novelist in the interview rejected the term. Yet putting all that aside, I’m fine with thinking of myself in the middle. It’s realistic and it’s comfortable. Here I am, and here I’ll be for a little bit longer, and then, barring disaster, eventually I’ll be even older and no longer middle-aged. For now, this feels just about right.

Project "Family Cookbook"

“Just for fun, my mother and I are writing a cookbook,” I told a friend back in October.

“Busman’s holiday?” she asked.

Yes, it’s true: my job is to write and my hobby is to write. And for the past four months or so, when I haven’t been working on deadline to finish drafting an article, a brochure, or a piece of marketing copy, I’ve been putting together a compilation of family recipes.

And yes, it’s a little geeky, but it’s fun. Like many families, we have long wanted to pull together all our favorite old recipes, and as I worked on my project, many friends and acquaintances told me of how their mothers or grandmothers or even they themselves had made up binders of photocopied pages, one set to be given to each family member, or even had them bound at a copy store.

But print-on-demand publishing opens new possibilities for families who want to generate recipe collections. True, it will look more professional – if perhaps not as artistically creative – than a looseleaf binder or leatherbound scrapbook compilation of recipes, but more importantly, we’ll have an unlimited supply. Because we are doing this with a print-on-demand publisher, our book will exist in the cloud, available to anyone at any time, for as long as there’s an Amazon. And speaking as a reader of the Business section, it looks to me like Amazon will probably survive both nuclear holocaust and Armageddon.

It’s important to us, because my mother is the author of two previous cookbooks that are both out of print, simply because a number was determined for the print run and every last book sold out. Each family member has a copy, but there aren’t any more copies for new friends or acquaintances or even future generations.

It’s not that I think this particular cookbook that my mother and I wrote together is so important. It’s no “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” or “Moosewood” or “Silver Palate,” to name a few that I really do think changed the way people cooked. It’s just….well, us. It’s our family’s favorite recipes. It’s the ones we all trade around and copy for each other and pass back and forth time and again.

And it’s the ones my children and nieces and nephew asked us to include. Even those as young as nine or ten knew that it was important to them that we preserve certain formulas, like the way Grandma makes hot chocolate, or the way Grandma makes guacamole, or the way Grandma makes Portuguese sweet bread. (Come to think of it, all the ones my kids were most concerned with getting down in writing were their grandmother’s recipes, not mine. I’ll try not to take offense. I suppose it gives me something to which to aspire.)

As my mother wrote in her introduction to the book, “As I work on this third collection, I find myself thinking not about my cooking class students or anonymous cookbook buyers, as I did [with the first two books], but my six grandchildren. These are their favorites as well, dishes they've savored at countless family dinners and holiday gatherings over the years, and I imagine that someday they'll want these same recipes at their fingertips to make for their own children and grandchildren.”

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s always a mistake to project too many expectations, particularly misty-eye or rose-hued ones, on future generations. But if they do want to cook the familiar dishes of their childhoods, they’ll know just where to find the recipes.