HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS?

Here's a piece I wrote with Leslie King, LCSW, with whom I wrote two parenting guides, focusing on how the Holidays can affect us all...

     With Thanksgiving behind us, the holiday season is upon us all again, arriving, it seems, even more quickly than it did last year.
     For parents, the home-stretch of year has arrived, and for many families it can feel like they are running an obstacle course to the new year.
     Add to this the fact that parents often find themselves hoping to somehow make this season better for their children than the last, if not the best ever. Yet for many families, this year also brings an increasing need to economize, if not to significantly cut back on their holiday hopes and plans.
     And as if that weren't all enough, the holidays also have a way of bringing up a host of memories -- some perhaps joyful, some perhaps filled with disappointment -- all mixing together in ways that can make these last weeks feel like a wistful, bittersweet journey for many moms and dads.
     Quite simply, it can be an emotionally charged time, raising hopes if not expectations, complicated by budgets, colored by memories and hurried by busy schedules.
     'Tis the season.
     So we would like to share the number-one item on our holiday to-do list this year, one that we will definitely be checking twice, if not every five minutes: to make a special effort to create room in our homes and hearts for a more peaceful season, and place our focus on the little moments that make the holidays truly warm and bright.
     Let's face it: the path to a more satisfying holiday season is not down the road of finding the perfect present, or creating the ultimate decor, or cooking up elaborate holiday fare, or making marathon holiday rounds to family and friends; rather, it is in conscientiously slowing down and focusing on creating the mental and emotional space to experience as much inner peace as possible.
     Practically speaking, this may mean simplifying your family's holiday plans, from your seasonal activities to the meals you share. Fewer dishes at your holiday table may mean fewer migraines for Mom or Dad, and a lot more relaxation with which to give your kids the best of you rather than your weary leftovers.
     For the family obligations that bind (and that can sometimes grind, shall we say?), give yourself some time now to inwardly prepare -- for that hyper critical aunt, or the impossibly grumpy cousin, or that nagging neighbor. By being a little more rested and relaxed yourself, you will have a far better chance to cope with whatever these holidays serve up.
     All of us can bring so much to the holidays that only with a conscientious effort can we avoid falling prey to the stresses that steal joy and exhaust moms, dads and their kids to the point that they can miss out the very kinds of moments that this season was meant to embrace and celebrate.
     With that in mind, may you and your family find peace in this season, and thereby encourage others, by your example, to find peace in theirs, too.

Wishing you Happy Holidays,

Be back soon...

Darryl

WHAT MATTERS MOST

        I recently read about a priest, Fr. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit in the 1500s who, during the last 28 years of his life, worked as a missionary in China. Whenever he wrote a letter home to Italy, he knew it would take 7 years to get a reply.
        Given such circumstances, what else but the most essential could ever satisfy his need to share something of his life and times with his loved ones. What else but his deepest thoughts and feelings would ever justify the quill and the parchment, much less the journey his words would need to take to find their way home?
        While it is often noted, if not lamented, that we have more ways to share information than ever, but fewer ways to truly communicate, what a wonderful notion it is to consider what we might write about our life and times, and what we might want to express and share with our loved ones back home, knowing that it could well take three and half years for our words to reach their eyes.
       While we don’t live in the world of the 1500s, perhaps imagining we did from time to time could restore to our awareness what truly matters most to us, what we truly value and would want to share about ourselves, not to mention sort out to whom we would most want to send our love.
       Should we take a moment, if only in our thoughts, to muse about what we might write in such a letter, much of what seems so pressing may seem to pale while the vivid rays of our truth glow to life.   

Until next time...which will be much, much sooner than three and a half years --

With My Best,

Darryl

RACE CAR DRIVING

       Mario Andretti, the preeminent race car driver of his era, once remarked that, “If everything seems under control, you're probably not moving fast enough.”
       Well, as with race car driving, so as with love, too much control is bound to slow us down, if not rob us of a potentially life-transforming victory.  
       In “Cowboy and Indian”, Billy, feeling he's utterly out of control, desperately tries to maneuver himself back into feeling he's still in control to dismal effect while Mira, coping with another kind of chaos, becomes increasingly risk-adverse in her choices, hoping to gain a little control by playing it safe.
       To be sure, much of life is necessarily about trying to control what we can, defend as much as we can and anticipate everything we can – all so that we will have as much control as possible over the uncertainties and potential dangers of our worlds.
       And that is perhaps why we need love so much, and why, when it comes knocking, it is such a gift -- for its capacity to coax us out onto ledges, or to draw us from our hidden caves, or from behind our moats and high walls is often the only counterpoint, the only antidote to what we would otherwise dare to do.
       In calling on us, even compelling our unwilling attentions, it forces to leave behind our safe houses and cemented beliefs.
       And to the point we are willing to heed its call, to accept the invitation, to even welcome love’s overtures do we have a chance to discover a little of the mystery that lies out there in the stars, far beyond and better than any barrier we could hope to raise or sustain.
       Which is to say...when our instincts for self-preservation soften and widen to embrace another or others, there is where love – and life – begin.
       Haven't you found it so?

Until next time,

With My Best,

Darryl

THE ENTITLED

       Truly breathtaking to listen to entitled folk talk.
       They can carry on with such a jaw-dropping lack of self awareness, casting breezy insults on all the `little people’ who don’t share either their inherited wealth or position, or who don't -- shockingly -- worship at the altar of their self-ratifying notions of innate superiority.
       The entitled can so easily luxuriate in a sense of “doesn’t everybody?” that one could think they were kidding, putting the rest of us on, until their next utterances do the functional equivalent of doubling down, revealing a revulsion for the poor or less powerful that bespeaks a paranoia reserved for those who imagine they have so much more at stake than the rest of us, and therefore so much more to lose.
We couldn't understand if we tried.
        But peel back the outer layers of their easy condescension, and one will quickly uncover a ruthless, competitive pride propelling these folks forward -- which in turn guards over a desperate need to not only impress, but, even more fundamentally, to constantly reaffirm they are one of the chosen, the special, deserving of any of every advantage, while being blithely, if not willfully, ignorant to the systemic advantages that have delivered them to their unsullied worlds.
       As a wise fellow once observed, these are the kind of folks that were born on third base, but think they hit a home run.
       And while that attitude might almost -- almost -- lend them a certain sympathetic dimension, given the shear terror one might assume they feel late at night, worrying they could lose their privileged positions, never fear, for their overarching assumption of greater worthiness will quickly allay whatever transient fears they may have momentarily entertained, melting their anxieties away into the unquestioned certainty of cream rising confidently to the top.

       Not only did I find these familiar tendencies of human character informing "Cowboy and Indian" as I wrote it, but also "Shadow Game", where the results of such a sense of entitlement inevitably leads to the pervasive poverty and squalor Jarret discovers in his travels, everywhere sustained by the quiet, pernicious belief that the poor and powerless are living the lives they deserve, as determined by Nature, genes, trust funds and/or God. Take your pick.
       When, in Shadow Game, Jarret starts to see for himself the suffering of the world around him in the faces of the indigent who come to him as a last resort, it changes him in ways that nothing else could.
       When Billy, in Cowboy and Indian, sees the masses of people India making do with so little, it changes his heart and sapping his youthful inclinations for self-pity.
       And when Eddy in Eddy Falls sees how easily one can be so quickly shunned from the privileged classes, any delusions he may have fancied about his own invincibility are summarily shattered.

       We all as human beings face trials in life, but if we are spared many of life’s trials through inherited and systemic advantage, we still nevertheless share our ultimate demise with all sentient beings.
       So while the pursuit of wealth and power has always been for many a way to feel as if they are staving off, or at least medicating the inevitable end of our mortal reality, it is my view that the growing sense for entitlement we see everywhere on ready display rivals nothing less than methamphetamine in its raw, narcotic power to rob a generation of what life can mean and be – especially when we learn to take our eyes off ourselves, and take a good look around.

Until next time,

With My Best,

Darryl

MEMORY

        Memory can play tricks.
        Sometimes I have to think very carefully whether some phrase or idea that has slipped itself back into my awareness originated with someone I know -- as in an actual person -- or whether it instead came from a character that once made his or her way through me, like a passenger navigating their way through an airport on their way to an unknown adventure.
       And while the notion that I sometimes have trouble telling the difference what is real or imagined may seem positively absurd to some, I can only report that for those like me, it can happen with enough regularity that I now try to always stop and think twice before quoting “a friend of mine” in relaying a story or anecdote.
       But even then, on occasion, I can’t be entirely sure from whence a phrase or anecdote may have arrived.
       So with that caveat, allow me to nevertheless mention what "a friend of mine” once said that popped back into my mind the other day while buying my son some socks, and presenting them to him with a certain satisfaction.
       He, conversely, received them with that certain, faint smile and barely disguised disappointment reserved for a person accepting a gift subscription to Insurance Salesman of the Year Magazine.
       But what I wanted him to know -- to appreciate -- about the socks was that although they are not sexy or flashy, they are what keep us comfortable and dry – which many a sexy-flashy thing cannot.
      What’s more, socks will be there for us day in and day out when yesterdays sexy-flashy things become today’s trash. I wanted him to see that a simple pair of socks is a joy to the overworked and underpaid, because socks, unlike so many other aspects of our lives, deliver on their promise -- unlike computers, for example, to name just a few of our reliability-challenged modern conveniences, to say nothing of our government.
       And that’s what I wanted him to appreciate and recognize in the lowly socks, even as the world swarms around him with the new and dazzling.

       Now, I will get him some flash, too. He likes skateboarding, and no amount of “reliability” can replace – or necessarily always should – some youthful moments of feeling like one has just the right gear, just the right logo or color coordinated pads -- as defined by the consensus of 8 to 10 year old aficionados – which help him feel a part of something. Because that experience, too, can help him -- all of us -- feel a part of something bigger than ourselves…as long as it balanced by an enduring appreciation of qualities of the lowly sock, which, while spending most of its cottony life looking up at the world, can help us all, by contrast, to never look down on it -- or down on others who who don’t have socks -- which is even more to the point.
       So let us appreciate the sock and what it represents -- as a friend of mine once said.
And although I’ve forgotten which friend said it (or was it a fictional character?), I will never forget what he said.
       Such is the legerdemain of memory.

Until next time,

With My Best,

Darryl

A COMPASSIONATE DISPOSITION

        Recently, an exceptional writer and friend, Dr. Harvey Mindess, past away. Much of his written work focused on the psychology of humor, and perhaps his most noted book, LAUGHTER AND LIBERATION, continues to be used in college courses across the country today. In a piece on Hawaiian humor (Humor in Hawaii: Past and Present), he wrote:

       "Humor is flexibility's twin, while political correctness, for all its virtues, contains a streak of rigidity too obvious to be ignored."

       During his life, he always returned to the themes of tolerance, acceptance, and the cultivation of the inward (and outward) capacity to not take ourselves too seriously, or our own beliefs as a Gospel with which to condemn others. In essence, he lived life with a generosity of spirit that ignited a flame in my heart, too -- one to which I return when I find my spirit dragging its tail feathers under the more-than-a-little-disheartening experiences I can best summarize as akin to watching the six o'clock news on almost any day.

       And in this time of political strife, with far-too-strident voices dominating the airwaves, thank goodness for those like my dear and deeply-missed friend, Harvey Mindess who, unlike so many of today's politicians and pundits, could find a little humor in their every day, could laugh at themselves, and could offer a compassionate disposition to others.

Until next time,

With My Best,

Darryl