thinking for yourself: thrift shop wisdom

"This is what I call getting swindled and pimped...this is what I call getting tricked by business."  - Macklemore, Thrift Shop

Maybe because my husband is a salesman and his territory has been the Midwest, we are naturally a road trip family.  One of the great accomplishments of my life was driving as the lone adult from St. Louis to Southern Florida with my four and six year old children.  Happily, they each threw up only once. 

This past week, we enjoyed a vomit-free road trip to Northern Minnesota. Being a bit older, the kids like listening to pop music while we drive and you can't listen to a pop station right now without hearing Macklemore's Thrift Shop  (Clean version!).  The poet in me is predisposed to like rap and hip hop and I actually think this is a great, fun song.  The thing I like best about it, is that it's really pretty subversive...the 'speaker' is basically saying that if you're buying a Gucci T-shirt for $50, when instead you could go to a thrift shop and purchase something totally unique for half the price, then you're getting tricked by business. 

Why is this subversive?  Because it asks us to question who gives us our version of reality.  It expects that even little kids who are listening to pop songs can question why and how we want what we think we want. 

We can and should do this in many areas of our life, because there is always someone else's idea of truth or reality that can influence us for better, for worse, or for neutral - but if we are not aware of it, we lose our power of choice.

A small example, maybe a silly one, from my own life, is the influence of my grandmother - my mother's mother.  She lived to be 95 years old and was a lady who enjoyed people, enjoyed life in general, played and won bridge games well into her nineties, and read the newspaper up until the last months of her life. She said the key to longevity is a sense of humor and faith in God.  She also was a lady who 'put her face on.'  I remember visiting her in the hospital when I was in my mid to late twenties. (As many older people, she had somewhat frequent hospitalizations in the last few years of her life).  I walked in, smile on my face, bringing youth and cheer with me and she looked at me and said, "Kate, you look terrible."  Huh?  I noticed she had just put on her lipstick.  I myself was not wearing any lipstick.  This is why she thought I looked terrible.  In my grandmother's version of reality, it was a truth that all women look better with a little makeup.  It brightens their cheeks and shows they have pride in themselves.

It was like the air I breathed growing up: "women should wear makeup."   I can't say this is as malevolent as 'getting tricked by business', but as an adult, I see that there is no objective law of nature stating the above.  While, I am still a makeup-wearer,   I have the responsibility to look at who and what has influenced me and then decide what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of, or where I want to fall in-between.  (Lipstick: only on dress up occasions.  Mascara: everyday.) 

Another example - there was just a editorial in the New York Times this week http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/unhappy-clean-house.html?_r=0 about how and why we've come to see the perfection of our homes as a means to happiness.  How did this get prescribed to us?

Here's the upshot:  we've got parents, friends, schools, business, religion competing with one another and sometimes overlapping in their efforts to influence the way we live or what we think about the way we live.  I find that some people I meet are not happy with their lives in part because they are so frazzled trying to live up to someone else's standard. 

It seems to me that Macklemore is doing and saying something right.  Let's use a little common sense.  Let's adopt a little of his swagger.  When you're wearing flannel zebra jammies, you just have to think for yourself.

the Doing Cure

The Talking Cure is a term coined, according to Wikipedia, in the 1800s by a lady who was cured of her 'hysteria' by talking with a therapist.  For all the merits of talking, a meaningful life must also have some Doing in it.  A lot of times we don't 'DO' because we've told ourselves we must do something Big and Important.  Maybe we got that message from our parents. Maybe we got it from TV.  Maybe we made it up ourselves because we have a wish to be Big and Important.

Here are two people, with outward similarities, who have Done or Are Doing, 'small' things that, I believe, are meaningful in Big and Surprising ways because they connect people with one another and with a sense of joy and love.  The first is Larry Selman, who's obituary appeared in yesterday's New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/nyregion/larry-selman-a-shepherd-of-greenwich-village-dies-at-70.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0  He was a someone well known in his neighborhood of Greenwich Village because of his "prodigious work as a neighborhood fund-raiser. From 1970 until his death he collected more than $300,000 by some estimates — from people he approached in the Village, one at a time, requesting donations of $1 and $2 each. He collected money for St. Vincent’s Hospital, the families of Sept. 11 victims, Muscular Dystrophy research, AIDS research, Kiwanis International projects and animal rescue groups, among others."  Mr. Selman also happened to have an IQ of 62 and after losing both his parent in the 1960s worked very hard with the help of his uncle to live independently throughout his life.  If you have the chance to read his obituary, something I admired about him is the way he brought his neighborhood together and helped people feel connected with one another and with him.

My second 'Do-er' is Grace, who, with her family have adopted a bus stop in Glendale, Missouri.  That's right.  A bus stop.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Graces-Glendale-Bus-Stop/116072348526169  If you haven't seen it or live outside of St. Louis, you should check out her facebook page.  It is such a treat to drive by and wonder what she is going to do next, how she is going to celebrate a holiday, or honor an occasion.  Driving by and seeing her latest 'I Too Have a Dream' in honor of MLK Day was a moment of joy and inspiration for me.  Grace also connects people with one another, gives them a sense of community, joy, and play.

Here is something I believe:  You can DO something loving, joyful and inspired even in the midst of the rest of your life, which might feel at times sad, hard or stuck.  Just choose a little thing and do it.  It takes courage, but if you look around, you will find so many inspiring people who have had courage before you.  It will be the cure for what ails you and maybe help somebody else along the way.

Beyond 'Girls' and Boys

With the return of HBO’s hit series, Girls, I’ve recently read an onslaught of  newspaper and magazine pieces speculating about dating, sex, and gender issues in the lives of 20-somethings.  I guess we’re supposed to find them endlessly fascinating.  It’s especially curious, because I’m reading these articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker, places that I am sure have a median age readership far older than 24 years.  So, I find myself more concerned with older people and our obsession with youth than I am about ‘hook up culture’ and what it means for dating.

I am a middle aged person, more or less, and this is what I’d like to say to us:   we would do better not to think about the Girls and Boys so much.  If you want to get older and enjoy yourself, start thinking about and spending time with older people.  Instead of looking at where you’ve already been, start thinking about where you’re going and who you might want to be when you get there. 

This can work in two helpful ways.  It can help show you what you don’t want to be and it can help point you in the direction of what and who you DO want to be. 

The first time I became fully aware of the “Don’t Want To Be” category of  older people was when I lived and worked in Washington, D.C. I was in my early 20s.  It was a high pressure/low pay job, though my superiors were very well paid, and growing more well-paid every year (the dot com years!).  People who were ‘old’ to me then, ranged in the ages from 35 to 50.  Not all, but more than several really struggled mentally and emotionally with the stress of their lives and balancing work   and family.  I remember working on a particular Saturday at my ‘cube’, when a project manager, who was probably 35 to 40 came to me crying.  “Will you talk to my husband on the phone?” she asked.  “He doesn’t believe me about how stressful this is.  He doesn’t understand how mean our boss can be.  Will you tell him?”  I did NOT want to be this person in ten years!  I began to examine the contributing factors to the panic and neuroses  around me.  I began to envision my life going in a different direction than the direction I seemed headed.

Conversely, I have had the opportunity in the past ten years to be around some vibrant, curious, wise older people, who have ranged in age from 50 to 95 years old.  Not only have I had friendships and mentoring relationships with some, some I have had the privilege to be with as a hospice worker or therapist.  When I am with an older person, I listen carefully.  Here are some characteristics I notice in people who age with grace and complexity: 

1)      They take risks – they take classes or travel or try new hobbies

2)      They find the humor in life and in themselves

3)      They are flexible with their time and flexible with their minds.  They don’t get stuck in one way of thinking, but continue to learn

4)      They stay curious about the world and show an interest in things that are ageless – music, art, reading, politics

5)      They have friendships with people of different ages

6)      They accept their age and don’t try to be younger (is it self-serving to say that I think dying the grey out of your hair is okay?!)

7)      They balance quiet time with activity.

I’ve heard, that when you’re mountain biking, you need to look at where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go.  Don’t look at the big boulder that you're trying to avoid, look at the smooth path you want your bike to follow. 

Our individual and collective mental health would benefit from valuing and thinking about age at least as much as youth.  I'd like to see some more articles in the New Yorker about that.  

why should friendship be a problem?

I just read this article today in the NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/fashion/its-not-me-its-you-how-to-end-a-friendship.html?_r=1&hpw about how to 'break up' with friends, in the age of Facebook and "unfriending." 
I found 90% of this article kind of silly.  The part that I didn't find silly or useless is what I've observed of my clients who are in the age of about 20 to 30 years old.  Some of them have had difficult life experiences, especially death or other great loss, and they feel out of  sync with their peers- as if they've matured 20 years in the span of only a few.  Even without grief and loss, I can understand that feeling of isolation when typical social 'bonding' begins  to feel empty. I am not thinking so much about that type of change here in this blogpost.

Here's more from the Times article:  Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.

The winnowing process even has a clinical name: socioemotional selectivity theory, a term coined by Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California.

"Shed people they collected in their youths."  That is kind of yucky.  This is maybe where the article begins to plunge into a worldview that doesn't exactly jibe with mine. 

I've found that as I get older, many friendships have an ebb and flow.  When I was younger, I of course had the experience of rejection when I felt more interested in spending time with someone who just did not seem to have as much time for me.  This was usually due to the life circumstances of the one friend changing (I remember when my friend H got a serious boyfriend and moved in with him - I hate to say it but my next 'boyfriend' was probably someone I dated in part to fill up the empty time that I'd previously spent with her.  Ugh.  The embarassment of youth!).  Over 25 years, H and I have had very close times and times where we haven't spoken as frequently, but because the friendship has lasted so long, we both know and trust that we will always be friends. 

This is the great advantage of letting go of 'defriending' someone or having to place a label - time unfolds and a deeper form of friendship has room to take root.  I also think it's a good idea in friendships, not to just have one best friend. Evidence that the one best friend thing is a bad idea usually starts accumulating in about 6th grade. 

I'd like to propose that we all just relax a little.  Give ourselves and other people room to change and grow.  Have a sense of humor.  Most of the time we don't have to make dramatic moves like 'ending' a friendship.  It can be a hard world at times; I think it's good to value all kinds of friends and friendships.