Someday Syndrome

What the Salmon Taught Me

So, where were we? Right. The salmon steaks were sizzling away and I was gagging on the smell.

Fortunately the gagging stopped pretty quickly. I guess my brain got used to the odor and tuned it out. Steaks cooked, Raul transferred them on to plates and put a jar of tartar sauce on the table (because we all know the real reason fish exists as food is for tartar sauce – or wasabe for sushi).

"Careful," he said (in Spanish, of course), "there are a lot of bones."

Damn! So much for wolfing it down in three unchewed bites! (Or would that be sharking it down since it's fish?)

Tentatively, I peeled off a piece of salmon, dipped it in the tartar sauce and popped it into my mouth. As my tongue searched for bones, I noticed a distinct lack of nausea-inducing fish oils. I tried another piece, this time without tartar sauce. Hey, not bad!

Small piece by small piece I ate the whole steak, taking an unheard-of fifteen minutes to eat it. As a child, a neighbour had died on a chicken bone and small bones in food have freaked me out a bit ever since. I then realized I was doing something my naturopath had tried to get me to understand years ago. I was using food to live in the moment. My thoughts were wholly on the salmon. I was not just eating it, but savouring the texture, the way each flake melted off the morsel in my mouth, sometimes to reveal a thin sharp spine, other times to reveal just more salmon.

I've purposefully focused on living in the moment before but rarely do I come to it spontaneously. I was therefore totally thrilled that I was doing so and that it had been something I'd normally reject out of hand that got me there.

Someday Lessons:

• If you're not open to trying (and retrying) experiences, you'll miss out on a lot of great moments.
• Sometimes understanding comes sneaking up on you, revealing itself when you least expect it.

P.S. It took a day and a half to clear the apartment of the smell of fish.

I Really Like to Work

Last Tuesday I met my friend Cate down in Madrid where we wandered about, ate and drank for several days. We then returned home on Friday and repeated the Madrid activities in San Sebastian, Pamplona, and Bilbao until she left last night. Totally relaxing and lots of fun.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, on Sunday night when I found myself wishing I could just go back to work on Monday. I was having a great time; I just missed working.

I've never missed working. In fact, I have always thought that I'd be happiest retired, spending my days puttering about. In reality, however, it was simply a case of not doing the right sort of work. I'm too independent to suffer a boss, except on a very part-time, hands-off basis (like with my teaching English). When I started my own business, I thought I'd want to work, but actually I just avoided working, to the point that I made more work for myself (through volunteering on my industry's national association and writing endless business and marketing plans).

Last year when I lived in France, I considered myself retired, but I actually had a part-time job. I wrote, I blogged and I kept up at my business-related networking. It was on a part-time basis, but it was work. I just didn't consider it so because I enjoyed doing it so much. Now I work about thirty hours a week on various writing and blog-related projects.

And I miss it when I don't do it.

Someday Lessons:

• Supposedly laziness might just be a case of a square peg in a round hole.
• If you aren't aware of what's going on inside, you'll miss important self-discovery moments.

My Apology to Booze

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how alcohol and I could no longer be friends – it just pissed me off too much. Well, I owe alcohol an apology. My foul mood had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with me.

How do I know this? This past weekend, English friends who live in my old village in France came to visit. Over dinner we chatted and drank a couple of bottles of Lambrusco between the four of us – to no ill effect. No bad mood, no paranoia, no desire to run and hide from the world.

So what changed from the almost identical situation in June? Only the language. In June, the dinner guests spoke Spanish. This past weekend, English.

And what has that got to do with anything? Well, I'm a bit of a control freak and when I drink I work at not appearing tipsy. Doing so in English is easy because I'm already relaxed. In Spanish, however, I'm tense because I know I don't understand everything and that frustrates me.

The solution? Get over myself. I spend my days writing in English. I speak Spanish a few hours a day. The language has been the number one stress in my Spanish life and it's time to let it go. I'm here for the long haul. I'm doing what I love. The language will come and in the meantime, if I don't understand, I don't understand. No. Big. Deal.

Let's just see how long I can remember that.

Someday Lessons:

• Most of our perceptions are based on assumptions – be willing to change perceptions when assumptions prove false.
• We are ever-evolving creatures – stay open for opportunities to learn something new about yourself.

Wading Through Chueca

The party filled the streets for a ten block radius in Madrid's gay barrio Chueca. The bars served mojitos, kalimotxos, and beer from their doorways. Dance beats fought with each other and with the revelers' shouts for dominance of the available sound waves. Drunken partiers in apartments above the bars threw water down on the crowd, which threw ice cubes back up at the partiers.

When a popular song came on, everyone forgot their conversations and sang along, jumping up and down. Alcohol bounced out of cups onto bare skin or fashionable clothing. Down the centre of every street ran a small river of booze, water and piss. Those who'd worn sandals cursed themselves for fools and vowed to throw the sandals out the moment they got home.

Through all this the people moved, sometimes flowing as easily as the liquids under their feet. Most of the time, however, the movement occurred in spurts, two opposing currents crashes together allowing only the dedicated or supremely drunk to slip through the cracks.

I also moved through all this, increasingly tense and annoyed at the general level of public inebriation. I don't like outdoor crowds, especially ones packed into narrow streets. In my head such crowds turn into mobs and I drown in a sea of people pummeled by the waves of feet pounding over me.

Usually I don't put myself in this sort of situation, but I wanted to be with my friends, so had to accept the crowds as part of the deal. Since I couldn't change the situation I decided to change my perceptions. Instead of fight the crowds, the noise, and the music, I merged with them. I use the changing beats to dance myself from tiny opening to tiny opening. I bounced off people pushing past me and I used the stumbling drunks to shield me from flying beverages.

I still didn't like it and would rather have been somewhere where I could have watched the crowd without having to interact with it, but I didn't let it ruin my night.

Someday Lessons:

• When you can't change your situation, change your attitude.
• Don't expect a one-time change in attitude to have lasting effects, but do enjoy the short term advantages.

Out of Context

On Friday night after a night out with friends in Madrid, Raul asked what was bothering me. I told him: "I can't wait for Cate to arrive so I can speak English with someone who knows me well!" then burst into tears.

I'm tired of having no roots in Spain. I don't contribute to about 90% of group conversations because, even if I understand the words, I know nothing about the context: Spanish music from 1998, the Pride celebrations in Madrid from two years ago, the TV shows a certain sexy actor has been in. I'm ignorant about all of it.

It's exhausting, frustrating and makes me want to run back to Toronto where I'd be surrounded by my comfortable cultural context. I know that I chose to abandon Canada and the consequences of moving to a new country include feeling like an alien, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it occasionally.

Someday Lessons:

• Intellectual acceptance of the consequences of choice has little influence on emotional reactions.
• Striving to realize your dreams will produce frustration. Know that this will happen and don't abandon your dreams at the first sign of crankiness or despondency.

Tips for Making Change Stick

As promised last week, here's the sixth and final installment in my series on making a profound and lasting change in my life. Of course, the actual process of change has just begun, but it seems to be going well and I'm happy with the initial results. We'll see how it goes as I get further into editing not just my current novel, but future projects.

In Tina Su's blog post on the topic, she gives us five tips for making the change happen more easily. They are:

• Focus on just one
• Mutual Support
• Understand Why
• Be Inspired
• Reward & Celebration

These are all things I try to do in all areas of my life. The only one I'm not so good at is the first. Being the sort of person who gets distracted by shiny objects, focusing on just one task gets really boring. Often I have a million projects started but not finished. Over the last year, however, I've really worked at paring down and most recently only have a few projects on the go at any one time.

I get my support and inspiration from my writers' website, Forward Motion, where I put up weekly goals and comment on my daily progress and the daily progress of others. Even when I feel I've had an unproductive day, someone provides me with the words to keep me going and to excite me enough to want to get productive again.

As someone who over-analyzes everything, I understand the why for all that I do – sometimes too well. I've learned to back off a bit on the analyzing and to just accept things at face value, and that includes reasons for wanting to change. For example, with my current goal of wanting to be better at focusing on the details in my writing while keeping the big picture in mind, it's enough to know that this will improve my chances to get published. I don't need to explore why I either see the whole forest or the bark of one tree; that's irrelevant to achieving the change.

Finally, the rewards and celebrations – again my writers' website provides a lot of that, but the biggest reward in this instance is rereading my writing and seeing how much better it is when I pay attention to both the details and the big picture.

Anyone out there have any other tips on making change stick? What helps you achieve an alteration in habits?

Someday Lessons:

• Know thyself – change will stick only by chance if you're not self-aware.
• Be willing to ask for help when you need it (yes, I've said this before but it can't be repeated too often).

Living Change Now

(Part 4 in a series of creating profound and lasting change)

Today I started living the new reality, as if I have already achieved my goal. Therefore, when editing my novel today, I focused on the words, on every detail in the text, but while doing so I kept asking "so what?" The "so what?" refers to the big picture – what does this particular detail have to do with the big picture? I cut out so much text and rewrote a whole bunch other.

The one thing I need to do still, however, is articulate the big picture – actually two big pictures, the novel big picture and the chapter big picture. I know this story deep in my bones, having worked on it for 18 months now, but I want to put it in clear writing.

I don't look forward to that though. As my sister said in a comment yesterday – we're divers, not lookers. I know in the long run I will improve my book for doing this exercise before I continue editing, but it doesn't produce a word count and doesn't produce any immediate progress.

However, as I said Tuesday, I've committed to the process and the change, so tomorrow morning before I start editing the next chapter, I'll write down all the pieces of the big picture. It's like hanging a shelf – you can hang it without prepping, and end up making a mess of the wall, or you can get all your tools lined up, beforehand, measure a couple of times, and hang the shelf with ease.

Someday Lessons:

• Prep work, while it might not look productive, makes later work easier and faster.
• Make sure your prep work is just that – preparation, not procrastination. It's easy to turn planning into a technique to avoid doing.

Trying Something New

As part of my goal to put more focus on the details in my writing, I'm using Tina Su's blog post on profound and lasting changes as my method of change.

The first step is to articulate a reality, that is to state the thing I would like to change, to describe it with nuances and details, what the Law of Attraction types refer to as the first half of the clarity through contrast process.

I call it unproductive.

Being a talker (and a bit of a Drama Queen), when I start describing a situation I want to change, I blow it completely out of proportion. And then I wallow in it, reveling in the concentrated negativity.

I would much rather paint the current and future realities in wide brush strokes and keep my energy for the actual change – the fine brush strokes needed to turn a rough sketch into a masterpiece.

I have, however, committed to this process, so will do every step as written.

Someday Lessons:

• Don't dismiss advice out of hand – there's a slight chance you might be wrong.
• When you commit to something, commit to it wholly.

My articulated reality follows after the jump...

Making Change Stick

I'm really proud of myself. Starting last week, I've suppressed my usual procrastination tendencies and hardcore editing my novel. As of today I'm 30% through the first pass. I say first pass because I'll need to polish out the editing widows, typos, grammar, and a million other little details to make the whole thing shine. For those who know me, there's a word in that last sentence that I never like to think about. Yup, it's "details" – I hate them, but I've realized that if I want to get my novel published (and future novels too), then I need to pay attention to the details in my writing. This means not just working harder than I usually do; it means making a profound change in how I view the world.

To help me with that change, I went surfing on the web (because you can find help for just about anything out there) and came across a great article on profound and lasting changes on the ThinkSimpleNow blog. I'm going to try the advice Tina Su gives in the blog, which means you as readers get to see the process I go through to get there.

Su outlines four actions and five tips, so starting tomorrow and going through to the end of the month I'm going to do and write about each of them one by one. The actions and tips aren't  radically different from what I've posted many times here, but I'm like most people and rarely take my own advice.

Someday Lessons:

• Follow someone else's path for a while – it'll open up new ways of considering old problems.
• The same thoughts expressed by different people in different ways produce different results – don't get trapped into thinking just one way.

What Do You Dream Of?

For the past 18 months I've pursued happiness. I've made conscious choices, welcomed the consequences (including bad ones), and struggled against procrastination. I've talked about it here, and you have followed along, "listening" to it all.

Today I want to turn the microphone around to face the audience. I want to hear from you. Specifically, I want you to finish the following sentence. You can use just a few words, or tell me a whole story. It's up to you.

If I could do anything at all, I would _______________ but I don't because ________________.*

Someday Lessons:

• Life isn't a monologue, nor even a dialogue – it's a multi-person conversation.
• When you speak your dream aloud, sometimes it's hard to justify why you aren't pursuing it.

* Two years ago when I articulated my dream to a friend, I couldn't fill in the second part, so kinda had to pursue the dream - immediately!