Posted by Elizabeth

I’ll never forget the year I graduated from college, when well-meaning people began peppering me with the inevitable question that strikes fear in the heart of every senior.  “What are you going to do when you graduate?”  The fact was, other than a vague notion that I might move to New York and try to be an actor – with no concrete plan as to how to achieve that goal — I was clueless.  Much like Anne, my life had always fallen along neat timelines, and while my peers would have undoubtedly described me as “goal-oriented” — a phrase I’ve always despised — the fact was that, other than an ability to put one foot in front of the other, I didn’t have any goals.  I suddenly realized that the only item on life’s to-do list was “graduate from college,” which I was about to cross off.  Now what?

Since that uncertain spring ten years ago, my life has taken me down roads I never could have imagined for myself.  I owe part of the adventure to the fact that I’ve never clutched the traditional to-do list, with predetermined milestones to meet at specified times.  In fact, I don’t know if I ever had a life’s to-do list so much as a life’s to-don’t list. I was never interested in setting goals to get married, have children, buy a house, and establish a successful career. (While most of these things have inadvertently happened to me – isn’t that always the way? – they certainly didn’t fall along any self-imposed timelines or according to a plan, perhaps because you’re supposed to place your intention on what you do want rather than what you don’t want, lest the universe get confused and mix the whole thing up.)  While I was comfortable expressing what I didn’t want for my life, I struggled to place any goals on that to-do list.  Looking back, though, it’s clear that I was living my life according to a to-do list; in fact, it happens to be a version of the same one I clutch in my hands today.  It looks something like this:

1. Find spiritual enlightenment
2. Solidify my identity
3. Lead an interesting and exciting life full of mystery and adventure
4. Pursue a career that is the deepest reflection of my soul
5. Figure out my purpose on this earth

Yesterday, Anne and many of you readers expressed frustration at not knowing what to do or how to proceed now that you’ve checked off the major items on your to-do list.  But what do you do when you will never experience the satisfaction of crossing any of the items off your to-do list?  It took me a lot of years to understand that I did have goals – they just happened to be lifelong projects that are so esoteric and abstract that I will never have a chance to complete any of them.  If I could boil down this list into one goal, it would read, “Learn to be human.”  Because each of these goals is some version of learning to be a fuller, more complete being, a task that won’t be completed until the day I die.  Fantastic, huh?

Although Anne and I maintain different sorts of lists, I, too, struggle with the same feeling of foolishly waiting to arrive at “that place;” the location where the puzzle pieces finally fall perfectly into position and I am fully transformed.  I read somewhere once that you should only set goals that are achievable, attainable, and quantifiable; that large goals should be broken down into smaller “action items.”  While this isn’t really my style, I concede that having such mammoth, nebulous items on my life to-do list isn’t really helping me towards my ultimate goal of learning to live contentedly in the now as a fuller human being.  In other words, to live my life in pencil.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to take a closer look at what’s on my list, examine how these items got there in the first place, and determine if they even belong there.  Along the way I hope to change my relationship to the list, and maybe rewrite it all together.  If nothing else, I plan on making these five items a little more tangible and understandable – not just for me, but for you, dear reader.  It may seem a little silly – even antithetical — to create a list for something as tenuous as living in the now.  But we’ve got to start somewhere on our journey, right?  My hope is that we can teach each other not just the why but the how of living in the now (wow, that could be the slogan:  “The How of the Now”).

Do you maintain a to-do or a to-don’t list?  Are you interested in reexamining or rewriting your life’s to do (or to-don’t) list?  If so, in what way?  What ideas do you have for me as I set about creating more specific goals to live my life in the now?  What topics are YOU interested in surrounding this idea of living in the now?

In other news, my meeting with the specialist went great!  Thank you all for your encouraging words and concern.  As of now (and is there anything beyond what we have right now?), everything looks to be developing normally and healthy with The Blob.  Although, it looks much less like The Blob now.  Check out this latest sonogram!

Posted by Elizabeth

Sometime last summer, I made the first mention in these pages that I was thinking I might be ready to have a baby, a tentative whisper into the crashing world of the blogosphere.  And at that time some wise reader told me that not only would having a baby bring change into my life, but that the ability to live one’s life “in pencil” was the biggest prerequisite for having said baby.  These words were very reassuring to me.  As the resident change-a-holic around here, I thought, “I love change.  I understand change.  I embrace change.  And the ambiguity that “life in pencil” presents?  Easy breezy!”  But as my first trimester draws to a close this week I realize, in a stark and scary way, that my understanding of what it means to live one’s life in pencil is woefully incomplete.

During the first appointment with my nurse midwife an eternity six weeks ago, I was asked to fill out a family health history.  Aside from some cancer and heart disease – standard American fare – my background is pretty run-of-the mill.  No chronic diseases or major health issues here!  When I got to the part of the form that inquired about any infant deaths, I had to pause and think.  My dad had a brother who died when he was young from a defect related to malformed lungs, and Maikael’s dad had a son who also died, days old, due to a congenital problem.  These are parts of our family health history that we rarely give much thought to – so much so that we even debated whether it was worth marking on the form – so imagine my surprise when my midwife followed up with a phone call the next day to gather more details about these situations.  At the mention of “genetic counselor,” “perinatologist,” and “just to be sure,” every fiber of my being immediately went on red alert – and I don’t think the alarm bells have turned off since.

Despite my midwife’s repeated assurances that the chances of something being wrong are “remote,” it’s all but impossible to focus on the “what if” scenarios that dance across my mind (if not in the foreground, certainly in the background).  I find them to be particularly acute while dreaming, when my rational mind, who has such catchy phrases as “I’m sure it’s fine” at its disposal during daylight hours, is rendered helpless when the lights go out.  It’s then when nighttime visions of a fully formed fetus, with features as delicate as a seahorse but cast in frightening miniature, quite literally falls out of me without warning.   These are awful dreams that shake me from my slumber in a sweaty twist of sheets in the middle of the night.  It’s these moments where I realize that motherhood is uncertainty incarnate, that the best efforts to explain or pacify are for naught, and that I have no choice but to throw up my hands and say, “We’ll just have to see.”  I know that I am not unique or special.  Just as every life contains a cross to bear, so is every pregnancy touched by something beyond our control.  But it’s how we treat these uncertainties that reveal how well we’re able to live our life in pencil.

This morning Maikael and I are off to the perinatologist for a detailed ultrasound, which feels less like a meeting with a medical professional than an appointment with fate.  Hope will be divined not through the stars but through grainy images that I cannot interpret.  I am both relieved and petrified that this interminable period of waiting is drawing to a close, ready and not-ready to hear the conclusion.  The chances are good that my midwife is right, that I’ve spent the past six weeks worrying over nothing.  But what if she’s wrong?  What if there are no answers, but simply more “I don’t knows,” more “we’ll just have to wait and sees,” more “just to be sures?”  What if? It’s these “what ifs” that show me just how much I have yet to learn about facing the unknown.

Do you agree with my assessment that “motherhood is uncertainty incarnate?”  What situations have you faced in your own life that caused you to realize that you have much to learn about facing the unknown?

In other news, I’m pleased to announce that “Dear You,” my letter to this unborn baby who has already incited such worry in my life, won Momalom’s Love It Up Challenge!  We here at Life in Pencil are honored to have been considered in the company of so many great writers and entries.  Thanks, Sarah and Jen, for this award!

Posted by Elizabeth

In case you forgot, today is Groundhog Day, the day when we discover if we’re in for an early spring or doomed to suffer the slings and arrows of a late winter.  I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Groundhog Day, maybe because it reminds me of that insufferable movie circa 1993 starring Andie McDowell and Bill Murray, where a weatherman is doomed to repeat the same day over and over (and over) again, which, as a change-a-holic, is pretty much my worst nightmare.  Truth be told, I never understood what those two things – repeating a day and a traditional rodent – had much to do with one another, but, now that I think of it, Groundhog Day does seem particularly suited to people who appreciate comfortable routine.  I mean, is it me or does Puxatony Phil seem to see his shadow, sending him racing back into his hidey hole, more often than not?

Phil has always struck me as somewhat of a scaredy cat – maybe someone who’s a little afraid of change?  Rather than bravely facing the daylight and the possibility of a new season, he often retreats to the comfort of his warm, safe burrow, prolonging the inevitable.  How many of us are like Phil, clinging to the changing seasons of our life with a death grip, trying our hardest to hang onto the shut-in nature of winter when spring, with its new life and beginnings, is at our doorstep?  How many of us hold onto a season past its prime, rather than face the turn of the calendar with grace?  Given Phil’s propensity for dodging the new season, Groundhog Day seems perfectly crafted for the world’s change-phobes, wanting to hang on to the comfortable, old way just a little bit longer.

This winter has felt especially interminable; I don’t think I’ve ever been more ready for a spring in my entire life.  I was delighted to receive a seed catalog in the mail last week whose pages were splashed with colorful photos of heirloom vegetables, the first tender sign of spring.  As someone who is always chomping at the bit for the next new thing, I sincerely hope Phil doesn’t see his shadow.  Although I can’t help but wonder, in my fervent desire to cut winter short and push through to the next season, if I am any better than Phil, who insists on hanging onto winter?  Maybe, rather than preparing to banish or cling to a season, we need a day to remember what’s good about this time of year — even if it’s sometimes hard to see — to remind us to be in the moment?

Are you a fan of Groundhog Day (the movie or the holiday)?  Do you root for Phil for see his shadow or not?  Am I crazy, or does Groundhog Day seem uniquely suited to the world’s change-phobes?

I have to mention – because when else am I going to mention this? – that I have a friend whose mother loves Groundhog Day so much that she throws a party every year.  I have always wondered if she’s able to find Phil-themed paper products.

UPDATE:  Once again, that scaredy cat Phil saw his shadow; six more weeks of winter in 2010 folks.

Posted by Elizabeth

The lights are on, but nobody’s home!

Actually, I’m “next-door” at my virtual neighbor Kristen’s “house”, who kindly invited me to guest blog as part of the Won’t You Be My Neighbor? series.  Over the course of the next several Fridays, Kristen will be featuring a guest blogger, and we were lucky enough to be selected (Anne will post next Friday)!  Kristen is the author of Motherese, a blog providing “cultural commentary and musings on modern motherhood.”  Like the best mothering blogs, you need not be a mother to enjoy Kristen’s writing.  So c’mon over and read my contribution, It’s Not You, It’s Me…And You, in which I explore the nature of change in relationships.

Posted by Elizabeth

All of us, more than anything, want to be happy.  When I worked as a career counselor, my first session with a client typically revolved around getting to know a little about the nature of their problems and setting some initial goals.  Usually at some point during the session, the client would sharply sigh, clearly frustrated, and say, “I just want to be happy.”  When pushed to elaborate – what does happiness look like for you? – most clients were vague at best.  The truth of the matter is, most of us want to be happy; we just don’t know exactly what will make us happy.  Even science has confirmed this fact, with study after study confirming that most of us do a terrible job of predicting our own happiness (Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard social psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert provides an excellent elaboration on this topic).  In other words, the things we think will make us happy don’t…and vice versa.  So what are we to do?  How are we to move forward on this path towards finding greater happiness in our lives?

Over the past three evenings, I’ve invested six hours of my life trying to move a little closer to the answers.  PBS aired This Emotional Life (hosted, incidentally, by the same Daniel Gilbert who wrote Stumbling on Happiness), providing a fascinating and multifaceted look into the age-old question, “What makes me happy?”  The results, as it turns out, are sometimes unexpected.  Here are the top ten things I learned about happiness:

1. Social connections are a key to happiness.
2. We can change our feelings by changing our thoughts.  According to science, we can think our way to happiness in specific ways.
3. While most of us would love to eliminate the negative emotions that stand in the way of our happiness, it’s important to accept the whole range of our emotional experience.  (Those negative emotions, it turns out, evolved as part of our survival mechanism.)
4. Our future thoughts are shaped by our present thoughts.  Part of why we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future is because we’re influenced by what we think will make us happy today, leaving no room for the inevitability of change in the equation.
5. We tend to believe that changing our situation will change our level of happiness.  While this is true, it’s not to the extent we’d like to believe.  (A little thing called “hedonic adaption” leads us to believe that what makes us happy for a day will make us happy for a lifetime, which is not typically the case.)
6. Amongst our greatest attributes, we humans find ways to like and be happy with the things in life we’re stuck with.  In other words, a debilitating injury doesn’t usually spell long-term unhappiness.
7. Spending money on having shared experiences with the people you love is typically a good use of your hard-earned dollars.
8. Even though anger may be justified, it doesn’t typically help you feel better, more happy, or extricate you from the situation.
9. Righteousness is a replacement for happiness.  In other words, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be happy.
10. Eliminating the burden of the future helps us to be happier.  When we know our time is limited, we are more likely to slow down and savor our present circumstances.

What strikes me about this list is the sheer volume and variety of things that make us happy:  there is no silver bullet, but a complex constellation of factors that can add to – or detract from – our happiness.    Whether we’d care to admit it or not, I think most of us are searching desperately for that silver bullet, even when we know it doesn’t exist.  And so happiness remains elusive.

I am also struck by the number of paradoxes on this list:  changing your thoughts helps, but changing your circumstances?  Not so much.  In this complicated equation, Change is not always equal.  This is an important distinction for a change-a-holic like me, who often (wrongly) assumes that all change is good, guaranteed to lead to greater happiness.  I’d probably be better off by focusing on making the changes that are proven to bring about happiness.  But if I’m anything like the scientists tell me I am, I will likely ignore their advice and keep making the sweeping changes that I assume will make me happy.

One last paradox:  I noticed a curious thing while watching this program.  In a number of instances, when people were mired in the depths of despair, their turning point towards leading a happier life came when they posed one simple question to themselves and didn’t have the answer:  “Now what?”  Most of us believe that happiness comes knocking at our door when we begin to have the answers, but this beautifully illustrates that perhaps happiness comes when we embrace the full weight and uncertainty of life.  Only then do doors to possibilities begin flying open for us.

What makes you happy?  Do you agree or disagree with the items on the list?  Is happiness something we can quantify through science, or is it all a bunch of bullroar?

Posted by Elizabeth

Here at Life in Pencil, where we talk about change every day, the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – is an exciting time.  New Year’s Day is, quite simply, a change-a-holic’s dream.  It’s the one day of the year when even the most diehard change-phobes come over to my camp for a spell, allowing themselves to feel the tingle of anticipation that comes with the possibility of new beginnings.  It’s a day for wiping the slate clean and starting over, my favorite activity.  It should come as no surprise, then, that I am an enthusiastic proponent of New Year’s resolutions.  At one New Year’s Eve party a few years ago, I famously invented the “New Year’s Resolution Game,” which involved writing five resolutions on different slips of paper, throwing them into a hat, drawing said resolution, and trying to guess which resolution belonged to which party guest.  In a group of engineers, it was pretty easy to guess who had resolved to “learn more about lasers in 2006.”

What struck me about this game was that I had no trouble coming up with five resolutions, when most of the guests struggled to come up with one or two.  I noticed that I set weighty and ambitious resolutions – I believe, at that time, there may have been a slip of paper that read “I resolve to spend at least three hours a day writing” during a time in my life when I was working 40+ hours a week – whereas most of my fellow partygoers set modest goals that had a reasonable chance of being attained.  When I set my resolutions, I think I knew from the get-go that many of those resolutions would never be achieved in their entirety, if at all.  But I seem to suffer from a delusion that, as the old saying goes, “if you shoot for the moon and miss you’ll still be amongst the stars.”

That’s why I was so excited to read Ari Herzog’s Resolve to Fail in 2010, a brief meditation on the importance of setting overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions, ones that you will likely never accomplish.  Essentially, Herzog says if you never fail then you can never succeed, because failure is an integral part of the process of being successful.  And to fail means to take a risk.  Herzog says, “The moment you divert from the path most traveled is the moment you can make a difference.”  I’d like to think this is what Life in Pencil is all about:  taking a risk on the unknown, trying something new, behaving outside the bounds of the ordinary.

So today, as you contemplate what the next year will bring, I encourage you to resolve to fail.  Amongst your more manageable resolutions, create one – just one – that you are likely to fail at.  And perhaps, over the next 12 months, that failure will lead to your eventual success.

What’s my impossible goal for 2010?  I want to write a book.  And sell it.

Now, what’s your resolution to fail?

Today we continue our Holiday Season Extravaganza.  Between now and December 25, we will share what it means to celebrate the holidays — Life in Pencil style.

Posted by Elizabeth

I have always been of the opinion that we should choose the holiday traditions we love most and leave the rest behind.  For example, I would rather scratch my eyes out than participate in any sort of commerce on Black Friday; see an amateur production of The Nutcracker; make my own holiday cards; bake a fruitcake; host a giant holiday party; decorate my house to the nines; string Christmas lights on my house; go to any sort of a parade that isn’t small, hometown, and slightly campy; or watch any of the claymation holiday specials on television.  I also know that there are readers out there from whom it wouldn’t feel like Christmas without watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer circa 1964 on CBS.  I am not a Grinch, I promise you, for there are a slew of traditions I feel called to resurrect year after year.  And at the top of that list is writing holiday cards.

This, I realize, is one holiday tradition that most people could live without, an obligation rather than a joy.  But my excitement is palpable when the cards hit the display shelves at my favorite paper store in October, and I have to physically restrain myself from buying the whole lot before Halloween.  A certain amount of ritual is involved in invoking this tradition and, before anything can be purchased, I carefully prepare my list, determining who will receive a card based on a complicated equation of geographic proximity, years known, depth of relationship, and reciprocity.  For example, if you are a high school friend who lives on the East Coast, who I rarely see but love to stay in touch with, you are likely to receive a card from me.  If you live in Albuquerque and I see you with any degree of regularity, you’re probably going to have to move away before you receive a card.  Sorry.

In the past, I was vehemently opposed to writing Christmas letters, which I considered to be a soulless affair, the work of lazy card writers.  Instead, I carefully penned each card, personalizing my message to the recipient, a time-consuming process that usually carried me through to Christmas Eve.  One year, however, I discovered I had a great deal to say, and I wrote my own version of the holiday letter.  Unable to bring myself to call it a letter, I dubbed it my “holiday missive,” whose form lies somewhere between a letter and an essay.  I spend the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving crafting my missive, ensuring its content balances reporting and storytelling, specificity and generality, its tone both uplifting and self-deprecating.  Approached in the proper spirit, I have discovered the particularly soulful aspect of writing my letter; rather than an attempt to reach a sheer volume of people with the least amount of effort possible, it is an opportunity to share my life through the creative medium I love best.

The day after Thanksgiving I set up a station at my writing desk, not unlike Santa’s Workshop, a holiday fixture where I assemble the cards.  Unable to give up the tradition of card writing altogether, I tuck the missive into the card, making sure I write a personal message in each one, a little walk down memory lane.  Between the cards, the copying cost, and postage, I estimate that I spend about $100 on Christmas card writing each year.  This will strike many as a ludicrous waste of money.  But the thing about traditions is that they often don’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense.  I think we gravitate towards traditions that reflect something about us as a person, that feed a part of our soul.  As a lifelong letter writer, Christmas cards are but one more means to keep in touch via the written word.  There are people on my Christmas card list who I only connect with once a year, but I can’t imagine not sending them a card.  As someone who has moved with startling regularity during my adult life, it’s a way to reconnect with the lives I’ve left behind.  When I shuffle the addressed envelopes in my hand, I see a pastiche of my life:  my childhood in the suburbs, my college life in Seattle, my brief stint in Oregon, two tries at graduate school in two different states, my first adult home in New Mexico, my travels around the globe.  For me, writing Christmas cards keep me connected to my past.  And in some small way, isn’t that what all holiday traditions do?

Do you enjoy writing holiday cards, or loathe it?  Do you believe in holiday newsletters, or are you opposed to them?  What is the number one holiday tradition that you can’t live without?

Posted by Elizabeth

Yesterday, as you were reading the Sunday newspaper, getting ready for church, or flipping blueberry pancakes, Nicolas Raap was setting off in a Toyota Land Cruiser to drive around the world.

Can you believe that sweet face was shipwrecked for a month?

When Maikael told me about Raap’s expedition, which will take him overland through 40 countries (he’ll ship his car at unavoidable water crossings), my first thought was, “Geez, I thought my ‘round-the-world trip was adventurous.”  Travel, like most things in life, is a matter of perspective.  During our eight months on the road, we could proudly puff out our chests and report some of the perilous situations we’d encountered:  outwitting scammers in Turkey, cruising around rough Lima neighborhoods in the dead of night, rodents dashing through Indian train cars, and almost-lost passports.  Then we’d meet travelers like Raap, who were hitchhiking through Africa or traversing the notorious Darien Gap, the narrow strip of land that connects Central and South America, a no-man’s land inhabited by drug traffickers and native tribes.  (We met a woman from France who, years earlier, had made the crossing by boat.  They were caught in a storm and shipwrecked on a tiny island, where she became the cook for the passengers and crew while their boat was repaired over the course of a month.  This is the stuff that movies are made of.)  These daredevil encounters were fascinating, but would usually leave us feeling like we weren’t taking enough risks – in travel or in life.

Maikael and I and our two little backpacks in Jordan

Stories like Raap’s leave me with a familiar itch under my skin, a nagging feeling that I want to hit the open road again.  I’d never attempt driving around the world – I value my sanity too much – but I miss the day-to-day excitement that this type of extended travel brings.  Although our lives were often complicated, filled with complex travel schedules and tenuous language barriers, things were also extremely simple.  Many times, a successful day meant having our basic needs met:  managing to negotiate three meals and procuring a roof over our head for the night.  There were many lessons to be learned about grace and gratitude.  We each shouldered two small backpacks, and by the end of the trip we had the feeling that we could have cut our load in half and been just fine.  We all know intellectually that we can do with less, but there is real power in actually experiencing doing with less.  I remember walking over the threshold of our house upon our return in March and being struck with how big our house was (it’s not).  I walked slowly through each room, arms outstretched, and picked up do-dads and knickknacks.  I couldn’t believe that it was all mine.  If only I could hold onto that sense of wonder and novelty, and find a way to reclaim it anew each day, perhaps I’d want for a lot less.

I realize I’m not really longing for another extended trip, but to feel those same feelings of awe and wonder in my everyday life, the sense of discovering the world afresh.  It’s what I imagine a baby must feel like every day of their little lives.   Raap and I certainly undertook different journeys.  I can’t imagine driving across Iran, Pakistan, or Angola.  But I feel a certain affinity to him, too.  He said, “I believe a trip like this is something many people dream of…is there a better investment than traveling around the world?”  I know not everyone feels this way:  it’s a tremendous sacrifice in time and money, and not everyone has the inclination to set off for an extended period.  There are many lessons to be learned right in our own backyard, but, for me, my trip allowed me to see the lessons with a whole new set of glasses.

Would you ever drive around the world?  What adventures (or nonadventures) pull at you?

Follow Nicolas Raap’s journey at Transworld Expedition

Posted by Elizabeth

I am standing in a kitchen bathed in red, the living room peeking at me through exposed two by fours, a pile of rubble gathered at my feet.  I am wielding a hammer, my eyes masked by crystalline goggles, when I begin gleefully tearing the surprisingly delicate drywall to shreds, secretly reveling in the fact that this is not my house.

As much as I love change, as much as I love reinventing myself and my surroundings, renovating a home is my worst nightmare.  Of course the idea of the whole thing sounds utterly romantic, but I’m enough of a realist to know that I have neither the emotional strength nor fortitude to complete a project of such epic proportions.  I grow bored too quickly of projects that don’t completely capture me, and I know myself well enough to know that, if I were to start ripping my house apart, it would never be completed.  I would live the rest of my days in a hollowed out shell of a home, bemoaning my decision to ever begin in the first place.

That’s why it’s so exciting for me to be a part of the process and live vicariously through my friends Ignacio and Anna, whose half-destroyed kitchen I took a hammer to a few weekends ago.  They’ve been hemming and hawing about a major home renovation – we’re talking doubling the square footage here, people – ever since I met them.  “Go for it, just go for it,” I egged them on, the change-a-holic in me getting an emotional contact high just thinking about that sort of dramatic change.  Their project is just in the initial stages, the part of the change process that I’m always most excited about:  there’s so much possibility contained in those exposed beams, those stripped walls, those bare floors.  It’s easy to see the world afresh at the beginning.  But eventually decisions will have to be made.  Paint colors chosen.  Tiles selected.  Fixtures purchased.  This is the part of the process that would keep me up at nights.  Walls tumbling down around me is exciting; debating shades of yellow is debilitating.  I sweat the small things because I don’t care about the small things; I prefer to live my life in broad brush strokes, bringing crashing change upon myself.  But a project like this is all about the little things, and I fear – no, I know – that I would make haphazard decisions so as not to have to worry about them.  Which is why I’ll never be a candidate for home renovation.

Ignacio and Anna, on the other hand, have precisely the right temperament to complete a project like this.  They were smart enough to hire a contractor to do the major work, like laying the foundation and framing the house, while leaving the smaller jobs to complete themselves.  Knowing them, they will worry just enough about the details to make a wise choice, but not so much as to drive themselves bonkers.  They hope things will stay on schedule, but are not delusional enough to believe that it actually will (when does it ever?).  In short, they are cut out for this.

I think our approach to home improvement tells us a great deal about how we sail the seas of change.  I recently read a marvelous essay, Demolition Daddy by Daniel Duane, in The New York Times Magazine, which chronicles one writer’s chaotic – but ultimately successful – attempt to renovate his house without a master plan.  Through the process, he learned that the approach he takes as a writer – “the quick production of rough drafts” – worked surprisingly well in the world of home renovation.  “By making every decision on the fly, as we lived amid the change, we didn’t have to work very hard at visualizing each new idea.”

Couldn’t the same be said of the process of change?  We concern ourselves with creating a “master plan” before we even consider dipping our toe in the water.  We struggle when things don’t go according to the plan.  We fret when reality doesn’t meet expectation.  How much more exciting – and scary – would it be to develop our plans as we went along?  Rather than trying to project new ideas, the ideas would present themselves.  We all develop a “change language,” a unique way we think about, communicate, and negotiate the process.  Me and home improvement?  I was convinced we didn’t speak the same language.  But maybe I just speak a different dialect?  Who’s to say that there is one way to renovate a home…or a life?  Perhaps, like change itself, whatever approach works for you is the right one?  Duane says, “By breaking the job into chunks and letting each flow into the next, we entered a kind of fugue state of intuitive forward progress, designing absolutely everything in terms of what felt best for the two of us and nothing more.”  Imagine how much easier home improvement – and change, and life itself – would be if we took those words to heart.

Posted by Elizabeth

Over the past six months, my Facebook status updates have looked something like this:

“Elizabeth is distressed that Wife Swap has disappeared from Lifetime’s lunch hour line-up.”
“Elizabeth has finally found an antidote to watching Wife Swap at lunch: a family who only eats raw meat (including chicken). Insert stomach-turning here.”
“Elizabeth didn’t know that ‘vendettaly’ was a word.  But according to Wife Swap it is.”

Every weekday afternoon, I settle onto the sofa with my lunch and watch Wife Swap reruns. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of watching, Wife Swap is a hilarious trashy reality television program revolving around two diabolically different wives switching households for two weeks, where they are given an opportunity to foist their values and beliefs upon another family.  That’s not how the network would describe the show, but it’s pretty accurate.  Sometimes I am completely enthralled and, despite my best intentions to snap off the television after I’ve finished my BLT, watch an entire episode (I’m not particularly proud of myself on these days).  Other times I can’t stomach more than a snippet of the episode, like the time the family who ate raw meat, with very ragged teeth, was featured (not good lunch-time fare, let me assure you).  And I can’t stand watching more than a few minutes of any episode that features high-decibel yelling.  There is a lot of yelling on Wife Swap.

After months of watching my Facebook status updates feature Wife Swap, and my own vow on this very blog to stop frittering away my lunch hour on the show, my friend, Heidi, finally asked, “Why do you love Wife Swap so much?”  The truth is I don’t love Wife Swap so much as I have a grotesque fascination with the program, not unlike watching a train wreck and being unable to divert your eyes.  For somebody whose pastimes include studying change in everyday life, it’s an excellent case study.  The formula for the program dictates that two opposing forces be thrown together.  The Cajun wife and the ballet dancer.  The evangelical Christian and the Rastafarian.  The mom who homeschools and the elementary school teacher.  The multimillionaire and the rural homesteader.  The NRA enthusiast and the pacifist.  The hunter and the vegetarian.  The BMX racer who cut down all the trees in her backyard to create a track and the environmentalist.  The risk-taking scientist and the safety-obsessed family (the former The Heene Family, as you may have heard, of recent “Balloon Boy” fame).

Of course the producers pick the most extreme examples that will make the best television, but what fascinates me is that, as different as the families are, nearly every episode boils down to this:  the controlling/structured/mean mom versus the free-spirited/disorganized/fun mom.  Through this one-dimensional definition, schedules and order become synonymous with being a kill-joy, and a lack of schedules equates with pure joie de vivre.  In other words, it’s the strictest definitions of our blog personas, the change-a-holic and the change-a-phobe.  Within the confines of the show, there is no room for a wife/mother/woman to be both organized and fun.  I know such a balanced view wouldn’t make compelling television, but I can’t help but wonder what stereotypes we wish to buy into and see reinforced as a culture?  Because I can assure you that viewers love these cardboard cut-outs.

At the beginning of each episode, the wives discuss their motivation for appearing on Wife Swap. On rare occasions the woman will state that she is interested in learning something new from her swap family, but typically she will discuss her desire to bring her way of life to her new family.  It’s not Wife Swap so much as it is Life Swap.  In these episodes, change doesn’t become both parties moving towards the middle so much as it becomes a battle of wills.  An episode is a sixty-minute exercise in the wife trying to convince her swap family that she knows what’s best for them.  And isn’t that so often the case when it comes to change?  We want to prescribe what we think is right rather than listen and learn.  Wife Swap isn’t a show about change so much as it’s a show about persuasion.  If I have learned anything from my hours of Wife Swap viewing, it’s that the most important ingredient for change is listening, something that doesn’t come naturally to most of us.  If we wish to invite change into our lives, as so many of us do, we would be wise to open our ears, for life is speaking to us all the time.

At the end of each episode, when the two couples are reunited, they sit down face-to-face for a post-mortem.  More times than not these sessions devolve into screaming matches laced with vitriol, and when the producer wants to bring them back to equilibrium (after providing ample shouting time to boost ratings), she does so by asking, “What did you learn from this experience?”  A lull usually falls over the room as the couples meekly offer up a random tidbit or two, which usually boils down to this:  I learned that I love my way of being in the world.  It’s obvious they didn’t learn a thing.

Note: Today’s image was provided by LiP Reader and Contributor, Mary, which prompted me to write this post.