What my mama taught me

There is a saying that goes something like "your mom is always right" or “mama knows best”. I generally don't accept absolutes. There are very few (if any at all!) things in this world to which the assured word "always" can be attached. But the older I get, the more I am willing to acknowledge that there is a large truth in the point that our parents, and probably our mothers especially, teach us a lot...And as fate would have it, the lessons often come in unexpected forms. My mom teaches me something nearly every day...more often than not without realizing that she does and even more often without saying a single word. She teaches me some critically important things about life simply by living her own life in best way she can. Or should I say as best as her failing body allows her to. So, here are a few things that my mama taught me (and continues to teach me) that may be unique as well as universal in equal measure:

• If you've got working limbs, USE them right now. My mom has been wheelchair-bound for years. She often reminisces of the good old days when she could walk. And I often remember with nostalgia and a bitter-sweet fondness when we used to walk together. The lesson: if you've got legs and they work, share a walk with someone you love! Or just take a walk alone. And in the process (this is the critical part) enjoy the experience of just lifting one foot and then the other. Don't take any step for granted!
• If you've got eyes that see, USE them right now. My mom has severely impaired vision. She isn't blind, but she basically has an annoying, blurred double vision – all the time. She is an avid reader and art lover. Fortunately, I haven't experienced the impaired vision that can NOT be fixed with surgery or glasses. But I can only imagine that living with something like this is probably no picnic. So, if you've got eyes, even if you have to put on your glasses to see better, the lesson is LOOK around and absorb it all. Really see things, people, faces, art, clouds, cars, buildings, the garbage on the ground, and the little script on the bottom of the letter…all of it. Revel in the incredible technology that is YOUR vision. A pair of good eyes - a real gift to cherish.
• If you've got a LIFE, LIVE it right now. My mom often says that her biggest regret is not enjoying the "good years". She says that until she got sick, she was “waiting for life to begin”. She didn't stop to smell the roses, even though they were right under her nose: great loving parents who pretty much did everything for her, a good marriage, a good job, an adorable kid (me) and loving special friends, to name a few of those "roses". So, what’s the lesson? Well, yes, most of the time, there is a way to continue living. No matter what card fate deals you, you can "adopt and adjust". Disability is not the end of the world. You can buy diapers, wheelchairs, lifting equipment, special bed….whatever. But if your body is not falling apart and you can go to the bathroom without assistance, the lesson here is that THERE IS NOTHING else to wait for. You already have everything you need!

I've read about various approaches on how to appreciate life more. Everything from "imagine that you have three months to live" to “climb the highest mountain without food and then head down eating wild berries all the way to the bottom” to "imagine you'll die tomorrow".
Listen, I don't care to be overly or unnecessarily dramatic. But I do want to urge that possibly in all of our lives a sort of re-prioritization is required. I certainly don’t claim any superiority just because I have a parent who is ill. I am right there with all of you, in the trenches of life YET often forgetting to live. What the #@$& could I possibly really know? I am a work in progress and will be for a looooong time. Yet I am watching my mom suffering through her life and I am learning…
So, if nothing else, simply ponder upon these very real lessons, and maybe ask yourself "am I really living, right now, this moment, to its fullest potential, or am I just waiting for life to begin?" If you are waiting, the bus has just arrived and the message has been delivered.
Here is your to do list:

• Take a deep breath
• Take someone's hand
• Take a walk with them
• Take a look around.

 Amazing, isn't it?

The Wind of Change

The Russian (or should I say "soviet") version of Mary Poppins is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's beautiful and inspiring in every way. I've seen it (no exaggeration) hundreds of times since it came out in 1984. There is a song in the movie about the "wind of change" (Russian lyrics by Naum Olev). This is my attempt to translate it.

Earth is spinning around like children’s carousel.
The winds of loss are swirling around it.

Those are the winds of loss, division and evil.

They are countless.

They are countless.

They seep through every crack,

Ripping off the doors to people’s hearts,

Crushing hopes and instilling fear.

The winds are swirling and swirling.

Hundreds of years, day and night, the Carousel Earth spins around.

Hundreds of years, all the winds come back to their origins.

But there exists the Wind of Change.

It’s going to swoop in and banish the winds of betrayal.

In time, it will chase away the winds of separation and disappointment.

Hundreds of years, day and night, the Carousel Earth spins around.

Hundreds of years, what goes around, comes around.

Tomorrow the wind will change.

It will come tomorrow to replace the past.
It will come, and it will be kind and gentle, the Wind of Change.



Awesome

A website I recently stumbled upon – www.1000awesomethings.com – really inspired me. It’s a simple blog that celebrates the AWEsomeness of life, the joy, the crazy goodness of it all. Naturally, I began to wonder, what would I list as awesome in my life. So, here is just a sampling of a few things that came to mind:

• Parfait yogurt in the cafeteria at my work – It consists of vanilla yogurt, granola and fruit. It’s exactly what I want and they have it for $3.50, almost every day. How awesome it is to get exactly what you want, exactly when you want it.
• Being able to celebrate my grandfather's 89th birthday – WITH him and the rest of the family, while scolding him for drinking a bit too much cognac. Awesome!
• Sleeping on the window-side of the bed – Makes me feel like I live in a tree house or a nest (in a good way). I climb into the bed, say “good night” to the moon shining through the window and turn off the light. Pure awesomeness!
• Amazon Kindle – For book junkies like me who read multiple books at the same time, carrying all of them around was tough. So, along came Amazon Kindle which can hold over 1000 books and you can read them all at the same time! Kindle was the best splurge in the past few years that just keeps on giving!
• Someone saying "thank you for inspiring me" – Such a miraculous and beautiful thing for any mere mortal to touch another mere mortal’s soul. To hear the acknowledgement of this wondrous moment is awesome!
• Spending 5 almost un-interrupted hours with your best friend whom you’ve known for 20 years – Don’t get me wrong. Such a foray is not entirely guilt-free - due to the potential emotional wounds inflicted on the left-behind husbands, children and pets during your time “away” – but totally awesome!
• Being loved…in spite of yourself – It’s such a miracle to be loved by one person. Knowing that you are deeply loved by many, just the way you are, is just crazy good, or should I say “awesome” :-)
• WQXR – It’s a NYC classical music station which has been my companion since I was a kid. Press a button or turn the dial and the sheer beauty just pours out of the radio - for FREE. Totally awesome!
• Being a grad student and not being in rush to graduate - just enjoying the process. Crazy awesome!
• Watching your child eat healthy food, reading out loud, catching snow flakes with his tongue, sleeping – In fact, watching your child do anything is awesome. I often catch myself thinking, "wow, a whole real person. So glad you decided to live here with us. Have another peach, please!"
  

What are the awesome things in your life right now? Notice them, name them, revel in them and celebrate them!

Life is good. Life is AWESOME!

Purpose

“What a day”, I thought as I was remembering an inspiring event I just attended. Passion and purpose was the theme. The energy in the room was palpable. Hours seemed like seconds as I was absorbing the wisdom from the incredible women in the room. Nearly no stone was left unturned in discussing vital, yet often overlooked topics. I was holding on to the railing of the subway car, happily thinking of the fun fact that this wonderful event happened on my “college day”. A day of the week when I can truly exercise the God-given right of being happy and pursuing my passion. I was anxious because I was running slightly late for class. Being the sign of Virgo requires me to be prompt and gives me a major heartburn when circumstances interfere. Yet, I was also excited to once again rejoin my fellow art history classmates and immerse myself in my passion.
But what about my purpose? Is it connected somehow to my passion? Does anyone care? Should I? My train of thought was interrupted by a guy with a bold shiny head who made loud sighing sounds every time the train slowed down. It was nearly my stop and I had to pay close attention. I've been known to miss it a few times and had to come back, which made me even more late and agitated. Mainly because time “wasted” on the commute was eating into my time of educational art history bliss.
Unable to ignore my buzzing impatient blackberry, I took it out of my pocket. I could actually feel my blood pressure rising with every "reply to all" email I read! Who invented these things again and why isn't he (or she) getting two consecutive life sentences for it? I know it’s not good to respond to emails while standing, walking, and chewing or doing any other activity that requires your brain, eyes and mouth coordination. One day I actually swallowed a chewing gum, hit "send" on the message I didn’t mean to send out yet, missed my stop and got a bruise from the subway car doors hitting me painfully in the arms. And it all happened at the same time! This is the mode I was in as I was racing downstairs, multi-tasking on my blackberry, making hissing sounds and not paying any attention to my surroundings.

As I got to the bottom of the stairs I almost tripped over someone (or someones) crouching on the ground. Two men were trying to help an elderly woman get up and I immediately "sprang into action". Pulling out my phone I asked the woman if she was OK. “I am dialing 911 right now" I said. With her blue piercing eyes she looked up at me and in a barely audible shaky voice said "please don't". I immediately felt something detach from me, lifted gently in the air and began to float towards her. It was something you could call empathy or compassion. I often feel it as something tangible. Like a light cashmere blanket that you take off your shoulders and put on someone else, who needs it more.
The bravado, the fearlessness, the "I am the queen of the world moment" feeling totally dissipated. I was completely consumed by this tiny, slightly hunched over, lady with a cane and a red coat. In just seconds, I felt totally responsible for her well-being. She represented my ill mom, my recently deceased grandmother and every little old lady I’ve ever encountered and yet to encounter.

It was dark. The two men were still at her side, but no longer supporting her. She seemed so scared and alone, so I said "Please take my hand. May I help you walk home?" At first she was momentarily cautious, kind of assessing my danger level, but then she kind of lit up, nodded, and still hesitating said "I don't want to impose on you". “It’ll be my honor. What’s your name? I am Rina. I am a student in Brooklyn College” I said.

And so we walked. It was just a few blocks, but we were taking small careful steps. She kept repeating her thanks. I kept asking her ridiculous questions and intermittently making empty statements, which at the moment seemed encouraging and even necessary. Something to the tune of “does your face hurt? It doesn’t look bad at all. What about your wrist? Aha, great, you can move your fingers. It means they are not broken.” We’d take a few steps and then stop for a moment. Finally, after struggling with the stairs in the foyer of her building, we entered her apartment. It was large and had a peculiar smell. It smelled of loneliness and dust.
Her name was Cynthia, I finally learned.
“And who is this?” I said as a beautiful black cat jumped on my lap.
“This is my cat.” said Cynthia smiling.
“What’s her name?”
“Angel”.
I brought Cynthia a glass of water and put her cane near an armoire. Wow, I thought to myself, if you live with a black cat named Angel, NOTHING bad should ever happen to you.
“Is there anyone I can call to let them know what happened?”
“No. There is no one”. It sounded like she’s answered this question many times before.

After a few minutes of examining her seemingly minor injuries, Cynthia agreed that it might be a good idea to call 911 just in case, which is what we did. Then we waited for them to arrive. She apologized for the mess and we laughed about how if she hadn’t fallen we wouldn’t have met.

When the AMT arrived, I opened the door for them, explained who I was (and wasn’t). “Cynthia, I’ll be calling you tomorrow to check on you. Ok? And you call me too. Here is my cell phone. I always pick it up! Don’t hesitate for a moment. Who knows, you might just have gotten yourself a regular (usually hungry) visitor on her way to school!”

As I started walking towards the college campus again, I thought what a day, but now for a completely different reason… What if my purpose is not some idealized vision and what if it’s not static? I read somewhere recently "If you are breathing, you have a purpose.” What if my purpose changes moment to moment as life teaches me another important lesson? What if my purpose that day was to be on a slow moving train, to be late for school, to be yanked out of my cloud of self importance, so that I could help Cynthia walk home and hold her hand? Time suspended, I entered her reality as she entered mine, and we wrapped each other up in a warm cashmere blanket called compassion. That’s one great purpose for the day, if you ask me…

Green hat

Almost every morning, near my subway station I see the same homeless woman (or, I just assume she is homeless). We always say hello to each other. She never asks for anything and I never offer anything aside from a friendly nod in her direction. She wears an oversize green hat with feathers. Her face is dirty, but pleasant. She reminds me of a painting called "Peasant woman against a background of wheat" by Van Gogh. Sitting right at the entrance of the subway station (her office), she is usually holding a small calculator, engrossed in what seems to be a long mathematical calculation. Her fingers moving really fast all over the number keys, she pauses for a second (waiting for the results?) Sometimes she seems visibly distressed by what she sees on the display and sometimes she laughs out loud.
I used to catch myself feeling sorry for her. I’d get a little pang in my chest, "Poor thing, she must be thinking it’s a Smartphone". Until one day, recently, I had an "aha" moment. It went something like this: How different am I really from this woman who is starring at an inanimate object and seems to be having a conversation with it, expecting it to respond in some way? Not by a wide margin, I am guessing. When our gazes meet, I am usually holding THREE inanimate objects - a blackberry, a phone and a radio (or an iPod). How crazy must I look to someone who prefers to have enough hands to hold, say, a cup of coffee, or someone else’s hand? Do people feel sorry for me in passing? Yes, I realize that a calculator isn't the same as a blackberry in terms of a two-way communication, but how different is it really? It’s made of plastic, mostly, from what I can tell. Ok, it displays letters AND numbers. Big whoop. But I'll be damned, if any one of us at one point or another (or every day!!) didn't look at our Smartphone in bewilderment, feeling lonely, isolated, misunderstood, outsmarted by the darn thing. How different am I from this woman, because I’ve been known to slam the phone down, as if it’s going to care, mumble something under my breath while shooting off an angry response to an "idiot" on the other end of the cyberspace, not realizing that the joke is on me because my inbox is too full and no emails can be sent out, or to be woken out of my trance of singing along with Madonna by the hissing “shhhhh” from my neighbors on the subway. Basically, I started looking at this woman and myself in a new way, wondering all along, if a blackberry isn't buzzing, does the silence mean we no longer belong, disconnected in a bigger sense of the word or are we just plain crazy? And if we’ve truly lost touch with our true selves, with our identities, and handed our souls, lives even, over to the inanimate objects, can we ever find a way back, find a way home and are we just as poor and homeless as my friend in front of the subway entrance? Or maybe it’s just me...Now when I approach the urban “peasant” woman, we nod in each others direction in total comradery, as if to say, "Yep, I hear you. The fuking numbers just don't add up". All I am missing, really, is an oversize green hat.

Life Lessons after 25 (ish) – Part 2

Turning yet another page in the calendar of my life, I can’t help but create another set of “lessons learned” (granted, I would  NOT say that I am done learning these lessons and truly live by them. But I really want to):


1. Don’t reserve saying I love you for special occasions. Just do it. Your tongue isn’t going to fall off. I promise.

2. Try not to try too hard. Shit is going to hit the fan anyway. You might as well not rush the process.

3. People don't change; they become more and more themselves. Mary Karr, the author of many cool books, wrote: "Every woman signs up thinking that her husband will change...every husband signs up believing his wife won't: both dead wrong."

4. The more you worry about the others, the more the Universe is going to extend its helping hand to you. Try it! It really works.

5. It’s not going to seem like the right choice every day, but still do try to marry someone you can’t live without (as oppose to someone you can live with).

6. It’s tough enough that children don’t come with an instructions manual or returns and exchanges policies; on top of that they’ve got you in the palm of their tiny little hands waaaaaay before they are even born. Basically, you are screwed before you know it, and you LOVE it anyway.

7. Time doesn’t really heal. Just covers up the symptoms. Like Tylenol. Hey, better than nothing.

8. Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world” (and I would add “stop whining that nothing good ever happens. Make it happen.”)

9. A recipe for a tasty therapy: 2 cups of flour (give or take), 1 egg, milk (enough to make a gooey mixture). Mix it all up, add some oil on the pan and start making blintzes. Listen to your heart through out the process.

10. Martha Beck taught me this one: The best way to be endlessly fascinating and attractive to others, is by creating an amazing, fascinating life for yourself, focusing on all the things you love do and be. So, get busy!

I am Sam

This morning started not unlike any other: shut off the alarm at 4:45 am, got out of bed, turned TV on. The news channel reported ugly news and pretty weather. I never stray from the news, almost religiously absorbing the onslaught of information, yet this morning something was pushing me to change up my normal routine. I started flipping the channels. I stumbled on the movie called "I am Sam", which is about a mentally retarded father (Sam) who fights for custody of his daughter. I've never seen the movie in its entirety (and it’s been out for almost 10 years!) Probably for the same reason I've never watched the “Schindler's List” in its entirety. Reason: I am a chicken. I am afraid that I might see that something which will tip the scale of my sanity and I won't be able to go on...But this morning, I couldn't help it. Through the thick blanket of tears I watched the tender and heart-wrenching moments including the scene when, after a court hearing, Sam’s daughter is being ripped out of his arms to be sent to a foster home.
I cried like a baby. Or should say like a grown woman. I have found that if we are truly honest with ourselves, most of the time we cry NOT just purely because we feel someone else's pain. No. We cry because this pain, or at least its seeds, resides within us, repressed or expressed. Listen, I am no dummy. I know I am impressionable and I know that it’s a romanticized version, "based on a true story”. A Hollywood fiction of sorts. I get it. But the movie tells an important story and illustrates a universal truth (at least it seems to me as such). This movie is about how to be a good human being. It’s about unconditional love, which is THE most important ingredient in the often messy, sometimes inedible, sometimes earth-shuttering soup called parenthood. I cried because I didn't recognize myself in Sam as much as I wanted to. I want to be THAT kind of a parent. Always. Every day. No breaks and no exceptions! A saying goes: "be the person your dog thinks you are". Kids are closer to the natural world because they can intuitively spot a fake. I want to be the person my son thinks I am.
There is an old story about three men, who are allowed to ask for one wish to be fulfilled by the Almighty. The first man asks for more wisdom, the second one asks for more patience and the third asks for a cup of coffee. The first two men look at him, puzzled. The third man just shrugs his shoulders and says, "everyone asks for what they don't have enough of”. I wouldn’t mind more patience and wisdom, but if I could ask the Almighty for one thing it would be to help me be a better parent, with an unshakable ability to love unconditionally, no expectations, no judgment, no baggage, in a pure uncomplicated way, every day. It’s the hardest and the most important quality to attain. But I guess everyone does ask for what they don’t have enough of. Perhaps it’s pedestrian and not unique, but I don’t care. You could say that from now on, I am a Sam wannabe.
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"Will you not be mad at me for one second? Because I want to tell you one thing, OK? Because last night, I was writing you a letter...and then the words, they got too big. Gesundheit, Floppy. Floppy has a cold.

And then I said...

Dear Lucy, I'm sorry I maybe hurt your feelings…and I was thinking about you all the time.


Lucy on a hammock…


and Lucy at school...


and Lucy in the sky and kisses and hugs, Daddy.


And P.S. I love you, like the song."

I am Sam, 2001