Tag: Jerry Seinfeld

There’s a Hole in the Bucket

Love is an action, but the feelings that you get from loving are incredible. Those feelings have to be love. So love must be a by-product of acting on love.

I’ve been wallowing in love-sickness these last few days. We took my youngest child and our only daughter to college on Friday (she opted to start this summer). Why is it that when you take a kid to college, everything that you do, and that you see, reminds you of them?!? Everything. I was in the grocery store yesterday, and on the clearance shelf they had a big bag of candy corn. I got a lump in my throat because my daughter is the only one in our family who actually likes candy corn. I almost publicly cried at our local grocery store over a huge, stale bag of candy corn.

My daughter seems very happy though. She’s meeting lots of people and I am so thankful for the technology of Facetime. Our youngest son is living with us this summer, while doing a summer internship. (His epilepsy has been well under control. Regular readers, thank you so much for your love and concern, and your prayers and good wishes. He is doing so much better than last fall. We all are doing so much better, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your love and support.) My youngest son is one of our middle two sons, of our family of four children. He shared a bedroom with our second eldest son, his entire childhood. He has never had the experience of being an “only child” with his parents’ attention entirely focused on him. Never. There has always been at least one other child at home, every time that he has lived with his parents. I am not sure that our youngest son is enjoying this “only child” experience all that much. He seems to find a lot of reasons to work late, and to go to the gym for hours and hours. I’m hearing, “Don’t worry about me for dinner,” a lot. Interestingly, all four of our children are dating only children. I can’t decide whether this means that onlies are somehow attracted to big, loud, boisterous, chaotic families, or if my kids are just tired of sharing with others?! It’s probably a mix of both.

On Twitter this morning, the Wise Connector posted this:

I like this take on the “Bucket List”. As a 51-year-old woman, the “Bucket List” thing kind of stresses me. I start worrying about prioritizing, and questioning whether I am wasting too much time, and even the state of my health. “The Bucket List” makes me concentrate on my demise too much. Last night, a group of good friends and I went out to celebrate one of our friend’s birthday at a new restaurant in town. The company was great, but the restaurant sucked. This restaurant is not long for staying in business, we all agreed (interestingly this restaurant is in one of those “doomed” locations. Three restaurants have already failed at that same spot. This is a phenomenon I have noticed my entire life, wherever I have lived. Some locales just seem to be cursed in this world.) Still, I am thrilled that we went to this new place. I am always curious about new places, and new people, and new things. I am thrilled for the experience which we had last night. I love having my curiosity satisfied, and now that particular restaurant will be conveniently tossed into the orange bucket above, leaving more room in the other bucket, which we middle-agers are expected to obsess over.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Then When?

“Desire is an ache, but it’s so much better than the numbness of wanting nothing.” – Holiday Mathis

I like to read Holiday Mathis’s horoscopes on a daily basis. She is an excellent writer and my horoscope always reads like a riddle. The above was my horoscope the other day. Even if you think astrology is hogwash, I recommend reading Holiday Mathis’ column. I always glean something from it. I usually think about what unique wisdom she has written about, throughout my days.

This quote of hers reminded me of the other night, over the Christmas break, in which my family all settled into watching Jerry Seinfeld’s latest comedy special. Jerry Seinfeld is worth 950 million dollars. As he adeptly states in the beginning of his special, he is not doing that special because he has to do it. Obviously, Jerry Seinfeld desires to do comedy stand-up routines. It’s probably one of his greatest loves in life.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the rote quality of our lives and our routines that sometimes it seems like a thick fog of numbness can set in. This pandemic, particularly in the beginning of it all, brought us all down to basic necessities of survival. I know that I personally have felt some numbness throughout this scourge. There were many days that I felt like I was just going through the motions. But at the same time, the pandemic has also helped to give us some real clarity, as to what is truly important to each of us, and also as a collective, in many regards. The pandemic has been a “pin pointer”, helping us to get real clear on what actually moves each of us, at our cores, by showing us what we like about our current lives, and what we desperately miss.

Most of us who live in Western cultures are way up the slope on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Most of us are not worrying about where our next meal is going to come from. At the very top of Maslow’s needs pyramid is “Self Actualization”. Self Actualization is described as “the desire to become the most that one can be.” According to Abram Maslow, when all of our other needs are met (food, shelter, clothing, love, esteem, recognition, health, intimacy, etc.) the only other need that is left for us, is the the need to fulfill the desire to become the most that one can be.

We were all built for different purposes. What motivates and excites you, may not interest me at all, and that’s okay. That’s what makes this world so interesting and full of variety. To become self-actualized, we have to become sleuths to find out about what’s possibly been lying dormant in our own DNA. We have to search past the fog of our own every day automated “doingness”, to get to the light and the beacon of our own deepest longings, and yearnings and inclinations and desires.

All of our flowers will look different in this Earthly garden. It’s the variety of plants in any garden, and how they grow and thrive together, that makes the garden so incredibly, breathtakingly beautiful. And every flower blooms in its own time, which interestingly makes the garden, something all together different, yet still achingly beautiful, in each of its seasons, year in and year out. If the garden is to reach its fullest potential, it is our own individual jobs, to push our own little closed buds, to be brave enough to open up and to bloom brightly, and take up our own space in the sunshine that bathes us all. We must do something with those seeds of desire which are purposefully implanted in each of us. If not now, then when?

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Shaken Up

There was a recent little on-line spat between a writer who wrote a depressing piece for Linked In, making an argument that New York City will never be the same again, due to this pandemic, and Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, who rebutted this article, with his own opinion piece for The New York Times. Jerry was very sharp and angry and defensive, claiming that he himself will never give up on New York City. The original writer, a Manhattan comedy club owner, claims that many people have woken up to the idea that with today’s technology, many people can now live wherever they would like to live, by mostly working from home, and many people are finding other places to be cleaner, more affordable, and more restorative than living in New York City. The writer, James Altucher, suggests that the mass exodus from the city is not temporary.

I like visiting New York City. I have never had a desire to live there, but much like Jerry Seinfeld’s biggest argument about why New York City will make a roaring comeback, I know that there is a resilient, teeming, revitalizing energy in New York City that is seemingly non-replicable, anywhere else. I have felt it every time I have been there. This force of energy is, overwhelmingly, the best feature of the city, in my opinion.

That being said, I’m not going to write another piece about the redeeming and not so redeeming qualities of New York City. That is done and written ad nauseam, by more qualified writers than me. I think what struck me the most, about both of these articles, was the longing and the sadness which both men seemed to express about the loss of vitality that the city is currently experiencing. If, for argument’s sake, we want to call New York City, the energy center, the heart, and the pulse of our country, than New York City is currently being assisted by a early model pace maker with extremely weak batteries.

What I think a lot of us are deeply missing right now, no matter where we reside, even in our own bodies, is a sense of aliveness, liveliness, exuberance and vibrancy. When you feel limited, it is hard to get excited. When you can’t make plans with any sense of a good probability of the plans coming to fruition, it’s hard to muster up enthusiasm. Energy goes where energy flows and right now, many of us feel stagnant and restless, when we are not mired in apprehension and fear.

When we dropped off our youngest son at his off-campus university apartment last week, I got a little spoonful of that excited energy back. Much like NYC, there is a sizzling, underlying buzz that occurs, uniquely, in college towns. The energy there is youthful, hopeful, sometimes blindly optimistic, but full of wonder and desire and ardor and confidence, bordering on cockiness. It’s the kind of energy that fuels the flames in everyone’s heart, no matter what your age.

I am a believer that there will be a lot of changes in how and where people live and learn and work, even after a vaccine helps to tamp down the coronavirus. I think that this pandemic has been an eye-opening experience for the whole body of the world. But, even though science was never my favorite subject, even I know the first law of thermodynamics:

The first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. (lumenlearning.com)

We may think that the world has become listless and lifeless, but I believe that the energy, the very Lifeforce that sustains all of us, is alive and well and flowing. Energy cannot be destroyed. It is flowing fervently in the minds of the scientists and the medical experts as they race to find solutions to stopping the devastation of the virus. Energy is whirling in the passionate hearts of teachers who are having to find whole new ways to reach their students, and to help them to learn. It’s pulsating in the creativity of innovators who are changing the way they do business, in order to stay afloat in uncertain waters. And of course this Lifeforce keeps our medical teams, physically and emotionally resilient, as they put in long, hard, taxing days, doing their best, to save lives.

I think that on some of these seemingly endless days of the pandemic, when I feel lethargic and listless, and maybe even slightly depressed, I am going to envision that my energy stores are flowing somewhere else, where they are greatly needed. I am going to pray that my energy is giving vitality to where it is much demanded, such as for a coronavirus patient, struggling with everything they have, to just hang on to life. Remember, what we give, is always returned to us. I imagine that the good, good feeling of visualizing my own energy being used where it is needed, will restore my own coffers more quickly than I could have ever imagined, opening my mind, and my heart and my soul to possibilities which I would have never thought of before. Maybe the world’s energy has been shaken and stirred by this pandemic, like a horrendous storm or a planet-sized snow globe, but when everything finally settles down again, the world’s energy will be balanced like it has never been before, and we will be in total awe, of the easy flow of it all. I hope so, with the most fervent energy still left in my heart.