Nat

The end of vacation is bittersweet, of course. It is always hard to reconcile the feeling of being completely relaxed with the imagined pressure of returning full bore into one’s responsibilities. One of the things I’m challenging myself to do this year, though, is to enjoy each nice moment without looking past it toward the next likely challenge.

So here I am, with my wife and stepdaughter safely deposited at the airport, waiting for my later flight in a great independent cafe in Palm Springs. The music and coffee are good. I have a private table with an electrical outlet and a high-speed internet connection. I’ve been able to download some movies and TV shows for my flight later today, and I’m catching up on email.

Palm Springs is one of those places where you can imagine that a large number of residents feel grateful every day for the palm trees, sunshine and mountain views that abound here. We will return next winter, as we did this year, and if we’re lucky, my stepdaughter’s field hockey team will earn an entry into the tournament they hold every Thanksgiving week right up the street from our favorite hotel. It is great fun to think that we would come back here before the end of the year.

In short, I love having a happy experience that I’m likely to repeat in the near future. My wife likes to say that we are creatures of habit, and I guess I would say that she is a creature of habit, but I’m happy to go along when the habits are so entertaining. Palm Desert is great for tennis this time of year, sunny and dry, and I took a lesson yesterday to try to revive my singles game. My instructor, Katie, had a great, easy way of thinking about the game.

Don’t think so much, she told me. It’s a simple game. Get the ball back over the net. She teaches a method that has the following slogan, “Form is not a fundamental.” What it means in the context of tennis is that you are just as likely to be responding to “an emergency situation” as to hit a shot with a perfect setup from a location you expected. Wow, what a life parallel.

In these cases, she says, do your best to get your racket on the ball and try to hang in there for a situation that’s more to your liking. Like all great instruction, and I find this especially from great athletic coaches for some reason, the most useful principles sound like a life philosophy.

So here I am in paradise for a few more hours, seeing my improved forehand approach shot in my mind, loving the bright sunshine on the sides of the Santa Rosa mountains, and thinking that it will be summer soon enough at home.

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?

Michael and I have been working on a book for a few months now, and we took this weekend to get away and make a major dent in it. It shouldn’t surprise me that the work would be so much fun, I guess, but I have spent much of my adult life afraid of long writing projects.

So, today we compiled the notes that we have been writing in 15-minute bursts since November, and we turned them into an outline. Michael did the typing, which I love because it lets me pace while we talk and think. Writing for me is easier when I’m not actually writing. It is typical of Michael to make things fun for me.

The best part of the day is finding work that doesn’t feel like work. To have any activity unravel from oneself effortlessly and focus the mind so that it requires no strain can be the best kind of inspiration. That was true for me over and over today. I have been wanting to remember what a joy it is to be working, and it’s easier for me when the work is entirely my invention. The collaboration makes it even better. It occurred to me in a cafe before dinner that writing a book with another person cuts the number of words in half for each of us. Huh.

Where am I going with this? Just that spending two days thinking about how to cultivate happiness automatically puts me in mind of how to appreciate being happy. My grandmother, who passed away this week, taught me about the state of happiness years ago when I was 18. I had broken up with a girl I adored. I had been moping around for days or weeks when my grandmother came to visit with my parents. She was always glad to see me, but she became very angry with me after dinner.

“You’ve got to snap out of this,” she told me after dinner in her hotel room. “Nobody wants to be around somebody as sour and withdrawn as you are. We will put up with you because we love you, but the people who don’t love you won’t stay with you for a minute if they don’t have to.” I was shocked to be called out by her like that, but she said it in a way that really shook up my thinking.

Naturally she was right. Unhappiness itself doesn’t drive people away, but the way you wear it does. Like it or not, that’s just a cold, hard fact. Better to adopt as friendly and hopeful a demeanor as you can. With any luck, it will draw toward you people whose company will console and reassure you. Maybe they will make you laugh, or at least forget yourself for a minute.

Friendship and love can be our salvation, even when it is friendship and love we have lost. This is what I have been feeling since last night, when Michael and I arrived at the hotel and started to work. I have felt it today. I feel my grandmother near as I write, and I am grateful to her.

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.

For the third day in a row, I am absolutely exhausted. It seems like two weeks since I returned from Colorado, and that was only on Monday. Part of dealing with exhaustion is figuring out whether it is physical or emotional. I think it is both. I have really struggled this week to deal with the challenges in our office with good humor and optimism.

Sometimes I wonder whether well-being and joy are made in moments like these, when we feel they are far removed from us. How do I reach out and pull them to me? I think Esther Hicks and the Abraham guides would say this is where you reach for the better feeling thought. I agree that it helps to think of something that is better than I am thinking right now.

Right now I am thinking, it really still hurts where I was chewing a pretzel stick and jammed it into my gum. What is better than thinking that? My wife went to a charity auction tonight and won us tickets in a luxury box to see a Boston Celtics game in December. What a treat to spend the night in the city with my wife after a fun night out. That’s a much better thought.

Even thinking about my situation, I can find my way to “it is almost the weekend and there is the chance to sleep in and choose what to focus on for at least a few hours.” Maybe I will clean up my office. That would feel good and would take no more than 5 hours. It’s about simple steps.

I will stop with the baseball after this (probably). Thank you to all of you who are indulging me. But here’s the thing. I waited until I was nearly 40 to see the Red Sox win their first Series, and tonight, just three years later, I was sitting in the stadium in Denver to see them win their second Series in 4 years, in person. Because it was such a tense game, I didn’t really enjoy being there until it was over.

Now, though, all I can think is how happy my father would have been for me that I got to see it happen. He was generous about my love for the Red Sox, switching his childhood allegiances to root for my team, with the love of a convert, I should add. My mother is a big fan now, too. She especially loves Manny Ramirez.

My friends Derek and Karen made this happen for me. I can’t even describe how happy I am. But it feels great.

The Red Sox are winning 10-1 in the 5th inning of the first World Series game. (Now it’s 11-1.) This is a dream come true for a Sox fan like me. I’ve thought often over the years about why watching other people play sports makes so many of us happy. I’m not sure I can really explain it, except that it is great fun to see adults do a job that lets them act like kids.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to the Homecoming football game at our local high school. After falling behind 20-6 at the end of the first half and seeming to be out of the game, they came back in the second half thanks to a fumble returned 98 yards for a touchdown and to 150 yards rushing by their star player. They tied with 2 minutes to go and won in overtime. The fans stomped their feet and chanted, and the coaches ran to the players and tackled them to the ground with joy.

Sometimes I think we don’t allow ourselves to play enough, and at least our emphasis on sports reminds us that games are beautiful and that playing them is a good idea.

It’s now 13-1 at the end of the fifth inning. What a way to start.

My “best moment, worst moment” journal exercise was ridiculously easy tonight. My friend Chris called after work to say he had tickets for us to see Game 4 of the World Series this weekend. I’ve been a Red Sox fan since I was 10, and I watch a lot of games with my wife. My father was a huge fan, and one of the great thrills of my life was seeing the Red Sox end their 86-year World Series victory drought in 2004. I watched with my parents in their family room. My father and I both wept for joy, and my mother kept saying, “It’s because I became a fan this year.”

But I’ve never seen them play in a World Series game, and now I will. My wife is a saint to let me break weekend getaway plans with her and my stepdaughter to go. She is so kind to me. And it’s been three years, I think, since I saw my friend’s wife and children in Colorado.

What a thrill this will be. Needless to say, there was no “worst moment” today in my journal.

It is ridiculous how friends can surprise you beyond your wildest hopes and dreams. I am very fortunate.

I have started a new journal exercise: each evening I write about the worst moment of my day, and then I write about the best moment of the day. The idea, when I started this three days ago, was to observe the challenge and start to identify a pattern or think about ways to avoid that kind of moment the next time I confront something like it. The idea for “best moment” was to appreciate the good that comes my way and to recollect how good things are in my life.

An interesting thing happened on yesterday. I couldn’t think of a “worst moment” to record. Of course, if you had forced me to, I could have picked a moment that was worse than all the others, but the point was that a bad moment didn’t easily occur to me.

I’ve tried to draw conclusions, but the obvious one is that, when I knew that I would be reviewing the day later for worst moments, something in my knew to avoid them during the day. What a great lesson that will turn out to be. If merely recalling consciously throughout the day that I am going to have to scrutinize what didn’t go well and try to find some way to avoid or improve upon this experience in the future keeps me from stumbling toward bad experiences, this exercise will prove almost magical.

Either way, I like the discipline. It’s especially wonderful to recall the best thing that happened (last night the Red Sox won a game to take them to their second World Series in four years!). I will keep doing this for awhile.

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.