Tag: Mr. Rogers

Let It Work

credit: @woofknight, Twitter

Yesterday morning I woke up grumpy. Nothing inspired me, nothing interested me and nothing really held my attention. Some of my friends said that the blog post that I wrote yesterday (about finding joy, even in the banal things of life), inspired them, and that made me feel like a fraud. I had to go back and read my own blog post to remind myself that I mostly write this blog as messages and reminders to myself, about how I want to live my life. I had to remind myself to find the joy in the every moment.

Today I woke up early, chirpy and chipper and engaged. This morning, I am finding everything that I read to be enlightening, interesting, hilarious and inspiring. I have at least a hundred memes/quotes/stories that I could share on the blog, which have somehow touched me and moved me. Nothing in my life has changed drastically in the last 24 hours. The circumstances of my life (the good, the bad and the ugly) have remained stable from yesterday morning until this morning. Perhaps I am bipolar, but it is more likely that I am just human. It is interesting to me, just how much our moods can affect our own engagement in our own lives. Which brings me to the most resonating (to me) quote, of the many that I enthusiastically and voraciously read this morning:

“You don’t have to make it work. You have to let it work.” – Alan Cohen

This is a lesson in life, that despite having a myriad of examples from my own life and from the examples in many others’ lives, that I think that I will have to keep learning for the rest of my life, and maybe even beyond. Sometimes you just have to let bad moods be, knowing that they will change to good, without rhyme or reason as to why. This is so against our human nature. We Americans, in particular, have had it drilled into us to “Make it work.” “Make it happen.” “Just do it.” We’re not good at “letting it be,” or as Alan Cohen states it, “Let it work.” We’re not good at letting things evolve in their own way, in their own time, with the solid faith, that with or without our fretting and sweating, things always have a way of working themselves out, often in the most meaningful, unexpected perfectness of ways. And it’s usually in our moments of surrender, when we finally (often out of utter exhaustion and dejection) get out of our own way, that we get to be the awestruck witnesses to the splendor of things working themselves out beautifully.

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

W-A-I-T

“There is a thing that I do: W-A-I-T. It stands for “Why Am I Talking?” explains Hanks. “I wrote that down in a notebook that I keep to remind myself that listening, for me anyway, is a disciplinary art. I have to force myself to listen because I love the sound of my own voice and because I’m a movie star I’ve been infantilized by everybody I come across who says I’m wonderful.” – Tom Hanks, being interviewed about his new movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neigborhood, in which he depicts Mr. Rogers

Listening is a disciplinary art for almost everyone, except for a few treasured, gifted, amazing people who everyone is equally intrigued by, and adores, all at the same time. I’m not a great listener. And since I am not a charming movie star, I’m already starting out with two strikes against me.

Despite swearing that I was going to expand my horizons this year, and start volunteering for things that didn’t involve my local school district, (trying to branch out from what I have done for the last two decades or so), I’ve ended up becoming a mentor to a 10th grader and a 3rd grader on a weekly basis. (like many middle-aged women, I am not great at saying “no”, nor was I doing an especially ambitious job of looking for volunteer opportunities, outside of the schools) I had to get special training for this mentor position. I went into the training cocky, presumptuous and overconfident. I’ve raised four almost grown children, who I think are pretty special people, and I’ve volunteered in the schools for 20 years. I could teach this “mentoring class” on the fly with one hand tied behind my back. I’ll put my time in to meet the state requirements, but I will probably be bored out of my mind. HA!

The focus of the mentor training was on LISTENING and what “real listening” is, and what it means to people. If you are good listener, apparently your response to the person you are listening to, will be a good reflection and understanding of what they expressed to you. That’s it. That’s all that they want. They want to feel heard and understood. They want to feel validated and important. They want your confidence that they are capable people who will figure out their own issues, in due time. The worst response apparently is advice, evaluations, and analyzations. Even reassurances can just be experienced as condescending brush-offs.

So right after my training session (after finishing up eating my crow and choking on some feathers), I ended up writing a long apology for my lack of listening skills, throughout the years, to my family (husband and kids) on our family group chat. My dear ones all kindly accepted my apology with not one protestation that I was mistaken about my lack of good listening skills. There was not one “awww, but you are too hard on yourself, you are a GREAT listener” from any single member of my crew. Rightly so. I then sheepishly extended this apology to some of my lifelong friends. They were very gracious in accepting my apology, as well.

I’ve worked harder on focusing on what the other person is saying, instead of using that time to come up with my soliloquy in response. Still, I know that I have some work to do on this listening process, yet. Yesterday, when I rudely interrupted my 10th grade mentee with a question about her story, she patiently but firmly replied, “I didn’t get to that part of the story yet.”

I like Tom Hanks’ W-A-I-T trick. I don’t want to be a walking podcast. I want to be present for my family and friends. I want to be a little more Mr. Rogers and little less “movie star – in my mind”. I think that life probably feels a little bit more in depth and meaningful that way.

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”― Ernest Hemingway

“This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen