Life Lessons...How To Be Alone

How To Be Alone
by Susanna Sonnenberg

In 1984 I was 19 and on any given day roamed from dorm room to cafeteria to classroom, then on to dance class or movie theater or Chinese restaurant.  Always with friends, always out with everyone I knew.  We hurried to meet up at coffeehouses or gathered outside the library, bound by lethargy.  Of course, we had no cell phones then, but our society was strung tight by perpetual interaction, presence, plans.  We went for groceries together and to the bank machine.  Everything happened outside my head.  There was no such thing as the interior life.  I needed my friends for the noise and motion, to be entertained, to be watched.  Partly this was the teenager's way of life sophomore year, but I'm sure some college kids liked isolation and privacy - just not me.  Solitude looked gloomy to me, held no uses.  I read better when my roommate was reading across the room on her bed.  I endured the subway ride after starting a conversation with the neighboring stranger.  Even falling asleep, for those of us who had boyfriends, was social.


Did I notice, after I got my first apartment, that a certain crucial thrill came from finding everything just as I'd left it when I opened the refrigerator door?  I must have, and stored the memory away.  But it wasn't until I had a baby that solitude looked interesting, became an elusive commodity. Now with the baby, I couldn't choose my state of being anymore:  Accompanied, by myself, quiet, festive - nothing was up to me.  Now instead of finding time to fill as I would  (a chance to make phone calls, to meet my husband for lunch, a chance to fill up with other people), I was with my baby, the glue of his saliva dampening the front of my shirt, his tendril limbs wrapped around my body, and his thick, soft fingers in my mouth when I opened it to say something.


For work I was reviewing movies, and all of a sudden this was the greatest job in the world because it gave me a chance to undo myself from the baby and go.  Alone.  There in the car at the stoplight, there in the line to buy a ticket, and in the brief, crackling dark before previews, I felt quiet and wonderful, there was a pause and a peace.  And when the movie was over, I returned to my family, renewed and ready.  


I like to be alone now.  I like to taste the honey on the toast, to consider the bee batting against the window. In solitude I come together, collect the errant bits of me that have wandered away, and reassemble them .  Solitude is so fiercely that:  the chance to still oneself.  From its sacred corner I look out, see the wide world, and feel my singular place in it.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

We welcome your comments & suggestions. "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a Life Lesson article or topic you'd like to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com

Life Lessons...Always Buy Two

"...Finding a comfortable pair of jeans that still manages to make your ass look like it's fighting to get out." - Allison Glock

 Always Buy Two

by Allison Glock

There are people who trip into bliss, gentle, smiling souls who coast on a never-ending sea of frothy optimism and the immovable belief that tomorrow will bring even more blessings than today.  I am not one of those people.  I trust that life for most of the planet is a cruel, unrelenting struggle brightened only momentarily by flashes of serendipity and luck.  A baby's smile.  A punctual flight.  Finding a comfortable pair of jeans that still manages to make your ass look like it's fighting to get out.  Such gifts are as rare as comets. Which is why, when you stumble onto something perfect, something that really - no debating, no shrugging - works, you should always buy two.

I learned this lesson early from my mother, who, being a Southern lady, wore stockings to work.  She also wore diamonds, and diamonds tend to shred nylons like so much pulled pork - a cause for panic unless you happen to have another pair stashed in your bureau drawer, which my mother inevitably did because she always bought two.  Of course, she could have removed her diamonds prior to pulling on her stockings, but because she'd bought two, she didn't have to.  And really - who removes diamonds when it isn't strictly necessary?


During an average day, most women drown in compromise.  Good enough.  It'll do. They look okay.  That's fine. At least he's employed.  Sure. I don't mind.  Whatever.  No, really.


When indisputable flawlessness enters our worn little worlds, it is cause for celebration.  And for stocking up.  I'm nt talking about SUVs or face-lifts here, but basics.  Staples. The white T-shirt that compassionately floats over your stomach.  The boots that don't suffocate your calves.  Lip gloss that gives you the pout of a teenager without sticking to your hair.  Toilet paper that doesn't shred or leave dust on your bathroom floor.  


Two offer symmetry and security.  With two you never ever run out.  With two you can break one.  With two you can breathe easy.  Three many seem even safer, but it borders on overkill and eats up valuable storage space.  Unless you're Oprah, who I've heard, buys 10 because she can.  Start with two.


.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

Image: Robin Bardot skinny jeans

We welcome your comments & suggestions. "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a Life Lesson article or topic you'd like to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com

 

Life Lessons...Less Is More

We welcome your comments & suggestions. This new feature "Life Lessons" now appears weekly... If you have a Life Lesson topic you'd like to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Less Is More

by Tracy Chevalier

Twelve years ago I left a job in publishing to do an MA in creative writing. My boss, Daniel - a fine editor who taught me everything I know about fixing bad writing - gave me as a farewell present an eraser inscribed with the famous dictum by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: LESS IS MORE. At the time I thought he was simply being witty, but in retrospect he couldn't have been more prescient if he had thrust a Vermeer painting in my arms and said, "Here, write about this - and keep it simple!"

Simplicity is a virtue that comes with experience. When I look back on early writing attempts, I cringe at my wordiness: the unnecessary adverbs, the elaborate synonyms for said (exhorted, anyone?), the tortuous formal sentence structures. As an editor I began to apply the less is more approach to others' writing, muttering to myself, "When in doubt, cut it out," as I wielded my red pen.

But it was really only when I wrote the novel Girl With a Pearl Earring and decided to try to imitate Vermeer's painting technique with words that I incorporated spareness into my own style. A poet friend helped, looking at my sentences and showing me how many words were unnecessary and could be discarded without losing meaning. It's surprising how little you need to tell a story. Vermeer painted many of his works in the same corner of the same room and he managed to reveal a whole world in that corner. I too discovered that simplicity doesn't mean a story is less complex

Ove the years I have applied "Less is More" to other parts of my life too. I wear less jewelry now - earrings or neclace, not both. I use tinted lip balm rather than lipstick and apply mascara only to my upper lashes. I avoid patterns in clothes. I listen to sonatas more often than to symphonies.

Sometimes I'll read a particularly baroque sentence in a novel and say to myself, I wish I could do that - rather the way a woman accustomed to wearing Armani might wonder whether she could pull off a Versace moment. But I know what's best for me - I've applied Daniel's eraser to my writing and to my life and it has made all the difference.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
Image: 'Beckoning' by Mike Pedersen

Life Lessons...The Past Can Set You Free

We welcome your comments & suggestions. This new feature "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a Life Lesson Topic you'd like to read about or have a life lesson that you've written about and would like us to post, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

The Past Can Set You Free

by Amy Tan

For the first 30 years or so of my life, I tried to distance myself from my mother and her dark waters. She flailed as she called out senseless tragedies: the suicide of her mother, her first marriage to an evil man, her second marriage cursed by the deaths of her husband and son just six months apart.
I, her ungrateful and secretive child, was often on the list of laments. She would pound her chest and wail, "Why?"

I tuned out her complaints. I vowed never to be like my mother, who tormented herself with what could not be changed. Nonetheless, I still feared being pulled down by her undertow.

Twenty-one years ago, when I felt that my work had become meaningless, I began to write fiction - just for pleasure, I told myself. Yet no matter how different I made the characters from the people in my life, my family crept in and made all the stories seem bleak and senseless.

About a year later, after believing my mother had died of a heart attack, I was jolted into realizing how little I knew of her. So for the first time, when my mother recounted those same sad stories, I listened. I wanted to know what had happened and why. As I imagined the past - the grand house, the hollow room, the still woman on the bed - suddenly I was there, experiencing it as it unfolded. I was the little girl with the breaking heart. I was alone with my dead mother lying on the bed. And I was crying as she did: "Why can't you take me with you?"

Dwelling in the past wasn't useless, I discovered, for I could change it. I could witness my mother's hopelessness as she endured the unbearable. I could be her voice, her mother's voice, the voice of the voiceless. And I could finally give meaning to all she had gone through. That was what she had wanted all her life. That was what I wanted as well: to give meaning to my life.

In freeing her, I freed myself. The legacy of my family is no longer dead weight. It buoys me with strength and curiosity. It is a reminder to look at all thing - the ordinary, the wondrous, and especially the difficult - and to ask why. In so doing, I see the many answers as they continue to unfold in the past and in the new day.

repost from American Elle: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
Image: 1912 - Lucile with a client and mannequin at a fitting

.

REMEMBER: We love to hear what you have to say. Your comments can be posted anonymously.

Life Lessons...Quit Comparing Yourself

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" now appears every Saturday... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

"I will reward each one according to their faithfulness. You're on a even playing field with everyone!"

~ Don Franklin

Quit Comparing Yourself

by Daphne Merkin

I have often wondered whether I am tone deaf when it comes to learning from experience, whether I lack the basic self-preserving mechanism that would lead me to draw the requisite conclusions and not open the wrong door again, ushering in the same old demons in new outfits. It would be a nice compensatory gleam of light on the bleak horizon of growing older [as well as saggier and more forgetful] if the idea that people accumulate wisdom with age were a self-evident truth rather than an example of wishful thinking. But if Freud got anything right, it was that we humans suffer from repetition compulsion. I think of all my doomed romantic choices, despite umpteen years of costly therapy and rabid introspection and my refrain might well be: Do it to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you.

And yet even I have to admit to a small but signal change that has come with the passage of years. By the time I turned 40, I had stopped [well, almost] comparing myself to others. I had ceased, that is, running a kind of permanent college reunion in my head, a life contest in which I always fell last in the lineup of imaginary rivals. It's a psychological tic -a corrosive habit of mind- that is almost impossible to break. Virginia Woolf was beset by this compulsion, aided no doubt by the fact that she was one of many siblings and was intensely competitive with her older sister, Vanessa. Her need to scope out her place in the literary landscape among other women writers, such as Katherine Mansfield, is writ large in her letters and journals and frequently got in the way of her friendships.

I myself grew up as one of six closely spaced siblings and my mother compared and contrasted us with one another at every opportunity, usually to my detriment. My two sisters and I were examined and characterized in mutually exclusive terms; they were what I was not, they had what I was missing. So I formed the notion that the only way to know what I was feeling about my life was to assess it according to the self-incriminating standards set by others. Being a person of hyperventilating, even brutal imagination, I took this to ludicrous extremes. I remember lying on a beach chair in Maui on my honeymoon, wondering why I wasn't on someone else's honeymoon. [Yes, my marriage eventually ended in divorce.]

I knew I had to change. I had before me as a cautionary example a much older friend, a woman writer who had been married to a more famous literary figure. Both of them had been part of the incestuous circle known as the New York intellectuals, and my friend had never come to terms with her place in the world, continuing to be racked into her old age by feelings of being insufficiently admired, compared with Mary McCarthy, say , or Hannah Arendt. Watching this woman ravage herself scared me. Somewhere along the line I stared experimentng with inhabiting my own life, without recourse to envisioning the life of imaginary or real Others. Having a child helped ease me into the constriction - and occasional vivid pleasures- of being me and no one else on this carpet ride. I'm not yet up to celebrating myself a la Walt Whitman, but one of these days I just might get there.

repost from American Elle Magazine: "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"
...Image: "The Rokeby Venus" by Diego Velazquez

.

Life Lessons...Perspective, Perspective

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" will now appear on Saturdays... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Perspective, Perspective

by A.M. Homes

It's hard to know what came first, my desire to not worry or an overload of the worry systems---so much to worry about that I couldn't possibly do it all. Maybe it was a brush with death -or watching others die-and the birth of my child. I'm pretty sure it was right in there between death and birth...losing a parent I'd never known, a beloved grandmother, and a best friend...and watching the planes hit the World Trade Center from my window. After all that and my daughter's birth, following two miscarriages and years of fertility treatments, I like to think I've gained a certain perspective.

Maybe it was also the fractured disk I suffered seven months into my pregnancy, the two months I spent in a wheelchair and my accidental opportunity to experience the world and its flaws as a handicapped person...and then the back surgery four days after the baby was born, which left me wondering if I would walk again. I learned a lot -or more like I gave up a lot. Any ideas I had that one has control over one's life, surroundings, destiny all went out the window. And with that came freedom--I no longer care how great my hair looks or whether I have the right clothes for a party [Well, OK, I still care-but less than I used to]. Frankly, as a single working mom with a two-year old, I find just showing up a minor miracle.

Importantly, though, it wasn't as if this perspective just "happened". It was a decision I made to step back, to learn to wait, to pause before reacting. I meditate, I breathe, I remember to wait--if not necessarily to think--before acting: to feel and to note what I am feeling and to tell myself that it is just a feeling or a thought and that not everything needs to be acted on. I have taught myself to be mindful of small moments. And when I'm having a bad day, when I can't get a real person on the phone, when it feels as though all of life has been outsourced, I take inventory--beginning with the acknowledgment that I am in fact very lucky, I have a happy child, I am walking --and today, at least, no one I know has died. On good and bad days alike, I am also aware of what I can do for others--extending out of my own life and into someone else's, not just taking care of myself and my own but embracing the larger world. Maybe I knew that already--but it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

repost from Elle Magazine's "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"

.

Life Lessons...Enjoy Your Skinny Years

Our New Feature "Life Lessons" will now appear on Saturdays... If you have a suggestion for a Life Lesson you'd like to read about, have one you'd like to post or would like to suggest another type of feature, please email us at EyeCandy58@yahoo.com.

Enjoy Your Skinny [or Skinnier] Years

by Ayelet Waldman

I have a notoriously dreadful memory. I forget everything: the titles of books I've read, the plots of movies I've seen, my children's favourite colours. Once, when I was single and living in New York, the true extent of my wretched momory was brought home by an unexpected phone call. The caller told me his name and waited. I felt a familiar clutch of discomfort. Was I supposed to remember him? "From college?" He said, "Jesus, Aylet. We slept together!" I paused, waiting for his name or his voice to trigger something, anthing. Finally I said, "I'm really sorry, but you're just going to have to narrow that field down a little more for me."

There is one aspect of my life, however, for which I possess perfect recall: I have a photographic memory for my bathroom scale. I'm like one of those savants who can recite the day of the week for any date in history. Tell me September 1986 and I'll say 102 pounds. May 1992? 107. July 1997? 170 [calm yourself, I was about to give birth].

I have always, from the moment I passed the 100-pound mark in my sophomore year, done battle with my weight. I've never been fat [pregnant! I was pregnant!], but I've spent the past 21 years feeling fat. I felt fat last June at 124 pounds, nine pounds more than the maximum dictated by the charts for a person of my height and birdbone frame--but I also felt fat in June of 1993 when I weighed 112 pounds...and in June of 1989 when the scale read an earthsaking 105.

I wasted so much skinny time torturing myself about my weight.
I've never had an eating disorder; my one attempt at bulimia involved six eclairs that tasted oddly the same on the way up as on the way down [March 1985: 101 pounds]. That experience has kept my fingers out of my throat ever since. But I've spent far too many of my waking hours the way so many of us do, standing in front of the fun house mirror in my bathroom, staring at every part of my body blown up out of all proportion and reality by my anxiety and self-loathing. If I had known in September 1991 [105] that 10 years later I'd be packing on 19 extra pounds, I would have worn a bikini! I would have pierced my belly button! I would never have worn relaxed-fit jeans.

This morning the scale read 120 and I thought, 'God, I'm so fat.' And then it occurred to me: Twenty-one years from now, am I going to wish I hadn't wasted this moment feeling fat? If there is a single lesson I've learned in the past 21 years, it's that as time goes by, most of us only get bigger. Someday I'll remember these years as skinny ones and I'll regret having wasted them just as much as I now reget my foolishness during the past 21. One of the hardest things to do is to see your body clearly. After 21 years, isn't it about time for me to do that? And anyway, if I think I'm fat now, just imagine what I'm going to look like in 2026.

repost from Elle Magazine's "The Most Important Thing I've Learned"