Sweet Sorrow

I have friends from the dog-walking cemetery who just moved to Vienna, Austria. I have known C and J for only about 8 months, but I totally fell in love with them and their dog Barney during that time. I know that we will keep in touch, and maybe even visit each other at some point over the next year or two, but it will not be the same as seeing them almost every day. I miss them already. I also don't know how my younger dog Amos is going to take their departure, because he and Barney not only look just alike but also are the best of wrestling and running buds. Peas in a pod, those two. I wonder if dogs miss each other in the same way that we do?

The way in which I miss my friends right now involves a combination of two sets of emotions that seem to be occurring equally strongly all at once. I find myself deeply saddened at the prospect of not seeing my friends and Barney on a daily basis -- they brought such a bright, happy light to the cemetery dog-walking community, and their departure leaves a hole in the fabric of that community. But this woe-is-me reaction is accompanied by a feeling of great happiness for my friends. The move to Vienna comes because of a wonderful new job for J, and I have no doubt that both he and C will relish living in one of Europe's most beautiful and culturally rich cities. This is such a great opportunity for them both, and I am so glad that they had the courage and sense of adventure to seize it. Plus, their presence in Vienna -- which is one of my favorite cities -- gives me an added incentive to go there.

I think that Shakespeare got it right, as usual, when he said that parting is such sweet sorrow. The sweetness of new possibilities brought about by a parting is mixed with the sorrow inherent in being separated from someone dear. At the moment I am letting both the sweetness and the sorrow do their thing inside of me, trying to make my peace with both these emotions so that I will be free to move on to the next thing that comes up. And I also am wishing that C's and Barney's first day in Vienna (they should have arrived this morning) will be a splendid one.

A Kind of Prayer

Say what you will about Mother Nature, but she is always fair when it comes to this one thing: when she pommels you with a major tropical storm one day, she immediately follows up with a crystal-clear blue sky, bright sunshine, low humidity, and a gentle breeze the next. The Washington, D.C. area currently is experiencing a particularly glorious day-after-the-storm. There is absolutely nothing about this day not to like.

But you know what? Although it interfered slightly with my ability to be outdoors, I actually liked yesterday's stormy aspect quite a bit, too. I found it very comforting to know that the rain was watering the crops and replenishing the water table, and in so doing making human life in this part of the world possible. Remembering the vital role of the rain and watching it, mostly from the safety of my home, put me in a very relaxed and contemplative mood.

As I walked my dogs in the crisp, cool morning air earlier today, I thought about the contrasting styles of beauty that yesterday and today offer. Appreciating whatever is happening in nature at the moment is something that I find myself doing on a regular basis these days, and my powers of appreciation are heightened when I am outside walking. Even after walking my dogs for over an hour in the morning, I often will go for another long walk in the National Arboretum so that I can get a better feel for what nature is doing at the moment.

When I focus on nature in this manner, I always am saying "thank you" to the universe for the current state of the world. Sometimes I also am looking for a more balanced way to exist in the world as I find it -- my walks provide a wonderful opportunity to release anger, to calm restlessness, to assuage sadness, to sort through confusion, to revel in happiness, to appreciate a moment of peace, to share uncontainable joy, and to cultivate thoughts of love. Through my observances of nature, I become acutely aware of the divine without, the divine within, and the inextricable links between them. I begin to glimpse the sublime oneness of people and things that I normally would view as separate and distinct, and I wish only good things for this collective union and all its constituent parts. This is the manner in which I pray, and the more often I do it the more I begin to think of life as one continuous prayer.

What Makes Us Human

There's someone in my life, someone whom I love dearly, who is very sick. When her illness first emerged last year, I so wanted to be positive for her sake and also to assuage my own discomfort, so I donned a fake, pasted-on happy face and talked of positive attitudes and keeping spirits up and so on. I felt like such a fraud the whole time I did this. What a relief it was when her illness went into remission -- what a just reward for enduring such a grueling course of chemotherapy. And how convenient for me, that I could pack away all that repressed ickiness I had felt deep down but never fully acknowledged.

Yesterday I learned that the symptoms of my loved one's illness have returned, and now I feel horrible. I feel sad and angry on behalf of the person who is sick because, by all the standards that I can conceive for judging such things, her situation just flat out isn't fair. I also feel sad and angry on behalf of her parents and siblings, who are all wonderful people and who each suffers in his or her own way because of this illness that is not theirs to bear yet that cannot but help to affect them all. In addition, I feel sad and angry for myself, because I am frustratingly powerless to make this young and vibrant person as well as I believe she deserves to be, as I so earnestly want her to be.

I now know from experience that trying to deny all these difficult emotions, as unpleasant as they may be, is not a wise path. Despite my most valiant efforts last year to suppress them, the uncomfortable emotions didn't ever really go away -- they just found new and creative (and usually not very productive) ways to rise to the surface and force me to acknowledge them. I reflected on last year's emotional repressions at great length today as I thought about the possible future journey that lies ahead if the tests next week confirm what we all suspect.

It now is clear to me that emotions do not stand for being suppressed, greeted with shame, or otherwise overlooked. Our emotions are one of the things that make us human, and we should feel them -- we need to feel them, and when we ignore or deny them we do so at our peril. After having that thought, I explicitly said to all that complex and intertwined stuff otherwise known as my emotions, "Bring it on!" From now on, I intend to feel each and every emotion that enters my heart or crosses my brow, and to feel it fully. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones that make me so uncomfortable I want to move to Timbuktu just to get away -- bring them all on. I can handle them.

I can handle all these crazy emotions, and here's why: All emotions are by their nature fleeting. We feel good today, we feel bad tomorrow, we feel kinda-sorta OK the day after that, and so the cycle goes. Actually bringing ourselves to feel all these fleeting and ever-changing emotions is how we know we're alive. I think we get ourselves in trouble, though, when we don't let a fleeting thing do its thing and flee. The trick, in my view, is to feel each emotion that arises for all it's worth, but then when its worth is expended to let it go. The trick, in other words, is to not get stuck.

This is what I want to say to my family, and to myself, right now: Tough times may well be ahead, but don't be afraid of your emotions and for god's sake don't deny them. Your emotions are what make you human, so embrace them. Embrace each one of them for whatever time it seems to serve a useful purpose, and then let it go so that you can feel the next thing just as fully. Because there will be a next thing. There always is.

A Few of My Favorite Things

It is taking quite an effort on my part not to use this space to vent my reactions to Sarah Palin's debut speech and the Giuliani tirade that preceded it. Instead, I decided to make a list of a few of my favorite things in life, the vast majority of which, I realized with a combination of relief and gratitude, would survive a McCain/Palin administration. Here goes, in no particular order --

- My fiance, especially his keen mind, good looks, and goofy sense of humor
- My parents and brother
- Jacob and Amos the dogs and all the endearing and funny things they do to make me smile
- The wonderful, small-town feel of my Capitol Hill neighborhood, and the many friends I've made while living there
- My home state of North Carolina, particularly the beaches, the mountains, and the beautiful green smell that permeates the air of the Piedmont region in between
- Congressional Cemetery
- The National Arboretum
- Really great massages
- Reading books, especially outdoors on a beautiful day while dining al fresco
- The voices of Cecilia Bartoli, Kiri te Kanawa, Samuel Ramey, and Thomas Quasthoff
- The music of Beethoven and Bach
- Lazy Sundays
- Cooking, especially for people I love
- Going on long walks
- Feeling that I am making a positive difference in the world
- The afternoon light in my upstairs den as the sun hits the skylight
- Taking good vacations
- Living in a place where I can feel the full measure of all four seasons
- The English language and all its many, beautiful nuances
- Having a strong sense of familial and regional history
- Magnolia trees
- Lilacs
- The buttercups that blanket the cemetery in the spring
- The silence of snow
- Figs, in part because they are delicious, but mostly because they remind me of my grandmother
- Ideas and the free exchange thereof
- Wine
- The Lebanese Taverna
- The British Virgin Islands
- Living simply
- Contemplating the ocean and soaking in its healing waves
- Sitting by the fire on fall and winter days
- Crossword puzzles and sudoku
- Collecting art as I'm moved by it
- Going to museums, especially on a rainy day
- Santa Fe
- Doing work that I feel is important and doing it well
- The Constitution of the United States
- Watching Duke basketball
- Being on a sailboat
- Eastern Market
- Tomatoes
- Having choices (although sometimes I have so many that I get overwhelmed!)
- Being a Luddite in a techno-crazy world
- The Library of Congress
- Chanel perfumes, especially No. 19 and Bois des Isles, which smells the way I think heaven must
- Coffee, especially in France and Italy
- Architecture
- Sunrises and sunsets
- Sitting behind the fish pond in the Duke Gardens
- The feeling of knowing that I am truly loved

I probably could keep going all day, but my food-and-drink entries above have made me hungry so I'm going to stop writing now and go eat. And I'll do so feeling a whole lot better than I did before I made this list!

A Woman and Her House

I bought my little row house on Capitol Hill in March of 2000 on somewhat of a whim. I had run out of space for bookcases in my tiny 1-bedroom rental in the Penn Quarter, so I decided to check out the Hill as a possible place to upgrade to something bigger. I figured that I had a decent shot of actually affording a house somewhere in that area (those were the days!), and I liked the fact that Capitol Hill was within walking distance of the National Mall and reasonable commuting distance to work. I was not in a mood to buy at that time, just to check out what the area had to offer with an eye toward buying in a year or two.

On a bone-chilling rainy Sunday in February 2000, a friend and I had brunch at Jaleo (an excellent bribe to enlist someone to go on a house-hunting mission!) and then drove up Capitol Hill with our list of open houses in hand. After spending a day trudging through one house after the other, I loved the feel of the neighborhood, particularly around Eastern Market, but all of the houses we’d seen were kind of blah – too small, too in need of work, too modern an interior for a Victorian-era building, too unappealing a layout, and so on. Just as we were headed to the car to go back downtown, my friend spotted a sign for an open house that wasn’t on our list but that was, conveniently, right around the corner from where we were parked. I reluctantly agreed to give it a look – I was cold, tired, grumpy, and ready to go home, but I figured that checking out one more place wouldn’t do any harm.

When I walked into the house that I now call home, I knew within about 15 seconds that it was “my house.” I immediately loved everything about it – it had been updated but all the charming Victorian details had been left intact, and it had a wonderful flow and a very comfortable vibration about it. As I climbed to the second floor, I saw a cozy den through the banister rails – it had once been the middle bedroom and narrow upstairs hallway, but a previous owner had removed the hallway wall so that there now was an open space in the middle of the second floor overlooking the staircase. This room featured a wood-burning fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases and a sunny window seat, and it was lit by a skylight above the stairwell. When I saw that room, I decided that I absolutely had to buy this house. I already was envisioning where to put all my things, which I knew would look just perfect in a Victorian house. A rapid succession of calls to The Bank of Mom and Dad, a realtor I knew from the Penn Quarter, and a mortgage lender immediately ensued. After stumbling upon this marvelous little house serendipitously on a Sunday, I participated in a 3-way bidding war the immediately following Tuesday and emerged victorious. I settled one month later, on the Ides of March.

Wow! Me, a home owner at the age of 29! Remembering how I felt when I turned the key in the door of my new home for the first time still gives me chills. This was my dream house, and my dream had actually come true. Man was I ever lucky! The movers weren’t scheduled to come until the day after settlement, but I was so excited that I moved the kitchen and bathroom stuff (there wasn’t much of it) over myself on settlement day, and Arthur the cat and I slept on the window seat that first night. At least I attempted to sleep, which was difficult in the face of Arthur’s endless serenade of sounds that were part meow, part howl. He didn’t settle down until the next day when all of our stuff arrived, and then he was fine until a couple months later when I decided that more space was an excuse to get him a new cat.

After a honeymoon period of a couple months, I found myself cataloging the flaws of the house. The wallpaper in the kitchen had to go, I wanted the walls to be a different color, the floors needed refinishing, the molding looked like it had about 20 coats of paint on it, the 100-year old windows rattled when they were closed and had to be propped open because they had no sash cords, there was lots of noise because of the buses and fire trucks zooming by, the deck was in need of repair, and the list continued. Whenever I fixed one thing I’d immediately notice at least two other things, so my home improvement list just kept getting longer no matter how much time and money went toward repairs. Now I knew why my parents and countless others called their houses “money pits!”

I found during the first few years that, as much as I really loved the house, I did not appreciate all its beauty and good attributes because I was so focused on what was “wrong.” I got so frustrated by all the perceived flaws of my home that I spent most of my non-working hours finding ways to stay out of it. Looking back on it, I see that this attitude toward my home in many ways mirrored my attitude toward myself during those years. I had long tended to focus on my own flaws to the exclusion of my good traits, and I always felt a need to stay in motion, to keep ahead of what I might find if I dared to be still for a moment.

These days, as I have relaxed into accepting myself as I am, I concurrently have been spending much more time at home. I now find myself really savoring all the good things about the house – things that I never fully appreciated before – and I marvel at how numerous those good things are. I see the lovely wall colors, the growing art collection, the updated kitchen in which cooking is such a pleasure, the lovely wonkiness of the original glass windows, and the furnishings that remain both pretty and comfortable despite the damage from cat claws. Although I still have something in the way of a to-do list, at this point I tend to see the items on it as things that will lend character and charm to the house until such time as they are addressed, which in many cases may well be never. So be it. Such is the beauty of an old house.

The newfound ability to pause, and to be comfortable with exactly where things are during that pause instead of grasping for something more or different, has blessed me with numerous benefits, not the least of which is the ability to appreciate the true loveliness of my home sweet home.

Who Am I, Really?

I recently have started having conversations geared toward finding myself a job sometime between now and the beginning of next year. There have not been any formal interviews yet – I’ve simply been testing the waters to get a feel for where I might have the best chance of cutting a deal to my liking (which, by the way, would involve policy-centered work in the bank regulatory field, enough money to pay the bills, no more than 3 days per week, and a reasonable assurance that the part-time aspect of the arrangement would be honored – if anybody out there is reading this and has any ideas, please let me know!).

In anticipation that the real employment negotiations will start taking place soon, this morning I dusted off my résumé. What a flurry of thoughts and emotions that brought to the surface! There was a time, as recently as last year, when I more or less defined myself by reference to my résumé, my job title, and my annual job performance ratings. Looking at my résumé today was a stark reminder of those days and how miserable I felt during them -- always looking to my job for fulfillment, always looking to my academic and job accomplishments to validate my self-worth, always competing to be better than those around me and better than I was last year, always feeling that no matter how well I did it was not good enough, always ticked off when someone else did better or got promoted faster (especially if that someone went to crappy schools and/or wasn’t, in my view, of above-average intelligence). Sheesh, what a draining way to live! No wonder I needed a year off!

At this time last year, when I was weighing the decision of whether or not to take a year off of work, one thing that I remember vaguely wondering in passing was, “Who will I be if I’m not a lawyer at the Federal Reserve Board anymore?” Answering this question certainly was not on my list of conscious reasons to quit my job and take a year off, but I think that in many respects it may have been my real reason for doing so. The part of me that really knows stuff knew that this question needed answering, and that there was only one set of circumstances under which I would bring myself to answer it. I needed to be in a place where I no longer had a job title that I could use as a substitute for a sense of self and where the list of academic and professional achievements that I was substituting for self-worth became completely irrelevant. I needed to throw away the psychological crutches on which I had so long depended to see what would be left standing without them. I have always liked a challenge, and boy did I get one!

Doing away with the conditions that nurtured my particular brand of the “I am what I do” belief resulted initially in a fair amount of self-pity and self-doubt. However, seeing what is left standing without the old crutches has been more than worth that early discomfort. What is left standing is a human being who knows that her true self cannot be pinned down and neatly labeled and is OK with that reality. What is left standing is a human being who knows that trying to convince herself of her worth by amassing external achievements is completely beside the point because self-worth comes from within. What is left standing is a human being who realizes that trying to assert her superiority over other human beings also is completely beside the point because in the end we are all just people who are born and die and who are essentially the same while we live. What is left standing is one human being among billions who knows that we are all in this soup called life together and that we need to honor one another, not compete against one another, if we are to have any hope of satisfaction, individually or collectively.

Today, after a year of reflecting on many topics, including my own sense of being, I looked at my résumé with new eyes. Today, for the first time, I did not look at that piece of paper and think, “This represents who I am.” Instead I thought, “This describes how I’ve chosen to spend my time.” This shift in perspective is, in my book, further evidence that the benefits of taking a year off were more than worth the costs.

It's Labor Day?

For the last nine years, I was a lawyer at the Federal Reserve Board and a total slave to the federal holiday schedule. I typically would start looking forward to Labor Day weekend no later than July 5. Labor Day kicks off that wonderful 5-month period during which there are one or two federal holidays a month. It also features hands-down the best weather of any federal holiday and does not involve either cooking for a crowd or going over to someone else's house to be part of a crowd (a real bonus for the introverts among us). I think it would be safe to say that Labor Day always has been my favorite federal holiday. I even like Labor Day better than Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which falls around my birthday and frequently got me a long birthday weekend.

In light of my enduring fondness for Labor Day, something very strange happened this year. I did not even realize Labor Day was coming until last Friday, when I just happened to hear someone mention it on the radio. If it hadn't been for that, I probably would not have known about Labor Day until this morning, when I no doubt would have been caught wondering aloud why my significant other was not going to work. What a difference a year and a non-working perspective make! I guess that's to be expected, given the purpose and title of the holiday.

Now that I finally am with the program, I would like to wish everyone, workers and non-workers alike, a happy Labor Day. It is a beautiful September day out there -- at least in the DC metro area -- and I hope that folks will make the most of it.