World Cup Soccer Plays Life

I’ve been watching World Cup soccer. Introduced by my grandsons who played in high school, I’m a fan of the game. And now, this year, this World Cup, I am joined by millions of other Americans who watched the awesome game against Ghana, who watched and held their breath during the tense game against Germany.

America is playing soccer! We don’t have to mumble and stumble in front of the European and South American teams any longer. We are in the game!

And speaking of being in the game, I love the television long shots. The shots of the entire field: seeing the players on both sides moving, running, setting up their plays, twisting and turning with the ball. They miss the pass; they go after it. They fall down, hug their knees, breathe and get up or are pulled up by an opponent or a pal and they are back. No going off to sulk, no whining, a grimace, maybe a wince, but getting back in the game any way they can as quickly they can. That is the goal; that’s their commitment.

I love seeing the patterns of the plays as one guy passes to a spot where his teammate might not even have arrived yet, but the kicker knows he will be there in time. I love how they back each other up, covering, pointing and anticipating.

 You may think I’m crazy but it’s such a metaphor for life, this game. I know it’s a battle that I am watching. Occasionally it is outright fierce and people get hurt. But think about it. We get knocked down in life, too--sometimes really hard, and we get back up. We also strive toward difficult and challenging goals; we just define them differently.

On our best days we are there for each other in extraordinary ways, anticipating, positioning ourselves to receive the ball should it be passed to us. And we’re ready to move with it: whatever needs to be done. We juggle the workload, family life, and complicated schedules and, constantly moving from point to point, we stay in the game—even when, as it can happen, we can’t wait for half time to come.

 Take a look at the whole field next time you watch. Everyone is in motion: a giant dance of intense purpose and meaning. When we are fully awake and alive that’s who we are. Like the great soccer players, we are alert, ready to move: ready to be where we need to be to make our lives work, not just for ourselves but for those around us, for those who count on us and, conceivably, for some whom we may never even have met.

 On the field we see, at least for a period of time, what it means to bond with other human beings in a shared purpose, human beings totally in the moment, making a whole- hearted commitment to what they are doing together right now.

This is how we should live.

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You might want to check out the new, weekly ESPN sports podcast: In The Loop. Three young men--my grandsons--“chopping it up” on radio with charm, humor and top-ranking sports savvy. 

A Surprising Shift

 I’m at my daughter’s house sitting in the sun on Sunday afternoon. A comfortable, lazy time: no one is going anywhere; no one is in a rush.

My favorite dog in the world, a black and tan Norwich terrier called Cameron, is on my lap and I am sprawled on a very cushiony chaise in the shade with a pillow behind my back. My daughter is near me in the shade as well, flipping casually through the latest copy of Real Simple Magazine. The sun is warm, the light breeze utterly benign.

The garden looks green and lush. Tall Connecticut trees--maples, dogwood, oaks and white pine--some of them hundreds of years old, I’ll wager--frame the yard, which is irregularly edged in the foreground by rhododendron, hydrangeas budding out madly and other low bushes unknown to me. There is a cared-for casualness about the planting in my daughter’s yard that feels as comfortable and easy as the deep cushion at my back.

My three, twenty-something, grandsons are with us: shirtless, in shorts and bare feet, drinking an assortment of iced coffees, teas, and sodas as they spread themselves out on wicker furniture in the sun. Unlike my daughter and me, they can get as tan as they want.

The youngest of the boys holds the family’s second Norwich between his legs and rubs her back. All these guys have graduated from college and have jobs in New York. But right now they are just hanging out.

My grand daughter, their fifteen-year-old sister, isn’t with us. She has gone sailing with some friends for the afternoon.

“Sailing?” my middle grandson—I’m going to call him Tim-- inquires.

My daughter responds. “Yes, with her friends, the Smiths. They have a boat in Norwalk.”

Tim brushes at his thick, dark hair with his hand and slings his leg over the side of the chair. “I bet she took her cell phone. Did she, Mom?” He presses.

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“Girls!” Tim says, sitting up straight now. “They have to take their cell phones everywhere! They can’t be without their friends for two minutes!”

I am surprised by his vehemence. Tim, with the lovely, steady girlfriend and the great job, I think of as very much of his generation: a cell phone always in his pocket. Tweet. Twitter. Whatever.

Something has changed.

 What is going on? I wonder. What unexpected awakening is this?

“Are you saying, Tim,” I ask, “that being on the cell phone all the time, checking for calls means that your attention is fractured? That you can’t really be where you are? You are not actually with whomever you are with?” (A bit much, I realize, but I can’t help seizing the moment.)

“That’s exactly what I mean, G-Ma! People will go to the Fourth of July fireworks this year and stand in the dark with the fireworks blazing away in the sky and--he holds his own phone high and looks into it—they’ll be watching those fireworks on their cell phones!"

“I write blogs about stuff like that,” I say, wanting him to know that I get it.

Tim grins broadly, revealing straight white teeth. “Good, G-Ma!” He says emphatically. “Don’t stop!” 

I won’t.

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Welcome Saudi Arabia to Life Opening Up! I hope you visit us again.

Helping Really Helps

A few years ago, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving found me frustrated and edgy. It wasn’t because I had 16 people coming and hadn’t made my perfect pies yet. Nothing like that. It was, simply, that I hadn’t done anything for anyone else: for anyone who’s Thanksgiving might not happen at all. Ordinarily I respond to one of the many requests that show up in the mail, but this year I wanted to buy real food, buy it myself. I had tossed out all the paper pleas thinking that surely a way to accomplish what I hoped would reveal itself, but it hadn’t. Now it was almost The Day and I had helped no one.

As I pulled into Stop and Shop, Westport, near the entrance of the store I spied my Yoga teacher from Yoga4Everybody standing with a small group, all of them wearing bright blue aprons that said in white letters, FOOD BANK.

Perfect. She gave me a list of what to buy and I bought a Thanksgiving meal for a family I would never see. Handing the food over to some cheerful young people, also clad in blue aprons, I left the store feeling relaxed and happy.

Everybody knows that helping is a two way street. We feel better when we help someone else: anyone . . . with anything. It doesn’t have to be a big deal; holding a door for a stranger laden with packages can lift our spirits. Psychology Today calls this the “helper’s high.” (New York Times, Dec. 1, 2009) What is amazing is that actual data exists to support what we are aware of experientially.

“It’s about stepping out of your own story long enough to make a connection with someone else,” says Cami Walker, a victim of multiple sclerosis, who, according to the New York Times, (Dec 1 2009) decided to give a gift to someone each day for 29 days. The results of her plan? Walker became “more mobile and less dependent on pain medication. The flare ups that routinely sent her to the emergency room have stopped and scans show that the disease has stopped progressing.”

Stephen G Post, director of The Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University, says about Walker’s experience, “‘There’s no question that it gives life greater meaning when we make this shift in the direction of others . . . But it also seems to be the case that there is an underlying biology involved.’”

 The Times reports further that “the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, CA,” found that "elderly people who volunteered for more than four hours a week were 44 percent less likely to die during the study period.”

Seniors! No curling up with Dr. Phil and Oprah. We have to get out there and help. Did you ever dream that prepping mountains of food in your church or synagogue kitchen might add to your life span?

The Times article goes on to say that “altruism may be an antidote to stress. A Miami study of patients with HIV found that those with strong altruistic characteristics had lower levels of stress hormones.”

“By contrast,” we are informed in the same article, “in one study of 150 heart patients, those who talked about themselves at length or used more first person pronouns had more severe heart disease and did worse on treadmill tests.”

 That’s it: young or old, no more lengthy monologues about ourselves. A sincere interest in others pays off even on the treadmill.

Analyzing two separate surveys of a total of 3,200 women who regularly volunteered,  a 1988 Psychology Today article described a physical response from volunteering, similar to the results of vigorous exercise or meditation.

Every religious tradition urges generosity. It’s not about striving for sainthood; it’s far simpler than that. Caring for each other enhances all of our lives. As Dr. Post of Stony Brook put it, "'To rid yourself of negative emotional states you need to push them aside with positive emotional states. And the simplest way to do that is to just go out and lend a helping hand to somebody.’”

Pretty convincing stuff, wouldn’t you say?

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Check out Unleash Potential, offering personal growth groups in Fairfield on the first Thursday of the month. Experts, Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby, are the compassionate leaders of Unleash Potential and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery.  Click here for more: http://www.unleashpotential.us/events/

Readers Raise Some Good Questions

 Readers have asked some interesting questions about the most recent Life Opening Up blog, Juicing Our Dramas.

One of you wondered why we do this? Why do we tell and retell our victim stories and tragedies? She speculated: Is there some underlying cause for our needing to repeat our dramas to whoever will listen?

Good question.

I would suggest that there is. We may be venting, venting, venting, and, at the same time, looking for attention and/or a way, perhaps, to appear more interesting. We can be expressing learned behavior that we picked up from a parent, or unconsciously striving to fill a hole leftover from an attention-deprived childhood. 

I’m a middle child who grew up with a smart, twenty-two months older sister and then, three years later, along came the much-longed for boy, a brother, who, in our patriarchal family, could basically do no wrong. The classic middle child syndrome contains a plea to be noticed.  (Ergo: a blog?)

My life became packed full of drama stories during my late thirties and early forties. I was so accustomed to the tensions that, as step by step, I began to gather myself together, I remember wondering:  If I get my life under control will I still be interesting? What will I talk about if there is an absence of crisis in my life?

One reader wrote that “your friends will like it” if you stop bombarding them with your dramas and she is right.

Another reader went further, saying that he knew he was guilty of this habit to some degree, but added that he had a friend who was dining out on her drama stories and driving everyone crazy. Could he approach this problem with the annoying person? Could he let her know?

It is not easy to give unsolicited feedback to anyone, even a friend, without causing offense. It depends so much on the nature of your relationship to that person. Does the other person know you care about him/her? Does the other person trust you? Have you participated in any inter-personal sharing with this person in the past?

Questions like the above can help us decide whether or not to take this potentially difficult path. Some people are more open to personal feedback than others, that is certain, and if you suspect that all that would come of such a discussion is a solid wall of defense and a wrecked friendship, then it’s probably not worth it.

 On the other hand, others can be touched that you cared enough about them to risk sharing your concern.

My rule is: trust your instinct. And, of course, our primary goal is to become aware of our own behavior patterns with friendly curiosity—no criticism--and to allow that awareness to heal us. Maybe doing just that will help others to heal as well.

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Welcome this week to new readers from Serbia, Romania and Senegal! I am honored that you read Life Opening Up and I hope you will again.  Many thanks to all of you from other countries and especially those of you in the USA for reading this blog!

Juicing Our Dramas

Let’s not juice our dramas. By that I mean telling and retelling the stories, large and small, in which we are life’s victim. You know the kind I mean: when the cable guy is supposed to come in a four hour time frame and shows up two hours beyond that: when we stand in an endless queue at the DMV and finally achieve the window only to be told that we haven’t brought all of the necessary papers. All that boring, stupid stuff that happens to us all the time when life, as is so often the case, fails to work for us the way we want it to.

Sometimes—at least in hindsight--it’s funny when things don’t work. We rather enjoy it because, for example, our friends have their DMV stories, too, and, together, we can dump all over that hopeless office and bond through our mutual frustration.

Some of our dramas are serious: a loved one receives a cancer diagnosis: a friend breaks a hip. We yearn for a sympathetic ear, perhaps a shoulder to cry on. These situations merit our attention.

 But most of our dramas arise out of the way we choose to perceive and describe every-day events in our lives. Our attitude and descriptive language make a big difference. I have a friend in the UK who, when her housekeeper for the summer fails to properly plump up the pillows in the living room, my friend will say, “It’s a nightmare!”

 No!  A nightmare is when one of our children is diagnosed with leukemia. Our ordinary life dramas are at the most, annoying or irritating and inconvenient. 

We can notice our drama-junkie behavior when we need to tell our victim version story repeatedly to almost any willing audience. That’s when we know we are hooked. That’s when it is time to relax, take some deep breaths and let it go.

Why does this matter? Why should we bother to become aware of this attention-seeking pattern? Because every time we repeat our drama stories we are, to some degree, reliving them and therefore refreshing the original anxiety or anger the experience generated in our bodies.

According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking Your Habit Of Being Yourself: How To Lose Your Mind and Create A New One, our bodies are unable discriminate between thought alone and the actual experience. Therefore thought—stories about the experience--brings on the same stress as the primary experience itself. And, as we all know, stress is not good for our health.

Do we really want to incorporate this victim story, along with all the others we have juiced over the years?

The next time we have a “poor me” or “a dreadful situation” story to tell, let’s tell it once, maybe a second time, but then? Ahhhh. . . . Could we just skip it?