We have a pope! Ring the bells that still can ring…

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

How I LOVE that lyric from Anthem by Leonard Cohen.

On March 13, I was sitting in my living room proofing a report that was due to a client.  My husband burst out of his home office, looking for me.  ”I hear the bells!  Do you hear the bells?”  Thinking he was going a little daft, I feared for a moment, but then got it…  the bells!  The bells of St. Augustine, the Catholic church at the bottom of my street.  The bells I catch at 8:45 every morning when walking Nessie.   Those bells ring at 8:45 every morning, summoning people to 9:00 Mass.

But it wasn’t 8:45.   It was in the afternoon.  And all of a sudden I remembered how the bells rang when Pope Benedict was elected.  So, this meant there was a new pope!  Now, my husband isn’t even Catholic, and for that matter, neither am I.  But I have certainly have brought my Catholic heritage into my life with no apologies.

So the bells were ringing, and with that, I was searching CNN.com.  Sure enough, habemus papum!  We have a pope!  And a simple Pope at that!   He cooks his own meals.  Eschews the fancy cardinal digs for a small apartment.  Rides the bus instead of taking a limousine.

CNN made good work of talking about this, how Pope Francis is a man of firsts–first non-European pope; the first Jesuit pope; first to choose the name of Francis, first to petition his flock to pray for him before he prayed for them.

Then, of course, the backlash.   Maybe he wasn’t so perfect after all.  Maybe he hadn’t done enough.  He should have done more to free and protect Argentinian Jesuits during the Dark War.  He didn’t back gay marriage.

When I started reading all this stuff about how “imperfect” Pope Francis is, I remembered Leonard Cohen’s lyric.  I remembered Dorothy Day who had an abortion, who was divorced.  I thought about the former party animal St. Augustine.   And then, what about Victor Hugo’s inspirational Jean Valjean–a thief, turned prisoner, turned ex-con, turned man of God.

I recently watched a Youtube video in which one of Dorothy Day’s commentator’s said that the meaning behind Dorothy Day’s famous quote:  ”Don’t call me a saint.  I don’t want to be dismissed so easily”  is that designating her a saint lets us all off the hook.  If we expect saints to be perfect, we don’t have to strive for sainthood, because we’ve already “broken the seal” of sinfulness.  Kind of like when you abandon a diet after succumbing to pint of Cherries Garcia ice cream.  Well, guess what.  Yes, we’ve all broken the seal of sinfulness by virtue of being born.

But accepting that we, as well as all the saints, have inherited this original sin offers us hope.   Because all we have to do is accept God’s grace and take up the cross.  Anyone can do this!  We aren’t that special!  But paradoxically, we ARE that special.   We are special because we have cracks–not because we are perfect.  Our cracks are the peephole to God’s grace, and the way for the light to shine on others.

So when some people bash Pope Francis, I just want to say, “He’s not perfect.  Duh.  But he has lived among the poor.  He does not dismiss them.  He has washed the feet of AIDS patients.  He does not dismiss them.”  And as pope, it seems he will not be dismissing the imprisoned on Maundy Thursday, when he will go to a minor’s prison outside Rome instead of St. Peter’s Basilica, where he will wash of the feet of young offenders,

If he can stay true to himself, it will be a wonderful thing for the people, for the Church, and for the world at large.  If he can continue to perform these simple yet profound acts of humility and love for all of humanity, warts and all, he will shine a light on what we all wish a Christ-follower and Church leader to be.  And he will shine a light on the path that we can all follow.

Why aren’t there more footprints in the snow?

It snowed in the Northeast last weekend, as everyone knows.   We got a decent amount of snow, but not too much to handle.

I took Nessie out this evening for her walk, and I happened to notice that there was only one other set of footprints in the snow out in the park, back by the creek where we routinely take her.  Maybe they were a neighbor’s–more likely they were my husband’s from when he took Nessie out yesterday.

I live in a suburb with hundreds of homes surrounding this little suburban oasis of a park.  But, with all those homes, there were no other footprints in the snow.   I don’t get it.

The woods were beautiful this evening–smokey grey and looking not unlike a Japanese pen-and-ink drawing.  The snow-protected creek bubbled with clean, clear, cold water.   The duck entourage quacked while navigating their way down the waterway.  And I couldn’t believe that perhaps I was the only witness.

The walkway into the park had been cleared by the township.  Perhaps the other dog walkers took that less-soggy route.  What a shame that we’ve moved so far from natural life that we think we should only walk on the cleared tarmac, and that we must avoid wet crunch of the snow and the icy, crackling, canopy of the woods.

How gratitude fuels prosperity

Yes, I’m still working through my prosperity classics.

One of the abstracts in Tom Bowden-Butler’s book sounded so interesting to me that I looked it up on Amazon and found that it was only a couple of bucks on Kindle, so I bought it.  It was Charles Fillmore’s Prosperity.

Charles Fillmore was one of the early New Thought leaders of the last century.   He founded Unity, a church within the New Thought movement which includes thinkers and spiritual leaders such as early ones like James Allen to modern-day New Thought practitioners like Caroline Myss.

One of the things you find in a lot of these New Thought/Positive Thinking books is that the secret sauce is gratitude.  You can work your butt off.  You can list goals.  You can network a web around every mentor and business leader and prospect in the country, but unless you do all of this with an “attitude of gratitude” your mileage on the road to prosperity is going to be akin to that of a Hummer.

“Many people who order their lives rightly in all other ways are kept in poverty by their lack of gratitude.” - Wallace Wattles

However, if you simply fill the tank with gratitude for anything that comes your way–if you simply thank God for the mundane as well as the miraculous, you may find you’re driving your way to prosperity at 50mpg.    Much higher efficiency.

Why is this?  To be sure, the mystics all talk about gratitude.  Meister Eckhart famously said that “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you’ that will suffice.”  But what does that have to do with opening up the door to abundance–to prosperity?

Poet, author and teacher Stephen Levine says:

Gratitude is the highest form of acceptance. Like patience, it is one of the catalytic agents, one of the alchemist’s secrets, for turning dross to gold, hell to heaven, death to life. Where there is gratitude we get the teaching. Where there is resistance we discover only that it keeps us painfully ignorant.

So when we are grateful we tap into the flow.   When we tap into the flow, we have access to an aura of abundance that that creates a magnetic attraction.  People become attracted to us.   Doors become open to us.  We, no longer resistant to what is, are open to walking through those doors fearlessly.

Daniel Peralta describes this phenomenon in Louse L. Hay’s book, Gratitude: A Way of Life:

When you express gratitude, you raise the vibrations around you to a higher frequency. You create positive energy that emanates out from you and returns to you as wonderful experiences. You become magnetic. Good things and good people gravitate toward you because you’re such a joy and delight to be around.

An attitude of gratitude is naturally attractive. It has the power to turn challenges into possibilities, problems into solutions, and losses into gains. It shifts the energy. It expands our vision and allows us to see what might normally be invisible to someone with a limiting attitude.

So, taking this concept, adopting it, and making it “actionable” in the parlance of business leaders means that once that gratitude has seeped into your consciousness like rum in sponge cake, you are in the position of accepting your present circumstances.  More than accepting them, you embrace them.  You call them good.

Good leads to good.  So if you’re starting from a place that you deem to be undesirable, what good can come of it?   So by turning the switch from the attitude of scarcity to an attitude of plenitude, you are on a different trajectory.  You are on your way to exponential goodness.

“We should form the habit of blessing everything that we have. We know that we are setting the law of increase into operation.” – Charles Fillmore

So, let’s just lean into our gratitude.  Let’s not just thank God for the obvious.  Let’s thank God for everything that is now in our field of vision.  Everything we can see.  Everything we can embrace joyfully.  Everything we can accept gratefully.  Everything we can change purposefully.

Here’s a poem about the joy of gratitude that expresses how I’ve felt at times:

I Kissed It

I was ironing the other day
And I found myself
Kissing
My son’s white T-shirt
Size 8
It was a silly thing to do
I did it anyway

I was wondering what to cook the other day
And I found myself
Kissing
A small rutabaga
It was a silly thing to do
Kissing a rutabaga
(Purply-waxy little thing!)
I looked around sheepishly
To be sure I was alone
And I kissed it

Some things make sense to kiss
You kiss a spouse
You kiss a cheek
Or two, if you’re in France

But there are things
So beautiful
So wonderful
So awe-inspiring
(To my eyes anyway)

That the desire wells up
Irresistibly
And I…
Sshh…
Just have to sneak a peck!

A silly way (to be sure)
To simply say
Thank you

–r. carrera  ©2012

What’s Your New Year’s Prosperity Affirmation?

This year I’m not doing New Year’s resolutions.  I’m doing New Year’s affirmations.

Remember when our teachers made us write things on the board 100 times in order to modify our behavior?  Well, maybe they had something in common with people like James Allen and Wayne Dyer.  And maybe they were really on to something.

I got an Amazon gift card from my son for Christmas.  So, I spent some time perusing the seemingly limitless choices, and then a light bulb when off.  Why not get one of Tom Butler-Bowdon‘s books?  Years ago I got his 50 Success Classics on MP3 and listened while I was driving.  I loved it.  It was just enough to get the gist of the classic works, already abstracted and synthesized.  And the bonus is his “In a Nutshell” where he gives you the key takeaway of the whole book.

So, getting his one book is like getting 50 books–and 50 great, time-tested books at that.

This time around, I chose 50 Prosperity Classics.   That choice may seem weird for someone like me, who writes about people like Peace Pilgrim and Charles Eisenstein and who basically feels that unlimited economic prosperity is going to ruin the environment.  But I looked at the list of authors in this book and they called out to me:  people like James Allen, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Friedman, Paul Hawken, Ayn Rand, Dave Ramsey and Muhammad Yunus.  If that’s not a diverse group of people to put under the prosperity umbrella, I don’t know what is.

What struck me immediately as I started to move through some of the authors was a common thread–the idea that manifesting prosperity is a matter of affirming your prosperity today.  And to me, prosperity doesn’t mean dollars and cents necessarily.  I’m not looking to be a millionaire, or own a better car than the one I currently have (a 2007 Prius), and I certainly don’t want more rooms to clean.  To me, prosperity is about thriving in a holistic sense.  Having physical needs fulfilled is part of it, but really, to me, it’s about creating conditions for your mental, physical, and spiritual being to thrive so that God can work through you.  Prosperity can be the happy result of unclogged spiritual plumbing.  Spiritual clogs can be fear, doubt, lack of imagination, lack of belief, and resignation.

A while back, I touched on Wayne Dyer and his book Wishes Fulfilled.  As a result of reading his book, I spun off with an interest in Anita Moorjani and Neville Goddard.   Reading the 50 Prosperity Classics I was reminded of these inspiring writers who join with James Allen, and Catherine Ponder, and Napoleon Hill in advising us to BE what we want to be NOW.  Don’t say, “I’m going to be healthier.”  Say, “I AM healthy.”   Don’t say, “I’m going to be able to pay my bills.” Say “I AM able to pay my bills.”

Once of the basic tools most of these folks teach in order to manifest prosperity in life is the use of affirmations, like  Catherine Ponder’s “I am the radiant child of God, my mind, body and affairs now express his radiant perfection.” 

Some people may think that affirmations are New Age-y and cheesy, but the most pragmatic, successful people believe in the power of the imagination–people like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs, who simply affirmed and asserted their unique visions.  They didn’t let “reality” stop them from manifesting who they were and what they were here on earth to do.  Reality is what we make of it.  It’s not a wall–it’s the window of our minds, thoughts, and hearts.

All these prosperity books are replete with stories of people who were able to manifest their realities.  I might think those stories were fiction, if I didn’t have a story of my own, but I do.    Someday I’ll tell it.

Not Just Any New Year: the 60th Anniversary of Peace Pilgrim’s first step

This is the way of peace:  Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.–Peace Pilgrim

60 years ago today, Peace Pilgrim stepped out to walk her walk and her talk of Peace.  I first learned of her in 1999, and was immediately drawn to her simplicity of purpose, and the joy in non-attachment she had.

She was a woman who walked well over 25,000 from coast to coast spreading her own rendition of the Golden Rule and living a life of peace and simplicity.  Her message is so basic and pure, uncluttered by religious dogma, nationalism, or any other –ism, I have become deeply inspired by it.  Love is The Thing.  Typically, so many things clutter up that message.  But she simply got rid of all those other things in her own life and was left with the Big Thing.

Here is an NPR article about her in honor of the 60th anniversary of her first step.

Here is the Friends of Peace Pilgrim Facebook page.

And here is the full text of Steps to Inner Peace.  I have several copies of this little booklet, which I try to give out when I can.  This is a short post, but I would rather you read her words directly.

Happy New Year, and may this year be a year of peace for all.

In order for the world to become peaceful, people must become more peaceful. Among mature people war would not be a problem – it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the things which make war. However, people can mature just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and our leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and set up better institutions. It always comes back to the thing so many of us wish to avoid: working to improve ourselves.– Peace Pilgrim

Bottled Water: A Simple Question With a Complex Answer

In my last post I referenced the author and speaker Charles Eisenstein.  Because I “liked” his Facebook page I get posts about his travels and articles from time to time.  I’m going to reprint some excerpts from the one I got yesterday.  I thought it was so good, I would recommend that if you are interested, go to his site and read the whole article.

I really liked this article for a couple of reasons:

1. I identified with the title Nestlé executive.  Having been a VP in a global marketing firm (and actually having had Nestlé as my client on a few projects) I could stand in her shoes, interested in doing the best job possible, both for the company and for the society it serves.   I could also identify with the young girl who asked the rather accusatory question–I certainly have my own questions about Big Business and its ability to serve the public good without further damage to the earth, simply because the goals of business and environmentalism are inherently at odds with each other in most cases.
2. The simple question put to the Nestlé executive by a young student was about Nestlé’s manufacture of bottled water.  But he answer was not so simple, and that’s what I really liked about Eisenstein’s piece:  It acknowledged that there is no benefit to a black/white, either/or mentality.  There is no benefit to pitting Us against Them and pointing fingers, simply because  we’re all in this together.   The question of “shouldn’t you stop making bottled water” calls into question not only market supply and demand, but also the lifestyle we’ve chosen for ourselves that necessitates water on the run, the current state of our natural resources to which we have all contributed, and our personal stories we live inside–of the Evil Corporations rolling towards us, the Helpless Citizens, tied to the rails.    But Charles Eisenstein gives each of us more power than that.

Well, I’ll let you judge for yourself by linking to the article, The Lovely Lady from Nestle on this website.  The bottled water question is emblematic of the whole tangled web we’ve woven, and the need for all of us to take responsibility in addressing the pressing questions of our future lives on this planet.

I am providing some excerpts, reluctantly.  I would reprint the whole thing, but I don’t have the author’s permission.  Printing the excerpts is nothing but a hatchet job of a very lucid piece, so I hope you link directly to The Lovely Lady From Nestle by Charles Eisenstein

The Lovely Lady from Nestlé
Charles Eisenstein

At a conference recently I happened to overhear a conversation between one of the speakers, a vice-president of Nestle Corporation, and a college student who was questtioning the VP’s glowing portrayal of Nestle’s social and environmental policies.

The student bravely interrogated the VP about their leading beverage category, bottled water. “Do we really need such a thing?” she asked. And, “I understand you are using 40% less plastic per bottle, but wouldn’t it be better to use no plastic at all?”

To each query, the VP had a persuasive, thoroughly reasoned response. Bottled water meets a real need in a society on the go. And did you know that raw ingredient for making the plastic bottles is a byproduct of producing gasoline from petroleum? If it doesn’t go toward bottles, it will end up as some other plastic product or dumped directly into the environment. Glass uses way more energy to produce. And tap water is no longer pure.

….

The VP’s positions are unassailable unless we can expand the scope of the conversation. We have to ask questions at the level of, “What role do plastic bottles play in the accelerating pace of modern life, why is this acceleration happening and is it a good thing?” “Where does our busyness and need for convenience come from?” “Why is our tapwater becoming undrinkable?” “Why do we have a system in which it is OK to produce waste products that are unusable by other life forms?” And, “Is the ‘sustainable growth’ championed by Nestle possible on a finite planet?”

….

In fact, the corporations don’t have all the power at all. They only do within the framework of a universe of force. In a universe of love, things are not at all hopeless. If we see the VP and people like her as people just like ourselves, then they can change as we have changed. …Maybe there is a time for fighting, for matching force with force. But I think if we carefully examine our victories in social and environmental justice, we will find that it was the power of conscience, compassion, and love that powered those victories.

Some random thoughts on money

Money:  Just a means of exchange?

One day my great uncle, at that point a young lawyer, came home to find his wife, my Great aunt Florence, crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Aunt Florence tearfully told him that she had torn up an envelope, thinking it was junk mail, and later realized there had been a check for $100 in it, payment for a short story Uncle Edwin had written for Boys’ Life.  $100 was a good chunk of change back then in 1920, around the time this occurred.

“Acchh, money,” said Uncle Edwin, consoling her.  “It’s just a means of exchange.”

If only he were right.  Seems pretty simple and I guess most fundamentally, he is right.  But we attach so much more to it—our security, our identity.  We trade it for what we think will give us comfort, prestige, success, beauty, and an aura of intelligence and even wisdom.

“When you’re rich, they think you really know” sings Tevya in the musical Fiddler On The Roof

But what exactly are we exchanging?

So we exchange away, we exchange our lives for this means of exchange.  We labor. Too often it means working in jobs we hate, working for people who demean us or exploit us.

Then we get our paychecks, and seek ways to find recompense for the unfulfilling hours of our lives we’ve spent to acquire it — trading it for stuff to make us comfortable, prestigious, successful, beautiful.

Sometimes we find we don’t have enough of this exchange medium, so then we go further and exchange our future for it—we go into debt.   By going into debt we build walls between ourselves and our liberty, because now we have to work harder and longer servicing the debt.  We exchange our future for more exchange medium.

Ultimately this “means of exchange” winds up being the medium of our prison.  We have taken what would be a better guarantee of happiness—more time with family and friends and greater choice of right livelihood—for an illusion.

“Money makes the world go round”  sings the M.C. in another musical, “Cabaret.”

So, what if we took money out of the equation? 

What if we found a way to eliminate money from our lives?  Screeech!!!

I can hear the sound of the needle on the LP screeching to a halt—all the music stopping and all that’s left is silence as people think, “huh??”

But, we HAVE to have money!

If all of a sudden money went up in a poof of smoke, or if it were exposed as the illusion it truly is, what would happen?

Would we disappear from the earth?  No.  We might be more in touch with it.

Would we still have access to food, shelter, clothing?   Well, think about it.  Perhaps we would then learn to work cooperatively in communities and share labor and simple resources, like they do in Amish communities.  We would, as part of this shared community, cultivate and grows plants from real seed for real food.   We would share livestock, birds, and fish.

Wouldn’t our lives be pure drudgery?  How would we have fun?   Despite what people think in this high-tech entertainment world, fun is fundamentally available for free.  We’ve just forgotten how to have fun without paying for it.

Yes, Virginia, there is life beyond Versace, contrary to what the advertising world will tell you.    There is even life without money.  The birds do it, and the bees do it.

“Look at the lilies of the field.  They neither labor nor spin” says Jesus (Matthew 6:28)

So, what is a world without money?

I am not an economist by any means.  But I think it’s interesting to just sit for a moment and challenge the paradigm that we have to have money in its current form to live.  Really.  Think about it.  What if our current caste system, which is driven by our “net worth,” was gone?    What if there was a New World summit that could hammer out solutions for removing the source of social inequality, greed, misplaced ambitions, years of hard labor, and the idea of “retirement.”

Think about it.    Just imagine a world without currency as a means of exchange.

Sacred Economics

That’s what I’ve been pondering since reading a couple of books related to a concept called the gift economy.  The first, Sacred Economics, by Charles Eistenstein.  The book description:

“A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with “right livelihood” and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money.”

An Elevated Life

There are many, many ideas laid out in Sacred Economics, and there are so many provocative ones.  One of the primary ideas is that our current system promotes a scarcity economy, while a gift economy promotes a plentitude economy.  I love the fact that Eisenstein presents his ideas in a way that shows that by giving up some of our profane habits, we elevate ourselves to the sacred.   There is no reason to think that giving up money is going to diminish us—on the contrary, it will elevate us.  It will open up all kinds of opportunities for right livelihood.  We bow into service to a life worth living.  We serve each other and by serving one, we serve all.  This is not laying down our daily lives for a company that exploits, denudes, or deprives.   Eisenstein says,

“It is ironic indeed that money, originally a means of connecting gifts with needs, originally an outgrowth of a sacred gift economy, is precisely what blocks the blossoming of our desire to give, keeping us in deadening jobs out of economic necessity, and forestalling our most generous impulses with the words, ‘I can’t afford to do that.’”

By the way, in keeping with the spirit of the philosophy of sacred economics, you can buy the book, or you can read it online for free.

The Appeal to our Self-Interest

The main reason for exploring this new way of thinking about money at all is one which should appeal to our self-interest:  Our current growth economy is simply not sustainable.

We are going to deplete all of nature’s resources and basically hand over our survival on this planet to the 1%, because income disparity will continue to widen, and the resulting impoverishment will run deep—even as the natural resources of the Earth dry up.    Something to think about.

Deep Economy from the Well of Community

The other book I read which is not specifically on the concept of gift economy but certainly outlines a transition to a more sustainable economy is Deep Economy by Bill McKibben.  McKibben, author of many seminal books on ecology and climate change, offers some interesting alternatives to a more sustainable way of doing things right in our own backyard.   For instance, simply orienting ourselves to our local communities will help right some of the inherent dangers in relying on giant corporations and foreign exports to drive our consumption.

In doing so, we build valuable social capital, and McKibben quantifies that social capital.  He shows us that the way we are living now–consuming mindlessly with false assumptions about true value–is built on faulty logic.  The same faulty logic that is used to justify working 40 hours a week simply because we think we“have to work”, even if by working we have to pay for childcare, car payments, transportation costs, work clothes and eating out.  The same faulty logic that justifies eating cheap, processed food, even when the long term costs in terms of our health will be so much greater.

Is All Growth Inherently Good?

It’s natural to think that all growth is good.  After all, nature is prolific in how it grows.  Human life is prolific in its growth as well.  So, it makes sense that we see economic growth the same way.  But not all growth is positive and life-affirming.  Cancer grows and cuts off life by upsetting the delicate balance of natural systems in the body.   Unrestrained economic growth is the same kind of cancer—taking over, dominating, crowding out the sacred connections to the broader, more organic systems in our communities and our culture at large.

We can go along on the current path, believing that “capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best way.”  Or, we can open our minds to another way.   Improve the capitalism we have now.  Or come up with something entirely different.

My three free jalapeño pepper plants

A gift from my local garden center.

This is just a quick post to give Madeline of Maple Tree Farms a thank you for the three jalapeño plants she gave me.   No charge!  She said, “Ah, they’re just three plants.  Take them.”    I had just told her that they were going to replace three pepper plants that cutworm had destroyed in my garden.

There is a connection here to a few other things I would like to discuss in future posts having to do with the possibility of the growth of a gift economy.  Last month I read Sacred Economics by Charles Eistenstein, and The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen.

Very provocative reading, and it all ties in with Madeline and my jalapeño plants.  More to come.

The Road Trip

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”–Mark Twain

Late afternoon somewhere between Arkansas and Tennessee

Summer vacation time is almost upon us.   A lot of people have made plans by now.  Some haven’t.  So, here’s a suggestion for those who haven’t:  Plan a road trip.

Road trips are not universally appreciated.  These days people consider the journey the odious part of the trip.  They just want to get through TSA at the airport, suffer the waits, delays, and discomfort of travel and just get to where they’re going.

Not me.  I love the journey, whether it be by plane, train or automobile.  The destination is just a necessary ingredient:  kind of like the stake that holds the tent up.

So, road trips are great for me.  Just give me the destination to aim at and I’ll be sure to get there–eventually–after I’ve hit up a few diners; meditated on a few vistas; let some loud sing-songs waft out the car windows and chanced upon a few happily unexpected meetings.

Here are a few rules for enjoying road trips

1. Accept that the journey IS the trip, not the destination.  Slow down.  Look around.
2. In order to appreciate the time (notice I didn’t say “kill” time, or even “pass” time), listen to your favorite songs and sing along.   Listen to some great podcasts.  Listen to great audiobooks–a good suggestion is any of Bill Bryson’s books, but particularly his travel books, like the hilarious A Walk in the Woods.   Chat.  Be silent.  Look around.
3. Get out of the car frequently.  When I went on a road trip with my Uncle Bill along the Mississipi in Minnesota/Wisconsin, he would pull over periodically and announce, “THERE’s a nice vista!”  And we would just stand there and soak it in–the sight of a  farmhouse nestled in a valley, cradled by the green hills around it.
4. Snap photos on the way with an app like Momento and keep them private or share them.
5. Go with like-minded travellers–nothing is worse than to be trapped in a car for hours with someone who is bored and/or impatient.
6. Plan to drive only 5-6 hours a day, so you have time to relax and sightsee.
7. Have a flexible itinerary:  half the fun of a road trip is the unexpected.   Map out things you’d like to see between Point A and Point B, but don’t be too rigid.  Go with the flow.
8. If you can, work in visits with relatives on the way that you don’t get a chance to see much
9. Be adventurous. It’s nice to see the standard tourist stuff, but it’s even better to be surprised by an experience you didn’t expect.  When I was in London one year, we missed the bus to Haworth, site of Wuthering Heights, and so we didn’t get there until after dark.  Rather than succumbing to the disappointment of not being able to see the heather on the hills in the pitch dark, we trudged up those hills anyway, until the lights of the village was below, the purple sky was above, and we were knee deep in heather that we picked, but didn’t see, until we got back to town.  It was an awesome experience.

One of My Favorite Road Trips

One time my daughter offered to drop off a friend at his home.  She lived in Washington DC at the time.  He lived in Texas.  I thought that was pretty considerate of her, going a mere 1500 miles out of her way to bring him home.

I heard about this when I was on the road, and when I asked how she was getting back to the East after dropping him off, she said, “I’m driving home myself.”  ”Oh, no you’re not” I told her.  In a stroke of providential serendipity, I just happened to be flying on business for two days to the friend’s home town.  So I cancelled the last leg of my plane itinerary and told her I’d meet her and we’d drive home together.

This was such a last-minute decision there were no big plans, no building up a lot of excitement and anticipation.  It was what it was–and it was wonderful.  I have such great memories of my daughter and I bombing across Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia and up the East Coast in the little VW Beetle.  We had a loose itinerary; we decided we were going to enjoy the trip and not just try to fly home quickly.  We didn’t book hotels until we got to where we were going, and we just had fun.  Take a look at the pictures.

Late afternoon somewhere between Arkansas and Tennessee

Our first stop was Hope, AK, to see the home of Bill Clinton.

After we visited Bill Clinton’s home, we walked down the nearly-deserted Main St. and took pictures of our reflection in an empty storefront window.

Stopped at Sun Studios in Memphis for a tour. Brought back a lot of memories of great music.

Of course we had to pay a visit to Graceland, famous home of Elvis

Couldn’t leave Memphis without paying homage to MLK at the Lorraine Motel, where he was shot.

Yes, we did have permission to explore an abandoned farmhouse. We weren’t trespassing here!

Oops! Seems the farm wasn’t completely abandoned! The horse looks like he’s wondering what the heck we’re doing there.

THAT’s a nice vista! Tazewell, Virginia.

Believe it or not, the end of our trip was marked by a double rainbow in Washington DC–one for each of us!

What’s Wrong with Bucket Lists?

Bucket List: 1) Reduce stress 2) Complete bucket list 3) Reduce stress created by not completing bucket list

Everyone knows what a “bucket list” is–the term was popularized by the 2007 by the movie that starred Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.  In the movie, the two men meet in the hospital as in-patients for cancer treatment, and they embark on fulfilling their “bucket lists”–things they want to do before they kick the bucket.

The notion is not new–and the movie’s title was based on the term.  Google “bucket lists” and you’ll find all kids of lists you can steal from and be inspired by:  The Thrill Seeker’s Bucket List; Bucket List for Men; 28 Places to See Before You Die.  The Huffington Post even has an article on the Reverse Bucket List:  things NOT to do before you die.

Sounds inspiring to come up with a to-do list of Meaningful Activities.  But the idea has always bothered me for some reason, and I think it’s because of the faulty logic:

1. Focusing on 5, or 17, or 98, or 1000 things to do before you die assumes that THOSE THINGS are the things that matter.
2. Aiming your arrow at those few things pushes the things you are doing right now into peripheral vision.
3. Therefore, the moments you ARE living, prior to jumping out of airplanes or crossing the country on a motorcycle are placed in your mind as not as important.
4. Then, what if those bullseye activities aren’t as fulfilling as you had hoped?  Haven’t you ever gone to the prom and it was nowhere as magical as you had imagined it?   I think that’s what Stephen Covey refers to as having the ladder against the wrong wall.
5. At that point, have you been chasing an illusion?  An expectation that this one thing, or dozen things on your list should be the things that count, when, after all, you find they weren’t?

Which brings me to the thing that bothered me the most about the movie.  While Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman were sitting on a mountain in Sedona or wherever, Morgan Freeman’s wife was trying to track down her husband, and essentially was shut out of the bucket list.  The movie tries to mitigate this by adding expository about some existing trouble in the relationship.  OK.   I’m sure there are people who are sorry, at the end of their lives, that they tolerated stale relationships, but maybe addressing relationships should be #1 on the bucket list as opposed to a fancy dinner with a near-stranger in Paris.

I’m not saying life shouldn’t be an adventure. and a quest for our heart’s desire.   Dorothy had to have that experience in Oz before she came right around to learning that her heart’s desire is in her own “backyard”  (a metaphor for inner self, or divine guidance, or the kingdom within).  But, the bucket list is not a mythological quest:  I think we must guard against making our bucket lists diversions from our true inner quests.

To me, a bucket list is like jumping over running streams right in front of you to chase a mirage.

My bucket list has one thing in it, and if I can accomplish it, I don’t have to worry about check marks and timelines.  In fact, the timeline for my bucket list is very, very short.

My Bucket List:

1. Be here now.