Inch by Inch

Last, but not least, there is a need for audacious hope. And it's not optimism. I'm in no way an optimist. I've been black in America for 39 years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there's sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we're doing, things will get better. I don't believe that. I'm a prisoner of hope, that's something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence. William James said it so well in that grand and masterful essay of his of 1879 called "The Sentiment of Rationality," where he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted. And that's what I'm talking about.

- Cornel West, from the 1993 commencement speech at Wesleyan University

Virginia to Wisconsin to California to Colorado to New York back to Virginia. Each place we lived, I hoped and half-believed it would be our home. In each place, we cultivated a circle of friends. Bug had his little buddies, I sought my dance and poetry.

In each place we lived, I planted a garden.

Gardening is audacity. Learning the fickle moods of the soil can take seasons. Years. The climate, the bend of the shade, the ants and voles, the clays and acids, and even just the way the rain pools all work together to create the unique temperament of the land. Tending a garden is not so different from tending a relationship. Over time, gardener and land grow to anticipate one another. The soil, in its way, awaits the tilling, the seeding, the gentle tending and the rough nip of pruners. The gardener comes to love the garden with that tricky combination of pleasure and irritation reserved for the most intimate companions.

Every time our family landed in a new place during the past six or seven years, I began at the beginning. No previous tenant left me an overgrown patch to weed, no departed lover left a guidebook. I started with nothing but a shrug and a shovel. Let the seeds fall where they may.

The amount of money I spent on of fresh dirt and manure and plants makes me cringe now, seeing the creep of red in my bank book. The number of miles I traveled to local land preservation offices to gather information and precious packets of native seeds has me shaking my head in awe. These days, I can barely squeeze in a trip to the supermarket.

In each place, friends and neighbors reluctantly allowed me to drag them into my sweat-drenched folly. Bug and Tee had no choice in the matter. Both donned work gloves and picked up shovels to help prepare the earth and sow the seeds.

I figured the first season would be the learning season. Little did I know each first was also my last. But this is the way of faith, isn't it? Cornel West differentiates between optimism and hope. Optimism ignores the evidence, believing in a happy outcome despite all the challenges in the way. Hope, however, is welll acquainted with the obstacles. Hope plots a path through them.

Over the years of uprooting, my desire for a home for our family grew to an aching, chronic hunger. With every move, I walked the tightrope between hope and defeat. Perhaps ironically, perhaps in the fierce determination to make it so, I invested far more cash and sweat in the garden of the last place we inhabited as a family. In New York, I ringed the perimeter fence with narcissus bulbs and native plants. Bug and I grew peas in the one patch of sun in the yard, and surrounded this with a mix of flowers whose names now swept from my memory. We edged the house in pansies, planted carrots on a support wall, and turned the dreary front yard into a splash of color. All of this we labored to create as our known life was fragmenting under our feet.

Sure, the effort was desperate. But desperation can lead to far worse than tulips and snow peas. I like to hope that the lilies I dredged up by hand from the creek bottom and hauled to our cabin will multiply for the people who live there long after our names are forgotten. Those two small spruce trees we planted in the burnt soil of our Colorado home might grow to house songbirds returning after the ravages of the Hayman Fire. Maybe the effort was not all in vain.

I learned a hard lesson with these futile attempts at marking a place. One cannot force roots into soil not ready to make way. The earth has to get to know its inhabitants. I have left every home far too quickly to have anything but the most fleeting knowledge of place.

Here we are in yet another temporary home. Here, Bug and I are guests in my parents' house. Their back yard is filled almost to the edges with a swimming pool. The rest, my mother tends. She buys her flowers and trims her hedges. Her aesthetic is unique to her, and she has lived in this place 15 years. She has had ample time  to learn where the sun will fall and whether the snapdragons will make it through until summer.

But this is our home, too. Even if it is another way station for Bug and me, it is still the only home we have. For Bug, whose life has been punctuated by a move every 18 months, a home of his own is important in a way most of us cannot fathom.

My son began talking a few weeks ago about moving into our new house. I let the comments slip on past until  a recent dinnertime conversation. Out of the blue: "What will our next house be like, Mommy?" I asked him what he meant. He explained, "We have to move to our next house soon."

Right there at the dinner table, I leaned in and looked him square in the eye. "This is our home. This, right here, is your house." I put my hand down on the table. "We are not moving anywhere. We are going to live here for a long, long time."

"How long?"

"Until you are big. Much bigger. Maybe first or second grade. Big like your cousin."

He considered this quietly. So did his grandparents, who were understandably surprised by this declaration.

Truth is, a place of our own is far beyond reach at the moment. Necessity dictates we stick around. Staying, however, is more than the natural outcome of financial constraint and proximity to Tee. Bug has never experienced continuity. Even now, the kid doesn't know where he is sleeping from one night to the next. The least I can do is give him one fixed variable on my side of the equation. When he needs to have a sense that he belongs somewhere, he can come to this sloppy, old place and find his mom, his grandparents, his dog, his bed, and a little corner of familiarity to which he can return no matter how much confusion the world throws at him.

High time, I would say, to plant a garden. Our garden, Bug's and mine.

We asked Grandma for a plot of our own in the midst of her ornamentals. She found one for us, and even handed over a few slivers of her precious sunlight. We turned the soil, righted bricks for a raised bed, and gathered sticks from a giant pine tree blown down in last month's storm. Together, my boy and I fashioned a bean-pole tent. Bug helped me dig, rake, relocate worms (a key task, I have learned) and trim the hemp line. Once everything was ready, we squatted together. Bug lifted each pea from my palm and placed it in its new nest of earth.

This is our first season growing in this soil. I aim to stick around long enough for my boy to reap the harvest. Change is, of course, inevitable. Fate could laugh at my folly. She might decide to make short work of my big plans. But we have to live with audacity. We have to plant ourselves where we are. Faith, the man says, is the courage to act when doubt is warranted. Perhaps this small corner of the land will share a secret or two, and we will be here next spring to feel the deepening of our roots.

Flourish

High-hope people believe that the future will be better than the present and that they have the power to make it so. 

- Shane Lopez

The canopy of flowering plums and crabapples bobs under cool April rain. On this Friday when much of the Washington area is battening down the hatches for a government shutdown, a collection of bouyant humans from various corners of the globe parted the morning's curtain of mist and shed both warmth and light on a little corner of Fairfax, Virginia. George Mason University's slick new hotel digs, the Mason Inn, hosted this flagship Leading to Well-Being conference.

You might have a picture in your mind of a bunch of feel-good hedonists trotting out their inner hippies while munching on Marriott canteloupe slices. You might be as surprised as I was to find the list of attendees weighed heavily with research scholars from institutions like Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Cambridge. Sure, meditation and yoga sessions were on offer even before the first dry pastry was served, but most of the day focused on the outcomes of scientific studies linking mindfulness to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and even nations.

Historically, much of the psychological field has focused on understanding and eliminating negative emotional experiences. Digging around in people's traumas and patterns was thought to be the way to uproot the bad to make way for the good. The trend now seems to be focusing on constructing positive, healing, and future-oriented approaches to generating well-being. Much more than emphasizing what is not working, most of us need to place greater attention on cultivating practices that move us towards good relationships, purpose, and accomplishment in our lives. As Martin Seligman shared in his keynote, he likes to grow roses. Sure, this involves a certain amount of pulling up weeds and clearing out space. However, "You don't get roses by weeding." To generate meaning and health, what do we plant? What do we work to create?

The research that most captured my attention revolved around the physiological changes occurring when positive emotions are introduced through regular practices such as meditation, appreciation, and caring for others. Measurable neurological changes begin to take place through the simple (though repeated) act of attending. "Attending" can take any number of forms. It might be keeing an eye on the present moment through mindfulness meditation. It also might be an increase in attention to what is going well, to feelings of warmth for a loved one, or perhaps to a hopeful picture of the future. Through any number of these practices, not only do people report a greater sense of well-being, but their brain function also increases.

Researchers are beginning to explore the changes occuring even on a cellular level. The vagus nerve, extending from the base of the cranium to the heart, seems to play a role in regulating cardiac function, as one example. Meditation has been shown to improve the health of this nerve and, consequently, the rhythms of the heart. The effect appears to sustain when the practice is continued, meaning the effect is more than simply a response to novelty. Decreases in illness and increases in longevity are not simply nice side-effects of feeling good. Inflammatory responses seem to lessen with regular practice of attention, and over time, the actual organism - the whole body - becomes more capable of fighting off disease and even thriving.

Putting some of this in the context of daily life, the Losada Ratio is an old-ish tool with new implications. I'm going to be sloppy here, but it more or less explains that the ratio of positivity to negativity in an organization or relationship has an impact on whether or not it will flourish. For each type of relationship, there is a "tipping point" below which dysfunction occurs. For a marriage, the ratio is 5:1. This means for every one dumb-ass thing you say to your spouse, you need to do at least five aweome things to make up for it. Because five is the tipping point, you actually need to be doing, oh, twenty or thirty, for the partnership to thrive. On a day-to-day basis, people in relationships, in workplaces, in classrooms, and in communities need to have a much higher quantity of appreciative, healing, hopeful, postivie experiences for every yucky one in order to acheive well-being.

Shane Lopez, Barbara Fredrickson, and Felicia Huppert were a few of the folks who presented both findings and interventions today. Their publications do a much better job than this little blog at explaining the implications. I am most interested, of course, in how I can apply the ideas as well as the tools to the various quarters of my life. When I am advising doctoral students, how might I employ appreciative techniques to help them through the rigors of the work? Is it possible to encourage both expansiveness of vision and singularity of focus? With my son, how might his daily experience improve if I tell him ten things he is doing well for every one thing that drives me bananas? What forms can mindfulness practice take in the life of a four-year-old, and how can we cultivate them in our rather frantic lives?

Most fascinating is the question of positive emotion in the midst of a divorce. For the past eight months or so, Tee and I have been moving through this separation with amazing control. Neither of us has gone nuclear, and we still speak with decency to one another. However, we have a lifetime of co-parenting ahead, as well as the looming challenge of courts (possibly) and custody arrangements (inevitably). If I am to believe the research, creating a balance of 5 or more:1 even in this relationship is key to making it work. Can you imagine? I somehow have to come up with seven or ten things I appreciate and admire for every one thing I criticize about a man I am divorcing? And I actually have to say them? Out loud? To him?

I am sensing I have the power to set a tone of creativity, hope, collaboration, and caring even in a relationship that is becoming something very different than what either of us wanted or imagined. Ugliness, however, is only one narrative of divorce. It might be possible for us to craft our own story. In the one I am just beginning to envision, Tee and I are the heroes who choose virtue and noble purpose over short-cuts, and our son is the ultimate victor.

The Happy Is

These walks with the dog, you must understand, carry a  unique agony. My current home is in a neighborhood filled with houses painfully beyond my means. I can only thicken my skin and blind my gaze as I loop past them several times each day with the mutt in tow. The irony is that I inhabit one of these wide-shouldered Fairfax County single-family homes. Yet even from within the quiet embrace of this neighborhood, I cannot see a clear path from where I am into a home (or a car, or an education for my son, or a suit of clothes) of a quality anything like the ones possessed by my neighbors. Living as a grown-up with one's parents is to wake up every day on the back side of the looking-glass.

I caught my attention drifting on a walk recently. That doesn't sound so bad, right? Unless your brain is well accustomed to blindsiding you, a little bit of drift is a fine idea. Unfortunately, mine is a tricky foe. I was strolling along with the pooch on a lovely spring afternoon, all budding wisteria and chirping birds. A sanitation truck roared up the street, workers hopping off to empty the bins into the gaping back. As it passed me and I waved my hello, I heard the whisper of this thought echo through my mind:

"They should throw me in the back. That's where I belong."

The thought was so fleeting, it almost disappeared before I could catch it. Indeed, even the slightest distraction, and it might have skittered into the dark corner before I ever noticed it had bared its fangs. Taking a breath, I decided not to let that one stick around. I went back home (such as it is) and began to write.

The tone: simple, clear, light. The objective: list things that make me happy.

Walking the dog. Hugging my son. Zumba on a winter morning. Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. Naps. Growing snow peas. Singing "the green grass grew all around." Oil pastels. Reading Carolyn Hax's column. Hiking the Manassas battlefield. Grabbing that last spot of free street parking. A seat on the metro. Taking the stairs. The plants in my office. My job. My students. My boss.

The smell and sound of garlic popping in olive oil. A good, sharp knife. Setting the table. Washing the dishes. Warm laundry from the dryer. Picking apples. Steam sauna. Contra dancing. The phases of the moon. The sound of peepers. The call of the geese.

Poems by Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, Billy Collins. The sound of Eva Cassidy's voice. Laughing over dinner with my parents. Reading the Gettysburg Address etched on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial. Racing down the hill to the woods with my boy. Mud. Rain. Snow. Frost. Swimming nude in fresh water. Sunflowers. Weddings. Alexander Calder. Stretching on the living room floor. Cold watermelon.

Writing a letter. Finding a letter in the mailbox. Listening to Cornel West speak. Girls' night out. Stretching. Kissing. A lazy conversation with an old friend. Smiling at strangers. Learning someone's name and using it. Teaching. Writing in my journal. Saying what I am thankful for. Telling my kid what I like about him. A campfire. Eight hours of sleep. Waking up to the faint memory of a delicious dream. My skin, my skeleton, my heartbeat, my breath.

As I write this list - one that is very hard to draw to a close, by the way - something stunning occurs to me. While my sole constraint was to write what makes me happy, I listed only things that exist in my life or are right within reach. My everyday world is astoundingly full of things that bring me joy. In fact, almost everything I do makes me happy. Okay, so I'm not crazy about that one intersection I have to get  through during rush hour, and for some reason, I despise emptying the dishwasher, but just about every other mundane task brings pleasure.

What do I do with the long stretches of time each day when I am not paying attention to making this list? My tricky brain slips very quickly into fixiating on what I am trying to attain. Things beyond my grasp tempt me with the vague promise of happiness. Perhaps (the whispers tell me), the house of my own, the higher salary, the man who will take care of me, that other thing out there will make me happy. I have somehow come to believe the sense of un-ease and failure I carry around is a direct cost of not possessing something, or of not having managed to acquire a whole bunch of different somethings than the ones I have.

Isn't it fascinating, then, that I have not lincluded things I do not have on my list? If a nice townhouse, a robust college fund for Bug, and a reliable car are supposed to bring me happiness, why do they not show up on the list of things that make me happy? Because, in fact, the coveting of those things plainly makes me unhappy. The sense of joy and peace I seek exists right in the world as I inhabit it.

Certainly, I need to aim for better circumstances for my son and me. However, my momentum in that direction might be more sustainable if I conceive of the source as brimming rather than lacking. Success is not only in the attainment. Could it also be in the (ahem) attunement?

Perhaps it is not a contradiction to strive for improvement while also feeling quite satisfied with the richness of the here and now. I'll even venture to guess that the best way to fashion a full and happy life is to take notice of how the project is already well underway.