Moose in the Kitchen

I had an experience a few weeks ago that was like getting leadership tips from Ghandi or having Stephen Hawking edit my science report. Or William Shakespeare say he really liked that poem I wrote in the 11th grade about the bell pepper and, yes, you SHOULD send it to The New Yorker, but first, try this – it will help. It was like getting life advice from GOD. What does life advice from God sound like, you ask? WELL, I’LL TELL YOU.

Life Advice From God, If He Descended From the Great Cloud in the Sky to Expound

Everything you need is already within you. So in your relationships with others, expect nothing – simply love, serve, and care for them.

Do what brings you great joy. That is your path.

Life Advice, The First

I am learning – slowly, oh so very slowly – to take things lightly. To avoid jamming people and situations into little boxes I have constructed out of the spider webs and chiffon and dust mites of What Should Be. And I am just…being. (Sort of.) (Don’t give me too much credit just yet.) (Life is long and my memory is short.) (Yet there’s discernible progress.) (Which is nice, because it’s been awhile.) (Should I stop with the parentheses yet?) (No?) (A few more maybe?) (WELL, HERE YOU GO.)

Naturally, because I felt like I was finally getting a handle on such drastic maturity and was maybe feeling a little smug about it, I lapsed straight back into a situation where I Have Expectations and You Clearly Have Not Met Them and Now I’m Going To Make You Listen To My Ceaselessly Circling Thoughts on the Subject. But c’est la vie. I’ve made the executive decision to allow the “expect nothing, simply love” idea to apply to myself as well as everyone else. What a relief.  So I get to forgive myself for unfortunate reactions, especially when they give me valuable information about my triggers, i.e. feeling like I am always the least important person in the room and everyone around me has a closer relationship to that other person over there, even if it’s the new gardener because HELLO, THAT GARDENER HAS TENDED HER GRANDMOTHER’S ROSES FOR THREE WHOLE WEEKS NOW AND WHAT HAVE YOU EVER DONE FOR HER GRANDMOTHER, HUH? Yes, I could take that sentence to a licensed professional and use it as the basis for a solid decade of therapy, but whatever. Part of growing up means identifying and accepting my shit and then figuring out how to manage it. Shit like shutting people out so effectively that such hysterical assumptions about gardeners and roses actually ring true because lo, YOU HAVE MADE IT SO. How is it that I have such an effect on my environment? I seriously thought I was just an innocent bystander. Oh, life. You win again.

Please forgive the hippie-dippy nature of this next statement, but the only thing I can think to do about the aforementioned Shutting People Out issue is to imagine all the walls I’ve constructed around me with cement and mortar and the occasional instance of macrame, and then shut my eyes and picture those brick and macrame walls dissolving into the ground. I was sitting outside in the sun today eating a chocolate croissant, as I am wont to do, and I could feel myself as this little island around which everything happened. Hipsters with cello cases were talking, dogs were barking, children were discussing aliens and what one should name a cat-eating alien. But I was holding myself completely separate from it. Nobody engaged with me and I couldn’t even begin to think of how to engage with anyone else. So I finished my croissant and closed my eyes and did my Wall Dissolving thing. Then I opened my eyes and knocked over my latte. The small, alien-naming child looked over at me and his mother hopped up to fetch me some napkins as the cello-owning hipsters yelled to watch out as the latte spilled off the table to be greedily sopped up by my denim-clad knees. Now that’s some life engagement. I might have chalked it up to klutziness, rather than my very California-esque ideas, the ones that are inevitable when you’re raised in the Church of Hippie and decide to return to your roots because nothing else is working, thanks. But then a very (very) cute guy asked to share my table. And then we had a nice chat. He even noted that my coffee stained knees simply showed my willingness to engage with life. HE ACTUALLY SAID THAT TO ME. UNPROMPTED. Unfortunately, I kept talking, as is my wont, and eventually went from charmingly quirky to making off-color jokes about how blood-sucking aliens are HILARIOUS, at which point I’m pretty sure he lost interest and started casually edging away. BUT STILL.

I sense I’ve veered off course.

Oh, right: Expect nothing – simply love, etc. As delightful-yet-imperfect humans, I think this is a lovely goal and worth aiming for, but isn’t something to get bent out of shape about when the inevitable failure occurs. This sucker is definitely going to take a solid beating with a sturdy bat when I find myself in a relationship and begin thinking, ‘Damnit, I SHOULD be able to expect something.’ But good to practice and maybe write on a post-it note and feel all zen about when it gets managed for thirty minutes on a random Wednesday.

Life Advice, The Second

Helpful if you needed a path. Do you need a path? I think we all need a path. Keeps us from wandering aimlessly through the grocery store in search of unspecified snack or accidentally taking the wrong train and ending up in Lafayette when aiming for Oakland and hey look, the show starts in 20 minutes, WHERE IS MY HELICOPTER AND/OR TELEPORTATION DEVICE? (We made it on time – barely – with coffee in hand instead of dinner.) If someone could invent an iPhone app for teleportation, I would be much obliged. Anyway, it’s good advice. Naturally I took it to mean that I should spend more time blogging and eating chocolate.

What Brings Me Joy

Blogging: About contemplative stuff, as has become something of a habit (cough), yes; but more when I have some random adventure to write about. Like putting a dollar bill in a go-go dancer’s g-string. Or sitting in the corner at a party sculpting pasta ducks in fetching headwear. I would love to do more bizarrely awesome things and write about them here. Take what brings me pure, unadulterated joy and put it into a form that brings me pure, sometimes-adulterated-depending-on-how-easily-words-flow-that-day-or-how-guilty-I’m-feeling-about-not-blogging-in-a-week joy. (Incidentally, that’s why I’m buying random, never-would-have-thought-of-it-otherwise things on Groupon. If it ends up in my inbox, and it never would have occurred to me but suddenly seems like a good idea, I buy it. Trapeze classes? Sure! Pole dancing lesson? Why not! Cupcakes? Well, I could have thought of that on my own and in fact I did last Thursday, but still!)

Dancing around my living room: Like a loon, a la this.

Reading: You should see the library fines. But not doing so much of it that I stop…

Engaging with the world around me: I’ve been known to make it hard for myself, but I do love it. I love meeting and talking to random people in cafes, I love interviewing artists (yay, freelance writing!), I love meeting blog readers, I love going out with random groups of people, I love molesting dogs on sidewalks. So…time for more of that.

I honestly have no idea how these things comprise My Path, but whatever. I think the point is to spend more time being happy than less. That’s always a good plan. And more of a choice than I tend to remember.

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