"This mantra misleads on nearly every front," according to this Diversified Insurance blog post

OK, so here’s where I’m going to provide the possible alternatives for Matt, but I want to lay out one overriding principle that I’ve learned in my travels in and out of employment and finding the best route for my life, and that is:

It’s not about you.  It’s not about you, but it is about finding your calling.  Sometimes you and God might not agree, but one of the best ways to distract yourself from the idea of retirement is to try to figure out how you and God can get on the same page.

I want to be perfectly transparent in my belief that finding the best path in life is not always about Finding Your Bliss or indulging in immediate gratification for the perfect work life.   Let’s face it–life is full of struggles.  To get to where you should be, sacrifice is always the price you pay.

So this theme of unretirement is really more about opening your heart and mind to alternatives.  Alternatives that might take your mind off of the typical  self-centered marathon of a life to cross the finish line at 65 with blinders on.  There are other ways to live in which your focus can be on the present moment instead of a future one.

Matt is lucky because he’s so young and life’s door is wide open.  But being young is sometimes a disadvantage for finding your true calling.  Sometimes you have to be like the writer in Ecclesiastes, or like Dorothy in Oz, wandering around until you realize that you spent a lot of time and miles searching for something outside yourself, not knowing that the real answer was right there in your own heart.

Perhaps Matt could get a head start on his course in life if he does what Lisa Kelly advises in her Ignatian blog post, Connecting to the Source, dotMagis.com.  In examining his alternative in life, Matt might simply want to take some steps to connect with the Source that will put him on the path meant for him.  This path might be something Matt hasn’t even imagined. It might be confusing to Matt.  It might be difficult.  But somehow, Matt will feel pulled in that direction.

Here is Lisa’s advice for finding new habits of the heart, which might apply in Matt’s situation:

- Get over yourself—whatever you are going to be called to, if it is a higher calling, it’s not going to be about you. It is going to be about and for others. You are going to be the tool. Connecting to God will require putting aside your wants, your desires, your biases, your plans. Are you ready for that?

- Get outside yourself- Stop judging and start observing, observing, observing. Be aware of what is going on inside. Ignatius taught his companion to just name what was going on inside and let it be what it is rather than trying to stomp it out or avoid it. He suggested seeing situations from multiple points of view—others in the scene, open to what insights may come from any vantage point, knowing God is in all of them. We are seeking what we don’t know or can’t see rather than reaffirming what we already think.

- Make some space and time for your mind and body-The first step of the Examen is to settle ourselves and be aware of the Presence. While some spiritualities make this space by retreating from the world, Ignatius saw it as most important to do while within the world. Get out in nature and let your senses be overwhelmed. Let the cares and worries and constant chatter of your mind fade away into awareness of nothing but the present moment. If we don’t stop talking to ourselves, how are we going to hear the Voice that we seek? Centering prayer, yoga, meditation all help people practice being in that space that makes connecting to the Source far more likely because the chatter is kept to a minimum.

- Give it wings. Trust what you glimpsed. Do something (even if you don’t know where it is going to lead you.) Get over your fears—don’t let that Spirit Not of God, get in your way. Run with it. Try it—knowing full and well you still have a long way to go. Prayer must result in some action or change to be complete.

So, perhaps Matt might decide to stay in his marketing job.  If he does, and if he pursues this job mindfully, he might decide to ignore the social cues the prompt him to keep up with his colleagues’ status symbols.  He might make a decision to stay out of debt, because as soon as you borrow, you are no longer living in the moment.  You are no longer free to follow God’s call.  And he might perform his daily tasks, as simple as they may be, with an attitude of service.

Or he might start mentally and prayerfully exploring other options, following his heart even if it seems counterintuitive to who he thinks he is, and what he thinks he wants.  So many saints found their way by ignoring their self-perceptions.  As Evelyn Underhill stated in The Spiritual Life:

St. Paul did not want to be an apostle to the Gentiles.  He wanted to be a clever and appreciated young Jewish scholar, and kicked against the pricks.  St. Ambrose and St. Augustine did not want to be overworked and worried bishops…St. Cuthbert wanted the solitude and freedom of his hermitage on the Farme, but he did not often get there.  St. Francis Xavier’s preference was for an ordered life close to his beloved master, St. Ignatius.  At a few hours’ notice he was sent out to be the Apostle of the Indies and never returned to Europe again.  Henry Martyn, the fragile and exquisite scholar, was compelled to sacrifice the intellectual life to which he was so perfectly fitted, for the missionary life to which he felt he was decisively called.  In all these, a power beyond themselves decided the direction of life.  Yet in all we recognize not frustration, but the highest of all types of achievement.

In out modern day, we have examples.  What do you think Albert Schweitzer‘s family thought when he gave up classical music to minister in deepest Africa?    What drove St. Theresa of Liseaux to inspire greatness with her spirituality of imperfection, with her Little Way?  What do you think Martin Luther King Jr.’s family thought when he took on leadership of the Civil Rights movement?   I really don’t see him sitting at Boston University saying to himself, “I think I’ll go home and put my family in danger and risk a nice life as pastor of a church and start a civil rights movement.”

So step one is to change our Habits of the Heart, as Lisa Kelly calls them.   Let Someone else do the coloring of our parachutes.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

I’m not a financial expert and I’m not a life coach, so the way I’m going to answer the “yes buts” about the retirement paradigm that I said that I’d talk about in the last post is to let the real experts take the floor by providing a few links.

Over the next few posts I’ll discuss some hypothetical people marching toward retirement:

Matt is in his late 20s and has been entrenched in his job for a few years.  He had gone to college and changed his major a few times, but finally settled on Marketing, after trying classes in history and anthropology.  He loved his classes in anthropology and thought it would be great to go to places and uncover hidden secrets about man and society, but he wasn’t ready to rush into grad school, and he was sick of being a broke student.  So,  he shifted to a more practical major, upon his dad’s advice, and his personality and better-than-average grades won him an interview at a Fortune 500 company.   He and his parents were thrilled when he got a job offer after only three months of searching.  In this economy, he considered himself really lucky.

But, some realities of 9-5 came as a rude awakening to him the first year.  Not that he dislikes his job as an entry-level manager.   He really enjoys the camaraderie and the challenge at this job.  Plus he’s optimistic about his future.  His boss thinks he has a lot of promise, and has indicated that he could be promoted within the year.  Matt’s friend Ashley started a couple of years before him and she is already a vice president!  She recently got rid of her college car, a Ford Focus, and bought an entry-level Audi.

However, Matt sometimes finds it overwhelming because he knows he has to work 50-60 hours a week at his job to continue to impress his boss.  With those hours, and his 3-hour a day commuting time into the City, he’s pretty exhausted on the weekends.  The worst thing is, he feels that two–weeks vacation a year is pretty constraining.  He has to choose carefully how to use each day.  His college dreams of traveling to exotic places has been pushed to the back of his mind.   He doesn’t think about it most of the time, because the thought of having to wait decades to do those kinds of things is kind of depressing.

In the meantime, he hangs on out Thursday nights with his friends at trendy bars and joins a really great gym, spending some of his cash on a personal trainer.  Because of his commute, he’s thinking of leasing a Lexus SUV.  There’s a great deal going on–only $396/month for 24 months.

Matt might want to read:

Your Money or Your Life:  This classic by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin will be on the list for all my friends here, because it simply asks you to take a good hard look at your life and evaluate how you are spending your life energy.  Nothing is worse than not being true to your values, and YMOL (as it’s affectionately called by its fans) takes you through the consequences of spending mindlessly, and provides 9 steps to transform your relationship with money and achieving financial independence.  An updated edition was published in December 2008.

Chris Guillebeau’s blog/book:  The Art of Non-Conformity:  Before Joe’s Golden Handcuffs get locked on, he might want to prod the fires of his dreams of travel by reading alternative lifestyles, such as Chris’s.  Or, Tim Ferriss’s The 4-hour Workweek.   Or, My Exile Lifestyle by Colin Wright.  Reading books and blogs that show how other young people have shaped their lives might help challenge the paradigm Joe grew up with and soften his loving parents’ advice to work hard and get a good secure job.   After all, isn’t that what his dad and mom had done?   That was fine, but Chris and Tim and show Joe another way.  Joe’s boss said he is smart, a great communicator, and has great ideas, so Joe could easily be another Chris or Tim if he wanted to.

Poke the Box by Seth Godin.  Since Matt is a marketing guy, this book will come in handy for both work and life.  It asks you to shake things up.  Don’t accept what you see.  Have the courage to take initiative.

Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover:   Before Tim leases that Lexus he might want to read Dave’s book.   But since most people read TMMO as triage after financial damage has already been done, let’s leave Dave alone for a moment.

Matt needs to ask himself the following questions:

• Why am I working at this job?  Do I really feel fulfilled, or did I grab it out of fear nothing better would come along?
• Was I also listening to my heart when I took my parents’ advice, or was I leaving it behind?
• Why am I coveting Ashley’s Audi?  What are my real reasons for wanting to lease an SUV?
• If I never get around to traveling to cool places until I retire, how will I feel about that?
• Am I following a path because it’s the path of least resistance?  Or because it’s the only path I’ve had a model for in my life?
• Do I really need the perceived security of a “good future” at a corporate job?  Why?  Is “security” even real in the workplace?
• If I really do like the challenges of my job, are there any ways that I use the same skills but modify the work schedule?
• If I really do like the challenges of my job, how can I ensure that I don’t compensate for my hard work by spending hard-earned money on stuff I don’t really want or need?

Next post:  Matt’s road(s) to the future

There was a child who was watching the mother prepare a pot roast for their traditional Sunday family dinner.  The mother cut off the tips of the roast and put it into the pan.  The child asked, ‘Why did you cut off the tips of the roast?’ The mother replied, ‘That’s how my mother prepared it.  She’s in the other room–why don’t you go and ask her?’ The child then asked the grandmother, ‘How come when you prepare a roast you cut off the tips of the roast before you put it into the pan?’ The grandmother replied, ‘Well, that’s how my mother did it.  Why don’t you go ask her?’  So,  the child went to her great-grandmother and said, ‘I asked Mom and Grandma why they cut off the tips of the roast before they put it into the pan and they each told me to ask you.’  ‘Well,’ the great-grandmother said, ‘I don’t know why they are doing it…but I did it because the roast we bought was always a little too big to fit in the roasting pan I had.’

Conventional wisdom says that we should work at jobs until we arrive at some arbitrary age that was set at some irrelevant point in recent history and then stop working suddenly in order to spend the rest of our days taking water aerobics classes or chasing balls on golf courses.

This paradigm is about as relevant as the truncated pot roast in the story above.  I’ve recently been thinking about how every day I ask the Lord for my daily bread–not for the bread that I might need in 2025.   This raised a contradiction in my mind–in the most foundational prayer Christians pray, we simply ask for what we need today–not tomorrow.   But as a member of this Western culture, we have been raised with the belief that we are as foolish as the fabled grasshopper if we only live for today without stocking up big time for our Golden Years, perhaps at the expense of our happiness today.

So, I started investigating where the idea of “retirement” came from.  And as you might expect, I found that the concept and practice of “retirement” as a very recent phenomenon created for the convenience of employers during the Industrial Revolution.   We, as a species, have gone millions of years without needing a pension or a 401k–but whoa!  All of a sudden comes the 20th century and now hoarding for the future so that we can drop out of society at late mid-life is part of our mental DNA.

Does it make sense?

Not necessarily, but the culture has over the course of four or five generations adapted to the concept.  I found this entertaining, short history of retirement in the New York Times archives and there learned that it was not the retiree fighting for the right to drop out of the workforce back at the turn of the century:  it was drummed up by politicians, factory management, and even religious leaders (Cotton Mather for instance).  The retiree in many cases would have preferred to continue working.

I also found this website, The Next Hill, that was created for the sole purpose of debunking the retirement paradigm.  An interesting read.

So, I found I wasn’t alone in questioning the value of the practice of saving, saving, saving, hoarding, hoarding, hoarding in order to get to a point where you only hope you won’t outlive your money, because ten, twenty, thirty years of your life are going to be spent in leisure.

As with the pot roast story, usually changes in practices start out with good reason.  Back when modern day retirement began and became entrenched in our psyche a couple of things were going on.   We weren’t living much longer than the current retirement age, and there were economic dynamics at play such as the Great Depression and World War II which forced economic adaptation.    But as time has gone on, the consumer culture has raised the cost of living, and better healthcare has extended life, and now we are in a situation where our financial advisors are telling us we’re going to need at list a million dollars in our coffers if we want a decent quality of life.

But I propose that all that is smoke and mirrors.  Perhaps the more natural evolution into our golden years is to be productive as long as we can be, earning our daily bread as we go.

A lot of people are going to say, “Hey, retirement is my right!  I can’t wait to get out of this lousy job.   I want to retire as soon as I can. Are you proposing taking that right away from me?”

No, not at all.  But which is better:  to spend your life energy focused on a moment in time decades away, just to save up money so you no longer have to do precisely what you’re doing now?   Or would it be better to relax about the future, which will free up your life energy to focus on ways that you can live more fully now?

In my mind, the answer is obvious.

TLC has a series called “The Hoarders” which is quite sensationalistic in terms of showing people who have become obsessed and sick with the inability to let go of things.  Their possessions, both useful and useless, overtake their lives.  Do you suppose that if you think about those horrible images of hoarding (which we are so quick to judge.) and imagine that all that stuff–the garbage, the clothes, the clutter–is turned into dollar bills saved and hoarded for the future–do you get that same feeling of sadness for the one who is buried beneath?  Are we buried beneath our obsession with hoarding dollars for tomorrow at the expense of a free and uncluttered today?

In the next post, I’ll explore a few of the “yeah buts” as well a proposition from shifting our personal paradigms about retirement.

The illustration above was taken from The Next Hill, and the one at the left was taken from the blog Not Buying Anything.

We see every new year as a reset button for our lives

Happy New Year!

Last night, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve showed clips of New Year’s in different cities around the world.   I was struck by the similarities in our celebrations:  fireworks, revelry, resolution, hope.  Didn’t matter whether it was Buffalo, Berlin, Bangkok or Beijing, we were all at the same party.  It was amazing!

What does it mean?  It’s just a number.  It’s just another day.  Some of us will jump out of bed and dust off the treadmill in the basement.  Some will wake up nursing a hangover and decide to postpone the New Year until January 2.

Seems we all want a reset button.  A chance to begin again.  A promise that if 2011 was not fun, 2012 will be better.  To paraphrase that wonderful song in Les Mis, not “another day another destiny,” but “another year another destiny.”   Days come and go, and while some days can be lifechanging, we have seen all to often that you band 365 of them together, and chances are, your life can be quite different for reasons sometimes not in your control.

As for me, some years have been branded.  1974 was a great year.  I also look fondly on 1968, 1985, and 1998-1999 (that was a doubly good time).  2005 and 2008 I could have done without.

So we know we’re going to have good years and bad years, so we try to do what we can to control them with our resolutions.  I’m a one-goal-at-a-time person, because if I have more than one, neither gets done.  But I have a big dry erase board just outside my kitchen with my One Goal on it, and if it’s important enough–if I’ve been driven to it by sufficient pain or desire–I get it done.

Goals are fun.  I find that the good thing about sprawling a goal on a dry erase board that’s placed where you spend most of your time is it helps to keep it front and center.

I heard a great term from Kathy Freston, an author whose concentration is on healthy, conscious eating.  She adopts a more gradual approach to achieving goals and changing habits.   She does not recommend radical conversion.  She doesn’t prescribe a 21-Day To Change Your Life plan.   In encouraging her own dietary plan she uses the term “leaning into veganism.”

I like that.  The idea is to just keep the intention in front of you as you slowly empower yourself to make lasting changes.

So, whatever your New Year’s Resolution is, lean into it.  You have 365 days to work on it!  If you vow to hit the gym every day and you skip a day, you don’t have to throw the whole idea out.  Instead of writing on your dry erase board “Go To Gym Every Day!!!!” write, “by December 31, 2012, I’ll be eating 500 fewer calories a day and I’ll be exercising regularly three times a week.”

Lean into healthy purpose, or lean into loving purpose, or lean into financially sound purpose.  But just lean into it.  Over the days the mindfulness of that leaning will creep into your daily life and drive you to that place.

One more tip for reinforcing the mindfulness on a daily basis is to steal a practice from the Ignatians–the Daily Examen.   At the end of every day, just mentally sweep through the day and think about how you did with your goal.  The idea isn’t to beat yourself up–it’s just do a checkpoint with yourself to identify what worked and what didn’t, simply to make it easier to do better the next day.

In the book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by the Heath Brothers, (a great book by the way), one of the first rules they talk about for finding ways to change is to look at success.  Don’t waste your time figuring out why you failed–look at why and how you (or others) succeeded.   You might do that with your Daily Examen.  Forget the donut you ate.  Think about how good you felt after taking the dog for a brisk walk.

Here’s a link to the Ignatian Daily Examen, but a lay version might look like this:

• Just chill.  Depending upon your own spiritual practice, find a way to center yourself.  Count your breaths, recite a mantra, simply focus on the God within.  Try to shut off your mind from all that internal chatter.  I simply snuggle into bed, turn off the light, and when I’m as comfy as can be, I become aware of my breaths until my mind shuts down
• Be glad.  Be grateful.  Say what you are grateful for–out loud or silently.  Like Pollyanna, play the Glad Game–try to find ways to be grateful for good stuff as well as the crummy stuff that happened.
• Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings as they waft past.  If you need help with this, there are tons of great books on mindfulness.  Transforming your feelings is like tearing down a wall that is keeping you from living the life you want, so don’t skip that step.
• Think about one part of the day.  Pick a successful moment and think about how good you felt at that time.  Give yourself a pat on the back.
• Visualize tomorrow.  Think about how rewarding it will be to repeat that tomorrow.  Visualize how tomorrow you will lean into your purpose.

One of the treasured gifts we got was from a friend of ours, Bill, who was, frankly, very overweight.  But we loved that about Bill. When Bill hugged you, you KNEW you were being hugged.  So when he came by one day when I was hoofing it alone with the four kids to offer his services in cutting the grass, I accepted tenuously.  We didn’t have a riding lawn mower.  We had, at that time, a $50 second hand mower with a cutting swath of about 6 inches.  I knew that it would be a struggle for Bill to mow that expanse of grass, but I accepted his kindness, trusting he would cry uncle if necessary.

He never cried uncle.  I had made a meatloaf dinner, but given my paltry cooking skills, I’m sure I was still greatly indebted to him after we ate.

He died a few years later of complications from diabetes, and my husband and I went to his memorial service at the same church (he had died in another state).   For some reason, even though I really didn’t know Bill very well, I started crying and couldn’t stop.  That’s not like me–the stoic Connecticut Yankee!  I guess I just felt it was so sad that we had lost, on this Earth, an Ambassador of Kindness.

*****

Fast forward many years, to my being gainfully employed and traveling a lot.  One night I was at a facility doing market research.  I had never met the director, Jim, but he was very intent on great customer service.  He would have done just fine in that regard in any case, but as it turned out, the city was surprised by a snowstorm.  I asked Jim to get me a taxi–but with the snow, it was going to be a long wait to take me to my hotel about ten miles away.

Jim offered to take me to the hotel.  ”No, that’s too much!” I told him.  What an offer!  Everyone knows how daunting a trip home can be in the snow, and in this case, Jim was offering me this daunting trip all the way to my hotel, and from there he would have to head home–God knows how bad the snow would be by then!  I accepted the offer, and I have never forgotten it.  Just a couple of months ago, I called him to commission his facility for a study and I had reminded him of his kindness.

Today, I came to work at his facility, and one of his employees got me settled and then said, “You know Jim, right?  We lost him last week in a car accident.”  I felt the wind kicked out of me.  Jim was 35, with a brand new baby son.  My eyes welled up with tears, and I felt stunned for much of the morning.  Why?  I didn’t know Jim.  I didn’t know his family.  All I knew was the kindness he had shared with me once.  Once again, I had lost an Ambassador of Kindness.

Goodness is not in short supply.  There are plenty of wonderful human beings.  But it would be great if we could hold on to them for a while.  It would be even greater if we could take their example and be Ambassadors of Kindness in their names.

RIP Jim, whom I barely knew.  Thanks for the lift on that snowy night.

I, like so many others, have spent time over the past few weeks examining the achievements of Steve Jobs since he died in October.  So many friends of mine talked of actually having cried when he died–it was almost like when John Lennon died.  But Steve Jobs was not a rock star in the literal sense of the word.  In fact he was in many ways what the Occupy protesters are protesting:  the head of a huge corporation that made billions, and who knew instinctively how to make money (one case in point, talking Steve Wozniak into NOT giving away his early technological achievements back when they were both part of the Homebrew Computer Club).

What so many of us actually grieved for was the loss of the person who had such passion for his creations that he changed the lives of each one of us, and that sounds hyperbolic, but it is the truth.  I, for one, found out about his passing on my iPhone, and then used my MacBook to read the news in greater depth.  In a weird way I felt that this very fact connected us as if we were some kind of technological distant cousins.  Uncle Steve was gone.

The inspiration for this post was this:  I was at a job just last week in which a quick snapshot was called for of the notes that were up on the dry-erase board our team was using, so I reached for my iPhone, saying to my client, it seems these days if you a phone, you don’t need anything else.

So, that got me thinking about how true that actually was, based on how I use my iPhone:

1. 6:00am:  I wake up early to work on a report, using my iPhone’s alarm.  I’ve chosen a soft, soothing ring, like “Harp” because I’m home and if I oversleep, no big deal.  But if I’m on the road and need to get up for an early meeting, it might be “Piano Riff” or “Xylophone”–much ruder, but much less likely for me to sleep over it.  No more calling the hotel desks for a wake-up call.
2. 7:30am: I’ve worked on my report for an hour and half and now Nessie is looking to go for a walk.  I wonder if I need a hat, so I check the weather app–43 degrees. Iffy.  I grab the hat.
3. 7:45am:  While I’m on the walk I see a turtle cross the path by the creek, so I take a picture with the camera, upload it to Facebook.  The rest of the time I listen to my iPod:  some music, and a daily Podcast by pray-as-you-go.org.
4. 7:50am:  Done with the walk, so I check my calendar to see what meetings I have.
5. 7:55am:  I read the daily Liturgy of the Hours readings on my Universalis app
6. 8:15am:  I catch up on my finances.  I check in with Mint and input transactions from the day before to my YouNeedABudget app.  Mint reminds me I have a bill to pay today.
7. 8:45am:  After breakfast and 20 minutes of yoga I log my meal and excercise on my MyFitnessPal app.I really want to get that report done, so I use my TaskTimer app, which is like a stopwatch, which is great for me because I tend to get distracted very easily.  But when I use the TaskTimer, I know I’ve pledged myself to 45 minutes of straight work.  Amazing what you can get done in 45 minutes of concentrated work.
8. 11:30am:  At lunchtime I’m meeting a friend for lunch at a restaurant I haven’t used before, so I can either use my map app, which came with the iPhone, or I can use the more GPS-like AT&T Navigator.  In this case, because I have to drive and there seem to be a lot of turns, I go with the AT&T Navigator.  On the way, I listen to my iPod.
9. 12:05pm My friend is a little late, so I read some of my book on my Kindle app.  Surprisingly, it reads very well, considering the screen is so small.  I sync it with my Kindle purchases, and the bookmarks always are in sync.   Or I could play a little Tetris.
10. 12:10pm Also while I’m waiting, I check my blog stats on my WordPress app.
11. 12:30pm  At lunch my friend hasn’t seen my kids in a while, so I show her the photos on my phone.  We also talk about the hardships of traveling, so I pull up a really funny comic monologue on travel by comedian Brian Regan on YouTube.
12. 1:10pm  After lunch, I check my email and voice mail in the car parking lot, and return a couple of urgent emails.  I can tell which ones to ignore–the ones that aren’t identified through my contacts.
13. 2:00-5:00pm  The rest of the afternoon I spend at my computer doing assorted tasks, taking all my business calls on my iPhone.  Hardly ever use the landline.
14. 5:30pm  I see a QR code for a magazine article I’m interested in, so I use the code scanner I’ve downloaded and get the article and a coupon to use on a shopping trip.  I save the article to Evernote.
15. 6:00pm  On the dog’s evening walk, I check out movies on my Redbox app and reserve one for the evening.
16. 7:00pm  After dinner, we check in with my son, using FaceTime.  (I actually hate FaceTime because I’ve seen myself on the reverse camera feature and it’s a pretty scary sight!  If they could only create an app with a gauze feature to soften those wrinkles).
17. 10:00pm  And before bed, I want to say a rosary, but I can never remember those darned mysteries, so I pray using my Rosary app.  If only my grammar school principal, Sister Ellen Marie, could see me now!

So there it is:  17 ways to use the iPhone.  I could have added more, but that would have taken me to a different day, and I didn’t want to exaggerate the number of applications my iPhone has in a typical day.

I love it.   A clock, an alarm, a camera, an outdoor thermometer, a stopwatch, a navigator, a music player, a mail server, a breviary/rosary, an address book, a concierge, a filing cabinet, a TV, a movie screen, a motivational tool, a shopping assistant, a financial manager, AND, did I forget to mention, a full-featured telephone:  All this in one elegant pocket-sized package.

And that’s just the applications used in my tiny corner of the world.  Amazing.

How do you use the iPhone in YOUR world?

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

~ “Why I Wake Early” by Mary Oliver ~

Today is a glorious day. So, this will be a boring post, nothing much to say, nothing much to learn. The learning is right here, and the saying is being done by the birds with their own special dialects: some whistling, some chirping, some calling, some lilting. Shadows cast by a rising sun are crisp and bold, and it’s cool for a summer morning.

Can't beat this office space--computer, coffee, and a windowless world!

This poem by Mary Oliver reminds me that waking up late on a day like this is like leaving money on the table. Lately, I’ve been taking my computer outside with my coffee and feeling like I have the best “office” in the world. Some boast of their corner office with views. How much is the rent for a space like that in New York, I wonder? But can it be any better than my “office”? No, you can have your corner office, I’ll take my windowless one with my view of the potted plants and the birdbath, and Nessie at my side.

Many “doers” and self-help gurus tout the benefits of waking early from a productivity standpoint. Leo Babauta, of zenhabits speaks to it in his blog entry: 10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How I Do it. Ben Franklin claims early to bed and early to rise will make us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

From a spiritual standpoint, I think rising early makes you feel part of the natural order of things. Sometimes when Nessie gets me out of bed for a walk as dawn breaks, I feel like I’m in the natural equivalent of “rush hour”–when dawn’s first light hits, you start hearing the bird’s morning chatter, the squirrels have already started staking out the goods underneath the trees, and the day is on the move!

This daily transition from sleep to wake, silence to action, inner world to outer world is all part of the ebb and flow of a harmonious life, and another reason waking early helps ground me–sets me up firmly on the balance beam we traverse during our waking hours.

A great self-help guide in walking this beam are the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. I am a novice in the spirituality of St. Ignatius, but I do know that it’s a very practical spirituality. I’ve been reading about it from authors such as Margaret Silf, Larry Warner, James Martin, and from a really great website, ignatianspirituality.com.

What I’ve learned so far is, in a nutshell, is that Ignatian spirituality is a discipline that is both contemplative and very active–a discipline you can wake to and go to work with. It’s a program of reflection, meditation, self-examination, and determining God’s will for us, and how to take the inner silence that this discernment requires and go out into the world doing your job, whatever that might be. It helps me store up the first cold press of the day, and use it as a generator for the active life. The result: the ability to find God in all things–the mundane and the chaotic, the kind as well as the “miserable and crotchety.”

Nessie in a morning meditative state

Today is the first day of a 31-day “IgnatiusFest” sponsored by Ignatian Spirituality.com. Here is the link to a cool calendar–each day has a new topic. Today’s is “What Is Ignatian Spirituality?” Tomorrow’s is “Why Do We Pray?” I encourage you to check it out. When I first started exploring this spiritual program (which the AA 12-steps were supposedly loosely based on), it seemed like it would be reserved for spiritual heavyweights, but this 31-day IgnatiusFest is a great way to learn about the spiritual exercises, break them down, and see how you might use them as part of your own spiritual journey.

Good morning.

She wore a simple salmon form-hugging dress that had a bit of a sash-like thing sewn in at the waist–a subtle suggestion of minister’s sash/Mama’s apron.  Totally appropriate for the role she has adopted, or the role that others have bestowed on her, throughout the years.

For perhaps the first time, she took the platform to say once and for all, explicitly with her own words and not drawn out through her questions with guests, what her guiding principles are, and what she believes to be true about the souls of each and every one of us.

She doesn’t have a divinity degree, and she has probably not spent much time at an ashram, and for all I know she is not a regular church-goer.  But her commitment to her calling, and her success in pulling people up spiritually and emotionally and physically speaks to the truth of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.  You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love. — From The Drum-Major Instinct, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oprah has served, and she has conquered.

She said it has all been done through the grace of God, and she closed her show with the words, “To God be the glory.”

Oprah says that her guiding principle is the spiritual equivalent of Newton's Third Law of Motion

Thank you, Oprah, for showing so many of us that we count, that our every thought and action reverberates through the Universe with an equal and opposite reaction (that is, it comes right back to us), and we have a special place on this Earth, simply because We Are.

God grant that we may all find our callings, as Oprah has so clearly found hers.

New Jersey back yard, May 2011.

I just changed the subhead of my blog to the above–”Pay Attention.  Be Astonished.  Tell About it.” by the poet Mary Oliver.

If you read my last post, you know that I sequestered myself for six weeks to try to listen to the “still, small voice” within me.  Part of this effort was my attendance at a Lenten series at Stella Maris, a retreat house on the Jersey shore.  One Monday night, Sister Ann Marie passed out a very homemade bookmark with this on it, from Oliver’s poem, Sometimes:

Instructions for Living A Life:
Pay Attention.
Be Astonished.
Tell About It.

“Pay attention” is a hallmark of so many spiritual leaders.   The Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, whom I so greatly admire, is one of them.  Paying attention is SO important.  What else do we have, but these precious moments of our lives to which we should pay attention?

“Be Astonished.”  It’s so easy to just take things for granted, but just imagine you are an entity new to this creation.  How astonishing is it that life on this Earth is so prolific?  How astonishing is it that we have the ability to cry at the mere experience of a rainbow?   How astonishing is it, to see the perfect symmetry, the perfect order of the petals of a simple garden flower?  If we all took just 10 minutes a day to act as if we were new to this earth, how would that change our lives?

“Tell About It.”  And here is where I can thank God that there is a blogosphere.  There are so many wonderful writers who are telling what they see, what they feel, what they hear about the miracle of Life, and I’ve learned so much from them.  And of course, thank God as well for all of the authors who have paid tribute to the pure miracle of life and our human experience.  I’m humbled by them, and I thank them all.

On this topic, one of my favorite diary entries was written exactly 43 years ago to the day, when I was 16.   It speaks of one simple moment when I was paying attention, was astonished, and was driven to tell about it.  I pray to God that I can continue to experience more of these precious moments.  There were a LOT of moments between 1968 and 2011 that I’ve wasted in this regard, and I don’t want to waste any more of them not living out Mary Oliver’s advice:

Connecticut back yard, May 1968

May 22, 1968

I must write to you now because everything is so beautiful.

I am filled to the brim with (I don’t know what to call it!) extreme happiness.  I have never seen so much beauty as I do now in this simple situation.  Everything is perfect.

A couple of weeks ago I made a little window seat in my room.  Between my bed and my closet is a space about 3 feet wide with a window governing this tiny wall.  Here I am sitting–reading The Thread That Runs So True while my white voile curtains flow over my legs.  I have finished cleaning my entire room (it took two weeks–I’m lazy) and it is beautiful.  I painted it scarlet, and it is my private place, with the pure white curtains and bedspread, my statue of Mary and my guitar on my wall…it is so beautiful I could cry while I lean on the window sill, part of Mother Nature herself.

I looked especially good today.   My hair, for once, looked as I have always wanted it to look.  I am wearing the dress that Ann Marie  today told me she loved.  I made it–a Swedish print dirndl and matching gold jersey top.  My complexion is free from blemish for a change, and my eyes looked more sparkly and expressive.

The weather is a huge part of the way I feel today.  Every day for the past three days it has been shining one minute–raining the next.  So, while reading my book, I was paying equal attention to the sun.  Suddenly, a big black cloud hid the sun and it poured.  Hail was falling by the buckets.  It was beautiful.  The thunder pealed and hailstones bounced off my screen. That was an hour ago.  Now, the rays of the sun are abundantly overflowing on the violet lilacs and freshly washed leafy trees.

I love this new type of weather because it gives me a chance to appreciate all of God’s gifts at once–the sun, then the cleansing of the earth, and then the flowers’ and trees’ appreciation to God for their bath.

Words cannot describe the beauty I see from my seat tonight.  There IS no word to tell you the happiness I feel in my soul.  My heart cries out thanks to God for bestowing me with so many rare and wonderful gifts.

Tonight, indeed, I am the luckiest person alive!!!

I left home for six weeks, intentionally.  There are several reasons for this, but I’m not going to talk about those–I am going to talk about the experience.

My home-away-from-home is an off-season rental at the beach.  It’s chilly here, even though it’s early April.  It’s also quiet–vacationers won’t be here for another two or three months.  Only the die-hard beach-lovers remain, and the restaurants and gift shops that line the main street are open, but certainly just biding their time until the tourists hit.

Not many people take advantage of stepping back from their lives to examine them, yet I would highly recommend it.   As a mom and a wife and the owner of my own consultancy, I’ve lived nearly my whole life pulled and pushed by the urgent matters of the day.  I’ve tried to be available to the needs of those I love, and I certainly don’t regret it–I love that I have very special people who depend on me at times.

The last time I remember I had no such responsibilities was when I was in high school.  I went through high school like a kid in a candy shop.  I took art lessons, sewing lessons.  I acted in school plays and I cheered the football team.  I had caring friends, and I signed up for committee after committee.

As any grown-up will tell you, once you graduate from high school and college, and say “I do” and start having babies, the focus on you flies off like a hat in a tornado.  All of a sudden, it’s about your spouse, your children, your boss–an inevitability that’s not necessarily bad.  But if you are the kind of person that just becomes a sponge for the needs of others, you lose yourself, inevitably.

Then, if you’re like me, one day–decades later–you wonder who you are, actually.  You wonder if your actions still reflect your values.  It might manifest itself as a mid-life crisis for some, but for me, it’s about an inner pull to hold the conch up to the ear and listen to the heart.  At first all you hear is silence.  And that’s all you should hear.

I’ve been on one religious retreat.  I went with my husband for a few days at Weston Priory–a Benedictine monastery in Vermont.  They don’t have guided retreats or seminars.  Basically, they give you a room and a prayer schedule–they pray five times a day.  You join them for prayer, if you so choose, and also share their silent meals with them.  Then you go back to your room, where there is no TV, no traffic, no radio, no computer, no noise except for the noise in your mind that all of a sudden seems deafening in the absence of the distracting kind of noise.  My husband, an extrovert, admits that it was freaky to confront his own mind in this way.  I, an introvert, admit that, yes, it was freaky.  I thought I was used to solitude, but as it turns out, solitude is a relative term.  Just try sitting for hours in a room where the ringing in your ears is all you hear.

My goals on this sojourn to the beach were to reconnect with me.  To quiet myself down and listen to my Higher Power.  To maybe explore if my old creative ventures in sewing and art are worth salvaging.  To connect with others who will support my effort–like the nuns at Stella Maris who have many really cool events at their retreat house on the shore nearby.  I feel a little like Thoreau, and my goals for this experience are not dissimilar to his–even if I my methods were not quite as “Spartan-like”:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Catherine Doherty was a social activist and foundress of the Madonna House Apostolate, a pioneer of social justice and a prolific writer of hundreds of articles and books.  One of her best-known books is Poustinia.  A poustinia is a small, sparsely furnished cabin or room where one goes to pray and fast alone in the presence of God for 24 hours.  I haven’t done much fasting, but I’ve spent time praying and reflecting in this little sparsely furnished cottage, where I have just what I need, no more.

The good news about this poustinia concept is that according to Doherty, you don’t have to get away for six weeks like I did.  24 hours will do nicely.  So, I think when I go back home, I’ll make it a point to go to a poustinia from time to time–maybe once a season.   Because if I find myself on the rumble strip of my personal path, I want to be able to get back on the road before another couple of decades go by.

I think maybe poustinia was an inspiration of the Holy Spirit himself. Though I thought only of our staff, I guess the whole, wide world is hungry for God. For a place without noise. A silent place, for some solitude. Yes, the poustinias will grow in our land — all across its face, because there is within it a limit that man cannot cross. A limit to their ability to go without prayer. A limit to be without God. A limit to their ability to take noise. A limit to their ability to be always in a crowd. — Catherine Doherty