that's it, right there

It’s kind of funny when people say they have TMJ — yeah, me too! You too! We all have TMJ — a temporomandibular joint. It’s that joint right there, where the jawbone connects to the head bone. That joint. We all have it, if we have a jaw. When they mean to say is that they have TMD, temporomandibular joint disorder. Hi, my name is Lori and I have TMD and it ain’t fun. No siree Bob, not one little bit of fun.

My sweet little jaw holds all my stress for me, and in fact, when I started trying to learn how to deal with stress a dozen years ago, I would just look to my jaw to see if I was stressed. I’d become so good at feeling stressed I didn’t really notice it (or I denied it, whatever, potato potahto), so my clenched jaw was the key to the picture for me.

So many people have this, and I’m one of you. You know how it gets locked sometimes? And sometimes you don’t know that it’s locked until you open it — too quickly — and it won’t open? I don’t know exactly what happened to kick it off this time, but I have a lot of inflammation in the left joint and can’t open my mouth wide enough for a medium-sized bite of food, can’t move my jaw forward and backwards (that’s the worst pain right now), side to side, nothing. Eating is excruciating; I have to put a tiny tiny bite of food on both sides to keep it balanced, and chew slowly. That doesn’t make it hurt less, it’s just the only way I can eat at all.

Here are the things I’ve tried to ease the pain:

• heat
• cold
• aspirin
• ibuprofen
• tylenol
• Klonopin
• a glass of wine
• massage
• rest
• Siang Pure Oil (menthol and peppermint, purchased in Vietnam, amazing stuff that cured a sick headache immediately)

Nothing has worked, and in fact it’s getting worse. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears (and closed mouth!). I’ve read everything I can find online already so I’m hoping for an idiosyncratic home remedy. Or magic. The probable truth is that it will just take time. Dang it.

But it’s a sunny, gorgeous, gorgeous day here! This mild winter has been just glorious. Happy Thursday, y’all!

another view of our map -- just as "correct" as the more familiar view

The first time I heard how British textbooks teach children the story of the American War for Independence, my brain went blank. In both instances, I was a grown-ass woman, in my late 30s, and yet I was kind of floored. Oh, the things I’d never even questioned, the things I just accepted unquestioningly as the obvious truth. I may have been kind of slow, but I think we all do this. After all, there’s not enough time to think closely about every tiny thought we have, and most of the time it’s just not necessary.

But I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility that my understanding is profoundly limited. In my younger years, every fall I read all the Carlos Castaneda books. I was most fascinated by the Yaqui ability to see, that involved seeing humans as luminous bobbing egg shapes of energy. Those who had given birth had dark spots in the lower part, because they’d lost some of the energy in giving it to the creation of a new being. I was curious about seeing the “lines of the world,” the energy that existed in a kind of grid and could be used by people if they knew how, and could see them in the first place. Setting aside those details, I do know there’s so much going on all around me that I am unable to see because of limitations of my human apparatus. I can’t see parts of the light spectrum, I’m limited.

Of course there are other limitations we can circumvent if we try very hard. We get stuck in our heads, locked into our definitions and descriptions, and we’re busy! For heaven’s sake, there are kids to be driven around, plans to make, laundry to do, work to get done…always too much work to get done, husbands to tend to, groceries to buy and prepare, old folks to care for and babies to feed, who has the time?

But can you stop for 5 minutes? Just 5? Set a timer so you don’t have to worry that you’ll screw up and do this for 6 whole minutes — the horror, what would you do then — but just do this. Just do this for 5 minutes. Sit still and look. See what all you can see. I had my 10am break this morning and decided to keep my eyes open and try to actually look, while paying attention to my mind which kept wanting to drag me to a to-do list, or to this afternoon, or next week, or when I was 5. I’d notice it was doing that again and let it drift away, and think “be here now. Just be here now.” Here’s what I saw.

Birds — pigeons walking around the street, sparrows flitting around in the branches. It’s a bird’s world, my street, what is their world? Lots of ledges, lots of small branches, little hollows under eaves for nesting, small patches of ground around the trees, tiny puddles left over from the super’s sidewalk-washing this morning. It’s their world, they are busy having a bird-centered life and I’m just in it, watching out my window.

People — men walking their dogs, men parking cars, women hurrying somewhere, workmen carrying boards, supers talking to each other. Each one of those people is the center of a whole world, they have friends and families and colleagues and enemies and structures of relationships and work and hopes and worries. Some may be having a great day, some may be in despair. They’re the center of a world, and they participate in the worlds of so many others, and perhaps as they pass each other on the street there’s some kind of connection in that large structure with the person they pass, and they don’t know it. Each of those people is moving around in his or her own world, and I’m not even noticed as I watch out my window.

Dogs — On their leashes, sniffing the trees, marking the corners of buildings, stopping to sniff each other while their people wait, the familiar paths they probably take a couple of times a day. Their attention sharpens when another dog is near, which happens all the time. Theirs is a dog’s world, filled with the scent markings they and others have left, as they are taken out to do their business on sidewalks and their people pick it up for them. Their experience of the breeze may be as a source of a whole world of information.

Buildings — built by workmen, designed by architects and engineers, financed by bankers, plumbed and wired by working men (the buildings are 100 years old, so they were definitely men). The buildings have stood here for a century as life went on inside, and outside. Storms raged, night fell, garbage strikes lay at their feet, snow fell, for a hundred years. People moved in and out, some died inside undoubtedly, some were born inside probably, some fought, some were hurt, lots of people felt love inside that building.

Wind — the branches of the trees are dancing in the wind, and there’s an entire wind-world going on. It sweeps down my street as if its funneled; it swoops down the Hudson River at the end of my street. It swirls around the faces of people walking past, the animal life is probably keenly aware of it in a way I’m not. The birds may even understand it as a road system or in some way that’s inconceivable to me. The wind does what it does whether I’m watching or not.

I hear the sound of construction in the next block, the jackhammer buzzing and vibrating the floor. I hear the hiss and cracks of the radiator in my building, spitting dry heat into my living room. I hear the music I’m playing in the background while I work. I hear the buzzer to my apartment every 45 minutes this morning. I hear people come and go, the door opening and closing. I hear snippets of conversation through the glass of my closed window as people pass by on the sidewalk, just the sound really, not the words.

And at the end of my 5 minutes of looking, I was struck by the whole of it somehow, everything that’s going on all at once, and I thought of the wonderful last line of Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:”

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

My sister had an opportunity in high school to go to D.C. for some reason or another — some kind of citizenship conference or something, the details escape me — and we felt like she was wading out into an alien land. Whoa, what would it be like, all the way up there? When she got there, she found that she was the alien, an object of pure fascination for all the other kids. She’s from Texas, really? (This must’ve been the 70s.) Everywhere she went, people asked her if she had oil wells in her back yard, if she went to school on a horse, if she had guns. OK, even today people will ask that last one. At first she tried to set the record straight but she got so sick of the idiotic questions she finally started going along with them: Yeah! Her backyard was so full of oil wells there wasn’t room for a swing! Yeah, actually she had a whole stable of horses, one for each day of the week, and she rode them 20 miles to school, with her guns strapped to her sides.

Like everywhere else in the world, Texas is a lot of things. It is a place of huge cities and rural communities. It is a place of history and frontiers, new and old. It is a place of intelligence and ignorance. It is a place of big hearts and hard hearts. For the last couple of decades, it has suffered greatly under the southern shift to Republicanism, but remember: historically it was a Democratic state of the old bleeding heart kind. It’s this, a place of ruggedly beautiful desert landscape, and this, a place of food passions, and this, Austin, honoring a commitment to keep it weird. Here in New York, saying I’m from Texas brings a pretty quick sneer, and only those who’ve been to Austin have the insight to know that it’s a varied place. It is, y’all. If you learn nothing else from me, learn that. We don’t all support the death penalty (or our politicians). We don’t all carry guns (or support gun ownership). We get abortions and march on the capital in protest of policies. Our hearts bleed, still, for social justice causes. We support our gay kids, and we stand against the state’s power to determine what goes in textbooks.

But we do kind of think there’s us, and then there’s everyone else. That part’s true.

Seated next to him was an elderly woman with brown L’Oreal hair and a very shiny scalp, and she was dressed so beautifully, lovely makeup and jewelry, and she was busy working away on her smart phone. In front of me were two elderly women dressed so beautifully, lovely makeup and jewelry, and they were busy talking about everything they’d been doing, and had planned to do. There were some elderly people in poor physical shape, sure, but MAN. We were probably the spring chickens of the bunch, and those sitting around us, at least, had it going on. But it was kind of like being in a Seinfeld episode when he’d go visit his parents in Florida and they ate dinner at 4pm.

Tonight we’re going downtown to City Winery to hear Marcia Ball and Beausoleil. Marcia Ball is a kick-ass Texas singer-songwriter, and Beausoleil is a Cajun Zydeco group. I really can’t wait; I love them both, and it’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight. Here’s a live performance by Beausoleil so you can do some toe-tapping yourself:

It continues not to be easy, doing this. Each time my calendar pop-up appears on my screen, I’m tempted to dismiss it and keep doing what I’m doing. Each and every time. Mindful eating continues not to be easy; I’m good for about a third of the meal and then suddenly my plate is clean and I don’t know how that happened! Mindful breathing, even in 3-minute spurts, continues not to be easy. My mind doesn’t want to stay in the moment, it flits back and forth across multiple things / timeframes, and sometimes seems to refuse to sit still. The rest has been easy to do: the early morning letter of gratitude and love, the identifying an intention for the day, the reading, the tea-drinking, the water-drinking, the bedtime ritual (which is really just so lovely, I encourage it even if you do nothing else). Even the bits that are and continue to be hard have produced important shifts and insights, and I’m grateful for them even if many of the insights are kind of difficult.

I enrolled in a 5-week meditation class, two hours every Thursday night, at Shambhala Meditation Center here in New York. It’s called Meditation in Everyday Life, and it’s the first of a progressive series of classes. I hope to take the next one after completing this one, but we’ll just have to see. Cart before the horse, living in the future, how’s about I see how this goes. It begins March 15, so I have a few weeks to wait, and to get a little bit better at mindfulness which can only help. I struggle with myself over being patient, because I expect myself to be able to do it perfectly immediately, and take imperfection as a sign that it’s not possible for me, that I just can’t do it. So this is an excellent lesson as I face the understanding that no one begins with perfection, at anything.

So here’s the new routine for this week, which builds heavily on last week’s routine. It’s important that I develop a routine that doesn’t become impossible to maintain during the workday, because I need to get my work done. It’s also important that it occur in small bits throughout the day, to help slothful old me reform myself in that incremental way.

morning:
up at 6am
drink a small glass of water
drink one cup of coffee and read 16 pages of Coming to Our Senses
write one email of love and gratitude to someone
write my day’s intention
get dressed and groomed
get to work by 8am, with a cup of green tea

10am
Eat breakfast
Drink a glass of water
Breathe for 5 minutes

noon
Walk fast for 20 minutes
Take photograph
Drink a glass of water

2pm
Breathe for 5 minutes
PLANK (including both sides)
Drink a glass of water
Have a cup of green tea

6pm
Breathe for 5 minutes
Have a cup of green tea
(Tuesday/Thursday — one hour of yoga)

evening
eat dinner as slowly and mindfully as possible

bedtime
think about what went well during the day
think about gratitude
set intention for sleep and for peace, and do the loving kindness meditation (provided after the jump, if you’re interested)

Have a wonderful Monday, y’all!

Loving Kindness Meditation

Breathe in and out, use either these traditional phrases or ones you choose yourself. Say or think them several times.

May I be free from inner and outer harm and danger. May I be safe and protected.
May I be free of mental suffering or distress.
May I be happy.
May I be free of physical pain and suffering.
May I be healthy and strong.
May I be able to live in this world happily,
peacefully, joyfully, with ease.

Next, move to person who most invites the feeling of pure unconditional loving kindness, the love that does not depend on getting anything back. The first person is usually someone we consider a mentor, a benefactor, an elder. It might be a parent, grandparent, teacher, someone toward whom it takes no effort to feel respect and reverence, someone who immediately elicits the feeling of care. Repeat the phrases for this person: “May she be safe and protected….”

After feeling strong unconditional love for the benefactor, move to a person you regard as a dear friend and repeat the phrases again, breathing in and out of your heart center.

Now move to a neutral person, someone for whom you feel neither strong like nor dislike. As you repeat the phrases, allow yourself to feel tenderness, loving care for their welfare.

Now move to someone you have difficulty with — hostile feelings, resentments. Repeat the phrases for this person. If you have difficulty doing this, you can say before the phrases, “To the best of my ability I wish that you be….” If you begin to feel ill will toward this person, return to the benefactor and let the loving kindness arise again. Then return to this person.

Let the phrases spread through your whole body, mind, and heart.

After the difficult person, radiate loving kindness out to all beings. Stay in touch with the ember of warm, tender loving-kindness at the center of your being, and begin to visualize or engender a felt sense of all living beings.

This is my 2nd daughter, Marnie. Say hi, Marnie! She paused for a minute; she's in the middle of printing the cover for her next book.

Here’s the deal. Teachers are everywhere. I’m a teacher, you’re a teacher, our parents (may be) teachers, the jerk in front of you on the sidewalk is teaching you something, we teach our children, and our children teach us. This is a story of that last possibility, one of the ways my children have taught me. Of course they teach us everything, from the moment they’re born — maybe even before they’re born. They definitely teach us how to be a parent, but they also teach us patience, and they teach us the real meaning of love and selfless love. They teach us how scary the world is, and how little control over it we actually have. After I had my first child, watching the nightly news became a terrifying thing — oh no! That’s the world my baby is going into! And so they teach us how to trust. My oldest daughter Katie once told me (~17 years old), “Mom, at some point you just have to trust that you raised me right, and trust me.” Cold water in my face, that bit of wisdom. And she was right.

When they’re doing the hard work of growing into individuals, if you pay attention you can learn a lot for yourself. And when they continue the hard work of growing into adults, there’s a whole lot to learn. Marnie is an artist, and in our culture, that’s a kind of tough row to hoe. The pay is pretty paltry; respect is not too visible until you “make it” (go to a party and have an investment banker ask, “so what do you do?” and watch his face when you say “I’m an artist.”); the hours are long and the benefits are extremely satisfying but that’s hard to exchange for medical care or groceries. But what are you gonna do when you just are an artist, when it’s the way you process the world, when you have something big to say? You live your life as an artist, that’s really what there is to do.

One thing I’ve learned from Marnie over a lot of years has to do with taking yourself seriously. Which isn’t the same thing as taking yourself too seriously, that’s a different thing. But taking yourself seriously, not discounting yourself and what you’re here to do, not dismissing your work, giving it the time and resources it needs and deserves. Taking your practice seriously, not relegating it to “when there’s time,” because there’s always someone or something that’ll impinge. Always. A couple of months ago, Marnie said, “When I started treating my business like a business, it started behaving like a business.” And that kind of knocked me back on my feet a little bit. I don’t really treat mine like a business; it’s what I just kind of casually do, and because of that, I don’t make as much money as I could if I treated it seriously. But it’s her life as an artist and taking that seriously that’s teaching me a lot right now. She revamped her website, ordered business cards, is busy applying for this grant and that grant, is applying to (and attending) conferences to showcase her work and to network. She networks, she builds connections and nurtures them as an artist. Because she is an artist, it’s who she is and what she does, and it’s up to her. (And p.s., the second volume of her book will be available soon — it’s going off to the printer this week. I’ll let you know when it’s available! Sneak peek here.)

I watch and learn. I pay attention. And I’m so grateful for the three teachers I gave birth to.

And so here I am, a new True Believer, and hope I am not annoying. I’m still a knitter and a baker, a reader and a writer, a mother and wife and friend. I’m still clunky and mindless, and go into thrashing mode more often than I’d like. I still get into an eating frenzy sometimes and hate myself for it afterwards. I still just want a pint of ice cream when the world comes at me a little too hard. I’m still grappling with a difficult life situation squarely in the middle of everything. I’m still all of that, and much more — some I’d admit to you over a glass of wine, some I admit to myself only in the dark, and some I won’t even admit then.

it's SO elementary: Look. See.

But baby, I’m trying. I’m trying so hard, and my old way of trying is the wrong way — the clench my fists, scrunch my shoulders up near my ears, squint my eyes and clench my jaw, and do. it way. That way is antithetical to what I’m trying now, and it’s so hard, but it’s so good. In the first week of my 40-day project, I have not succeeded many more minutes than I have succeeded, but the effort and the willingness to try has had a huge effect on me. Huge. (‘uge, if you’re Donald Trump. I’m not, so huge.) Because it is doing such powerful things for me, and because you are part of my world, I want to share the thing with you, in case it grabs you, in case you need it too.

I read this yesterday in Coming To Our Senses (Jon Kabat-Zinn), a book I keep mentioning and recommending. The chapter opens with a fragment of Yeats’ brilliant poem Sailing to Byzantium:  ”Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is, . . . ”  Kabat-Zinn writes:

…virtually everybody has to some degree or other whispered longings from deep within the psyche, a secret life really, a life full of dreams and possibilities we usually keep hidden. The sad thing is, we usually keep it hidden from ourselves too. We suffer greatly as a consequence. The secret is sustained often for the whole of our lives with no inkling that we are complicit in a self-deception that can be severely life-eroding and self-destructive.

The real secret? That we really do not know who or what we are, for all the surface preoccupations, pretensions, and the inward and outward posturing we construct and hide behind to keep ourselves and everybody else in the dark.

My attention was captured by the beginning of that passage, the part about whispered longings. Don’t you secretly feel that you are so much more than you are allowing yourself to be, or to know? This reminds of the poem Our Deepest Fear by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Of course that idea doesn’t have to exist solely in the framework of God, or of any particular God, though it is clearly a spiritual framework connecting to something larger than our small selves. I first read a snippet of that poem in Woodstock, handpainted artfully on a piece of (probably handwoven) linen, and I started crying. I think we all (or most of us, anyway) share this sense of something greater in us than the one who talks to friends, does the shopping and cleaning, pursues hobbies, travels, loves, hates, tries, succeeds, fails. Kabat-Zinn goes on:

Isn’t it time for us to discover that we are already larger than we allow ourselves to know? Isn’t it time for us to discover that it is possible to inhabit that larger knowing and perhaps free ourselves from the deep anguish of our persistent habit of ignoring what is most important? I would argue that it is long past time, and that now is also the perfect time.

I am so surprised by the real effect of trying to meditate, trying to be mindful. I can’t sustain it for 3 minutes, and my effort to eat mindfully lasts for about the first third of the meal and then suddenly my plate is clean and I don’t know how that happened. But the trying is amazing. Two fundamental things have happened after the first week: 1) I’ve learned that my thoughts are most often either in the future or in someone else’s head, and 2) I’ve learned how quickly I rewrite what’s happening so I don’t have to know what’s actually happening. MAN. Look at everything I’m missing!

In the coming week, my project is going to expand into my body; I want to get back to my kettlebell, and I want to do some yoga. My body is part of the deal, and reconnecting to it as it actually is is important. I have to work out the details, so that’ll be presented in tomorrow’s post, in case you are interested in taking any piece of the project for yourself.

Happy Sunday y’all! I’m getting offline now and enjoying another beautiful warm winter day in NYC.

a bad cell phone picture of my haircut -- kinda shaggy, soft turns toward my face. i like it! i'll try to get a better shot later.

blue blue skies in Manhattan!

How about some Dionne Warwick — and oldie and a goodie (the song that is!!)

Jealousy is deadly to a friendship. When I returned to Austin at age 40, to begin graduate school, my life was pretty difficult and it felt like I lived on scorched earth. I had an old friend who still lived in Austin; Maureen and I met each other in our early 20s, before we had children. We knew each other and were close friends through the births of our kids, and remained friends after I left. So I got in touch with her when I moved back, and we were both excited to reconnect. Unlike me, Maureen had a pretty luxurious life of privilege; she had a happy marriage (I was long divorced), two daughters, she was very creative and volunteered at her daughters’ Waldorf school, her husband made a lot of money, she’d gone to college at 18 and completed her degree at the typical age. No one has it all, but Maureen’s life was pretty great. When we got together the first time, her response to me had a jealous stab: “Well, I could go to school now, too, but I have TMJ.” [never mind that that doesn't even make sense.] As if I’d presented myself as above her in some way, or challenged her. After that, she had a difficult time dealing with me, for no reason (I think) other than her jealousy, though I don’t quite get it. She’d say mean things to me, things that were insulting, things that stung and left me feeling like I was a bad person in some way, but through it all I smiled and acted like she hadn’t said those things. Our friendship dwindled and eventually came to an end because she quit speaking to me, and I haven’t heard anything from her since then.

This is a very real instance in which my mindfulness project is difficult and painful, because I’m trying not to smile and act like people aren’t saying the things they’re saying, as I’ve done all my life and as I did with Maureen. We do this all the time, I know we all do. We collude — even against ourselves! The trick is knowing what to do when you allow the awareness of what happened. I have no idea what I’m doing here, I’m flying by the seat of my pants, and not at all elegant or graceful about it, but this is what I think is the honest thing to do. I hear something, I acknowledge to myself what it really was (not what I wish it was), and then I say what it was and how I actually feel. I started off thinking it’s a way of expecting more for myself, but now I think it’s much deeper than that, more basic. It’s really about having an honest experience of the world and of others, whatever that may be.

two mentions of Gandhi in a row -- whaddya know! unintentional, i'm not studying Gandhi or anything.

But it’s hard. Denial is quite a good deal (until it isn’t); I deny that I’m feeling mad or uncomfortable and so I’m not! I deny that someone said a mean thing to me and so they didn’t! I deny that people have disappointing feelings and so they don’t! But with every one of those denials, I’m living in a fake world. A fake happy world.

Tonight my husband and I are going to The Thalia Follies at Symphony Space, a political cabaret. It’s great — an audience of people like us, Upper West Side Democrat/lefties who share a similar view of the political world. Plus it’s screamingly funny. I get my hair cut tomorrow morning (whee!), my friend Laura is getting married Saturday (whee!) in NC, and it’s another weekend of my real life ahead. I won’t be online, so I wish you a wonderful weekend whatever you do.

xo

It’s really just about doing no harm in the world. I find that compelling in its simplicity, and a nice consolation prize for those of us whose lives don’t involve going out to change the world for the better. I guess I’ve learned I’m too lazy to do that. But I can do no harm! Sure, I can do that.

The deal is that it’s truly meant to be broad and ubiquitous, and it’s not as simple as it sounds (isn’t everything). Am I being hard on myself, critical of myself, putting myself down? Ahimsa – notice it and let it go. Do I talk about people behind their backs? Ahimsa. Do I cause someone pain or grief? Ahimsa. Of course it’s pretty simple to do that with people I love, or even like or feel neutral about. Big deal. (And this is a repeated lesson in the Bible, if I remember my New Testament from so long ago….a couple of the apostles taught “It’s no credit to love those who love you, to do good to those who are good to you. Even tax collectors and sinners do that.” Sorry for the paraphrase, it’s been a long time.) So sure, I can practice ahimsa with my friends and family, with the person in front of me at the market if they’re being nice. But I want to practice it otherwise, when the person at the market is causing me a lot of hassle. Just don’t do harm, that’s all. Just don’t cause pain and grief.

As a counterpoint to Gandhi’s comment that if you can’t do it in all departments it has no value, he also said this: “If you can’t love King George V, say, or Sir Winston Churchill, start with your wife, or your husband, or your children. Try to put their welfare first and your own last every minute of the day, and let the circle of your love expand from there. As long as you are trying your very best, there can be no question of failure.”

This makes me think of an experience I had in 1980 — and you’ll see how shocking it is that I still remember it with such gratitude, 32 years later. I was stuck in traffic on IH-35, the major highway that runs north-south through Austin. My little Datsun B-210 did not have air conditioning, it was late summer (and therefore ~675 degrees….Texas, you know), and it had been a very bad day. I just wanted to get home. As far ahead as I could see — and that’s very far in a flat landscape — the traffic was at a complete standstill. I was going to be sitting there for hours. I couldn’t keep the car going the whole time, I couldn’t listen to the radio. All I could do was sit in the sweltering heat, with my fury and irritation and desperate wish to be home. I glanced over at the car to my right, and the driver, a middle-aged man, smiled at me. It wasn’t an eyebrow-waggling smile, it was just a lovely and gentle smile. That’s all. He smiled at me, held my gaze for a few seconds, then turned away. I’ve always wondered if I smiled back — I don’t think I did. I was so surprised and taken aback. He didn’t want anything, it wasn’t a come-on, he just smiled at me. As I turned my eyes back to the traffic ahead of me, everything in me lightened and shifted. I remember it all these years later.

So today, I will smile, even if it’s at a person who is irritating me. And since I live in crowded NYC, the odds are good.  :)  Happy Friday, y’all.