by Dan Gediman
Walking the dog makes me lighten up and pay attention, not to what’s in my own head but to the unexpected small delights of the actual world. The dog gets me out of the four walls—work, clock, computer, phone—and into the land of smells and colors and serendipities. He reminds me of everything I can’t control and don’t need to.
Some religions elevate walking to the level of meditation, but I don’t reach that high. I believe in modest miracles: the hummingbird, the red sock, the fact that my middle-aged body still works. I believe in paying attention. I believe in meandering. I believe it’s time to take the dog for a walk.
Betsy Buchalter Adler is a writer, a birder, a philanthropic adviser, and a lawyer for nonprofit organizations and their donors. A graduate of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she lives with her husband of forty-two years and their dog, Ollie, a short-haired collie, in Northern California and Manhattan.
Yankee Go Home
Rita Barrett
It wasn’t shaping up to be my ideal Christmas Eve. I had spent much of the day fighting the urge to cry, and my spirits were low as I boarded the train with my two best friends.
The train’s destination was León, Spain, but I wished it could transport me to Portland, Oregon, USA. I was studying at a Spanish college and had planned to spend Christmas with a friend who was studying in Austria and another who had come over from the United States for the holiday. Our tour of Spain over the break sounded exciting as we planned the itinerary in our letters, but on the twenty-fourth of December our adventure dulled in comparison to being home with our families.
On the train, we talked about all that had happened since we last saw one another in September. Our English marked us as foreigners on a train carrying excited Spaniards home for la Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, with their families. A few seats away, a Spanish university student stared at us. Reaching into his scanty English vocabulary, he wrote a greeting in the steam on his window: “Yankee Go Home.”
Oh, if only we could go home! After contemplating his sentiment for a moment, I called out to the young man in Spanish, “You want us to leave?”
Surprised to hear me speak his language, he responded with the expected political opinions. I’d already discovered the resentment some Spaniards felt toward the American military bases in their country, and I wasn’t surprised when he raised that issue. My Spanish wasn’t perfect, but I translated for my friends as we shared our opinions. As we talked, the Spaniard seemed surprised that our convictions didn’t match the stereotype he had of Americans. The young man finally conceded that perhaps not all Americans were out to dominate the world, and we began laughing and enjoying our conversation.
Our new companion’s stop came before León, and he said good-bye as he gathered his things and walked toward the exit. Suddenly he stopped and turned back to his seat. Wiping off the phrase on the window with his jacket sleeve, he replaced it with a single English word: “Welcome.”
When I think about that homesick Christmas Eve, the encounter on the train seems so appropriate for the season of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” How amazing that just a few minutes of talking with ordinary Americans shattered the stereotypes the young Spaniard held.
The following summer the friend who had studied in Austria and I traveled through Europe, making new friends in several countries. We stayed with a goat herder’s family in Sicily, ate at the home of a medical school student in Florence, chatted with people in France, and helped build a church in Germany. What was our secret to meeting these people? Well, between the two of us, my friend and I could speak or at least stumble around in five languages. Not only did getting to know us change their views of Americans, but our own stereotypes crumbled as we got to know people.
I believe that learning another language gives one the amazing power to break down cultural walls and bring people together. I have found that nothing warms the soul of a native more than hearing a visitor attempt to communicate in his language. Speaking another’s language shows interest and respect for that person and his country. It says, “I value your culture, and I don’t expect you to do all the work in this relationship.” If we want world peace, I believe a good place to start is to learn to speak the world’s languages.
Rita Barrett teaches Spanish to high school students in Portland, Oregon. Ms. Barrett hopes that by learning a new language, her students will grow up to be people who erase “Go Home” and replace it with “Welcome.”
The Courage to Change the Things I Can
Mark Olmsted
I believe in picking up trash.
I’ve always hated litter; in fact, I once walked out in the middle of a date because my companion threw a wrapper on the sidewalk. In my opinion, it’s the most preventable and stupid of the world’s sins, and it is all the more infuriating because it has no advocates. For example, although I am also against corporal punishment, there are people who would readily argue that it is a useful and necessary form of discipline. No one ever defends littering—even its practitioners.
Yet I am not one to throw stones. For the first several years of this millennium, I was a drug addict who sold crystal meth to support my habit. My buying and selling certainly contributed to a lot of toxic waste created by meth labs. After nine months of prison and a commitment to sobriety, I knew I had to make amends.
After moving to the enclave of Little Armenia in Los Angeles, my first reaction to the trash-filled streets was to say a well-known prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” As I walked my dog every day, I thought the litter was something I just had to accept. After all, what was I supposed to do? Pick it up?
Then one day, I decided to do just that. With a leap of faith, I went down to Home Depot, bought myself an E-Z Reacher, and just like that, I started plucking the empty cigarette packs, soda cans, fast-food packaging, coffee containers, newspapers, Styrofoam cups, and just about anything you can think of into plastic grocery bags. For over five years now, I have filled at least four bags every morning, one for each block of my dog-walking route. Sometimes, I do it again on different streets in the afternoon, especially if I’m having a bad day.
I believe in picking up trash because it’s taught me that you can’t assume to know the difference between the things you must accept and the things that you can change—you have to think about it. It’s taught me to question the premise of all sorts of assumptions I had previously made, from the idea that the only possible reaction to traffic is anger and frustration to the belief that I was a hopeless addict who couldn’t possibly get sober.
Every morning, picking up trash is my answer to the questions: How can I be of service today? What do I have the courage to change? And every night, no matter how much the day didn’t seem to go my way, I can fall asleep counting the bags of trash I’ve picked up, comforted that in this lifetime I’ve been able to find one thing to do that’s unarguably, unambiguously good.
Mark Olmsted is a former drug addict who undertook keeping his neighborhood clean as part of his recovery regimen. He conducts lectures titled “The Six Spiritual Principles of Picking Up Trash” from his base in Hollywood, California, where he still picks up bags of litter every day. His website is www.trashwhisperer.com.
To Hear Your Inner Voice
Christine Todd Whitman
If I have learned nothing else during the course of my life, I’ve learned to listen to my inner voice. Everyone has one. We call it different things: our moral compass, a gut feeling, following our heart. Whatever we name it, we should always pay attention to it. It makes us who we are.
Nine years ago I was in the second year of my second term as governor of New Jersey. I loved that job, and I was working hard to make what would be my last term, due to term limits, as productive as my first.
Toward the end of that term a U.S. Senate seat opened for New Jersey, and I quickly came under intense pre
ssure to throw my hat into the ring. As soon as I said yes, I knew I should have said no.
Deep down, I knew I didn’t want to run for the Senate. I could do much more as my state’s chief executive than I could in Washington, where I would be just one-one-hundredth of one-half of one-third of the federal government. And the idea of appealing to special interests for the money I would have to raise didn’t sit well with me. My inner voice was telling me loud and clear, “Don’t do it.” I didn’t listen.
In the end, all it took was one trip to Washington, D.C., as a Senate candidate to know that I just couldn’t see this through. So I dropped out of the race, returned the money that we had raised, and went back to being governor. My aborted campaign wasn’t one of my finer moments. But it reaffirmed my belief in following my inner voice.
A far more personal moment came when my inner voice told me to do something and I didn’t listen. It was the night before my brother’s third heart surgery, when I visited him in the hospital. After a walk down the hall and a light talk about our children, it was time to leave. As I saw him lying in his hospital bed I had an overwhelming urge to give him a hug and wish him luck. That kind of emotional display was out of character for us, and I thought it might tell him I was worried, so I didn’t do it. My brother didn’t survive the surgery.
As I look back I know that most of the mistakes I have made have come when I didn’t listen to myself, when I didn’t trust my instincts.
There is so much coming at us every day that life can get very confusing, but, as I have always told my children, there is only one person with whom you go to bed every night and get up with every morning, and that is you. Sometimes you stop paying attention to yourself. I believe you need to listen, carefully, to hear your inner voice. And then you have to do what it says.
From 1994 to 2001, Christine Todd Whitman served as the first female governor of New Jersey. She was also head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003. Ms. Whitman now leads the Whitman Strategy Group, a consulting firm that focuses on energy and environmental issues.
Keep It Real
Rose Eiesland Foster
My philosophy of life sure isn’t the same as it was, say, twenty-two years ago. In 1983, I intended to complete college and become a professional of some sort, fully independent of anyone else, fully self-supporting. Not answering to another and being self-sufficient meant I would be a success. Nice clothes, nice car, nice “stuff”—these were things I felt would grant me a successful life.
But genetics and circumstance toiled with me. My body developed cancer twice before I hit forty, nearly killing me. Two of my adult siblings died from a rare kidney disease. I literally bumped into the man who would become my lover, best friend, husband, and father of my two children. Love leveled me into a state of the highest of highs, and, ultimately, the lowest of lows. My heart, unseen by others, was in for a workout. I discovered that loving and loss are always connected. I hate that. I “lost” my lover to mental illness; I “lost” my sister, brother, and mother to physical illness; and I “lost” the youthful appearance of health as my body adjusted to losing a breast. I had a nice car, some nice clothes, and a nice house. But, on the inside, things looked pretty grim.
Burying my forty-year-old husband, I made a vow to myself and to my two amazing children—that I would spend the rest of my life “being real.” Being real means letting my hem show, letting the tears flow, and telling the truth about things. It no longer means anything to me how things look. All that matters to me now is how things are. Being real means telling the truth, no matter how harsh and stark that might be. It means writing down my actual weight, going without makeup for days at a time, letting my arms flap in the breeze. It means telling my dad every single time I see him that I love him. It means saying aloud how much I miss my husband, or my sister, or my brother. And being real means asking for help.
Where did self-sufficiency and smooth skin and nice nails go? I always thought that asking for help meant I was deficient in some way. “If there is anything I can do, please let me know,” many have said to me. But instead of politely declining an invitation to dinner for fear I might start crying in the middle of dessert, I go. If someone wants to know how I am, I tell them. “Today, I thought about my husband eight hundred times and ate two ice cream cones for lunch.” And, then, something happens. The person who asks me how I am says, “Well, me too.” Tears shed during dinner are met with an embrace and a long talk after.
So my philosophy of life now is just three words long: keep things real. And it hasn’t let me down yet.
Rose Eiesland Foster is pursuing her graduate degree in social work and lives in Lawrence, Kansas. She helps counsel others who have lost loved ones to suicide, and she hopes to secure employment counseling others who struggle with issues related to grief. Her son, Sam, is attending art school in Wisconsin, and her daughter is a junior in high school.
Important Strangers
Leslie Guttman
The bookstore was warm and cozy. It was packed, maybe because people didn’t realize the rain had stopped. I was on a lunch break. I got a weird feeling. Someone was looking at me.
I looked up. A woman with long, black hair about five feet away quickly looked back down at the book she was leafing through. I looked down, too. More people came in the door. The gust of air that followed them smelled clean, as if it had been freshly laundered.
I glanced up again at the dark-haired woman in time to see her slip a book into her satchel and walk off. I hesitated and then walked after her.
“Pssst,” I said, pointing at the satchel. Up close, I saw that she was about thirty and probably homeless. Her khaki parka was filthy, her hair matted. The satchel was bursting with her belongings. She gave me a sorrowful look. Then she handed me the book and ran off.
The manager came up, having seen what had happened. The book was a journal designed for someone who was grieving. Someone like me. It was beautifully bound, the paper creamy and heavy. It had space to write the answers to statements like: “I miss the way you . . .” and “It’s hard for me to be without you when I . . .”
“She’s been wanting that book,” said the manager. “She comes in all the time and looks at it. Sometimes, she puts it on hold, but then she never gets it.”
Dammit! I thought. Why did I have to be such a Goody Two-shoes? When will I learn to mind my own business? Why didn’t I just let her steal it?
I ran out of the store. It was raining again. I caught up with her a block away. “Did you just lose someone?” I said.
“My grandmother,” she said. “I used to talk to her every day, and I miss her so much I can’t stand it.” I told her about my stepdad, who had just passed away. His kindness had helped knit our family together for eighteen years.
I told her to wait a second. I knew I was now in a Buddhist fable in which nothing is an accident. When I came back and handed her the book, we both stood on the curb and wept.
For the first time since my stepdad died, I felt understood—as only a stranger can understand you, without inadequacy or regret. Up until then, I had felt alone in my grief. I was reluctant to turn to my family because they were grieving, too. The love of friends had not been able to dilute my sorrow.
But because the grieving thief and I didn’t know each other, I had no expectations of whether I would be understood in my grief and no fear of being disappointed if I wasn’t. Since we wouldn’t see each other again, I could be emotional without being embarrassed or scared it would drive someone away.
I believe life, or God, or whatever you want to call it, puts people in our path so that they can help us, or we them—or both. This encounter made me want to stay open to the chance meeting with an important stranger, to the possibility of unplanned symmetry that is luminous and magical.
Leslie Guttman is an independent journalist who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she grew up. She worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for over a decade and is the author o
f Equine ER: Stories from a Year in the Life of an Equine Veterinary Hospital published by Eclipse Press.
My Parents as Friends
Bhavani G. Murugesan
I believe in living with my parents. It’s been almost two years since I came to live at home. I never meant to stay this long—not after years of boundless freedom at schools, stumbling out of cabs at four in the morning, leaving kitchen sinks filled with week-old dishes.
Coming home was meant to be a short, inexpensive stint until I passed the bar, fixed my broken bank account, and moved to the Big City. Today, at twenty-seven, long after my bank account is softly purring, I continue to live with my parents. I have come to rediscover them in ways that my teenage mind would not allow—as adults and as friends with flaws and oddities very simply their own. And sometimes, even mine.
Growing up, I remember my father as a silent, stern man—not the sort of person around whom one could laugh. As a teenager arriving in America, knowing nothing, I wanted a father who could explain the human journey. In college, when friends called home for advice, I would slump into a deep melancholy for what I did not have.
Then one night after my move back home, I overheard my father on the telephone. There was some trouble. Later, Appa shared the problem with me. Apparently my legal training had earned me some privileges in his eyes. I talked through the problem with Appa, analyzing the motives of the people involved and offering several negotiation strategies.