Month: July 2017

10 years ago today the final Harry Potter (The Deathly Hollows) book was published. I was in Moscow and was DESPERATE to find it in English so I could devour it on my insanely long plane ride home. I walked all over the city checking bookstores (I did not have a functional cell phone and had limited internet access – remember those days ?!? and YES I did get lost. more than once) and I. was. determined. Finally, I saw the book in the window (in cyrillic of course) and ran inside and there it was. In English.  I will never forget the feeling I had picking it up, holding it to my chest, inhaling that new book smell, and knowing that what I held in my hands was the end to an era. That as desperately bad as I wanted to read the end of the story, how heartbroken I would be to read that last sentence — the word that would close the chapter to my childhood.

I will never forget how Harry Potter found me. In grade school, once a week we had a library day where we had to check out a book. I loved this. However, I had a very good friend who was not into reading (hey Salina!! 😉 ) and she grabbed a book because she had to, then handed it to me asking if I wanted to read it. It was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I shrugged and took it, and I would never look back. I read that third book first and although yes, it was a bit confusing, I was IN LOVE. I quickly checked out the first two and finished them in the same week. But what now? There were no more! This started my love affair with fantasy. I read SO many other series waiting for each Harry Potter book to come out. The list is staggering.

Up until that muggy summer in Moscow in 2007, Harry Potter was an integral part of my youth. I could not imagine life without the anticipation of the next book. I cracked that book on the plane and had to slow myself – I was reading SO fast and my heart was racing. But I had to slow down, I had 10+ hours and was stuck in the middle of an approximately 7 person aisle. I took a deep breath and  read every sentence and every word as if it was giving me oxygen. I still finished it on that plane before I got to Chicago. I felt a deep sense of sadness. The way you feel when your favorite tv show comes to an end after 7 seasons (cough cough Gilmore Girls) or when your child has his last day of preschool (waahhhhh he starts KINDERGARTEN next month!).

I cannot put into words what this world of magic did for me during those pivotal years of my life that I spent feeling out of place and unsure of who I was. It was a world where nothing was as it seemed and kindness and courage mattered more than anything. It encouraged love, inclusiveness, condemned racism and lauded perseverance and differences. It taught me that I could find beauty and magic in the world around me (“Happiness can be found in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light.”)  That I was lucky beyond words to have my family and the kind of inherent love that many did not. To be kind because you never knew what the person next to you had experienced or the battles they were fighting. Most of all, it taught me that I could be whoever I wanted to be if it was important enough to fight for.

I have never stopped fighting to be that girl, and I never will <3

I cannot imagine a better atmosphere for writing. I am sitting outside on my patio with thunder in the distance, the air cool and wet from rain only moments before. The air smells like I am only steps from a lake and coffee tastes like vacation.

Couldn’t pass up an opportunity to write in this.

I spent my youth and teenage years reading. I still read nightly, but I do not devote nearly as much time to it as I used to due to adult life (I KNOW you guys know what I’m talking about here – free time is at a premium!) ANYWAY I absolutely loved classic literature when I was younger (still do!) because it opened me up to all kinds of knowledge and life views and experiences that I was desperate for. I also LOVE that the common threads of humanity are woven across centuries – people are people no matter where and when they lived. This is probably why I like studying history so much. Anyhow, there are lots of books that impacted the way I view life but today, I have one in particular (and specifically one quote!) that I want to talk about (pretty sure I sound like an English professor, and you thought you got AWAY from school! MUAHAHA!) Candide.

The quote, translated is this: “We must cultivate our own garden”

(well it varies depending on the translation, but essentially this is it. You get the point.)

A VERY quick synopsis of Candide (if you haven’t read it, or just have forgotten about it like  a normal human being because you read it a million years ago in school and you’re not a freak like me) is that the title character, Candide, is a young naive man who goes through and encounters a series of RIDICULOUSLY terrible situations (we’re talking Monty Python level ridiculously terrible) and the man (his tutor, essentially)  he is traveling with is quick to remind him that no matter what is happening, they are living in the “best of all possible worlds” (said to the man who is missing limbs and was sold into slavery by his mother, for example.) He is optimistic to a point of absurdity. The book is a satire on certain philosophies and religion but I won’t get into all that. PS I absolutely love satire, so if you see a lot of that in this blog, well now you know why 😉

The quote “We must cultivate our own garden.” is at the end of the book, and essentially means that YOU are responsible for your circumstances and if you want to live a meaningful life, then you need to cultivate it. Fate is not responsible for your success or your happiness and sometimes things suck. Life is not always grand. If you want any spot of happiness, you need to figure out what it is you are trying to attain, and work on it.

I think of this often – I think about what I want out of life as a whole, what I want to achieve that month or even that day,  and then I make a plan and work on it. Sure there are moments of random, times of serendipity and times of terrible things that I could have done nothing about – but what I do WITH those things, how I handle them, THAT – I control. I cultivate an environment that enables me to persevere and learn the best way that I am able. There is no better example of this than actually cultivating a literal garden (which is why, I believe, Voltaire uses that analogy.) You prepare your earth, choose what to plant and when, take care of it, and watch what you have cultivated flourish. If you make a mistake, sometimes it’s the end of the plant, and sometimes it’s not. But do you give up? Or do you cut it back, tend to it frequently, and try to bring it back?

I know which person I am, which are you?

 

Does anyone else ever look in the mirror and go “HOT DAMN! I look GOOD!” and other times you look in the mirror and you’re like “Holy Shit. Why do lifeforms even talk to me?” This is me from day to day or probably even hour to hour… I don’t really keep track of those thoughts, probably as a self preservation tool.

My point here is that if our own opinions of something as trivial as how we look in a mirror (which LET’S BE HONEST! is ALWAYS the same give take 1 lb or some makeup or a cuter shirt) then how ridiculous is it that we don’t realize how much perception dictates how we see people and the world around us?

How I see things literally differs in my own head depending on my mood and circumstances. I might wake up one morning and be THRILLED that the sun is shining – it’s going to be a beautiful day, and we’re going to do this and that and life is GRAND! I might wake up and the sun is shining and UGH it hasn’t rained in 12 days and I am living in SCORCHED EARTH and I have to close all my curtains and hide in the basement so me and my vampiric children don’t start sizzling.

Now apply this to social issues.

What I see is different from what YOU see, from what your neighbor sees, from what your mother or husband or children see. You might all be looking at a bush and you think “gross, that’s scraggly as hell. Ugh If I wasn’t SO busy I could pull that out and landscape that area – maybe next year” Your mother sees “Why hasn’t she trimmed that What have I done that she cares so little for where she lives I must have gone wrong somewhere?” Your neighbor sees ” That mother is always playing with her children, what a lovely family to live next door to.” your kid sees ” I am SO hiding in that! It will be hilarious! They won’t be able to find me!” Your husband sees nothing because men don’t give a shit about bushes.

Perception is everything. I once heard a quote and I have abided by it for many years. It was “just because they don’t love you as you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you the best way they know how.” I apply this to my friendships, familial relationships, and even my marriage. People do their best. You do your best. Sometimes the way you love someone is completely different than the way someone else does but it means no less or no more. Some people show their love by words, other by physical means, other by actions. No one is right or wrong. We all do things in our own way in our own time. I feel that this way of thinking can truly cross bridges in rocky relationships. How often do we feel like so & so doesn’t reciprocate? But they usually are. Just maybe not in a way you’re picking up on.

Perception is all the difference in a good mood vs a bad mood. In productive vs I am watching netflix all day and crying.

I choose to believe that most everyone (MOST – gotta allow for the crazies!) is doing their best. That most everyone is trying to better themselves and the people they love. Some of us do a better job than others, but we’re all trying our best. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we’re all working from our own frame of reference  – it’s just that some of us have rosier glasses than others.