Category: being human

fear.less

There’s a new kid in town, one of those neighborhood champions who will get in between you and the big bully — the one with the scabs on his knuckles from knocking down a thousand just like you — stick out her chin and say You leave my friend alone! And because it’s not just you anymore, Scabby Bully Kid will sometimes go away.

That bully is fear, and fear.less is the new online magazine that’s here to help us all square off against it. To help us help each other, by giving space for people to tell their stories and spread their experiences, ideas, ruminations, affirmations, and sometimes just raise their fists against all the things that make us afraid.

Fear.less is the creation of Ishita Gupta and Clay Hebert — a place where:

Every story you read is an example of conquering fear, whether an immediate physical danger, the looming threat of failure, the pressure to compete in a changing world, the incessant quest for identity, or the overwhelming uncertainty of death.
 
— from About fear.less

They’ve just put out their first preview of what you can expect in the magazine: from photographer Platon, reflections on fear, honesty, preparation and bringing your own true self to the party. See for yourself in this lovely PDF. If you like it, you’re welcome to save a copy for yourself, and spread copies far and wide.

Life can be so very good, but it’s rarely good in a vacuum of self. We’re here together, and that matters. We’re creatures made of soul, made for joy and love, and anything that gets in the way of that needs to get its front teeth knocked out. We’re all the kid being bullied. We can be the champions too.

(You can also find fear.less on Facebook and Twitter. Ishita and Clay, thanks very much for your permission to make Platon’s story available here.)

What if…

There are the big crossroads moments, of course, when a doorway blasts open between the life you’re in and another that will inevitably be very different, and the universe does everything short of hanging up pink neon arrows that flash “PAY ATTENTION NOW.” When I saw my first pictures of St. Paul’s and realized I had to have it, even if it meant going a thousand miles from home at age 13. When I was accepted at Clarion and had to decide whether to quit my job and take out a loan. When I met Nicola. When I said yes to the big job at Wizards of the Coast because I knew it was my shot at someday being able to write full time, even if I had to stop writing while I did the job. When I asked the executive producer to give me the screenplay work, and found myself suddenly, passionately in love with writing again. Those were doors.

It’s easy to play the game with those big moments: Oh my god, what if we’d never met, what if I hadn’t made it work, what if I’d been too scared or too sensible or too damn stupid to (any number of things)? But writer/columnist/yoga guy Mark Morford plays a more subtle game in this post over at SF Gate: not Monday-morning-quarterbacking the life you have now, but rather trying on a life that you see walk past you on the corner, or at another table in the restaurant, or in a parking garage… shrugging yourself into it for a second not because it’s so different from yours, but because somewhere inside is that tiny voice of recognition, of connection, of There I am again.

And he’s right: it’s a good feeling. It was nice to be reminded of it; and to imagine, for a moment, what it was like to be Morford standing there watching that guy and his dogs, seeing all those other ways that he — that any of us — might have lived this life.

(Thanks to Jeremy for the link.)

Only human

I’m a big fan of the awesome Carolyn Hax, the only advice columnist I have ever given a damn about (I am way suspicious of people who make a living telling strangers how to make personal choices). I like her a lot. Based on her print/online presence, she’s friend material. Her advice is consistent and always focused on relationship, communication, connection, being human around other humans. The way that we all abrade each other sometimes. Common courtesy. Kindness. Having the back of people you love.

I’m sending you off to a column from a couple days ago. It’s a two-parter: you’ll find the link to part two at the bottom of part one (or at the end of this post). Part two is the payoff, but part one gives you the context.

And although I’ve started this post as a fangirly squee-out to Hax, really it’s all about the part-two story that Jersey Guy tells. It made me cry. Some of us are never lucky enough to have this moment of realization. And although I think all of us make big life-changing mistakes, some of us are never lucky enough to make them with people who will forgive us.

I’m one of the lucky ones: for all the countless thoughtless ways I have fucked up with my Most Important People, I have been forgiven, and for most of the ways that people have fucked up with me, I have forgiven them. Sometimes only after a long time, and sometimes with very little grace. But I am working on it.

I get so tired of my own defensiveness, my own special-babyness, my sometimes utter lack of kindness, my occasionally incredibly limited perspective. I need stories like Jersey Guy’s to remind me that if I’m special, then we’re all special, and that I’d better not forget that we’re all only human. Only is a funny word: it implies “merely” or even sometimes “unfortunately” — but I think the real lesson here is that only human is a vast, complicated and lifetime-project thing to be. It’s a thing worth being the best at that we can; because the best is so fucking beautiful it turns my heart inside-out.

Jersey Guy – part one.
Jersey Guy – part two.

Cost

I’m busy lately, mostly in ways that I enjoy, with so many more things I want to do. And I’m finding it ironic that I’m better at doing things now — more skills, more focus, way more discipline — but the doing takes much more out of me.

The benefit of age for me so far has been expertise and confidence and a stronger sense of myself. And now I need to learn how to gracefully pay the price for all these gifts of age: the fact that I literally cannot read without glasses anymore; that if I get up early and throw myself into work and forget to eat, I will feel bad for hours; that intense work fuels my soul but makes my body tired and shaky for days; and that I can no longer sleep as deeply as I used to, no matter how tired I am. I’m not repairing myself back to my twenty-something baseline anymore. I am, to my surprise, destructible. I’m not talking about death now: I am doing pretty well with accepting that I’ll die. I just hadn’t spent much time thinking about the slowing down that has to be managed before the stopping.

I live with someone whose body has changed in some accelerated ways, whereas I’m pretty much on schedule, and I am not complaining. But my awareness of my own body has increased exponentially because Nicola is so in tune with hers, and because we have had to learn to pay attention to nuances; to learn to distinguish MS from whatever else might be going on. And so I’m noticing, and feeling… not angry, only occasionally sad (although I suspect there’s more of that to come), but mostly just really annoyed right now. There is so much I want to do.

Life’s for sharing

This was filmed at Liverpool Street Station in London earlier this year, during an actual commute day (in other words, real people are in for a real surprise).

Forget that it’s a commercial. Just have fun.

And because Fun = Good, have some more (thanks to Jennifer for pointing me to this one).

It’s a great ad campaign. It makes me want their phones and their service. And that’s fine with me. If they have this kind of imagination anywhere in their company, and the wit to approve this and make it happen, they can have my money. Because look how much fun everyone’s having. The people dancing, the people watching, the people sharing it all on their cell phones… Look at the comments on YouTube from people who went away a little more happy for having seen other people dance, smile, share.

I hope, I hope, that this is what the future really holds. That the mighty interweb and all our technology won’t just be about retreating into our little fleshpods and broadcasting ourselves one-way into the world. I hope that the future really is about connectivity. We have so much that’s hard to share right now; look how easy it is to share the good as well. Now there’s a thing worth doing.

I stand in awe of all the ways that human beings can create joy. Aren’t people amazing?

Yes, we can end hunger

49lappe_markets

I hope someone in the Obama administration is aware of this story about a city in Brazil that is successfully fighting hunger (thanks to Jeremy for the link).

This is one of the grand things about human beings, this urge we sometimes have to help each other, in small ways and large. And to learn from each other how to make things better. It’s not just about changing process, it’s about changing perspective.

Edited 21 March to add: Thanks to Steve for this additional article on Belo Horizonte’s anti-hunger programs.

Ice weasels and angels

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
— Matt Groening

No, no, Nicola and I aren’t grumpy at each other, and this isn’t me being bitter and twisted. This quote is just the laugh-out-loud truth about love that no one ever tells us when they’re giving us the Barbie and Ken Dream Wedding Set (and if you’re a guy, trust me, the world gives you the Dream Set too, just in different ways).

There are so many ways that love tests us — all love, from friendship to parenthood to marriage to… whatever. At some point in all these relationships, the ice weasels come and we have to decide if we will lie there while they chew. We have to decide whether the love is worth it.

Why am I thinking Deep Ice Weasel Thoughts on a slow Sunday morning? I have no idea, although perhaps it’s because I am also seeing in the world the kind of love that doesn’t always get much airtime: the love of human beings for the humanity of others. I see it in JobAngels, where people are helping strangers find jobs. I see it in the woman who barters handywork for office tasks that she could easily afford to pay for — she has the money, but she knows things are tight for others and she wants to help. I see it in the people who every day give strangers, including me, a kind word or a reassuring comment on a blog post.

The ice weasels are certainly with us right now. But the angels are too. I’m not religious, so I don’t mean stern beings with wings and white robes. I mean people who commit acts of human love in spite of their own fear and their own struggle, whether it’s a small kindness to a stranger or the sometimes-wrenching choices we make for those we love most closely. All those things we do for love. If we let it, love makes angels of us all.