Nat

Monday holidays are a super invention. I have felt for a long time that 3-day weekends are the perfect length to rest up for the work week. You get an extra day’s sleep without an early alarm; you have time to run errands, relax, and do projects; and you know that the rest of the week is a short one.

Mainly, the long weekends helps me focus on having fun and getting things done. But, there is also the holiday itself. In the case of Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday, we get the chance to remember the life and contribution of a man who inspired other people to change our society.

This new year, I am looking all over for inspiration, especially the kind that pushes me closer to a life that makes a difference. For some reason 2009 already feels like a year in which we can all make a difference, starting with our new president and the belief that he and his team will be able to help turn some of our problems around.

Inspiration and hope go hand in hand for me. I’m feeling hopeful, and that has made me feel ready: ready to write, ready to help my friends, ready to make a difference. MLK made a difference. Barack Obama is ready to make a difference.

Why not us? Why not me?

Today’s lead news story about the USAirways flight safely landing in the Hudson River in New York City has really inspired me. It is stunning and wonderful to see the media coverage that is typically devoted to a catastrophe focus instead on a catastrophe averted.

The superb reactions of the USAir flight crew to land and evacuate the plane safely, the seemingly orderly participation of the 150 passengers, who let women and children climb out first, and the fast response of ferry captains and rescue personnel to race to retrieve the passengers from the wreckage, remind us how well people can react to crisis.

I have been struck watching some of the interviews on the TV news tonight how measured the passengers appear in their comments. They are balancing joy in being alive with wonder that they could have come through something so nearly awful. One gentleman, a young doctor, struck a note that resonated with me: he said that, right at impact with the water, he braced for what he had learned to expect from the movies, an explosion, some object to tear him apart. Instead, several of them started shouting, “We’re OK. We’re OK. Let’s get out.”

I love the fact that the people had the presence of mind to figure out immediately that real experience could be better than one had been led to expect. This is grounds for celebration. The skilled pilots and the flight attendants all remembered their training and managed a once-in-a-lifetime challenge with intelligence, poise, and efficiency. The passengers who relied on them adopted the same level of thoughtful responsibility to assist in their own rescue.

What a triumph. It fills me with happiness. Reuters has some great photos.

The first major snow storm of the winter blew through southeastern Massachusetts this afternoon just before dark. Two inches had fallen by nightfall, which happens before 5:00 p.m. these days. Because her plans came together late in the afternoon, I agreed to take my stepdaughter to a friend’s house just as the storm hit its wildest point.

We probably should have turned around when I realized just how bad the roads were, but by that time we were halfway there, and it would have been disappointing to my child not to finish the trip. The drive was a little scary, but mostly because my imagination tends to kick in when things start to feel out of control. I tried to push out of my mind the idea that I might make a wrong turn in the dark on the way home and drive off the road.

It’s a good lesson to remember every once in awhile that we sometimes choose to think things are worse than they are. It’s easy to do with so many examples in the news and in our lives of things turning awful. How much better, though, to move the opposite direction and envision things being even better than they seem.

Our street lost power tonight after I ate dinner, so here I was alone in a house without lights or an internet connection. After complaining about it on the phone with my wife, I climbed into bed with my laptop and watched a silly romantic comedy with the last of my laptop battery.

I guess the point I’m making is that I can get carried away hoping things don’t take a turn for the worse, when it would be every bit as logical to hope that things will take a turn for the better. This sounds like a superficial kind of pretend game, but I mean it seriously. Where we have the chance to make things better through our determination, I think we have a duty to do it.

Nothing is more important.

The power has just come back on in time for me to finish this before bedtime.

Leaving work tonight, I walked out with a coworker whom I barely know. Because it has been raining hard here for two days, we complained about the rain. He told me it was particularly annoying for him since he’s building a new house and the rain makes the job site really muddy. Then he went on to tell me about the geothermal heating and cooling system he is putting in.

For some reason I thought this type of system only worked when you are located over hot springs, like the ones in Iceland. Not true, it turns out. My colleague explained to me some of the basic principles of this system for using the earth’s natural temperature of 55 degrees to warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I was fascinated.

On the way home, I called Michael to observe that, when I am in a great mood and really in tune with whom and what I really like, I notice that fascinating information comes my way in every unexpected conversation. Learning new things from casual social contact is one of the great pleasures of my life. It gives me a sense of the wide range of wonder this life is able to give us.

The whole ride home I wondered about better ways to heat our house. Great fun.

Until recently I was one of those people who grumbled after Thanksgiving about Christmas besieging us too early. I complained about getting the tree and wrestling it inside. I muttered while bringing boxes of decorations down from the attic, and I flew into a rage if the process of putting lights on the tree took too long (which it always did). One year, I even made my stepdaughter put ornaments on the tree without me.

What was I thinking?

This afternoon, after helping my mother put up her Christmas tree, I drove to the lot and brought ours home. It snowed this morning, the first snowfall of the year in our part of southeastern Massachusetts, and the wet snow melted onto our living room floor as I settled it into its tree stand. Nothing that three beach towels spread around it couldn’t take care of.

After it had dried off, I turned on a CD of English Christmas carols and strung the lights. The disk is called “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and it features the Cambridge University choir, with boy sopranos in nearly every track. They are mournful and quiet and evoke the early nightfall of rural England. They are perfect to listen to with a fire burning in the fireplace.

There is something about this aspect of Christmas–the part that acknowledges the onset of winter and the hardships that must have settled over the English countryside in the 17th and 18th centuries, when many of these carols were written–that makes me melancholy, but not dreadfully. The tunes always make me want to cry, though not just from sadness.

Today, alone in the house trimming the tree, I was trying to understand it. Eventually I decided that it has to do with a baby being born the child of God, arriving weak and hungry, as babies do, but bearing the hopes of shepherds, priests, and kings. Such a humble start. I kept seeing in my mind’s eye the baby, wrapped tight and laid in straw by his mother, with grown men down on their knees in front of him.

Two of my friends spoke to me yesterday about taking a risk. They are facing some financial uncertainties and decided to spend some money on themselves anyway. For one it was to have an organizer come in and help her arrange files in her office. She knew this would give her peace of mind that she could find important records if someone asks to see them.

For another, it was to rent an office so he would have a place to work away from his house. Neither of them had to spend the money, and the thriftier choice would have been not to spend. Still, they have both been practicing how to expect abundance. They each felt that spending the money was going to take them closer to what they wanted to achieve. My friend with the organizer was smiling so broadly I could feel it over the phone.

Each of them told me that I could learn a lesson about how to have faith. When we stay on the lookout for what will move us toward joy, we will be rewarded with greater courage. It is not the risk itself but the motive to move towards one’s dreams despite the risk that gives us a greater sense of power and freedom. Faith will do that for them. It can do it for you and me.

It amazes me when the right book comes to me just when I need it. Last week a friend recommended Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat. Pray. Love. I had read the reviews and walked by it in bookstores for months, thinking that I would probably like it, but when I received the recommendation last week, I was particularly desperate for advice about reaching out to God.

For those of you who haven’t read it–and I strongly recommend that you do–Gilbert opens the book sobbing on the floor of her bathroom, desperate for guidance about whether to leave her marriage. She asks God for help, and receives a clear answer back. The answer is, “Go to bed, Elizabeth,” and what she writes about this is that she recognizes it as wisdom. “True wisdom,” Gilbert writes, “gives the only possible answer at any given moment” (p. 16).

It’s a great definition. Typically I expect that real insight will allow me to solve all of my problems at once. I know this is ridiculous when I am being rational, but suffering has a way of making me want to know everything all at once. Gilbert’s reminder that we only need to know the best next step strikes me as great advice, both because we can only take one step at a time, and also because it reminds us to narrow our focus on a problem to the tiny portion of it that we can handle right away.

Brilliant. (Plus, the rest of the book is funny and charming.)

A friend of mine lost his job not long ago, in a layoff. It’s hard for him to talk about without getting angry and sad. Eventually in some conversations he gets around to the question why they didn’t see the value he brought.

I don’t have an answer to his question, and I wish I did. I would like to peer into the future and see what his next job will be, to reassure him that the future is bright, that he will be fine. He doesn’t want to hear that from me, even if it is the truth.

Which brings me to the question: how do you respond to personal difficulties? Do you look for a silver lining, live with your disappointment and try to figure out the cause in something you did or didn’t do?

Here’s a quote from Ben Stein, which I found yesterday and love: “It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated – it is finished when it surrenders.” While I don’t want to preach platitudes to my friend, I believe in Stein’s line. We cannot surrender.

How do you do that in your life? What have you survived?

When I am around my friend Renee, I feel that wonderful things are going to happen. Perhaps it’s her quick sense of humor and easygoing affection. Regardless, it’s great fun to be around her.

Some people make me hopeful, because of their sheer determination to make the world a better place. That’s how she is, and the funny thing is that she makes the world a better place just by showing up.

Renee and I were talking about the future and what we would want it to be like. I want many of the typical things: to exercise more regularly, to learn to play a musical instrument, to watch what I eat, and to love what I do. We talked about the fact that all of these desires can be met. None depends on anyone else. The future is liberating.

Another inspiring story from USA Today this morning. Nancy Berry teaches first grade in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and she draws on unusual, experiential learning techniques to instill love of learning, good manners, and curiosity in her pupils. She has an entire area of the classroom devoted to milkweed plants, which free roaming catapillars in the room eat. They eventually become free-flying butterflies.

Her classroom sounds like a thrilling discovery. I loved that she places equal weight on science and writing, and I really loved that she says of her teaching approach that she tries to give five minutes of praise each day to each student. She uses imaginary friends to help teach manners and classroom behavior.

USA Today runs a series on All-USA Teachers, and Ms. Berry certainly stands out as an innovative, loving teacher. Children fortunate enough to have this kind of teacher early (and I had many of them) start life with a great advantage: they tend to see the world as a long series of promising discoveries.

What a way to want to engage with the world. Hats off to Nancy Berry and her “berries.”

(Red Sox win Game 2 in a nail-biter, 2-1. Woo hoo.)