Solution 14: Celebrate Progress

Today I'm celebrating my two-year anniversary of beginning yoga. I don't do yoga every day, but I do practice nearly every week and I'm happier and healthier for it. I can also touch my toes, a side benefit of dubious utility but symbolic of the larger change yoga has made possible over the past two years.

Acknowledging depression was the tipping point that brought me to the yoga mat after expressing mild interest in yoga for years. I knew something in my life was out of balance, and "yoga people" seemed to talk a lot about balance. It's hard to tell in hindsight exactly when I lost my way, but yoga was part of the way forward.

This is why the "yoga anniversary" is so meaningful - I think of it as a kind of holiday to celebrate resilience. For my first yoga anniversary, I bought a fancy recycled yoga mat as a treat. This year I'm seeking something non-material to celebrate. Perhaps traveling to a class or a daylong yoga event? reading the Bhagavad Gita?

In the end I've settled on re-claiming the search for resilience, which I will call "net happiness" in honor of the Bhutanese leaders' declaration of "Gross National Happiness" as their goal. "Gross National Happiness" is an alternative to the "Gross National Product" indicator of national wellbeing, a statement that wellbeing is more than economic growth, more than the accumulation of stuff. A worthy if elusive goal.

In the search for resilience - which I now think of as preventing a relapse into depression - I am starting a twitter account to create a sense of accountability for my own piece of Gross National Happiness. This will include status updates on whether I am feeling depressed, anxious or energized. These will alternate with reporting actions I've taken to contribute to Gross National Happiness, with helping others as a strategy for fighting depression. Ideally there will be a sequence of (1) noticing episodes of depression/anxiety (2) reclaiming positive energy through helping others (3) receiving positive feedback from any tweeps that appear.

Hopefully this will not devolve into narcissism and will be a way to give back, a way to celebrate my yoga anniversary. Hopefully connecting with others in a positive way will build my resilience to daily life once more. We shall see.

Fishy fish: Solution #13

People say having an aquarium is good for your mental health, though I'm not sure if that's true during the set-up phase. I've never been so worried about my plants dying as I am about my new fish dying. Great practice for confronting mortality in general perhaps.

Yet now the movements of the shiny school of fish are endlessly captivating. They split up, they sit alone, they swim together, they chase a little bit and then relax. And the team of shrimp at the bottom are even more entertaining, a mass of flying legs yellow legs. They fly effortlessly in swooping trajectories across black gravel.

Stagnation

Same job, different frustrations, is this what I really wanted? After deciding to leave and not finding anything immediately I pushed to change my position, or rather to shift 100% of my time on the management responsibilities I have been gradually taking on over the past four years. Now it feels like I've squeezed out the fun parts and my days are hectic, filled with interruptions from upset or impatient people barging into my office. What have I done?

Now I know I need more juice in my networking and job-creating/job-finding quest yet my energy is tapped by the end of the day with the new version of my same ole job. Would I face the same frustrations at a new position? In the effort to adapt I'm working unreasonable hours, leaving not enough time to recharge. In the evening I sit on the couch and say "I don't want to go to work," atypical for one who has always poured my heart-mind, aspirations, and enthusiasm into professional pursuits. I'm desperate for new challenges, new peers and mentors, new scenery, yet sometimes a half measure feels worse than no change at all.

Simplifying and the Big No: solution #12

For nearly a year I have been pursuing multiple projects at once, in the effort to be open to the best option and hoping it would reveal itself. However, somewhere between two and ten projects lies a threshold between multitasking and unraveling. Will I ever figure out that magic number?

This multitasking fuels several weeks with 100% energy on one project, followed by several weeks 100% on another. In some ways this is satisfying and effective. In other ways the transitions leave a feeling of dislocation and being out of touch, a Sisyphean thirst for completion.

Now I am making small steps to simplify. The first was to drop a pending job offer after sitting on it longer than was reasonable for anyone involved. Finally it is done, though not without excessive investment emotionally, intellectually, and politically in a path that was not for me.

Immediately afterward I held my breath, but the days and weeks that followed have made it clear that saying "no" was the best answer. Clearly I need more practice saying "no" to perceived opportunities.

Limbo Land

There is a finite space surrounding major decisions that begins when you have all the information that you're going to get, and usually ends with a deadline. If you decide and act on that last piece of information promptly, you can smoothly move forward and in all likelihood won't look back too often.

After sitting on a job offer for nearly three months, this space charged with promise has become a kind of purgatory. No new information is coming in, and yet I feel equivocal, paralyzed. This is an offer I actively sought out, but in its final form carries such dramatic change for good and bad that it's hard for me to make the leap. The more time passes the less I feel compelled to act. The offer is open-ended yet my lack of response creates bad feelings. Proscrastination at its finest.

Stretch Your Mind, solution #11

On a whim I acted on a longtime aspiration and signed up for Mandarin Chinese class. The language of my ancestors and of the looming economic/cultural change of our times, Mandarin is supposed to be "hard" to learn. To be honest I thirsted for a challenge and hadn't been finding it at work. Why not throw myself against the great wall of a pictographic language with few connections to English? Why not have a chance at saying things like "i'm not a student" to the large portion of the world that lives in China?

Stretching my mind with this new class has really lifted my spirits, renewed motivation, and by requiring my full attention, it abruptly shuts down the work-mind soon after I leave the office. The best part is picking out simple words like "is not" or "big" out of kung fu movies or overheard conversations in the city. And just for the record, it's true that Mandarin is "hard" but I try to remember that little kids in China are growing up and learning this stuff right now, so hopefully I can too.

Suiran wo bu shi zhong guo ren danshi wo shi zhong wen xue sheng. Though I'm not really Chinese, I'm a Chinese student.

Crime, Perception and Fear

I just don't want to live in a place where crime is a regular occurrence. It's just not comfortable knowing that within the next year odds are I will be affected by yet another steady, needling fear in the wake of crime.

Round and round these thoughts churn, with a nearly audible rhythm reminiscent of a car's broken fanbelt. Year before last, stolen bicycle. Last year, stolen CD collection and lawsuit. This year a stolen laptop, homicide in the building, hold-up down the street. Can I move forward with out ruminating on these absences every day? No personal harm, no lasting material loss and yet now and then fear creeps in at nightfall.

Rumors and newscasts feed my unease, but is any of it real? Would there be crime like this if I still lived on the west coast? in a smaller city? in a different neighborhood? if I never left the building? if there were off-street parking? if I didn't watch the news? if I stayed home? stayed in the US? traveled alone? And so another hour passes.