I can feel the fatigue, honor it and leave plenty of room for it when it shows up and not try to cross over the solid yellow line and pass it by. I lived speeding past fatigue for years. I would get stuck behind it in that one lane and I would put on my blinker and pass it by...much to the chagrin of my world weary bones. (I have rueful - sardonic bones.)
I am in a new phase of my life. Turning 50 notwithstanding, though I do think it inspires in its own quiet way, this new phase is heralded by an awareness that it is time to be guided by a new partner in my life. Oh no, not that...my husband Drew and I are great. We have weathered the storms - hurricanes - tsunamis (you get the idea) of the last four years and are thriving (our story is a post for another day). No, this new partner in my life is feeling.
Not some feelings, not a partial serving - full contact feeling.
Here's the deal. The paradox. Because, if I've learned nothing else, I've learned that everything, and I think I mean pretty much damn near everything, is paradoxical. Now stay with me here, I can feel that this is important. What I am about to say isn't new, you've heard it before. This time, I don't want you to just hear it - just see it. I want you to feel it.
We already have in abundance the very thing we think we lack. We're the only ones who don't know it.
I know - you already went to the I think I lack a million dollars and I don't have it. Well, who's to say you don't - yet. Let's move out of the material realm for a moment and begin with perhaps a more challenging feat - a feeling.
So, the thing I 'think' I lack is the ability to really feel my way through my life or as Mary Oliver so beautifully wrote - the journey. I rely so much on my seeing sense/my clear rational mind sense/ the symbolic imagery-psychological sense stuff that I have miss vital cues from my feelings. And I want more.
What is paradoxical are all the clues I've learned about myself over the years. Just like a character in a play, we learn a great deal about our character from others. I am a feeling not a thinking type on the Meyers-Briggs. I am a Quick-Start type on the Kolbe Index. I am the Innovator Lifestyle on the CPI (California Personality Inventory). I haven't done the Strength Finders yet but I've a strong hunch that FEELING is high on the list. When I am with friends, clients and new acquaintances, I hear a lot of messages about my warmth and how people feel around me. Well, I want to feel this way around me too.
So, my theme this year: 2012 is the year to feel my destiny.
One year.
One sensuous year.
If I find that I don't like all this feeling, I can pick something else for next year.
I have a hunch I'm going to like it very much. (Once I get through the fatigue stage. I have a hunch that feeling/fatigue are friends and just like that two-lane highway, there is a precarious balance between the two.)
So, here's what I'm doing. Several years ago, I was overrun with bags of every shape and size at home. The cupboard was popping, I didn't like the waste and I thought I'm going to make a change. I decided that I would commit to no bags for one year. And I mean NO bags. No bag takeout food was a bitch. Well, after the year was up, it was no sweat to keep going. And when the new bag laws went into effect in January here in San Jose, I felt a part of that change. The 'one person can really make a difference'
kind of experience. Because, generally there are thousands of ones all at the same time. That is pretty power-full-stuff.
Can you feel it?
So, feeling is my bag intention this year. And I have so many cool experiences already to share from January. Stay tuned for my post on The Wonder Wheel which will set up the 'feeling my destiny' year. I am excited to share with all of you.
Do you have an intention for this new year? One clear focus? If you don't, go out into the wild night and listen for directions and then tell me - what's in the bag?
A friend posted JK Rowlings 2008 Harvard Commencement Address on Facebook yesterday. I hadn't seen it and paused in my Facebook newsfeed viewing to watch. I'm glad I did. And I wanted to share it with all of you. I was struck by much of what JK Rowling shared in her address, but in particular it was the juxtaposition of the central theme of her piece that captured my heart and imagination. The title of the address was The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.
There are indeed countless benefits to things falling apart, to being broken open, to getting a few life lemons. I happen to think that the failure sets the stage for dreaming again...for re-connecting to a quiet voice inside that sparks our imagination and unleashes it...for better. Because indeed, the 'fringe' benefit of failure is it can't get any worse...not really.
The passage that most captivated me was this:
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
In the work I do as an intuitive energy coach, it is such a joy to work with clients who are embracing the 'razors edge' experience of tapping into their intuition and venturing into new wilderness. It does indeed feel like a wild new world. I love the phrase 'mental agoraphobia' and I concur with Rowlings sense that the wilfully un-imaginative likely are more often afraid in their narrow confined world.
So cheers to the freedom of failure and the wilfully imaginative spirit that is alive and well in so many individuals. The quixotic sense of failure shows up in the most surprising and unexpected ways. Now, when I have that experience, when the sense of failing wildly at something shows up in me, I see it clearly for what it is: the call of the wild. When I fail, it is a signal to me that I have ventured out far and wide, beyond the edges of my mental agoraphobia and I weep at the freedom to live so openly, so transparently, so undone.
Continue to be brave of heart and courageous of spirit as you bring your own unique brand of brilliance into the world.
May you fail to live within the confines of your mental agoraphobia.
Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.
Ok, a funny you would say that experience. A friend sent me this article the other day about the healing properities of lemons. I emailed Catherine and said, 'oh, you must have read my blog!' She said, "no, I didn't send it because of your blog, I sent it because I know you choose healthy options and you may come across someone who needs to know this info." Her email was titled: Maybe I Should Be Selling My Lemons? A wild and wonderful coincidence. Read on to enjoy these new life lemons. Take what you like and leave the rest. My original Life Lemons post is below.
Have some Lemons ...they Really Do make a difference!
This is the latest in medicine, effective for cancer!
Read carefully and you be the judge.
Lemon (Citrus) is a miraculous product to kill cancer cells.
It is 10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy.
Why do we not know about that?
Because there are laboratories interested in making a synthetic version that will bring them huge profits.
You can now help a friend in need by letting him/her know that lemon juice is beneficial in preventing the disease.
Its taste is pleasant and it does not produce the horrific effects of chemotherapy.
How many people will die while this closely guarded secret is kept, so as not to jeopardize the beneficial multimillionaires large corporations? As you know, the lemon tree is known for its varieties of lemons and limes.
You can eat the fruit in different ways: you can eat the pulp, juice press, prepare drinks, sorbets, pastries, etc. It is credited with many virtues, but the most interesting is the effect it produces on cysts and tumors.
This plant is a proven remedy against cancers of all types. Some say it is very useful in all variants of cancer.
It is considered also as an anti microbial spectrum against bacterial infections and fungi, effective against internal parasites and worms, it regulates blood pressure which is too high and an antidepressant, combats stress and nervous disorders.The source of this information is fascinating: it comes from one of the largest drug manufacturers in the world, says that ,after more than 20 laboratory tests since 1970, the extracts revealed that:
It destroys the malignant cells in 12 cancers, including colon breast, prostate, lung and pancreas .
The compounds of this tree showed 10,000 times better than the product Adriamycin, a drug normally used chemotherapeutic in the world, slowing the growth of cancer cells.
And what is even more astonishing: this type of therapy with lemon extract only destroys malignant cancer cells and it does not affect healthy cells.
Institute of Health Sciences, 819 N. L.L.C. Cause Street, Baltimore, MD 1201
(Snopes indicates that this is a mix of fact/fiction)
