Whose Time Is It Anyway?, or, Advanced Mind Hacking

One of my favorite little books on meditation, mindfulness, and all that jazz is the classic “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

It opens with the story of a father who never has time for himself. Maybe this will sound familiar: housework to do, career stuff, children demanding time in so many ways. Even a child’s wish to play with a parent is just one more thing that must be addressed before getting “Me Time.”

Eventually, however, the father figures out a secret to getting limitless time for himself: he counts it all as his time. By bringing all of himself to the activity at hand—bathing the baby, helping with a math problem, washing the dishes—all of that time is his. Brilliant and beautiful: I love this kind of reframing.

As the gentle Thai monk points out in the next chapter, however, chances are quite good that the father doesn’t remember to bring all of himself to all of his activities, all of them time. One reason for that, he suggests, is that we all need practice and training in mindfulness, so that our habits support us rather than carry us away from that goal of limitless time.

But I know something the monk doesn’t, at least not as lived experience. Or maybe he is just too kind and gentle to point this out: sometimes, living on someone else’s time is easier. A mom can spend a full day living on family time: getting kids up and ready for the day’s activities, driving, shopping, cooking, mediating arguments, taking care of bedtime, planning for tomorrow. Even in 2011, you get Good Mom Points for spending a day this way. You’re busy, so you must be important, and you put your desires last, if you can even remember what they are.

It can be exhausting, true, but the dirty little secret is, you spare yourself the labor of choosing how to use your time, and so you absolve yourself of the responsibility of what happens with it. Dissatisfied with how the day went? Well, what could you do—you were never on your own time.

Even in a relatively healthy family, it’s not unusual to see each individual’s time get tangled together with everyone else’s. Kids rely on mom to be their engine, waiting for her reminders to get ready for their own activities. Dad counts on mom for maintaining social connections and organizing what happens around the house. Mom plans vacations and weekends around what the rest of the family would enjoy. There’s nothing malicious or insidious about this state of affairs: part of it is training kids, part of it is efficient division of labor, part of it is the joy of making other people happy. Still, it’s the rare family woman who doesn’t find herself wondering, like the father in the story, where her “Me Time” has gone and—much more challenging—what she would with do if she ever found it.

This is a mind hack Triple Salchow: be fully present in the endless loop of household activities, acknowledge the choices that you’re making, and acknowledge your own desires. You gotta get the first part right, or you won’t be set up to land it at the end.

I trip on all of these sometimes, but I’m worst at the last one. I admit it: sometimes I will do something for the kids or for my husband because it just feels too hard to think of what to do for myself. My birthday’s coming up this week, though, so I’m going to work on sticking the jump at least once, as a gift to myself.

Mind Hack Monday (on Tuesday)—What’s a Mind Hack?

Many years ago I worked as a copyeditor for a psychology journal, an enterprise that was fascinating and tedious in direct proportion to the number of tables in each article.

I was struck by an article about cortisol levels in people who had undergone various kinds of severe stress or trauma. The people in the study had permanently elevated cortisol levels; whatever stressor had lead to the release of the cortisol hormone had occurred so much or so severely that it effectively stuck the body in the on position. In plainer English, the adrenaline rush of the fight-or-flight response we all have when faced by a crisis had become permanent condition for these people.

This article depressed me profoundly, because not only did I see myself in those people, but I saw the possibility that I would Never Feel Better. My Stress Hormone Release Valve (note: not scientific terminology) had broken and would now stay broken, maybe forever.

Not too long after that I took up the practice of meditation. Honestly, I was kind of desperate to feel better: anti-depressants weren’t common then, and talk therapy—the kind where you review all your grievances against your parents and the bullies in school and whoever else might have wronged you—had gotten stale and repetitive for me. (Nothing against therapy; I’ve had great therapists since then.) I would have tried anything, and while I was trying the stress-relieving qualities of a loaf of banana chocolate-chip bread at the bakery I saw a sign for a meditation class.

Truly it changed and saved my life, and now we are learning why. Scientists have begun studying the effects of meditation on Tibetan lamas and casual practitioners, and they are finding that meditation can change the way the brain works—including long-term cortisol levels!—for the better. We’re also learning that brains are more plastic than we think and that cognitive decline can be slowed or possibly (in some cases) even reversed.

Some people call this “Mind Hacking,” a term that reflects a kind of cheeky optimism about the possibility of reprogramming our thinking—and maybe even the physical processes underneath it—by hacking into our brains like a programmer rewriting less-than-functional software.

Meditation is one example of a powerful mind hack, but I like to think of a mind hack as anything that reframes my thinking in a way that breaks some previously written loop and starts me in a new direction. A great metaphor, analogy, or question can be a deceptively effective mind hack. Sometimes it’s just the right advice, permission, or idea at the right time.

I think all three of us are fans of a good mind hack, and between us we should have at least one to share each Monday, like AM’s post this Monday about letting go of “the idea that They need you and that the world won’t be right” if you take time off from your responsibilities and schedules.

So true, which is why I am writing this piece about mind hacks on Tuesday, when I wanted to have it done on Monday. 😉

Play along with us and share any good mind hacks you know, too. We’d love to feature your idea, book suggestion, inspirational quotation, or any other trick to keep our minds agile, positive, and healthy.

A Safe Place to Cry

First, the memory

I had a toddler, my oldest daughter, about to go to co-op childcare for a couple of hours; my husband was in school, already on the bus to campus. We were cleaning up in the kitchen of our little one-bedroom apartment when the phone rang. “Is your TV on?” my brother-in-law asked.

“No, why?”

He explained that planes were flying into buildings in New York, maybe in Washington. I hung up and turned on the TV and saw 9/11, there on the Today show. Then I turned off the TV and took my little one to the co-op, waiting to turn on the radio until she was gone. For years I wondered, “Why did my brother-in-law call just to be sure we saw the news?” Writing this out now, the answer is obvious: He did what everyone did, reached out, needing to know that his family was OK.

We lived in Minnesota, of course we were OK. Except that’s not how it seemed at the time. I went back early to pick up my daughter, beginning to wonder what sort of mother drops her daughter at childcare when the nation is apparently under attack. My husband called to tell me that the Minnesota campus was closing, and all classes were cancelled: no one then knew what would happen next. Where else would planes crash? What other forms of terror could be happening? I drove to pick him up, relieved that we were all together again at last. Over the next few days we heard from people who were there: they were OK, no one we knew was hurt, no one we knew was lost.

For weeks afterwards I was afraid in large gathering places: the concert arena (we saw Neil Diamond sing America), the Mall of America (said to be a target, as a symbol of American decadence). While Ground Zero is a place of incredible tragedy in Manhattan, when it first happened, 9/11 was happening to all of us.

Now, the anniversary

Probably I have cried more today than I did 10 years ago. I suppose that is natural: now I know how many died, now I see how long and deep the consequences were.

It’s been a week for crying. My friend Kelly has been talking about it on her blog, and she shared a great New York Times piece about crying in public.

I don’t like to cry in public, but since becoming a mother and suffering whatever hormonal changes happened there I have learned to suck it up and deal with it, because it’s going to happen. Besides, as an adult, I know things about sadness, fear, and loss that I could not have imagined when I was younger, and there is no one to hush and soothe those things away for me.

As a young adult I never cried in front of anyone: I remember vividly hiding behind a Pepsi vending machine in a Las Vegas hotel to cry, the only private place in the entire casino, maybe the entire city.

There just aren’t that many vending machines in the world, however, and eventually I had to give up and let go sometimes. Most often it’s happened during church (don’t worry, this won’t get religious), in part because there is not much to do in church besides just be present with what is happening there, and in part because in church there is a lot of singing, and if there is a cry inside me, there is no way I can open my mouth to sing without it coming out.

The first time I cried in church—I mean cried, not just got teary-eyed—a man came up and introduced himself at the coffeeshop afterwards. We had locked eyes at one point while I was walking out to collect myself, and he said it seemed weird not to acknowledge the connection later. We never became friends, but we talked about sadness, and then talked about our kids, and schools, and coffee, and then smiled at each other from then on.

On a particularly rough morning, deep in some period of depression, an acquaintance, a much older man, came over and put his arm around me and said, “This has always been my favorite place to come and cry.” And I cried with him for a while, and then he gave me a little squeeze and a smile, and walked away. I knew he had suffered hard losses in his family, and his quiet and brief outreach touched me in a way that a long hug from a close friend could not.

Such a lovely gift those men gave me. Each of them said, “I see you crying. I acknowledge the human connection between us. While it may make some people uncomfortable, your crying is OK,” and then they moved on, without needing to make it end or initiate an intense therapy session. Sometimes I wonder if that is the real reason we don’t like to cry: not because it makes us look weak, but because in that moment of weakness we risk someone jumping in and trying to drag it all out of us.

So this morning, primed for many tears, I skipped the mascara, packed up some Kleenex mini packs, and made sure to get to the church on time. I hadn’t even pulled into the parking lot before I started to cry, trying to explain to my younger daughter, now 8, what “9/11” is—she’s heard it before, but she’s also heard of the American Revolution and the Civil War, all events in the time known as “before I was born,” with little differentiation in emotional impact.

My girls sat next to me in the pew and periodically looked over at me in a worried way. My oldest knew, clever girl, that I was not singing because I did not want to break down utterly. She patted me, hugged me, sometimes took my arm throughout the service. I smiled at her and winked over her head at my youngest, hoping to reassure them that crying is OK, and maybe to teach them that, even when you are grown and there is no one to make it better for you, even when the dangers and losses are real, there are safe places to cry.

Mind Hacks Monday–I Can Handle It

A Facebook friend was seeking some advice from her friends in the computer for handling a five-year-old’s mixed emotions about starting Kindergarten.

Do you downplay fears and talk up the fun? Acknowledge the sadness at leaving a familiar preschool? On that first day, do you stay for just one more minute, or do you exit quickly without looking back at the forlorn, tear-streaked face of your abandoned baby?

As I move through the second decade of parenting, I’ve taken the philosophy that what I do isn’t all that important. It’s what the kids do. So my advice was to help the child feel competent to handle whatever unpredictable feelings come up: feel sad? feel scared? feel lonely? That’s OK, you can handle it.

Introducing yourself to new kids making you feel shy? That’s OK, you can handle feeling shy. Getting frustrated when your handwriting doesn’t look like that strip pasted on your desk? That’s OK, you can handle feeling frustrated.

This was of thinking was a revelation to me when I first discovered it. Somehow I grew up believing that bad feelings—mine or anyone else’s—were to be avoided at all costs, and were a sure sign that something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. Meditation helped me to learn that feelings were just feelings, not events or situations that require action, and practice taught me that I could sit through feelings that seemed unbearable and still be there the next day.

Then I had a choice: I could choose to try control my feelings, maybe by shutting down and withdrawing, or by going seriously Type A and controlling every aspect of my environment. Or I could simply remind myself that having a feeling, no matter how bad, is not going to kill me, and no feeling, no matter how intense, lasts forever.

In the book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, author Susan Jeffers says that “I Can’t Handle It” is the belief at the base of all fears. To fear rejection is to believe that you can’t handle rejection. To fear loss is to believe that you can’t handle being sad or disappointed.

As a freelancer, I’ve recently ended a contract that has provided almost half our household income for several years. Talk about feeling the fear . . . But I’m lucky to have experience—and I don’t just mean experience as a writer or editor. I have experience having less money, so I know I can handle that. I have experience being turned down for work, so I know I can handle that. I hate feeling uncertain about the future, but that’s nothing new either. Uncertainty—I can handle it.

And yet the great thing about “I can handle it” is that it neutralizes so much of what makes uncertainty unpleasant. There’s no controlling outcomes: maybe my parents will react badly to that decision, maybe that investment is going to tank, maybe my child is going to hate school. But can I handle it? That’s entirely up to me.

There is an obvious risk with “I can handle it” as well. “Handling it” doesn’t mean lying there and taking it, or going it alone. Too many people I know act as though asking for help or even venting a little bit about their concerns proves that they couldn’t handle it. “Sorry for whining,” they say. “That’s OK, I’ll do it myself,” they say. “That’s just the way it is,” they say.

Just like self-acceptance doesn’t have to mean giving up on yourself, “I can handle it” doesn’t mean “I am the world’s doormat.” “I can handle feeling bad” doesn’t imply “and therefore I will not investigate how I could lessen the frequency, duration, or intensity of my bad feelings.”

It’s deceptively simple: “I can handle it” merely frees you from the urgency of feelings—yours or someone else’s—so you can focus on what is really happening and what you can really do about it instead.

Can You Accept That?

Knowing what really constitutes “self-love” has always puzzled me, so I am liking these recent questions from AM. I really like the metta meditation, but I am not always sure, in practice, how unconditional love will look.

To look good in my wedding dress years ago, like many brides-to-be, I decided to needed to lose weight. I was attending Weight Watchers meetings, and we were talking about self-love. I said that I needed to accept myself as I was, and decide that I am OK now, regardless of whether I lose any more weight or not.

It was a good realization, and as it happened accepting myself as I was then did make it easier to lose weight. I probably lost another 20 pounds before the wedding, and the WW leader was very complimentary about my success. She also said, “Aw, remember back when you said that you would have to accept yourself as you are? And now look at you! You didn’t have to accept that.”

I felt sad for her, thinking as she did that a less than perfect body was not acceptable. Yet I could also see what acceptance meant to her: giving up on yourself, not really loving yourself enough to treat yourself well and give yourself the best. It is such a hard balance to strike, between loving yourself as you are now and dealing honestly with things that you could stand to improve. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between giving yourself a break and giving in to things you know are not good for you.

Soon after that, I wore my beautiful wedding dress, moved away, and continued attending Weight Watchers meetings and losing weight. As a thought exercise, the WW leader encouraged our group to close our eyes and imagine how life would be different after we lost the weight we wanted to lose.

At this point I had lost a substantial amount of weight, at least 40 pounds. I looked a lot different than when I had started, had great clothes, a cute new husband and new apartment. Still, as I closed my eyes I nearly started to cry. I realized: the magical life that I thought would materialize after I lost weight was no closer than it was 40 pounds ago. I had not suddenly become more confident, famous, witty, or wise. I did not love myself any more as a thinner person. Inside I was still perpetually dissatisfied not just with how I looked, but who I was.

Once again, I had to recognize that if I wanted to love myself, I had to start with where I was at that moment, and not wait for myself to get a little thinner—or to get a cuter apartment, or to have a few more publications, or to organize my photos, or whatever was holding me back.

Pretty soon I’ll be celebrating the 16th anniversary of wearing that wedding dress, and I know from experience that self-love, accepting yourself where you are, starts over all the time. It’s not a one-shot deal. Not only do you have to deal with doubts that creep in when you aren’t looking, but you also wake up sometimes to find that “where you are” is somewhere you didn’t plan to be.

You’re asking all over again: Is this place OK, and if it isn’t, am I still OK? Getting back to a “yes I am” after that takes some effort. The metta practice can be wonderful for that. It can also help you sort out the difference between the place you don’t want to be—not taking care of yourself, in a bad relationship, in a rut—from who you are.

I also love AM’s questions. I don’t judge my friends’ bodies. I don’t even think about their careers. I don’t judge their parenting or their houses. As a highly critical person, I’m well aware that my friends are imperfect, but that doesn’t make me love them any less, and when I think of it that way it seems like a possible step to extend that to myself.

Lost in a Good Book, or, Don’t Fight the Inevitable

I have a very strange habit of picking up books that I really want to read, at the library or bookstore, and then leaving them sitting on my shelf. This leads to some scary-looking, double-shelved, broken-down, saggy-ass bookcases.

Exhibit A. There are many many more scenes exactly like this one almost every room of three floors of my house. I haz a shame.

Most recent example: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. I am not a big lover of contemporary fiction for adults, but Bel Canto quickly became one of my all time favorites. I had been hearing that State of Wonder was even better, and after finding that I was 1028th in the line of requests in my library system (with 100 copies to go around) I would be better off just buying the dang thing.

So I did. And it took me weeks and weeks to read it. Nights when I wanted a little something to read, it sat on my nightstand forgotten, a part of the wallpaper in my cluttery bedroom.

Then one day I had nothing to do but sit in the hammock — well, strike that, reverse it. I have everything to do but sit in the hammock, but I was tired of the tyranny of busyness and decided to plant myself in the hammock with a book and a beer regardless.

I started into State of Wonder. For a couple of nights I was up until at least 1am reading. Laundry went undone. Groceries went unpurchased. Children drank maple syrup and ate empty tortillas in a vain attempt to fill their hungry bellies. And then I finished the book. (It was wonderful.)

Dance with Dragons awaits, but the same pattern has emerged — forget, ignore, re-read a snippet of a David Sedaris essay before falling asleep. And now I think I understand in the front of my mind what the rest of my brain already knew: once I pick up the book that I really want to read, nothing else will happen.

As usual, I am the last to know these crucial facts about myself. A friend posted this on my wall recently: “Saw this and thought of you.”

Is this you? Take it. Claim it. Get in the hammock and stay there until it’s too dark to read. And then tell me, what book are you lost in right now?

Twenty Years Ago: Lollapalooza, Pre-Geek Chic, and Love

Do you remember August 1991?

Twenty years ago I was going to the very first Lollapalooza concert in Chicago. I was working at the Minnesota Daily, and the two other night editors and I decided to go together.

Vocabulary digression: the night editors were the last of the editorial team to see the paper before one of us drove it—drove it!—over to the printer in the middle of the night. A large part of our job was to maintain the integrity of the actual text of the paper once it had gone “Prod Side” (out of the editorial office and into the production office, housed in a completely separate building) and was in the hands of the art directors, advertising people, and other folks who were more concerned with visual appeal than the accuracy of the 4th largest newspaper in Minnesota.

Everyone working on the paper was probably 25 or younger, which explains why it didn’t occur to anyone that if all the night editors left town for the weekend (when the paper didn’t run) and for some reason couldn’t come back by Sunday night, the paper would be in a bit of a pickle.

Luckily, although all of us were brilliant editors and students, none of us were especially wise, and off we three drove in my tiny bright blue Honda Civic hatchback, which had been dubbed The Indigo Chariot by my roommate.

My memories of the trip are hazy, but I have to laugh at the things I remember:

—Chicago Pizza

—Ice-T as a young rapper instead of old actor

—Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction: For most of their set there were 2 girls with no pants dancing lethargically next to Mr. Farrell, as if grinding with a rock star would be the most boring thing they would do all day. I think they did some things that were supposed to suggest they were Maybe Bisexual (ooooh! Edgy!). I remember looking at Perry Farrell and thinking that he looked just like a super-nerdy former high school loser (trust me, I know) who now had the fame and fortune to force models to gyrate next to him in public. It was kind of sad. I’m curious whether they’ve maintained that part of their act 20 years later.

—Living Colour, which I was really into at the time for some reason

—The cute nerdy editor who drove my car a lot of the way. He was a little younger than me, highly geeky, and scrawny in that way that made me feel—at 5’9”, with the hottest, perkiest body I would ever have—more like an older sister than a potential love interest. Still, had I not moved away, who knows? “Geek Chic” was not yet something any sane marketer had considered, but I was totally charmed by this pale, glasses-wearing boy who confessed at the age of 20 that he still liked dinosaurs. (Bitchy young me: “Really? I liked dinosaurs too. When I was FIVE.”) Last I saw he was a city editor for the Onion, so you can see my instincts on the whole “So Nerdy He’s Hot” thing were right on.

—Henry Rollins scolding the crowd for not clapping enough for the Butthole Surfers, who totally sucked.

—The repeated failure of my car to start.

See, you knew where this was headed. In the morning, as we left our hotel bright and early so we responsible young editors could be back in Minneapolis with hours to spare, my car would not start. My beautiful First Car Ever, for many years the only car used among my groups of friends, was dying.

We got it to a service station, and their brilliant advice was to drive drive drive drive without stopping, because once I stopped it would not start again without a jump from a kind stranger. So we did just that. We headed out of Chicago and into the prairie until it seemed we would absolutely have to stop for gas. We stopped for gas, made panicked calls to whatever Daily staffers we could find (cell phones? this was 1991, people, there were no cell phones for college students), got a jump, and rolled into Minneapolis just in time for the three of us to do our jobs for the Monday morning paper.

Because we were the very last editorial staff to see the paper, that issue has more than a few inside jokes tucked away referring to our predicament, including a little line art representing my poor hatchback, which needed a fair amount of work before I could drive it off to graduate school a couple weeks later.

Somewhere after midnight we all walked to one of the editor’s apartments and tried to crash there, but we were so wired we stayed up talking all night. I think the other female editor and I flirted aimlessly with Cute Editor Boy, all of us knowing full well that we were the kind of people who went to alt rock concerts and danced like fools, then went home alone to read classic novels and recover from too much smoke and crowd noise and write about it all later.

Sometime before sunrise we walked Editor Boy to his apartment, then went for pancakes. I probably only saw the two of them a handful of times before leaving Minneapolis; there was no point in further developing relationships that were about to end.

The Indigo Chariot was fixed and I drove it, along with my mother, and my step-father and grandfather following in a station wagon, to Ann Arbor. I cried as we drove away: I loved the city of Minneapolis, I loved the music and the theater and the lakes, and I was just starting to figure out, at the age of 21, that there were boys there who actually kind of liked tall nerd girls. On the way to Michigan, I stopped at the last exit of the Upper Peninsula to call my housemates in my new digs. I lay on my back on the floor of my hotel room and laughed with surprise when a boy answered the phone and identified himself as Eggmaster.

I hadn’t told anyone when I would arrive, so I told Eggmaster that getting him on the phone was the biggest relief of my life, still laughing from exhaustion and now from nerves. “I’m so glad I could be part of the biggest release of your life,” he said, and I don’t know whether he misheard me or decided to mess with me.

I met him a the next day: horn-rimmed glasses, a thin white t-shirt, black motorcycle jacket, black combat boots, long and heavy black bangs covering one of his eyes. I soon saw that his bookcase was full of Poe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald; I learned that he was a drummer and he loved Rush. Geek Chic indeed, except he was in no way scrawny, and he was —hurray!—a full four inches taller than me. I did not learn his position on dinosaurs. Despite our breathless, giggly phone conversation, we hardly spoke to each other for three weeks, so intense was our shyness and introversion.

Nevertheless, Reader, I married him.

When I read online that today Lollapalooza was marking its 20th anniversary, the incredible sweetness of August 1991, which seems so long ago, came rushing back. Though I am right now listening to my twelve-year-old daughter practice her Bach inventions, I remember another bright young woman who was just waking up to the surprising possibilities life has to offer, amazed that she, too, might have a chance at love, joy, and just a little reckless abandon.

Today in Chocolate: Sizzling Bacon Bar

I like chocolate, but I am not a Chocolate Lover. I don’t like things marketed to women that presume we all start tossing our 36Ds at whoever presents us a with a Hershey Bar. I will not buy a book called Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul, simply on principle.

At a restaurant, I’d be more likely to order something lemon or caramel. Given my choice of the ultimate food, it would be a perfect peach.

Still, I’ve learned that some days call for chocolate.

If I thought I was controlled by hormones in my teens, wow—they got nuthin on my 40s. Teen hormones were something more like a ferris wheel: highs and lows. Forties hormones are like a roller coaster built by spiteful demons: nauseating highs, terrifying plummets, and lots more curves. And at certain hormonal times, chocolate is required.

It’s so required that my husband will go get it late at night, when I have that certain hysterical gleam in my eye. My husband who works from home and often wears pajamas until dinner will gladly get dressed and get us a soothing nibble of something just a touch less dark and bitter than my mood at the time.

So it was that my daughter—after a lengthy crying jag that covered death, pollution, and swimming—said that she needed chocolate, and I decided to heed her call.

After searching the local fancy candy shop, this is what she decided to come home with.

Sure, Vosges has had a bacon bar for a while, and bacon has become old news as a fusion food. What made this bar interesting to us was that:

1. Apparently Christopher Michaels is the chocolatier for the Academy Awards,
2. He is originally from Brainerd, Minnesota, and was inspired by Minnesota lake and fair memories,
3. Not only does it have bacon, but it has Pop Rocks! (or generic equivalent)

That’s right. So when you eat it, the popping candy pops in your mouth like sizzling bacon. Hello! Is that not happy-making food when thoughts of beaches you love and your eventual departure from the earth is overwhelming you?! It’s like the bacon is fresh and hot and the little fat bubbles are still popping as you snarf it down—with chocolate! Just when I thought bacon-as-trend was completely played out.

One downside: the bar cost freaking $8.75. When I told my daughter she could choose any chocolate bar, this possibility had not occurred to me. “A one-time treat,” I made clear as I drove home, barely able to stop myself from pulling it out of the paper sack and ripping it open en route.

Is it my top chocolate for Cacao Alert level day? Perhaps not. But it was worth a try, maybe more than one time.

Rating: 4 eggs out of 5, partly for novelty factor

Do you have a chocolate you’d like to submit for review? Sans bacon, please.

What’s the Best Advice You’ve Ever Gotten?

I kind of suck at taking advice. I am better at reinventing the wheel, because dammit, I’ll make my own wheel my own way.

This can be a lovely trait, but let’s be honest: sometimes, it can be a stupid one. I know this well as a parent and teacher. I have watched children, teens, and young adults plow headlong into disasters of varying scale that could have been prevented had they Just Listened to the voice of experience.

I’ve gotten a lot of good advice from my mom: “This isn’t your last chance to eat cheesecake,” she once told me, and I pull that one out all the time when I can’t make a choice or I really want something I shouldn’t have just then.

When I couldn’t choose between two gorgeous wedding dresses she said, “If you like them both, you can’t make a bad choice.” Another one I use a lot.

I recently heard a friend say to his son, “Don’t say ‘no’ to something you want.” So true. I don’t know if it’s the girl or the midwesterner or the shy person (or lazy person) in me, but I say no way too often.

Funny how great advice often seems obvious when you look at it later.

One of my favorite pieces of advice was not for me, but for Lisa Simpson. Lisa, with whom all former nerdly 2nd grade girls can identify, has a substitute teacher who likes her, who gets her. He gives her some hope that somewhere there’s a place for girls like her, and then, too soon, he leaves. He leaves her with a piece of advice that gets me to this day, written on a note that he hands to her as his train pulls away (see left).

What’s the best advice you’ve ever heard? Who gave it to you?

Do You Have a Mentor?

I pride myself on being pretty independent minded, and I like to think that this trait has developed nicely over the decades.

But when I’m stuck, really stuck, I often cast about for someone or something to say simply: “Take this step next.” Or, “you’re wrong, he’s right, deal with it.” Bad as I am at dealing with authority, sometimes an authority is exactly what I want. Just for a second.

Ideally we all have someone to play that role now and then, just for a second. Someone who stops being neutral and humble and “oh I’m sure you know best” long enough to tell you something that gets you unstuck.

Tons of (now faceless) people told me as a young person to be realistic and have a Plan B, but it was the one who said things like “Somebody has to write the books” that I remember. I think the best advice my dissertation advisor gave me, and I don’t even remember what it was in reference to, was “Aww, fuck ’em.” That one is truly multipurpose.

The thing about growing up and finding a little success is that your mentor pool gets smaller. Everyone likes to give advice to cute college girls.

For now, most of my mentors are in books. Sometimes it’s an author, like Anne Lamott. Often it’s a character, like Anne Elliot or Esther Summerson or Propsero or Granny Weatherwax.

As you might guess, most often I want a mentor to help me figure out how to deal with difficult people, to be the calm center of the storm. I want mentors for taking charge, and for letting go. I want mentors for practical creativity that isn’t sappy or mystical, but sharp-edged and real.

Who have your mentors been? Who would you choose as a mentor now? What do you want mentors for?