Small Step No. 1

How To Change Your Day With A Single Smile

I do not consider myself to be a leader by nature, more of a follower. I identify most with the term “observer,” far preferring to sit at the proverbial corner bistro table and watch the world unfold as it does with little interference from me.

If asked, I’d tell you I’m an empath. I can sense when you’re feeling heavy or light, whether you’re overwhelmed or tense, how your emotions might dictate our plans. I observe, observe, observe. I react accordingly, adjusting my own demeanor based on the given mood, or moment.

And sure, while important to offer flexibility, this does not often bode well for a parenting strategy. We can only do so much observing-and-reacting before we’re required to steer the ship from emotion and circumstance to truth and perspective.

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More to come.

For The Sophomores

my hope for you today

& every day in your continuation

is that you will witness this miracle

... each bruise and breath and leaf. That you will see your generation as I see your generation: one of strength and wisdom and great, great hope. One that mesmerizes me, like a fire we can’t turn away from, like a fire that enchants.

Like a fire that sparks, spreads, warms an entire nation.

Other hopes: that your parking meter be ever full. That you eat your vegetables. That you will meet your future spouse after a terrifically poor haircut, so that every day after he/she will marvel at your vast and inexplicable improvement, at his/her vast and inexplicable luck.

I hope the futon is on sale. I hope you wear sunscreen, call your grandmother. I hope you remember your pin number and forget your phone. I hope you floss. Hum in the hallway. I hope you take a Jeep ride under the moon, taste dandelion wine on a rickety front porch. Bathe in a creek, sleep on a floor. Break dance in Chipotle. Carry your friends. I hope for you more love than loss, more questions than answers, more books than nightstand. I hope you’re kind to the waitress. I hope you get leg room on the way to Ireland.

I hope you look to your future, yes, but also lock eyes with your past. I hope you see that it has mattered, every scrape and shout and smile.

But mostly: I hope you dare to be ordinary. I hope you allow yourself a handful of terrible jobs and long commutes and bad dates. That you get tongue-tied on conference calls, botch the interview. I hope you find the miracle even then, in the most uncomfortable, unfortunate of instances.

(I hope you forgive yourself when you can’t.)

Small Steps

A Small Step

To Kick Our Multi-Tasking Habit

Boone Pickens perhaps said it best: When you are hunting elephants, don’t get distracted chasing rabbits.

This week’s rabbit: Stranger Things.

I’m not a TV watcher by nature, but every now and then, a show will grip Markus or Max so tightly that it becomes a focal point for conversation after conversation, theories and recaps and findings passed around the dinner table with the mashed potatoes.

The show sounded fascinating enough, even without the 80’s factor and the Indiana plot and of course Winona’s hair. And this is precisely how I wound up staying up waywayway past my bedtime last Saturday night hitting Play on Season 2.

I have been searching for pockets of time to hit Play ever since.

Earlier this week, while I needed to make dinner, so I chopped cauliflower while watching Joyce Byers trash her own house again, and of course, it wasn’t twenty minutes before a pot of spaghetti was bubbling onto the stove and I still hadn’t figured out where the heck Hopper was.

I turned off the TV, realizing there were enough rabbits for me to chase without adding a virtual one to the mix.

And so, a small reminder for myself, courtesy of this simple trick my therapist friend shares with his patients:

Pay attention to your hands.

It’s the perfect cure for multi-tasking, he says. When you’re writing an email, watch your fingers on the keyboard. When you’re folding laundry, watch your hands sort through the whites. When you’re at the park with your children, pay attention to your hands pushing them in the swing, brushing a leaf from their hair, holding their bike helmet as they run wild in the grass.

When I do (or think of doing) a million things at once, I do them less well. When I multitask, I'm teaching my brain to distract itself and things just take infinitely longer, my fuse growing infinitely shorter.

But there’s something inherently lovely about single-tasking, about focusing on just one thing at a time for as long as we’re able. And it turns out, I only need to retrain my brain with what I already have available: our hands.

It’s a small trick that snaps my mind back to the present and – better yet? – preserves energy for my next task.

(Like hitting Play on Stranger Things the very second those little dishes are done.)