Category: Fun
Tuesday, Mar 8, 2016 | Big Thoughts, Confessions, Fun, Readings, Travel, Work |
Yesterday, I drove to Toronto for a reading, and stopped in for a jolly afternoon visit at my publisher’s new office. I was going to visit my sister too, and really make a day of it, but she was sick. (I should have brought her chicken soup, but my germophobe tendencies won out.)
I noticed that many of yesterday’s conversations revolved around the idea of space.
Space for the mind to think. Space to breathe. Space to relax. Time is a form of space, and when it’s packed, it can feel cramped and tight. But even time that is packed with events and duties can feel spacious, in certain moments. My goal is to make even a busy day feel spacious, by settling into the present event, and offering my full attention.
I don’t always manage it, it’s true. When I’m tired, when I’m anxious about what’s coming up next, when I’m pulled in different directions, when I’m longing to do something else instead … then there’s no space, no flow, limited attention. I can ruin my own fun in this way. I call it: pushing myself ahead. What I mean is, I’m pushing myself out of the moment I’m in by occupying the ones upcoming, rehearsing them in advance, usually with a worried or impatient furrow to the brow. There’s also the problem of pushing myself back, going over errors in the past. And what about pushing myself entirely out of the picture?
My meditation right now is focused on Generosity. (Fittingly, I use an app called Headspace.) “What would you like to give to yourself?” asked the friendly voice of Andy-the-meditation-guide this morning. What would I like to give myself? My mind went blank.
Finally, I thought, forgiveness … enjoyment …
Forgiveness? Well, I understand it. I’m feeling guilty for slipping out early after my readings these past two nights. Terribly guilty. Both evenings I had a long drive before me, and I was very tired. I’d given my best effort on stage. I wanted to go home and sleep. No matter the circumstances: slipping out early is antithetical to how I’ve disciplined myself to behave. So I’m crawling with discomfort at having prioritized rest over being gracious, polite, respectful of the readers yet to come and of my hosts. I don’t know what’s right. And clearly I don’t know how to forgive myself for this decision.
As for enjoyment … I had a fun day yesterday. Once it got rolling, I didn’t worry, I felt relaxed and content. My uncertainty came when it ended. I wasn’t sure when to end it, when to transition to the next part, the part where I drive home and go to bed. I didn’t know what was best for me; indeed, as I write this post I can hardly let myself pose the dilemma in those terms: what was best for me? Maybe I didn’t know what was best for me because I frequently fail to take that into account; I was genuinely stumped by Andy’s question, thrown back on my heels. When I do something for myself, I feel like I’m stealing it. I shouldn’t take this. It isn’t mine.
Ah, enjoyment…
Of course we all do many things we don’t particularly want to, for reasons of necessity, and we can find ways to enjoy rather than endure many of these. But I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about those little things we do for ourselves. What are they? And do you give yourself permission to enjoy these little things, wholly, without guilt, without suspecting you’ll be penalized? Do you give yourself that kind of space? It’s occurred to me that I do this only rarely. And that if I were to give something to myself, that is what I would give: the ability to recognize what I want, and to enjoy it when it comes.
Sounds easy. Strange it should be so hard.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Mar 3, 2016 | Adventure, Family, Fun, Kevin, Kids, Parenting, Play, Readings, Travel |
Yesterday, we gave the kids a snow day. This was not my idea, but Kevin was very keen on it, so I agreed somewhat begrudgingly as it meant sacrificing a quiet day at home in my office, alone. Quite a lot of snow had fallen overnight, but it was crisp, clear, and beautiful, as you can see from the photo above. In the morning, Kevin took the kids sledding; some safety boundaries were pushed to great hilarity, apparently (good thing I hadn’t gone along!). In the afternoon, AppleApple and I went cross-country skiing. We still had all of our regular after-school activities: piano lessons, soccer practice, and a soccer game. It was awfully late when we gathered together again for supper. The boys had been home alone, playing dominoes, waiting to eat until we’d all arrived. Well after 7PM, we sat down to a very popular meal of soft tacos. I could sense the difference the unofficial snow day had made for everyone. We were so relaxed, and especially kind to each other. We sat for ages after we’d finished eating, talking and laughing; everyone.
It’s a luxury to take a holiday in the middle of the week. Kevin and I are both very fortunate to have jobs that allow us this level of flexibility, and yesterday was a reminder to take advantage of that freedom from time to time.
Today, my office is quiet. The dogs are sprawled out napping near my feet. I’ve set the timer for fifteen minutes.
I have some news. I’m going to France in April. (!!!) I’ll be away nearly three weeks, attending events at an arts festival in Normandy, and promoting the publication of the French translation of Girl Runner (or, Invisible Sous la Lumiere, as it is being called). I’ve been commissioned to write a short piece as part of the arts festival, and will be given an artist’s residency at a museum for about ten days. I’ve been dreaming of a writing retreat for a long time … just never imagined it would happen in France!
One sad thing about the trip is that I’ll be missing the performance of AppleApple’s adaptation of Macbeth. Of course, in 18 days, I’ll be missing much more than that. I think I’m missing everyone and everything in advance right now. Premature homesickness. Adventures are so much harder to throw yourself into when you’re leaving behind children.
Two readings coming up this weekend. I’ll be in Hamilton on Sunday evening at an event called Lit Live, and in Toronto on Monday evening at the Rowers Reading series. Check my upcoming events page for more info.
Ding-ding-ding! That’s my time. Tomorrow I’ll try to remember to tell you about turmeric tea, the laundromat, and swimming.
xo, Carrie
Monday, Feb 15, 2016 | Adventure, Driving, Family, Fun, Holidays, Swimming, Travel, Winter |
Day One. We wake at 4AM, are on the road before 5AM, and arrive around 10AM at our first stop in Bluffton, Ohio, a town off the I-75 where my family lived during the Carter-Reagan era (in other words, a long time ago). No photos. Lunch with dear old friends. At noon, friends and I walk to the Bluffton Library where I do an hour-long book talk on Girl Runner. Then we are on the road again to Tennessee, a mostly uneventful trip, although I’m pretty sure the kids will never let me forget that red light I run somewhere in Kentucky when we are off the highway looking for a grocery store.
Anyway.
Day one ends successfully with arrival at aunt and uncle’s house (pictured above). It is dark and late, but not too terribly horribly late. We are giddy. Some of us have eaten McDonald’s sundaes.
Day Two. Everyone learns how to drive a golf cart! My aunt takes us to a super-cool “extreme sport” indoor trampolining place (Kevin and I are too tired to participate). After supper, we go to downtown Nashville to watch the Predators lose rather badly to the visiting Philadelphia Flyers, an entertaining outing.
Day Three. More golf cart driving. An international friendly soccer match with cousins. Running around outside. Starting a puzzle. Seeing deer.
And, after supper, packing up and driving south through the night.
Day Four. Drive through Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida (adults taking shifts at the wheel). Stop for breakfast at McDonald’s, with regret. Arrive at Grandma’s place in Fort Myers, Florida just in time for lunch. Nap. Swim. Watch competitive cooking shows on TV. Get fed meals by Grandma. Go to bed early.
Day Five. Super Bowl Sunday. Start 1,000 piece puzzle. Swim (all swimming happens in a big outdoor heated pool that everyone loves). Read. Nap. Jog. Look for alligators. Eat tacos while watching football game.
Day Six. Boat ride with Grandma. Kevin stays on dry land. Lunch out with Grandma and kids. See dolphins and many many birds. Swimming upon return. Finish puzzle. Try on Grandma’s hats in anticipation of beach visit tomorrow.
Day Seven. Family trip to the beach. No amount of photo-manipulation can disguise the fact that it is really windy and pretty darn cold. Beach hats in great danger of flying away. But here we are, at the ocean, really far from home. Lunch at weirdly wonderful sushi/burger joint. Souvenir shopping afterwards. Swimming in the late afternoon.
Day Eight. CJ jogs a mile with me. Kids start another 1,000 piece puzzle. Swimming and more swimming. A hunt for gators is successful! (Well, gators were spotted, though not a shred of photo evidence exists to prove this; same goes for the dolphins.) Puzzle gets completed before suppertime.
And after dessert, we pack up, say goodbye, and start driving north.
Day Nine. Drive through Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. Snow and ice are visible by dawn. Arrive at aunt and uncle’s in time for breakfast. Kevin and I nap all morning. In the afternoon, we return with the kids to the trampoline place, but this time we participate! I discover a flair for swinging from ring to ring over a pit of foam blocks. Impressed with my feats of strength, I climb up a rather tall wall only to discover that I’m now at the top, and must somehow get down while simultaneously preserving my dignity (have I mentioned my fear of heights?). We shoot baskets, jump, leap, balance, swing, and fall. It’s fun to play like a kid.
Day Ten. Drive home through Tennessee, Kentucky (under construction), Ohio (under construction), Michigan (giant pile-up on highway requiring detour), and Ontario (white-out conditions, snow storms). Finish listening to a recording of Agatha’s Christie’s Death on the Nile, which is a relief to most of the passengers. We highly recommend the chicken sandwiches at Big Boy (as eaten in Louisville), and sort of recommend the food at Taco Bell (as eaten in Windsor).
Day Eleven. Arrive well after midnight. Dogs happy to see us. That post-holiday malaise. And soccer, soccer, soccer as soon as we wake up.
P.S. I’d do it all again in an instant.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Jan 6, 2016 | Adventure, Exercise, Fun, Meditation, Play, Spirit, Writing |
Immersion is the word of the week. On Monday morning, our family switched off holiday-mode and jumped into the deep end. I feel like each day has doors that open into different rooms, sometimes into wildly different rooms, and I open a door, step over the threshold, and adapt to whatever role is required of me; and then it’s on to the next door.
The key is to keep the other doors closed while securely inside any given room. Every once in awhile everything will tumble out into the hallway, where it will need to be sorted, organized, and assigned back its proper place. Or, I find, it’s helpful to leave stuff in the hallway. Forget about it. Don’t sweat it. It will be waiting for me when I’m ready to sort it out, eventually. (The hallway represents email, I think, more than anything.)
On Monday morning, I opened the door to the swimming pool with my eldest daughter, and she taught me how to do a flip turn! What a fabulous and unexpected beginning to this new year. I’ve been terrified of learning, but she gently urged me to try, and try again, and by the end of the lesson, I was able to sprint to the wall, flip turn, and sprint back again — my mind lost in effort, my fears lost, too.
I neither believed I would be able learn this new skill, nor imagined I would ever try to learn. It was such a happy surprise to discover that this new skill was within reach; and I couldn’t have done it if someone else hadn’t believed that I could, even when I didn’t believe it. Is this a metaphor for an approach to the every day? To attempt new things, even slightly unwillingly, even if you can’t quite see the point? To allow yourself to be coached, nudged, gently? To take pride in the smallest of achievements — that too. Because, I thought, if I can learn this, imagine what else I can learn!
The writing adventure has filled quickly. As of this posting, there are two spots remaining, and a few drop-in days, so if you’re mulling but interested, get in touch. I’ve had several people wonder whether the adventure could be for them, as they are not writers, and the answer is, yes: think of this as a creativity workshop, with writing as the medium.
Time to open another door, now. It’s a lovely threshold to step over. All this week, I’ve been meditating and then diving directly into writing (fiction) for several hours, while turning off my phone and email notifications. It’s bliss, but it’s also highly productive.
Wishing you a day of immersion and focus whatever doors you may open.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jan 1, 2016 | Adventure, Big Thoughts, Confessions, Fun, Meditation, Organizing, Play, Poetry, Spirit, Teaching, Writing |
Here we are, day one of a new year. I’ve walked the dogs through gently falling snow flakes. The children slept till 10AM. We have this one last day of our unusually relaxing holiday to do as we please, each of us, before the new year’s schedule clocks in tomorrow morning.
Of course I am thinking about what I’d like to do this year, in addition to what I’m already doing; what would I like to try, what experiment shall I undertake, what challenge, what adventure, what’s calling? And I have a small idea, a possibility I’ve been mulling for awhile that seemed affirmed yesterday by the conflating coincidences of driving across town on an unexpected errand while listening to an interview on the radio with Elizabeth Gilbert, who was talking about the creative impulse. The creative impulse is not benign, she said (and I paraphrase). If it isn’t put to use, if it isn’t acknowledged and fed, if it isn’t set free, it will find its own damaging purpose.
I began thinking about rage, just under the surface.
I was driving along a street I don’t very often take anymore, and it triggered a memory: that I’d stopped for gas, at a gas station that no longer exists, in fact, with two toddlers strapped into car seats in the back of our old red truck. I was enormously pregnant with my third child, and it was hot, a summer’s day, and we’d just gotten a load of groceries. I filled up the truck with gas, and as I was walking around the hood of the truck to climb back in to the driver’s seat, a man approached me. He looked, if not homeless, then close to homeless, and with a rough voice he asked if he could bum a cigarette.
My response shocked even me.
Rage. It was rage that poured out, with no warning, no pre-emptive interlude. “Do I look like I would have a cigarette?” I snapped at him, almost shaking with my fury, indicating my pregnant belly.
“No,” he replied sheepishly.
I got into the truck and slammed the driver’s side door, vibrating with rage.
I didn’t know what had come over me. I didn’t know why I was so very angry. I couldn’t think of a good reason to be feeling what I was feeling in that moment.
But now, I think maybe I understand. Like raging people all over this earth, my wider, deeper emotions were not accessible to me at that time in my life. I was repressing a great deal: disappointment about my career, the sense of boredom and aimlessness as I struggled to be a stay-at-home mom, exhaustion from the drudgery of the day-to-day. There were many things I was not telling myself, or allowing myself to feel, because I couldn’t have borne it. So when tapped or triggered, there was only one emotion on offer: rage. Rage is a defensive emotion. It lashes out so as to prevent us from feeling anything else.
I’ll never know exactly why the man’s question set me off, but I think I was afraid of him, and did not want him near me. I felt vulnerable. I also felt morally righteous. Whatever it was, I was feeling something for which rage was a cover. I was ambushed by my own inexplicable fury.
I think unless we allow ourselves to experience a full range of emotions, including those emotions that indict us for our own failings — jealousy, envy, disappointment, humiliation, fear, uncertainty, grief — we will be at the mercy of that one emotion that is always on tap, always available, a defence against what the world may think of us, and what we may think of ourselves deep inside. Rage rage against the dying of the light. Yes. But rage rage against the accusations that we know to be true, and the terror of being fragile, and the admission of loneliness and failure, and the misery of not knowing everything best.
Rage rage against being human and fallible.
Rage rage against culpability.
Rage rage against knowing thyself, because to know thyself truly is to know some awfully dark truths, is to acknowledge enormous imperfections, and ugly vanities, and moral failings.
Yet I maintain that it is better to know thyself than to remain lodged in clotted rage, railing against the world, and spewing harm and hurt. The hurt your rage will cause to your own self is far greater than any hurt you could bring upon yourself by knowing yourself truly. It is only when we see ourselves as vulnerable and weak and wrong (rather than wronged) that we can see others with compassion, and love too.
And the rage will diminish.
It really will. It will not shock you with its sudden emergence, or hurt those you love most dearly. You will feel its potential, yes, but you will know what it means, and hear what it’s saying: you will feel behind the rage to the emotion that rage is trying to protect you from feeling, and you will be able to name it, and to access it, and to experience it. It is only through experiencing the deeper emotion that you can understand yourself, and get through that emotion.
I am alert now to my own rage. I know it’s trying to tell me something more profound. Why am I so angry? Is this moment deserving of my anger? So rarely it is. Almost never, in truth. And pouring out my rage, pouring it onto to someone else, is unacceptable, always. I believe that. So if it happens, when it happens, I try to name that too. To apologize immediately. Never to let myself off the hook. To reflect. There is always more work to do. Because it is easy to mistake rage for purpose, for fuel. At least it’s better to feel something than nothing, maybe? But the opposite of rage is not emptiness, it’s not nothing, it’s not depression, it’s not powerlessness, it’s not silence. The opposite of rage is connection.
Here is my idea. This coming year, I would like to host writing adventures in my home. It will be an experiment, I confess. The point will be to use the physical act of writing — writing by hand onto the page — to bring us into a meditative state of focus, in which we can access memories, draw them forth. We’ll leap from the intensive imaginative images we’re experiencing in our minds into the adventure of fiction. The exercises will be guided, the space will be safe, and none of us will be able to guess in advance where we might travel to on any given evening. Being or becoming a writer is not the point. The process is the point. Play is the point. Adventure is the point. Discovering and mapping our own inner imaginative space is the point. Anyone can participate. Everyone has a creative impulse. This is just one of a myriad of ways to express it, but it’s the method I can offer, if you’re looking for an opening, if you’re looking for a way in. Or out. Or deep down.
Please send me a message if you’re interested and I’ll keep you in the loop as the idea becomes a plan.
Happy New Year!
xo, Carrie
PS The title of this post is the first line of a poem by Rumi called “The diver’s clothes lying empty.” Look it up if you don’t already know it. Read it out loud. It will tell you everything I’ve written here, and much more.
Tuesday, Dec 29, 2015 | Adventure, Big Thoughts, Birthdays, Coaching, Confessions, Exercise, Family, Friends, Fun, Holidays, Play, Spirit |
I love that my birthday falls so close to the end of the year; it’s the perfect time for reflection. Last night I wrote by hand in my journal, as I’ve done for many years now, on the night before my birthday. This is just one of a few simple rituals that make each birthday feel special, squeezed as it is between Christmas and New Year’s. For example, this morning started with a hot yoga class; something I’ve been doing on my birthday since 2009, when I first tried out a hot yoga class. That first yoga class was a treat and an adventure, to try something new, and to steal time for myself. I couldn’t have guessed how it would change me. I was hooked — not necessarily hooked on hot yoga, although that has served me well over the years, but hooked on moving my body, becoming present in my body through physical challenge. I’m now entering my seventh years of serious and regular physical practice: running, walking the dogs, cycling, spin class, weight training, boot camp, kundalini yoga, hot yoga, swimming, soccer, dancing, cross-country skiing.
In 2011, I focused on competition and races.
In 2012, I first learned how to work through injury.
Also in 2012, I joined a women’s soccer team and became a teammate. I hadn’t participated in team sports since I’d last played soccer at age 11. I had a fun season that summer, but we moved to the country and I didn’t play soccer again. Later, I would have said definitively that team sports was not for me; was it trauma and shame from having been, often, picked last in gym class, a lingering sense of not belonging, not knowing how to belong? We moved often when I was a child. I was often the new kid and new kids who are shy are picked last in gym class. But that wasn’t my interpretation at the time; instead, I thought I was bad at team sports. If you’d known me as a teen, you would never have thought, oh yes, Carrie will make a good coach someday. Belonging to a team as an adult changed me, and it has changed my outlook on team sports. Seeing my kids belong to teams, even during times when they’ve struggled, has given me insight into the potential of being part of something bigger than oneself.
Also, it’s just plain fun. Have I mentioned that part?
Today, I turn 41 years old. This is middle age, if you’re honest about average human lifespans. Today, I don’t mind being older. I’m grateful for a body that is able to move and stretch and participate. I do not take it for granted. Much brings me joy in this rich and textured time of life. Connection to my children. Soaking up time together as a family. The adventure of writing. Opportunities to be a mentor, to teach, to coach. Sharing and receiving the ongoing story of our daily lives with friends, with siblings. Getting to hug my mom, and my dad and stepmother. Reading wonderful books. I’m humbled by the luxuries of my life. If there’s one thing I want for the year ahead it is to seek out, look for, and recognize opportunities to serve, to offer what’s mine to give, and also to share. To share a sense of adventure. To have fun. To play. May none of us ever be too old for that.
xo, Carrie
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