Laugh, Dammit, Laugh!

Laughter is an essential part of healing, no matter what you’re dealing with. Here are two hilarious articles from The Onion that I’ve tied to relevant topics:

The first funny article reminds us how difficult it is for most people to give up on the idea of “achieving” -- an idea which, ironically, can be one of the greatest hinderances to healing. If you don’t allow cut yourself some slack and be okay with doing nothing, it’s hard to relax and give your body the time it needs to recover, especially when you’re talking about a long-lasting condition. Stop being so hard on yourself!

This second Onion article provides a tongue-in-cheek reminder of how we could all benefit from surrendering our illusion of control -- though not, of course, to “smart people,” as in the article, but rather to just the natural course of fate, or the universe, or God, or whatever word you want to use to describe it.

Love Notes Confidential (My Friend Laura on Love)

I'm going to keep this very brief today both because I don't feel like writing much and, more importantly, because what I have to say is simple:

Without love, life means absolutely nothing. And more specifically, without love, no illness, disease, condition, or whatever (use whatever noun you want) can be healed.

While there is no substitute for a loving relationship, sometimes it helps to be reminded of what love actually is, in all its manifestations. For that, I recommend the website of my friend Laura, Love Notes Confidential. It contains kind words, reminders, poetry from great love poets like Rumi and Laura herself, and more.

I'll leave it there for today and allow you to explore.

Love,

Matthew

Love Poems (Part 1)

Love Poems (Part 1)

In my last post, I discussed guilty pleasures and their relationship to self-acceptance. Well, here’s another guilty pleasure of mine: writing poetry, and in this case, love poems. But I am not ashamed of this. It is an expression of myself, an expression of truth. How could I be ashamed of Truth?

Almost every problem in the world can be attributed, if you trace it back far enough, to a lack of love and connection. I think the same can be said for illness: when we don’t get the love we need, our bodies are less likely to remain healthy.

Instead of going into reasons why this happens, which would take a considerable amount of time and consideration, I’ve decided to share a number of love poems. Allow yourself to read them slowly, take them in, and sit with them for a while if you want. Allow yourself to feel loved and accepted. Enjoy.

I Will Teach You How to Sing

Lover, when I find you, I will give you the ocean

and show you who made it.

I will teach you how to sing

from your soul rather than from your brain.

You will never know loneliness.

I will ensure that you never learn that word.

We will revel in the joy that we are.

If I knew how to braid hair, I would braid

yours into pictures. Each would carry the

same message: I adore you.

I love you with every breath in my body.

And when my lungs finally gasp out, I will love you

as the sprouting trees. I’ll become the birds that eat

their fruits, and in that feathered form, I’ll be

your soul singer each morning when you awake.

But why wait? I am with you even now, and already

all this has begun.

-

Staring into the Sun

looking into your face is

like staring into the sun,

but I will happily blind myself

to see this light of life

-

For more on the subject of love and self-acceptance, refer to some of the other blog posts, especially my last one, entitled “Guilty Pleasures.” Click here to read "Love Poems (Part 2)."

All poems on this blog are copyrighted material.

Guilty Pleasures (We all have them, so get over it)

In a column this week for Slate magazine, Mike Spies discusses “guilty pleasures” -- what they say about us, how we deal with them in social settings, and even the interests that he hesitates to share.

I appreciate the frankness and honesty he exhibits, especially when he shares his “lame defenses” for watching The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and other shows with “no anthropological significance.”

The article hits a rich vein of truth: that in our society, we’re far too obsessed with what people think of us, which leads us to develop an intellectually and culturally acceptable set of interests in addition to the real one made up of stuff we actually enjoy. Sure, there’s always overlap, but the first list wouldn’t exist if we weren’t trying to impress people.

The most essential point Spies makes in his article seems to be almost a passing thought. Musing on the implied questions of why you’re too embarrassed to admit what you like, he writes, “‘Are you so insecure [in yourself that] you can’t engage anything that isn’t obviously ‘smart’?’”

Well, apparently most people can’t. They’re too afraid of being rejected by the people around them. And that’s a real shame, because when you stop being yourself, it not only makes you unhappy, it makes it harder for everyone else to be happy, too.

The funny thing is, I used to do it, too -- that is, I’d express my interests in such a way as to seem cooler or more intellectual than I “actually am” (quotation marks because this is all completely subjective!), sometimes stopping just short of outright lying. Sure, I have my intellectually acceptable interests, like chess, politics, and philosophy. But I admit to some guilty pleasures, too. Number one on that list is the music of Jimmy Eat World, complete with all their melancholic, sometimes borderline-emo lyrics and sad vocals. Hell, they’re one of my favorite bands, and I own every song they’ve ever put out, even the stuff I had to dig for on eBay.

But Jimmy Eat World is not a guilty pleasure, per se, because I don’t feel guilty about listening, just as I don’t feel guilty about giving five stars out of five to the movie Eat Pray Love (yes, that movie). Frankly, I don’t care anymore if you tell me I’m a loser. Because you know what? I’m secure enough in myself, happy enough with myself, that other people’s opinions no longer matter.

Not everyone is going to like you. That’s said so often that it feels cliché and stupid to even say it (uh-oh, am I going to lose my intellectual credibility for saying something trite and unoriginal?), but it’s the truth. And as long as you seek other people’s approval, you will be miserable.

Most of the people around you are just as insecure as you are, if not more so. They’re just as scared and, whether they’re real enough to admit it or not, just as much in need of love. So love yourself, accept yourself, and then extend the same gift to them, even if they laugh at your taste in reality TV shows.

Geez, You're Mental (Spaces in Print and Spaces in Thought)

Geez, You’re Mental (Spaces on the Page and Spaces in Thought)

In his column this week, Slate magazine writer Farhad Manjoo lays into people who commit what he considers a terrible offense: using two spaces after a period. I guess I’m a terrible person, then, because if it weren’t for the automatic space-erasers on these sites, there would never be less than two spaces at the end of my written sentences.

(View the column by clicking here.)

Manjoo provides ample arguments to back him up: typographers have agreed since the early 1900s that one space is correct and two spaces is “criminal”; people who use two spaces only do so because of the way typewriters worked 60 years ago; having one space instead of two is “more visually pleasing.”

Although at first I expected a perfectionistic rant (I’m a recovering grammar geek, and even I thought writing an entire article about spaces was going a bit overboard), it turned out to be a solid piece with some interesting historical bits for me to learn.

The best lesson we can learn from this article, however, has nothing to do with grammatical or typographical spaces, but rather about the space between our thoughts, or the lack thereof. About how ridiculously mental -- that is to say, how concept-obsessed, how mind-based -- we’ve all become.

Where once we lived in nature, worked in the fields, tended gardens, crafted things with our hands, now we make our livings talking and pontificating, consigning the real labors to the machines.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have intellectual discussions, and I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with working with ideas versus concrete objects (the separation is just in our minds, anyway). But we’re focusing on a single word while forgetting to read the poem!

The result, unfortunately, is that we’re completely caught up in our thinking minds instead of living in the real world. We no longer know how to just be present to what we’re doing; there’s always a line of commentary, most often coming from within our own heads.

So even as we’re exposed to more incredible opportunities than could fit into ten lifetimes, we’re seeing record rates of depression, social isolation, anxiety, and suicides. Even conditions alleged to be entirely physical (I don’t believe anything is ever so separate) can be linked to the manic brain.

The secret is not to do more, or think differently, or be somebody else. The secret is to let the mind be still and to be present to what we’re doing, whether that’s working in a garden or punching a keyboard, trying to decide how many spaces to use. The impact is profound.