Nat

Since my father died a year ago, I have become messier than ever before. The disorder I create around me reflects my inability to place everything where it belongs. Looking at the piles of papers, books, and clothes strewn around my desk, I realize that, for the moment, I know how to start things but not how to finish them. I could analyze this tendency, analyze myself, and conclude that I am shying away from endings. Maybe it is that simple.

I don’t really want to turn the page. Dropping items wherever I am lets me avoid finality of any kind.

But it’s also a nuisance. When I was very young, I looked around my bedroom one day and decided that I didn’t want to live in the middle of a mess. From that point until I married twenty-two years later, I carefully put everything away: clothes, papers, pens, books. I’ve lost that habit, lost it long before I lost my father. It’s just that I am more likely to look around at the mess I’ve made now and think, “I will never be able to clean this up.”

At the same time, there does come a point at which you say to yourself, “Enough.” There are other people who are bearing up under much more tormenting circumstances. Who am I really to let everything go?

My wife always tells me that the way you clean up a mess is to pick up one thing at a time. I have always known she was right about that. The trick is to go ahead and start.

Last night my mother and aunt hosted a dinner party to honor my grandmother, in lieu of a memorial service. In addition to my mother and aunt, we had two families who had been friends of my grandmother’s for decades, friendships that had started with the parents and grandparents of those present.

It was a really nice occasion on every level and especially entertaining because my grandmother’s lawyer, Pete, told a handful of amusing stories about my grandmother’s sense of what was proper and improper about his business attire when he visited her. Pete was the third generation of lawyers in his family who had served my grandmother, and he drew the hardest duty in being the last. Not only did he manage all of her finances for the last 3 years, but he also managed her health care appointments because all of us in the family live 3,000 miles away.

The man is a saint, patient, good natured, philosophical about the extent of his duties, right down to waiting with the body while the funeral home came to the apartment. We were all extremely fortunate that he was willing to shoulder the responsibility.

My grandmother was demanding and particular, but she was also grateful and gracious towards those who assisted her. She lived long enough to appreciate those on whom she had to depend.

The other family included the surviving son of my grandmother’s best friend and his wife. They are very busy people, with substantial business and philanthropic responsibilities, and they are leaving tomorrow for a Hawaiian vacation. In some sense, this dinner was a duty, but they all performed it with lighthearted grace and kindness.

It was a wonderful tribute to my grandmother, to her indomitability and character that these friends have remained faithful for 50-70 years. It was also a tribute to their constancy to her and to us, the kind of support that we can’t ever repay.

Today I did some work cleaning up my grandmother’s apartment. She passed away in January. She had an amazing life, living almost to 100 and remaining in her own apartment to the very end. It was a good life for her, I think.

Cleaning up the apartment was bittersweet. Because she kept such an orderly home and because she kept to a tight routine in her later years, her apartment looked as if she had just stepped out to run an errand, except only for the plants, which hadn’t been watered in three weeks. I tried my best to revive the seven African violets, which lined the window in her study.

Mainly I looked for keys, threw away dead plants and food from the freezer, and visited with my memories as I dusted and opened drawers. As hard as it is to visit a loved one’s home after the owner is gone, there is a ready barrage of reminders of what we shared.

What really struck me, though, were the conversations I had with the manager and superintendent of my grandmother’s apartment building. When I thanked them for all they had done to help my grandmother continue to live in their building at the end of her life, they both told me how much they loved her and how difficult it was to have her gone.

That is the great lesson from today, and the abiding joy: there are kind people in this world, and they will go out of their way to help you do what you couldn’t do on your own. Love is quite a legacy.

For the last two days, my family and I have played tennis on vacation with several strangers, and the experience has been great. Players of all ages and skill levels have been polite, encouraging, and friendly to all of us. It has made the games great fun, while still providing a competitive outlet.

I’ve been saying friends whom I’ve called on the phone, that it is easy to be happy and friendly on vacation, but the point is that meeting friendly people always makes me feel good about my life and about humanity in general.

One lesson my parents taught me over and over when I was young was that it’s always smart to make it easy for people to be nice to you. They reminded me that good manners, helpfulness, and sociability combine to make a likable person, and they demonstrated by their own behavior that making an effort to be friendly all of the time made our home and their workplaces better.

Our family vacation this week is teaching the same lesson to my stepdaughter, but she has known it for years. I was proud yesterday when an older gentleman complimented my stepdaughter on how pleasant she was to play with.

I am grateful for the chance to start over, no matter how many times I have to do so. I have started to kick my sugar habit dozens of times in the last 2 years. Usually I start on a Monday. Then, if I don’t make it to Thursday, I figure, Well, I’ll start next week. I always feel good about starting.

When I’m in the gym, I watch the hard core athletes with admiration. I used to envy them, until I realized how silly it is to feel that others’ discipline is something to envy. Nothing would keep me from approaching fitness the same way but the lack of determination to do it. That’s what I love about the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” It makes us accountable for taking control of our habits.

My habit since writing this blog has been to start and stop. In part, I stop because it requires a great commitment to be a widely read blogger, to scan other related blogs and cross-communicate with their authors. I have other projects that keep me from doing this.

Nevertheless, it is a worthy project to document here what I find about the search for happiness. More and more writers and researchers are taking the subject seriously.

My take for today is that we can always renew our intention to find a healthier way to think about our lives and our world. My great friend, Claire, told me today about the power of surrender. To surrender apparently derives from the idea of giving oneself up, or to give back more than was given. There are many efforts to which we can sensibly give ourselves up. Giving ourselves over to improving our thought is a very good start.

I played in a simple round-robin tennis tournament today with my wife and stepdaughter. Even a year ago this would have been unimaginable to me. I was terrified of under-performing. But my wife convinced me that when you play, all you have to do is make the experience pleasant for those around you, win or lose. This is so simple. It is easy for me to compliment those who play well, even if they are beating me. And the thing is that in a morning, I am bound to have some good shots along with the bad ones.

It is better not to be afraid. I am giving up certain kinds of fear. This is where renewal always begins for me.

What do you do to make tomorrow better than today?

Yesterday a nor’ easter storm, made up of the remnants of tropical storm Noel, whipped into town and knocked out our power at 4:00 in the afternoon. Fortunately, other parts of town were unaffected, so we were able to have dinner at a restaurant right up the street. It was the best of both worlds. Other than having dinner in a warm, heated restaurant, we spent the late afternoon and evening enjoying our family’s company by candlelight.

In those circumstances, simple pleasures reassert themselves. Balancing the checkbook, a chore I detest, assumes a quaint, Dickensian feel, and reading a book feels like a special treat. After dinner, I hauled in the small pile of dry wood from the porch, and my wife built our first fire of the season.

We hunted down all of our candles, arrayed them on trays in front of the fire, and played Uno, the card game, for an hour. In that light, it was hard to distinguish green from blue cards, which added to the game’s suspense and surprise. Finally, we decided to beat the cold that had settled into the house by heaping extra blankets on the beds and turning in early.

Adding in the extra hour we gained setting back the clocks for Standard Time, I slept for 11 hours. In short, it was a simple celebration of winter pleasures like families would have experienced a hundred fifty years ago.

It is a great reminder to me that happiness can sometimes come from subtraction. What I mean is that we often think, “If only I had…” I would be more happy. But in this case, it was the absence of creature comforts and electronic entertainment that gave us one another’s laughter and companionship.

What a treat.

Today was a study in contrast. While hundreds of thousands of delirious Red Sox fans celebrated the team’s World Series victory at a raucous street parade, my office struggled with some very difficult news. I couldn’t really enjoy the thought of the victory parade, because it seemed frivolous.

This kind of contrast, between joy and sorrow, always raises the question for me how best to retain a sense of well-being when we are challenged with bad news and hardship. While I don’t always have the answer, I have learned to reach for the source of my greatest and most reliable comfort and peace.

For me that is my faith and my family. For you it could be something else, but returning to what always makes me feel better takes me beyond the circumstances in front of me. I think this is why so much of Buddhism focuses on giving up attachments. Being attached leads to suffering. I take from that the need to believe that there are enduring sources of joy. On days when they appear uncertain, I am learning to hang in there and wait for tomorrow.

My wife always makes me feel better after a day like this. She knows that words alone may not comfort me, but her presence always does. I’m hunkered down waiting for the wave to roll over.

Blogging has been very difficult for me this summer, following my father’s passing in May. Although much of my study and effort to address this loss spiritually and emotionally are related to the core mission of our work at Cloud 9000, I frankly felt that blogging about them would be a betrayal of my family’s privacy. Yet finding renewed joy and purpose in the face of sadness and loss has been the great work of this summer.

One of the lessons is that small gestures of sympathy and kindness from friends and acquaintances carry enormous power to comfort and uplift. I am the fortunate recipient of hundreds of these attentions, and they have delighted me again and again. I can’t thank these people enough for making the effort.

This may be the greatest lesson of all from the summer: that our efforts to serve others in even the smallest ways can make profound and lasting impressions and deep impact. Buddhists would call this effort compassion, Christians might call it charity (in the Bible it is translated from the Greek as “lovingkindess”), and I think the Hebrew term “mitzvah” describes acts of kindness like these, although there may be a better Jewish term for this act.

Whatever the name, kindness to those in need is a fundmantal principle of organized religions and is a basic human need.

I welcome any comments here that describe kind acts that have been offered to you this summer.

Today was my stepdaughter’s last day of junior high school, and we attended the student awards program. I loved the way the staff spread the prizes among a relatively large group of students. They gave awards in every subject, for the arts, and for good citizenship. I’m very proud that my stepdaughter won three prizes.

I’m proudest of the award she won for citizenship. It acknowledges a student each year who serves the school well at school and who represents it well in the community. The principal, a lovely woman who is retiring from a 35-year career in education today, talked about Catherine’s cheerfulness and her smile. She mentioned that Catherine brightens the school with her attitude and friendliness.

Nothing matters more to me than this trait, and I’m thrilled to pieces that she receives praise for demonstrating it. Mrs. Conlon, the retiring principal, started today’s assembly reading a quote from Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In it the prince meets and befriends a fox. When they part, the fox tells the prince, “Remember that there are two ways to see, with your eyes and with your heart. The only way to see well is with your heart.”

It’s a lovely reminder, and Catherine needs no one to remind her. She sees with her heart every minute of every day. She is special. We are blessed.

We had a death in the family last week, and the response from family and friends has been remarkable. People have outdone themselves to be kind and supportive. It is a marvelous human trait that so many people surprise you with their goodness in times when you need it most.

For example, we received a letter from the grown daughter of family friends. The letter writer didn’t know the deceased well at all, yet she managed to capture all of his qualities precisely and warmly. Also, I have been flooded with cards and notes from people at work whom I don’t even know well, and many have said the most naturally reassuring things. There is nothing more moving for me in this than to be floored again and again by people’s ability to find words to make you feel happy and proud. Maybe this amazes me because I always struggle to know what to say to people who have lost a loved one, and I think of myself as usually knowing what to say.

All in all, I have found throughout my life that most people will do everything in their power to do good to you if you give them half a chance. At no time in my life can I remember feeling this more strongly. It is a great gift and one that also suggests to me the presence of a comforting God, reaching out through many, many people.

I have found new things for which to be grateful every day, and they start and end with our friends’ fundamental decency and caring. I am so grateful.