Deep Thought

“Mom, is there a…”

I was microwaving chili and hacking jagged hunks out of a pan of leftover cornbread in a hurried attempt to get a decent meal packed up. 

 …logical reason for…

We needed to dash out the door – like, NOW – if the twins were to be even vaguely on time for another evening performing in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the university.

…life?”

Um, what?

 Is there a logical reason for LIFE?  Seriously, what the hell, Lizzy. 

This child, my child -- small, pigtailed, scruffy, and deceptively quiet -- sometimes brings to mind Shakespeare’s Cassius, who “has a lean and hungry look.  He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous.”  Such little girls, likewise. 

Okay, no, I don’t really think that one of my nine-year-old daughters is hazardous -- or destined to stab Caesar, for that matter – but Lizzy’s ruminations often drop like flaming zeppelins from a cloudless sky. This is a child who, when stymied in her desire to cover all windowsills in the house with plant seedlings, chides, “Daddy, sometimes I think you are not very good at delaying gratification.”  This is a kid who glances around the living room and says, apropos nothing, “There would be so many right angles in the house, if you tried to count them all.” She is not merely making conversation; she is searching for logical patterns within the dizzying fractal landscape of existence.  Such observations might seem delightfully precocious -- until you are forced to attempt to address them in three minutes while simultaneously wrestling mini carrots into a Ziploc. 

About a year and a half ago, my children were subjected to a test to determine who would get to be part of the euphemistically labeled “Extended Learning Program.”  That afternoon, I asked the twins what they’d thought of the experience.  “Oh, it was pretty easy,” said Molly, with casual confidence.  “You just had to find the patterns.  The last few, though,” she continued, blithely, “didn’t have any pattern.” 

Ha!  I’d laughed indulgently at her childish conceit.  How funny to think that no patterns exist, just because you aren’t bright enough to find them!

Um, ha.   

Apophenia is the perception of meaningful patterns within random data – our Rorschach-elephant cloud-locomotive propensity to confabulate monsters under the bed and tin-foil hat conspiracies.  Confirmation bias is the equally human tendency to only look at evidence that supports what we want to believe -- because my political candidate farts rose-petal freshness.  A false negative or a Type II error is denial that a pattern exists, even when it does.  Even when it totally does, dammit, dammit, dam—uh, yeah.  Patterns.  Ha ha… 

Now, I struggled to gather my thoughts and my cornbread.  Could this Life-the-Universe-and-Everything- level introspection be symptomatic of too many “adult themes” in my kids’ lives?  Wallowing in Tennessee Williams’s dark and cerebral play about death, fear, lust, and denial is an unlikely after-school activity for fourth-graders.  Kids, welcome to the tsunami of deception that erodes our souls! 

Lizzy was being semi-patient with my density -- but insistent: “There’s the Big Bang, galaxies form, the Earth, and evolution… but is there a LOGICAL REASON for life?”

There are lots of great books out there on parenting.  I probably should have read some of them. Instead, when the kids were toddlers still struggling to master their fricatives and glottal stops, I decided that I would not be the parent who snaps, “Because I said so”, or “You’re too young to understand”, or “It was the stork”.  I wanted to let them find the patterns – the messy, confusing, terrible, real patterns.  Jay agreed with my strategy of dispensing Too Much Information, although he quickly granted himself an egress in the form of, “How about you ask Mommy?”

Brick: What makes you think Big Daddy has a lech for you, Maggie?

Margaret: Way he drops his eyes down my body when I’m talkin’ to him, drops his eyes to my boobs an’ licks his old chops!  Ha ha!

Brick: That kind of talk is disgusting.

Margaret: Did anyone ever tell you you’re an ass-aching Puritan, Brick?

[Cue four children to run across the stage, shrieking.]

The twins were cast as “no neck monsters” – two of the insufferable and over-abundant children of manipulative, abrasive parents in a dysfunctional, unfulfilled, greedy, Southern-polite but below-the-surface foul-hearted and foul-mouthed family.   After the first read-through, decorously held in a meeting-room at the campus library, the actor playing the family patriarch greeted me with anxious discomfort.  “It’s not exactly an appropriate script for children…”

A few days later, Molly chirped up at me, “Mommy, what does ‘poontang’ mean?”

Snigger.  “It’s a rude slang term for female genitalia,” I told my kid.  She nodded.  She’d guessed as much.  No harm, no foul.

Other questions are harder. 

A logical reason…

I took a deep breath.  I closed the fridge.  “Lizzy, pretty much every aspect of philosophy and religion, throughout all of human history, has been an attempt to answer that question.  Seriously.  It’s a great question.  People have come up with a ton of crazy possible answers.”  I mentioned a few topics the twins already vaguely comprehend – world religions, pantheons, legends, holy doctrines, passionately held beliefs.

“No, but I mean a LOGICAL reason.”

Yeah, kid.  Yeah, I know.

A few rehearsals into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Molly was enjoying herself.  (Shout and run around?  Giggle backstage with friends?  Great!)  Lizzy was not.  She said she hated the play.  Why, she wanted to know, does everyone seem angry at everyone else?  Why is there so much yelling?  Why would anyone want to watch a play about such horrible people? 

I felt guilty.  My urge was to try to shelter the kids from the full force of the script.  Couldn’t the nine-year-olds just don their adorable costumes, zip out for their cues, and let the rest wash over them?  But no.  That wasn’t working for at least one nine-year-old.  So I did the opposite.  I encouraged the kids to examine, to understand, to dig deeper. 

Brick: You think so too?  You think me and Skipper did, did, did! – sodomy! – together?...

Big Daddy: … This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.  You! – dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it – before you’d face truth with him.

Brick: His truth, not mine.

Big Daddy: His truth, okay!  But you wouldn’t face it with him!

Brick: Who can face truth?  Can you?

Yeah.  We talked this through.  We talked through… a lot.  

I asked the kids how the character Maggie, might feel, married to a man who could not love her.  I asked them how Brick might feel, trapped by a society that reviled his kind of love.  I asked them why Mae might be avaricious enough to use her kids as pawns, why Gooper might feel so bitter about his father, and why Big Mama might prefer a constant cocktail of lies to the truth in which she is drowning.  I also asked what might have been changed, to break these toxic patterns.

Slinging the bag full of chili and scripts over my shoulder and hustling my kids out the door, I told them, “Grownups don’t know the answer to this question.  Not a full answer.  Not a LOGICAL answer.  In fact, our inability to answer this question is so universal that a really funny author made a joke out of it.”  I summarized, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the conundrum faced by the computer named Deep Thought -- and its comically unfulfilling answer.  Forty-two.

They got the joke.  I grinned.

As the theatrical experienced progressed through dress rehearsals, Lizzy seemed to find her groove and become more comfortable with the storming and raging.  By the time we reached the final performance, she was ready to wax philosophical about the nuances of each altercation, the failings of each individual, and the drawbacks of the social mores to which they adhered.  In her tiny A-line dress, waist-length blonde braids, ribbons, lacy white socks, and Mary Janes, she took to the stage with greater confidence.  “I hope I’m not getting type-cast as a cute little girl,” she observed, her brow wrinkled.   

Only, I thought, through apophenia and confirmation bias.  The frilliness of the socks does not fit into an easy pattern with the personalities of the wearers.  At the final curtain call, the no-neck monsters took their bows earnestly, alongside the Real Actors.

A week after the final performance of the show, my one-minute-older-twin was busy tending to the seedlings that her father had declared to be an unmitigated irritation.  She looked up at me with a perfectly-Lizzy abstracted gaze.  “In real life,” she announced, “there are no good guys and no bad guys.” 

I asked her to elaborate. 

“Like, if I told the story about Daddy and the plants, he might seem like the bad guy.  But from a different point of view, if I told the story about him taking me out to breakfast, he’d be the good guy.”  Lest I harbor any over-inflated sense of my own merits, she added,   “You, too.  There are downsides to a person -- and upsides.”

Gosh, thanks, kid.  But… yes.  You’re right. 

The patterns are not stark in black and white.  Sometimes – apophenia -- they are not there at all.  Sometimes – confirmation bias -- finding them will stretch your brain.  Sometimes, recognizing them will make your heart ache and twist and break with the pain of truth.  Sometimes, they will remain forever beyond your grasp.  Some answers, perhaps, are better left at “forty-two”.  But … search on.  Search on.

Many parts

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

--Jacques, As You Like It (Act II, scene vii), William Shakespeare

[Nameless… wordless… swathed in black and creeping purposefully through the shadows… a killer stalked.  Silently, the hooded figure moved forward.  The quarry, unknowing, took a final breath at the cliff-edge.  At last, with a single cold-hearted shove, the murderer sent the victim plunging to certain doom.]

As the slayer strode remorselessly offstage -- as quickly and purposefully as a four-foot-tall person can stride while wearing a sweatshirt that hangs well past her knees -- her hood slipped a bit, and one of her long blonde pigtails sprang out.

Last week, I was part of a small but appreciative audience who were treated to a theatrical smorgasbord of unprecedented oddness: namely, sixteen three-minute(ish) plays written, directed, and acted by children aged 8-15.

The performance was the culmination of my kids’ Spring Break Camp with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater, and was therefore one of those Things Parents Have To Show Up For.  I expected it to be, at best, cute, and perhaps unintentionally funny.  I did not, however, think it would inspire any degree of artistic contemplation.  But after I watched one of my twin eight-year-olds send a fellow actor to his purported demise, I began to wonder.

The audience giggled, of course.  I did too.   I simply couldn’t help it.  But I knew, in my heart, that Lizzy, the most diminutive of all sixteen playwright/thespians, was not trying to be funny.  She was being, wholeheartedly, The Mysterious Killer.

“All the world’s a stage…”

Acting has always tempted and intrigued me, although I’ve never had much success with it.  As a ten-year-old, I longed to follow in my big sister’s footsteps and earn a lead role in the school play.  I didn’t.  Instead, I was given a green pointy hat and placed among the ignominious horde of awkward elves on the rickety risers at the back of the stage. 

By high school, I was too intimidated by the apparent coolness and popularity of the theater crowd to seriously consider signing up.  Besides, I was busy with the math club and the track team. 

Math meets and track meets did not garner much in the way of audience. Not that it was really an audience I wanted – certainly not in my teen years, when being entirely invisible seemed far more appealing than being noticed.  No, what appealed to me about theater – and what still does – is the idea of being someone else, while still, enigmatically, being myself.

“…and all the men and women merely players …”

Looking through the Spring Break theater program, I noted that Molly was playing the role of “Mother” in two plays, and “Chatty Kathy” (a talkative young woman vying for the hand of a prince via a jump-roping contest) in a third.  Her twin, meanwhile, in addition to playing the nefarious (and seemingly motiveless) murderer, had garnered roles as a boy who befriends a dragon, and as a monster who devours children in their beds. 

I knew that the camp instructors had set things up such that each child, regardless of age or gender, could audition for any role he or she wanted.  Thus, the program reflected, at least to some degree, the parts my kids had chosen to play.  That fascinated me – because, what roles, real or imagined, do any of us choose? 

I’ve never had the luxury of choosing a theatrical role, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to find myself in the roles assigned to me. This past summer, I helped out with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater’s annual outdoor production.  It was the third time I’d done so.

The first time, years back, I was part of all the crowd scenes in Julius Caesar, including the bludgeoning of an innocent poet.  While I’m not actually in the habit of bludgeoning poets, no matter the odiousness of their doggerel, the role did make me think more deeply about what can happen – and why -- when mob-madness takes hold.

In my second Shakespearean foray, I was assigned to be a dancing shepherdess.  Yes, really.  Dancing.  Also, giggling, flirting, and singing, in a shepherdess-y dress and hair ribbons.    And you know what?  It was hugely fun.  Part of my psyche (unbeknownst to everyone, including myself) actually enjoys giggling, flirting, and -- heaven help the audience -- dancing and singing.

This year, I gathered props, mended costumes, and spent a couple of scenes onstage in a non-speaking role as a “forester”.  There wasn’t much skill required, but in every tech rehearsal and dress rehearsal and each of the show’s thirteen performances, I pretended to be a stalwart member of a down-to-earth woodsy cadre.  I pretended to be terrified of the knife-wielding Orlando.  I pretended to be amused by the banter of my betters, touched by the plight of an exhausted old man, and fascinated by the ruminations of the melancholy Jaques: 

“…they have their exits and their entrances …”

Rather than merely pretending, though, I decided to find the corner of my brain that really, truly, was intrigued by this speech.  As I sat on the stage – which usually meant sitting in a dirty, frigid puddle, because it never stopped goddamn raining last summer – I let my heavy ragged brown dress fall haphazardly around my booted ankles, and I wondered. 

I wondered about the roles we assign ourselves, and the roles we are assigned by others, and how they differ.  I pondered to what degree we really get to be the directors of the ongoing improv shows known as “our own lives”.  I speculated as to what roles my friends, my family, or my kids might cast me in.  I questioned my interpretation of the roles I already play – mother, scientist, outdoor enthusiast, wife, writer, professor, activist, friend, daughter.  I contemplated what other (astonishing, rewarding, hilarious, shocking) roles I might be capable of playing, were I ever to assign them to myself.

Some of these same questions floated back into my head, as I watched sixteen kid-crafted plays unfurl on stage last week. The participants in the Spring Break camp varied widely in their acting and writing abilities, but I found myself more interested in their intent than in their skill.  What iconic roles did they create and fulfill?  Why did the plays include seven mothers (no, eight – I forgot the mother dragon), and only two fathers?  Why were all the parents (even the dragon) so bland, dysfunctional, and naysaying?

Lizzy was not the only kid whose roles reached far outside the realm of the predictable.  The iconoclastic eleven-year-old daughter of my good friends (whom Lizzy blatantly looks up to) was cast as a delightfully spacey father in Molly’s play, as well as a dashing (if argumentative) Romeo.  Then there was a boy – he looked to be about eleven – who put on a lilac wig and a skirt to play the part of “Pretty Lulu”.  I kind of loved that boy. 

Ever since Robert Rosenthal’s 1964 classic classroom experiment showed that merely telling teachers that some (randomly selected) children had great potential caused actual increases in IQ in those kids, study after study has likewise demonstrated that expectations – and the roles we are assigned based on those expectations – deeply impact our reality.  Just knowing this, and having the tiniest inkling of the terrible injustices that it engenders, chafes and angers me.  If the whole world says you’ve got to play the part of “adorable little girl” or “suspicious black teenager” or “skinny white boy who definitely shouldn’t put on a skirt and jump rope” it’s all too easy to just say, Yeah, sure, that’s who I am.  And… that’s who I’m not.

Over the course of a single airplane journey this winter, Lizzy was off-handedly called “Princess” by three different strangers.  All of them were, I’m sure, entirely well-meaning, but I longed to correct them. That little girl in slightly grimy old jeans is not a princess.  Really.  Trust me on this one.  Clearly, each of these men (they were all men) had badly miscast my kid in their personal stage-plays. 

But, to be fair, perhaps I’d miscast them in my own.  I’d assumed, with a shocking lack of creativity, that Guy #2 was “Bored Fiftyish Male TSA Agent”.   But who was he, really?  What if he also played a secret nighttime role?  Perhaps, mentally, I should have called him, “Princess” too. Yes, I’ve removed my laptop from my carry-on, Princess.  Yes, those are my shoes, thanks, Princess.

Maybe it seems frivolous – or even insulting – to imagine random strangers as clandestine drag queens, but I assure you I don’t intend it that way.  To me, humans are intriguing precisely because each of us can, and does, play so many roles.  My most fascinating and wonderful friends – the ones I long to spend more time with -- tend to be individuals who contain multitudes.  If you’ve worked as a nurse, a shipwright, a stay-at-home-dad, a mathematician and a gardener, you’re probably an interesting person to eat dinner with.  If I’ve seen you as word nerd, apple pie baker, guide-puppy caretaker, computer programmer, hiker, and gay-leather-fetish-gear-wearer, you are all the more human to me. 

“…and one man in his time plays many parts…”

Sixteen kids got up on stage last week, and my optimistic core rejoiced.  Yes, other people will always try to force roles upon us, try to direct us, try to limit us.  But, ultimately, we are all still our own writers, our own directors, and our own actors.   No matter where our name appears on the playbill, we all have many, many roles to play.

[Nameless… wordless… the four-foot tall murderer strode offstage, hoodie flapping at her shins and pigtails askew…]

In a moment

Me, July 2006, in a stunning demonstration of how not to Live In the Moment

“When’s the show going to start, Mama?  Are they late?  Is there going to be a real dog?  Is the witch scary?  How scary?  Where’s my program?”

The balcony was a cacophony of hyped-up kids struggling out of too many jackets and bouncing on theater seats that left short legs dangling and necks craning. Molly and Jacq, a few seats away, were burbling with anticipation.  Lizzy, to my left, hogged my armrest, jiggled, and interrogated me. To my right, my friend Mark took out a thick sheaf of paperwork, a ballpoint, and a headlamp.

“Grading papers?” I asked.  

My gut reaction was amused admiration. Usually, I’m the one who is told I’m taking multi-tasking to extremes – an accusation against which I defend myself by pleading necessity and efficiency.  If I hadn’t been able to nurse two babies at once while finishing my dissertation, I wouldn’t have earned those fancy-pants letters to go with my name! However, I sometimes question my choices, and perhaps even my mental landscape.

“Actually, it’s a grant proposal I’m reviewing.”  Mark shrugged a half-grin at me.  “I’m running out of time to get it done, so…”  And, as the four-year-old behind him kicked his seat, he set to work.

I considered Mark’s diligence through the lens of recent articles I’d stumbled across (in between emails, of course), and I was pretty sure I ought to be tut-tutting. There seems to be a growing backlash against the sort of mental gymnastics required to – for example -- simultaneously learn about important geopolitical events, mentally design a bicycle shed, and bake brownies.  People like Mark – and like me -- warn The Experts, are scattered.  They are stressed. They are not Living In the Moment.  They are not Mindful.  As a result, they cannot possibly be happy.

Was Mark, alone with his astrophysics in his bubble of light, not alive in the moment? Granted, as the house lights dimmed to darkness, he put away his flashlight and appeared to concentrate on the impending twister in an artificial Kansas inhabited by a rather tall Dorothy, a treat-obsessed Toto, and a witchy-sultry Miss Gulch.  But if he was still half-thinking about the National Science Foundation, was he insufficiently mindful?  More to the point, was my own general lack of mindfulness a deep-rooted psychological flaw that (although currently leaving me quite cheerful, thanks) would one day render me – I don’t know, scarred?   

On the stage, a horde of achingly adorable munchkins declared themselves to be the Lullaby League and the Lollipop Guild.  One, sporting a truly fabulous hat, aced the solo lines sung by the Coroner, and I recalled savoring that pompously over-rhyming ditty as a child: “As coroner I can aver I’ve carefully examined her.  She is not merely nearly dead, she’s really quite sincerely dead.”  Goodbye, Wicked Witch of the East!  But… with a puff and a bang her evil sister appeared.  Horrors!  Lizzy hurtled into my lap, there to remain for the next two hours. 

My memory flew to being five or six myself, and convinced that my dad needed to protect me from the black-and-white TV version of the same dread hag.  Really, Lizzy wasn’t doing so badly.  Just a few months ago, she’d been more scared than this by a puppet version of Oz. Would her apprehensions fade as quickly with the years as mine did, I wondered?  Would she plunge with relish into Edgar Allan Poe in junior high?  How soon would I be able to read her through the terrors of Mordor?  Even as the Scarecrow bemoaned his lack of brain, my own brain happily meandered back a decade or so, to revisiting Middle Earth syllable by syllable with Jay.  Prydain, Pern, Hogwarts… I loved them all.  Including, of course, Oz – where I was right now.  Mostly.

As the Tin Man explained his macabre history of self-destruction by axe, I wondered whether I even capable of being mindful. Mindfulness isn’t some new-age fad. I’m pretty good at ignoring those.  No, it’s at the core of several Eastern religions – religions of which I have scant knowledge, but at least a modicum of respect.  Years ago, I read Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hahn, thus gaining just enough understanding of Buddhism to make an idiot of myself if asked to discuss the subject.  Still, I do remember being struck by a few cogent points in the book.  For example: you do not actually hate washing dishes; you just think you do.  Why not enjoy the warm sudsy feeling, the squish of the sponge and the squeak of the clean plate, rather than muttering imprecations into a real or metaphorical beard? At the time, this idea felt like a minor epiphany.  

The charmingly effete lion danced along towards the Emerald City, and I recalled seeing the movie version of Oz in college, with a rowdy-nostalgic group of friends.  It was sponsored by the gay students’ association, and we all cheered for the King of the Forest with the bow on his tail.  Would gay rights seem so hard-won to my kids, by the time they made it to college?  My mind danced from past to future and back again.  In contrast, my daughter, eyes locked on the action, was most definitely Living In the Moment.

Most of what I sort-of-know about mindfulness had been gleaned – not without a ladleful of irony – from the soul-sucking wrecker of twenty-first-century Zen, the internet.  I am deeply in love with this conduit of endless and instantaneous information.  So is Mark, as far as I can tell.  Another black mark against us both.  In any case, the gist seems to be that in order to be happier, saner, and less of a frantic parody of everything that is wrong with This Modern Age, I should practice unselfconsciousness, engagement, and deep breathing.  I should savor each moment, and accept rather than fight life’s negatives.  I should lose myself in the flow of time.  I should avoid agonizing over the past or dreading the future.  And, of course, I should stop trying to do ten things at once and just… BE.

Um… okay.  I’ll get around to just being when I’m done planning our family vacation, packing tomorrow’s lunches, helping the kids with their homework, and sewing a cow costume, ok?

In truth, as I readjusted Lizzy to prevent total loss of circulation to my knees, I felt like I did get the point.  Sort of.  Unselfconsciousness?  Heck, yes.  I like myself better when I stop caring too much about what other people think of my mismatched socks, my inability to hold a tune, or the mysterious smears on my kids’ faces.  Life is better when I’m not cruelly judging over my own shoulder and taking notes on my lack of productivity, my disorganization, and my inability to curb global climate change.  Of course, there was some circular reasoning here, in that trying to decide whether I’m properly mindful is a comically self-judging pursuit.  If I then go on to blog about it? I don’t actually need to explain the incongruity here, do I?

Still, I bought into some of what I’d read.  Deep breathing?  Engagement?  Not fighting the negatives?  Yes, yes, and yes.  I’m a lot less of a screeching harpy if I fully oxygenate my brain before commenting to my kids on the subject of the Cheerios crunching under my heels… and then get down to their level and absorb the joy of making necklaces out of breakfast cereal… and then pretend to be playing Quiddich while we all sweep the floor.  Hands-on engagement, edible jewelry, AND witchcraft!  I was In The Moment!

Unfortunately, it was the wrong moment.  I wasn’t supposed to be thinking all this through while the Winkies marched and the Jitterbugs did backflips in hot pink satin.  As for Mark… somewhere around If I Only Had a Brain I’d noticed that he was not in Kansas anymore.  Or in Oz, for that matter.  His head was nodding gently chestward.  If you dream during a story that takes place inside a dream, which moment are you inhabiting, exactly?

Moreover, I wondered, if I enjoy almost all of my moments, but am often in the wrong one, I am failing or cheating somehow?  I do enjoy washing dishes, but not because of the unique awesomeness of each suds-bubble.  I tune out the reality of the grime in favor of enjoying the time spent chatting with Trusten or laughing with Margaret as they dry plates or wipe counters.   If I listen to novels while running -- which is also my morning commute – am I failing to savor the experience of running? Of commuting?  Of snow, car headlights, and the shadows of hundreds of spruce trees?  I’m certainly not In the Moment if I am mentally planning a trip to the Grand Canyon while correcting first grade math homework, or if I write a grocery list during a dull meeting. 

The Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion, in their efforts to save the heroine, knocked over a large piece of scenery.  For the kids, this was clearly a high point.  And, yeah, it was for me, too – although Dorothy had a lovely alto, and the witch melted beautifully.  This was community theater to the core, but it was enthusiastic, sometimes-inspired, sometimes-brilliant, fun community theater.  Still the best part of the show for me didn’t really have anything to do with the choreography, the sets, or the pit orchestra.  It came when I accepted that I’m ok with my state of mindfulness, even if I’m often ballooning through a twister somewhere between Kansas and Oz.

Technically speaking, I admitted to myself, I’m terrible at living in the moment.  For one thing, I have no desire to savor the precise moment when the cat retches a hairball onto the rug or someone screams, “I’m telling Moooooooommy!”  For another, my mind is about as grounded as a fruit-bat.  But, on the other hand, I don’t endlessly engage in the behaviors that are supposedly so harmful to the non-mindful – agonizing over the past, stressing over the future, and failing to enjoy myself in the now.  

I enjoy the minutes and hours of my days, not despite my flitting brain, but because of it.  I thrive on new ideas…distracting ideas…crazy ideas.  I relish linking the past and the present to an imagined future.  I need daydreams. I even (sometimes) am energized by doing six things at once (so long as none of them involve politics or vomit).  And while not everything has a funny side, I solidly believe that most things do (which is what makes The Onion an excellent news source).  

On stage, the Wonderful Wizard was booming impressively through his microphone.  And then, just as impressively, he flubbed his lines.  He offered the confused Tin Man a brain.  After a long and awkward pause he added, “Or… was is a heart?”

Don’t fight the negatives, I wanted to tell him.  Embrace them!  As I laughed (kindly and cheerfully, I hope) along with the rest of the crowd, I realized that just as the Wizard is a creature of smoke and mirrors, so too is the idea of being mindful.  If I feel like I’m Zen enough to please myself, then (with my lap full of semi-anxious kid and my mind full of semi-formed notions) I’m plenty Zen.  

The roar of laughter from the audience woke up Mark.  I’m not sure if he got the joke, but he looked quite ready to laugh along.  Perhaps, for him, a nap was exactly what he needed.  Maybe his brain was at its most comfortable floating somewhere between NASA rocket science, the Yellow Brick Road, and deep delta-wave somnolence.  Sure, he wasn’t living in the same moment as anyone else in Hering Auditorium.  Perhaps that grant proposal was not fully reviewed, either. But the world was a happy place in his moment.  As it was in mine.