Catching Happiness

Your Life Is Happening Now

July 20, 2016

“Make treating yourself a priority and always remember your life is happening now. Don't put off all your dreams and pleasures to another day. In any balanced personal definition of success there has to be a powerful element of living life in the present.”

—Mireille Guiliano

Attitudes

Dropping the Rope: The Power of Letting Go

July 15, 2016

“Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.”—Eckert Tolle

I’ve done it a thousand times, but this time something went wrong. I was bringing Tank out of his paddock to go up to the barn, when another horse squeezed between us, pulling Tank’s lead rope tight. In response to the pressure, Tank pulled back, jerking the lead rope out of my hand. Because I didn’t have the good sense to drop the rope when I first felt a tug, the result was a severe rope burn on the palm and middle finger of my left hand. I spent the remainder of my time at the barn with my hand wrapped around an icy water bottle, and the rest of the week healing.

While this was an instance of literally needing to let go, it reminded me that there are plenty of attitudes, expectations, fears, worries, opinions, burdens, and limitations we—I —should let go of. We’re often taught about the importance of persevering—not so often about letting go.

I’m now of an age where letting go is taking center stage. My son is grown and my role in the family is changing. I’m becoming less interested in what others think of me, so I’m reevaluating what I do and how I do it. I’m setting aside certain desires and dreams to make room for new ones. None of this is easy, and it starts with letting go.

As you might have guessed, letting go does not come naturally to me. I’m more inclined to cling, to fight change, to stay rigid. What am I so afraid of? Pain? Discomfort? Chaos? Pain, discomfort, and chaos are part of life. Holding tight to that lead rope reminded me that holding on doesn’t protect me from pain. Sometimes it causes it. And here’s the thing about letting go:

It reduces the pain. If I’d dropped the rope as soon as I felt Tank pull against it, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt. I don’t know why I was hanging on so hard—there was no real reason for it. Sometimes we hang on so hard, and for what?

It allows us to regroup and move on. Tank trotted off only a couple of strides and the other horses did nothing but sniff noses or flick an ear in his direction. I was easily able to collect him and resume our walk up to the barn. Sometimes it’s only when we’ve let go that we see the way out of our difficulty, or the excellent alternative to what we were clinging to in the first place.

If we’re in a situation where we’re clinging hard to a person, belief, or outcome, and we’re miserable and frustrated much of the time, perhaps it’s time to at least consider letting go. Take a few minutes, close our eyes, imagine what it would be like to let go. Do we feel relief? Panic? Deep sorrow? Visualizing letting go might offer us the breathing room we need to see a better option for moving forward. If our attitudes and expectations rob us of happiness, we should let them go. If we’ve tied our happiness to a particular outcome that we just can’t seem to produce, it might be time to let that go, too.

In a case of perfect timing, yesterday, our yoga teacher, Tina, finished the class by reading us the following poem as we lay in final relaxation pose:

She Let Go

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the “right” reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go. She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go. She let go of all the memories that held her back. She let go of all the anxiety that kept her from moving forward. She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment. She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.

No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.

—Rev. Safire Rose

What are you clinging to? Is it time to let go?

Love

End of a Summer Day

July 13, 2016

Photo courtesy Maurice Muller

Introduction by Ted Kooser: We hope that you will visit, from time to time, our archived columns at www.americanlifeinpoetry.org, where you may find other poems by the poets we feature. Today's is the third we've published by Sharon Chmielarz. a Minnesota poet with several fine books in print, including The Widow's House, just released by Brighthorse books.

Fisher’s Club

A roadside inn. Lakeside dive. Spiffed up.

End of a summer day. And I suppose

I should be smiling beneficently

at the families playing near the shore,

their plastic balls and splashes and chatter.

But my eye pivots left to a couple;

he is carrying her into the water.

He's strong enough, and she is light

enough to be carried. I see

how she holds her own, hugging

his neck, his chest steady as his arms.

I have never seen such a careful dunk,

half-dunk, as he gives her. That beautiful

play he makes lifting her from the water.

And I suppose I should be admiring

the sunset, all purple and orange and rose now.

Nice porch here, too. Yeah, great view.

But I have never seen such a loving

carrying as he gives her. Imagine

being so light as to float

above water in love.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2015 by Sharon Chmielarz, “Fisher's Club,” from The Widow's House (Brighthorse Books, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Sharon Chmielarz and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Books

Meet Jean Kerr

July 08, 2016

If I could pick one writer whose writing “voice” and persona I would most like to emulate, a top contender would have to be Jean Kerr. It’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard of her, so let me introduce you.

Jean Kerr, bottom, with Barbara Bel Geddes
Photo via Flickr

Jean Kerr (1922-2003) wrote plays and essays, and was most popular in the 50s and 60s. Her essays were gathered into collections such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and How I Got to Be Perfect. She was married to the Pulitzer-prize winning drama critic Walter Kerr, with whom she often collaborated on plays. They also had six children, five boys and a girl!

Somehow I stumbled onto her books when I was a pre-teen in the 1970s. Why I should have found a middle-aged playwright and mother of six so irresistible is a mystery, but I was immediately enamored. Her essays made me laugh out loud. (Once I remember reading something of hers while in church and muffling my giggles while my mother glared at me.) I think I identified with her because of the picture she painted of herself: tall and less than graceful (that was me, too), smart but slightly awkward and unsure of herself (also me). Despite “those children, and that dog,” her life seemed full of challenging work and a loving family. I wanted that, too.

She sounded happy.

Kerr met her husband, Walter, when she was still in college and he was an assistant professor at a different university. They were married in 1943, and in 1946 they wrote The Song of Bernadette, a drama that closed after only two performances. Their later collaborations were more successful, including a revue called Touch and Go and Goldilocks, a musical.

Kerr’s most popular play was 1959’s Mary, Mary, a comedy about a divorced couple discovering that they still loved each other. One of the longest-running productions of the 1960s, it was also made into a movie starring Debbie Reynolds. Her last play was Lunch Hour (1980), and starred Sam Waterston and a post-Saturday Night Live Gilda Radner.

In 1957, her collection of humorous essays, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, became a best seller. The book was eventually adapted into a movie (starring Doris Day and David Niven) as well as a sitcom that ran on NBC from 1965-1967.

More of Kerr’s essays became the books Penny Candy and The Snake Has All the Lines. In 1979, How I Got to Be Perfect pulled together many of the essays from the previous books.

I’ve spent a few happy hours rereading Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and How I Got to Be Perfect while I wrote this blog post. Here are a few tidbits:

From the introduction to Please Don’t Eat the Daisies:

“I do have a compulsion to read in out-of-the-way places, and it is often a blessing; on the other hand, it sometimes comes between me and what I tell the children is ‘my work.’ As a matter of fact, I will read anything rather than work. And I don’t mean interesting things like the yellow section of the telephone book or the enclosures that come with the Bloomingdale bill….
“For this reason, and because I have small boys, I do about half of my ‘work’ in the family car, parked alongside a sign that says ‘Littering Is Punishable by a $50 Fine….’”
“Out in the car, where I freeze to death or roast to death depending on the season, all is serene. The few things there are to read in the front-seat area (Chevrolet, E-gasoline-F, 100-temp-200) I have long sine committed to memory. So there is nothing to do but write, after I have the glove compartment tidied up.”

On taking her children to the beach:

“It was my plan to loll in the deck chair and improve my mind while the happy children gamboled and frolicked on the sand. That was my plan. Their plan was to show me two dead crabs, five clam shells, one rusty pail they found under two rocks, the two rocks, two hundred and seventy-two Good Humor sticks, one small boy who had taken off his bathing suit, one enormous hole they dug (and wasn’t it lucky the lifeguard fell in it, and not the old gentleman…), fourteen cigarette butts, and a tear in Gilbert’s new bathing trunks.”

From “Letters of Protest I Never Sent”

“The Ever-Krisp Curtain Co.
Dear Sirs:
In what mad burst of whimsy did you adopt the slogan ‘These curtains laugh at soap and water’? Now, I begrudge no man his flights of fancy. We are all poets at heart. And when I purchased my Ever-Krisp curtains I did not really expect them to burst into wild guffaws or even ladylike giggles the first time I put them in the sink. (As a matter of fact, with five small boys and one loud Siamese cat I don’t want to hear one word from those curtains.) But, in my incurable naivete, I did take your claim to imply that these curtains actually survived contact with soap and water. I don’t mean I expect them to remain ever-krisp. I’m quite accustomed to ever-limp curtains. I did, however, expect them to remain ever-red with ever-white ruffles. As it happens, they are now a sort of off-pink strawberry ripple, which of course doesn’t go with my kitchen.
Ever-Disgusted”

(I also rediscovered the origin of a phrase I use from time to time, “What I am really looking for is a blessing that’s not in disguise,” attributed to Kerr’s mother.)

If you want to read Kerr for yourself, her books are out of print, but used copies are available, and you can download Please Don’t Eat the Daisies for free here. You can also check your library for her work—mine has one of her books and one of her plays. Some of the essays feel dated, but many of them still amuse.

You can also take a peek at the Kerrs’ former rather fantastic and unusual house (which she referred to jokingly as the “Kerr-Hilton”) by clicking here.

Funny but not mean-spirited or crass, bemused, occasionally flustered, but always able to rise to the occasion (though not always successfully) and laugh about it later—that’s the spirit she brought to the page. I haven’t found another author quite like her.

Do you have a favorite not-so-well-known author? Please share!