Category: Blog

Friendships between women are exhilarating, transformational, messy, necessary, life-giving and sometimes devastating. This past week, I made the decision to leave a friendship. Over the years, I felt less and less authentic. My emotional and physical health began to suffer – but I put myself second so I wouldn’t hurt her. Well, I did hurt her. But I’d hurt myself much more.

In dealing with my decision, I found a very interesting passage online about the throat chakra:

The throat chakra is the fifth chakra in the body’s energy system, and its purpose is to act as the voice that is able to speak your authentic truth. This chakra provides clarity between what is right and wrong for you. It helps to form the authentic truth in your belief system, and it enables you to be assertive in expressing that truth to others.

My first reaction to this passage was “Oh no! Someone’s had their hands wrapped around my throat chakra because I haven’t been able to speak my truth!”

Those hands were my own. Thank goodness, I loosened my grip before passing out.

In comforting me, my sister left me with this wonderful and fitting imagery. A garden choked over with weeds takes hard (sometimes painful) work to clear. But only by doing that hard work and preparing the soil will you know what new growth can occur.

I’m glad it’s finally spring. What kind of emotional and physical clearing are you doing this time of year?

I’ve taken several personality/work styles tests over the past 20 years, including the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Most recently, my employer had us take a test from Emergenetics. My results held no surprises for me:

• Low on the social and expressive scales (I prefer one-on-one time to big parties; I prefer to work in solitude)
• High on the structural and analytical (I meet and beat deadlines, I like lists and rules and order)

• Mary is an accountant by day but is learning to play bass guitar at night.
• Fred is a graphic designer who enjoys skateboarding.
• Christina is a cyclist who teaches yoga.

My head is swimming from all the big ideas I picked up from speakers during my company’s annual meeting in mid-February. Themes from the talks are sure to come up in future blog posts but today I’m going to write about humor. (Mostly because I am in a humorless mood today!)

I’m not talking about one’s ability to tell a good joke, or put on a lampshade and become the life of the party. I’m talking about one’s openness to joy, laughter and lightheartedness even when the world seems to be crumbling down around you.

Peter McLaughlin, a management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, listed humor as one of four requirements of a successful executive or organization (the other three points being energy, positive emotions and happiness). I’d venture to say all four are interconnected.

So, despite heavy workloads and stressful work environments, McLaughlin stated that employers who put a high priority on humor and laughter had more effective and productive employees.

Let me share two examples: one work-related and one personal.

When I was in my early 30s, I ran the publishing division of a large nonprofit in Washington, DC. My boss would regularly bring staff to tears with her shouting, changing moods and unrealistic expectations. The three managers who worked for her (myself included) had to work hard not to let her negativity trickle down to our own staffs. On an especially tough day, I bought each of the women who worked for me a roll of Lifesavers candies. The levity it created buoyed us (sorry for the pun) the rest of the week.

My sister, Tessa, has been one of my greatest teachers when it comes to finding joy on a daily basis. She is known for her “sussies” or surprises — little gifts she gives to people to make them smile. She once told me she tucks a sussie into each room of her home. Whenever Tessa catches a glimpse of one, it reminds her to smile. It may be a funny photo next to her computer, or a goofy looking stuffed animal on a bookshelf. The photo to the right is a sussie that Tessa gave me. This silly looking fairy hangs above the toilet in my guest bathroom — and has brought smiles to many visitors.

Do you look for joy on a daily basis? What shape does it take? Do you think humor is an important part of your workplace?

I’m in that weird space between books – meaning I’ve finished writing one and don’t feel like starting another just yet. The manuscript is now out with a few beta readers and then the revision process will begin.

I think this ebb and flow of energy and creativity is something we all experience. We put in time and effort toward a goal – all hands on deck, so to speak – and it’s natural to feel low energy when the goal is accomplished.

It’s also natural to feel like we’re being lazy if we don’t jump right back in and DO something.

Alas, it’s the human BEING versus human DOING dilemma. The state of just being can feel unnatural because we’ve been wired (taught?) to go-go-go from morning to night. Busy, busy, busy bees, buzz, buzz, buzzing around.

So…Mondays are my dedicated ‘writing day.’ I didn’t write today – at least not fiction. I slept in, had coffee, watched the snow, baked Valentines cookies, had tea with a friend and read a book. Nothing I did had anything to do with productivity or accomplishment! Hurrah!

I even managed to ignore my work emails for most of the day.

My wish for each of you this week is to take a break from doing – at least for an hour – and just be in the moment. If we practice, maybe it will start to feel natural.

We writers – and I suspect all creative types – tend to get down on ourselves a lot. A couple (or a dozen) rejections arrive in the email box and it’s “I’m crap! How did I think I could write and sell a novel? Are my thighs getting bigger?”

I’ve been in Texas all week visiting my sister and her family. She lives in Glen Rose, a town of 2,100 people. It’s the kind of town where the pharmacist knows my sister by name; the kind of town that turns out in full force for the opening of the new school gymnasium; the kind of town where gift shop owners on the square encourage shoppers to visit their competition.

Glen Rose is double the population of the town where I grew up; a town I dreamt of escaping my whole childhood. And boy, did I. I went to a state university of 50,000 students. I’ve lived in cities with populations in the millions.

And yet, I ended up living in a small town myself. And although it’s 10 times larger than my sister’s community, it gives me the things I took for granted as a child and the things my sister experiences daily.

My pharmacist knows me by name – which is tough with a name like Mikulencak. I’m likely to see 10 or more people I know just by walking down main street. I have a main street! My office building’s landlord cut my rent in half just so I’d stay in her building.

I’m confident that even big city dwellers find this sense of community in little pockets of their bustling cities.

What about YOUR town (city) makes it home for you?

My goal in 2011 was to blog once a week. You can see from the posts listed at the left that I did not achieve that goal. I didn’t even make it to two posts in December. On this bright, sunny New Year’s Day morning, I have vowed to let it go. No guilt. No regret.

Which brings me to the word of the year: compassion. Consider it my one resolution for 2012.

A dear friend used to remind me that we seem to have a limitless capacity for compassion – but for others. We rarely have this level of compassion for ouselves. When I speak of ‘compassion,’ I’m referring to its less-used definition: tenderness.

The world is a hard place to begin with, and we tend to make it harder by living with regret, guilt, judgment, self-doubt, anger. When we make a mistake or fail to live up to someone’s (our own?) expectations, we should try a little tenderness. (Hey, that’d make a great song. Oh, it’s already
one. First recorded in 1932 and re-recorded hundreds of times since then. Good job. We need the message to sink in.)

In its most simple form, compassion (tenderness) is the act of just letting it go. Acknowledge the pain or sadness or regret or failure and then say to yourself, “Self, you deserve a break. Let’s move on from this.”

During the holidays, I can get as giddy as a 9-year-old. I listen to Christmas music 24/7 (just the oldies like Bing, Perry and Burl) and watch my lit Christmas tree in a darkened room, and bake cookies to deliver to friends, and obsess over wrapping paper and ribbon and tags. I even think about renting a child so I can show up at the Santa pancake breakfast at McDonald’s.

With a few pounds, I could be Mrs. Claus. In fact, I’ve thought about using Ancestry.com to determine if I have relatives from the North Pole.

All kidding aside, the holidays also make me kind of sad. I have no immediate family in the area. My dad died when I was 18. My mom died eight years ago. My sister’s family is in Texas and they celebrate there to be close to the remaining grandparents. So, I’ve never *hosted* Christmas at my own home.

Still, I’ve decided to tell Sadness to take a vacation in Phoenix this Christmas. This year is about gratitude and remembrance.

As a writer, I value memories – mine and others’ – because they provide the rich details that make any story come to life.

Here are a couple of my fondest memories. Each year, Mom would give a special ornament to the three of us kids (and I still have mine on my tree to this day). Often, they’d be in the same *theme* but my brother would get the Santa, I’d get the angel and my sister would get the elf. The photo to the right is probably 38-40 years old!

Fruitcake was a big deal in our household. And not for giving! The kids would chop the neon-colored fruit and nuts while Mom would make the batter. We’d end up eating fruitcake for breakfast the whole season.

And now for a memory shared by my cousin Kathy. Her dad would hide money in their stockings and my cousins would have to figure out where the bills were hidden. No easy task! One year, he carefully opened a candy bar wrapper and inserted the money, then resealed the packaging. Another year, he went to the trouble of opening walnuts (!) , hiding the money inside, and then gluing the nut back together.

Would you please share one Christmas memory with me while I help Sadness pack its bags?

It must be a function of aging that time seems to fly by at an astounding and alarming rate. December? Already? What happened to November and the six months prior to that?

My (mostly unspoken) fear is that time flies by so quickly because I’m not fully awake; present and attentive to what I feel and do and say each and every day. Kind of like when you drive a familiar route and then, wham…you’re home and you don’t remember passing landmarks along the way. Just yesterday, I was 18. And today I’m 46. That’s a helluva blink of an eye.

On Saturday, my nephew graduates from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s very stressed: money woes, grad school applications for himself and his girlfriend, the future.

I wish I could stop time for him so that he could fully be present in the moment, to savor the current milestone before worrying about the next.

It’s hard to do. I often worry about “when” and “if” scenarios instead of sitting with the now.

For me, that might mean having a holiday coffee drink and reading the paper without my Blackberry on the table, blinking at me to check it. Or it might mean enjoying each bite of the amazing BLT at Poppy’s sandwich shop instead of inhaling it so I could get back to work.

What’s going on in your “now” that you want to savor? There’s no time like the present.

My brain is noshing on the notion of beauty today – what it is, how it differs for each of us, how society shapes our ideas on what’s attractive or sexy.

Tawna Fenske, a writer I follow online, recently posted a fun blog entry called “Not so hot boys who make me want to get naked.” She talked about men who have a certain charisma that transcends societal norms of attractiveness. Case in point: Lyle Lovett. (yummy)

Then, last night, I had dinner with my dear friend, Joelle, who is dog-sitting for someone. Sissy, the sweetest little bulldog you’d ever hope to meet, isn’t pretty by anyone’s standards. But to me, she’s BEAUTIFUL. I couldn’t stop kissing her mushed in face. I can’t define in words what attracted me to her but I wanted to scoop her up and take her home.

Joelle and I then talked about how our ideas of beauty have changed as we aged. She’s an avid (i.e., obsessed) road- and mountain-biker so naturally her cute little body is muscled, lean and athletic. She finds the ‘strength’ in her legs beautiful and thanks them for bringing her so much joy.

I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of my hands. I type all day, every day, so I look at them a lot. My fingers are long. My nails have always been really healthy. And now that they are professionally manicured, I can’t stop staring at them! Not only are they utilitarian but they’re sensual and expressive.

What’s beautiful in your world today? Do you find you buck society’s idea of beauty?

To Deonne, my writer friend in Taos: would Billy Bob Thornton make your sexy man list?