This post is not for the relentlessly ambitious, nor is it for those who feel no driving need to accomplish any particular thing in this life. This post is for the rest of us: The ones who feel like we should be out “living life” when we’re buried deep in our work. The same ones who suffer the nagging pressure to get back to work when doing anything that isn’t work. (We know who we are.)

So, if like me, your Sisyphean attempts to push that rock (novel, start-up, thesis) up the hill find you second-guessing your every move and feeling guilty about both what you’re doing and what you’re not doing, read on.

My personal guilt cycle goes something like this:

1. I’m not getting any younger.

2.  I need to finish editing this book.

3. There’s more to life than this damn book.

4. I should be _______  (Fill in the blank with any of the fun, groovy activities I’m not doing  because I’m always editing the book.)

5. I should really be working on the next book.

6. I’m not getting any younger.

When the guilt cycle hits high spin, it’s not pretty.

Some people blame the human penchant for guilt on centuries of the Judeo-Christian work ethic, but when it comes to guilt about time, I blame the aphorism.

Aphorisms are those pithy little observations that are said to impart a general truth. But even the briefest glance at a list of common aphorisms reveals their tendency to mind-boggling contradiction:

Look before you leap. / He who hesitates is lost.

The more the merrier. / Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

Stop and smell the roses. / Keep your nose to the grindstone.

Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile. / Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. (In that case, better give him the inch first.)

And then there’s the mother of all contradictory aphorisms: Live each day as if it were your last.

It sounds so lofty, so noble, doesn’t it? But like a salted caramel latte laced with chocolate, it’s packed with guilt. Taunting us that it’s not enough to muddle through each day, doing the best we can with some mundane blend of work, chores, errands, and goofing off. Live-each-day-as-if-it-were-your-last, like a cop with a heavy nightstick, lays on the pressure: Are you having the most amazing, profound life you can? Or are you just taking up oxygen?

If I were truly living today as if it were my last, I would begin with a huge stack of blueberry pancakes, spend the morning browsing bookstores, and then pick one of those tomes to enjoy over a cup of good java at my favorite café. After lunch (a sizeable slab of cheesecake) on the rooftop deck of the local bistro, I’d relax in a hot tub with my husband and enjoy a couples massage. I’d cap it all off with a night of dancing and a bottle of Italian red.

It would indeed be a great DAY, but I have some serious doubts about it making a great LIFE.

Recently, in the throes of this dilemma (while folding the laundry—a compromise—it’s not editing the book, but it’s not goofing off either), I paused long enough to see an interview with Frances Fox Piven on MSNBC’s The Last Word. It was a moment of clarity: Eighty-three years young, Fox Piven has spent her life fighting the good fight. Talking to Lawrence O’Donnell, she radiated strength, humor, intelligence, and stamina. Watching her, I thought: She is exactly what I hope to be.

Now, I can’t say what Fox Piven’s life has been, but here are a few of the known facts:

• She is a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
• She grew up in Queens, attended P.S. 148, earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., all from the University of Chicago—a scholarship student, she waited tables to make ends meet.
• She has served on the board of the ACLU and held office in various professional associations including the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
• She’s written books galore including Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
• She has devoted her life to social activism and made significant contributions to social theory.

All this sounds glamorous. A life of exclamation points. But I strongly suspect that a woman who says, “I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society,” is no stranger to roadblocks, frustration, setbacks, and uncertainties. To work for social justice is to take on the Hydra whose heads multiply by a factor of ten for every one slain. One just rolls with it. All of it.

And rolling with life—all of it—may be the antidote to guilt. Guilt eats our energy, leaves us doubting, renders us unable to fully engage with whatever we’re doing (yes, even if what we’re doing is playing online solitaire).

Instead of always feeling guilty for what we think we should be doing, or what we fear we’re neglecting, or what we might have accomplished by now, I think it may be enough to just be. To say, at the end of the day: I had a day, and with any luck I’ll have another tomorrow.

Imagine the possibilities for happiness in that.

As Pete Seeger (by way of Ecclesiastes) wrote:    

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven.
 

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”                                                                                                                              (Henry David Thoreau)

It’s mid-January and, depending on your personal tolerance for masochism, you may already be hearing the crack! of those New Year’s resolutions. You know the ones I’m talking about: eat less, exercise more, eliminate stress, organize your closet/house/universe. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these goals. The problem is they quickly drain enthusiasm because they address our shoulds but not our dreams. No one lives to lose ten pounds. So, before we get much older, let’s make a pact and declare 2016 the year we embrace our dreams. Go all out. Lay the foundations for, or continue building the life we really want, the one that speaks to our true selves.

Everyone harbors dreams. Listen to kids. They can invent a million dreams on a summer afternoon. But by the time we’re adults, that equation has shifted to a million reasons why we can’t pursue our heart’s desire: How can I become an artist/dancer/open my own B&B when I’ve got student loans to pay down/ three kids to feed/am past age 50? It’s true, there’s a world of responsibilities at 40 you never imagined at 10, but there’s also a lot more fear: What if people think I’m crazy? What if I try and don’t make it?

You can drown in reasons and argue with your fears forever. Nothing untried can be proved or disproved. So I will repeat here the best piece of advice I ever got from a writers’ conference: Leap and the net will appear.

As a college student in the Midwest, I used to hitch rides with kids driving home to the NYC area on semester breaks. Arriving in Manhattan, I’d rent a student room for $6/day on the upper floors of a Madison Avenue hotel and walk. Everywhere. I just needed to breathe in that “center of the world” energy and hope because it was my energy and hope, too. After college, I landed a job as editor at a publishing company in Michigan, and traveled the country learning the ropes of the apparel trade while writing how-to-succeed articles for women’s retailers. I met a lot of good people, but it wasn’t my dream. So, I turned in my resignation, loaded up my VW Bug, and drove to Boston where I signed a lease on a small apartment. (I figured it was easier to be poor in Boston than NYC.)

I leapt and—miracle!—the net did appear. For me, it was the offer my company made to continue my editorship on a contractual basis from my Boston home. It was a great and unexpected gift, saving me the hassle of looking for work, but if it hadn’t happened, I would have waited tables or manned the Slurpee machine at my local 7-11 to support my writing. Sometimes, someone else holds out the net. Sometimes, we have to weave it ourselves. Usually, it’s a combination of both. But mostly, it’s about wanting something so much and believing you are capable. When you see with the eyes of a dream, you begin to spot opportunities outside the range of normal vision. (Don’t worry, it’s not all Shangri-la. I’m going to fess up to some BIG mistakes before we’re through here, and I invite you to laugh long and loud or shake your head in despair of me. I just want to illustrate that nets do appear, and you often have to leap before you see them.)

So, I moved to Boston, wrote my first novel, revised it a bunch of times, and tackled a few short stories. Doing my old job outside an office gave me a lot more hours to write. (It’s amazing how much time gets wasted in offices.)

It’s true that when you’re young, you don’t worry so much about stepping outside the conventional. You’re not particularly dizzied at the idea of beating your own path. Indeed, unless you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, what else can you do in your early 20s? But, I don’t believe our dreams vanish with age. More like they get shoved into some dark corner and silenced in the cacophony of our busy lives. Doubts creep in, grow up around them, cut off their oxygen. We must fight this silencing. A Facebook friend, Jo Anne Shumard, recently posted this: “Doubt is like being afraid to color outside the lines. Do it anyway.”

What happens, though, if you make a mistake, maybe many mistakes? Well, you will. Obstacles arise. Things fall apart. Failure lurks. That first novel I referred to earlier? After typing THE END, I mentioned it to my hairdresser. She had a sister whose college roommate had become an assistant editor at what is today a division of one of the Big Five publishing houses in New York. Cut to the chase: I had lunch with the sister. She recommended me to her editor friend. I sent off the manuscript and the editor loved it. Yes! I thought, I’m on my way! The catch was that as an assistant, she needed her boss, a senior editor, to read the book. A second letter arrived three months later. The senior editor liked my book, but had a list of specific changes he wanted to see before making an offer. Still great, right? Except I was so young and so clueless about the industry and had yet to meet other writers, I thought this meant I had bombed. I put the novel in a drawer and went off to Europe. (I know. I know. I can only offer this example as one that perfectly answers the question: How dumb can you be?)

But doubts don’t kill you. Mistakes don’t kill you. I continued writing and had kids and paid the bills by doing freelance articles for business publications and newspapers. From there, I broke into feature articles for women’s magazines and got a regular gig online. I made and still make decent money editing college texts. But I never gave up fiction.  I went to writers’ conferences, joined critique groups, and just kept learning my craft. And now I’ve got a novel I’m shopping and another I’m writing. Life is good. Hard sometimes, but good. Kathryn Stockett tells the story of how she revised and revised her novel The Help while getting rejections that would have crushed a lesser soul (“There’s no market for this kind of tiring writing.”), BUT the 61^st  agent she queried said yes. The Help enjoyed a long ride on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than a million copies, and was made into a movie. Seriously, read her story here. She will inspire you to never quit.

Yes, luck definitely plays a role. There are so many things we don’t control. But I’ve always liked the quote by humorist/writer Sam Levenson (on the struggle up from his immigrant tenement childhood): “I discovered that the more I hustled, the luckier I seemed to get.”

What happens, though, if you go for your dreams and they don’t materialize in the way you  imagined? Well, what does? If you strive for your dreams until your last breath, and that last breath finds you still striving, you will have lived a life pursuing what you loved. There are worse epitaphs. As business magnates are fond of telling us, all opportunity carries risk. But you can’t really do a risk assessment on your dreams without asking: What do I risk by not following my heart?

So, as we launch out into 2016, I wish you a year—and a lifetime—of dreams. Remember that John Lennon was once dismissed as “hopeless” and “certainly on the road to failure.” Stephen King worked a drudge job in an industrial laundry while writing Carrie. Even Albert Einstein was told he “[would] never amount to anything.” All they had were their dreams, a fierce belief in themselves, and an unquenchable determination.

So, keep leaping. And maybe pack a few bandages.

 

 

 

“The Oak King” by Emily Balivet (for more by this artist, click here )

 

This New Year’s Eve Let’s Party Like It’s 1099

In general, I’m not a big one for rituals, but the Solstice exerts some weird influence on me and I find myself feverishly steeped in holiday traditions. The buying of a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. The production of 27 dozen cookies and two pounds of fudge to be tinned and shipped hither and yon (an event known at our house as the Bake-a-Thon). Perhaps, the most “sacred” among these annual doings is the viewing of six holiday-themed movies, ending on Christmas Eve with the 1984 George C. Scott A Christmas Carol.

I have many favorite scenes from this lush version of Dickens’s tale, but oddly what most sticks in my head is a little throw-away bit where Tiny Tim and the whole Crachit gang belt out a song. “Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green; Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen,” they sing blithely, huddled cheek-by-jowl in their dark little hovel. No matter that Bob Crachit’s boss Scrooge is, well, a scrooge, or that the Grim Reaper may soon claim Tiny Tim, the Crachits are imbued with the Christmas spirit, and damn if it isn’t infectious. I find myself humming that tune even in the sweltering heat of July, but what exactly does it mean: Here we come a-wassailing?

Digression #1: I have always been a sucker for the mysterious power of words. As a child, I was bewitched by Edward Lear’s line in “The Owl and the Pussycat”: “They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon.” “Runcible,” a delicious slice of language that runs joyfully over the tongue. The Collins Dictionary defines a runcible spoon as a “forklike utensil with two broad prongs and one sharp, curving prong, as used for serving hors d’oeuvres.” Runcible, it notes, is a nonsense term coined in 1871 by Lear. Apparently, he used it to refer to a variety of objects, including cats, in his poems. We invent the language we need.

So, back to this wassailing thing. Wassail itself is a hot drink made with wine, beer, or cider, spices, sugar, and usually baked apples. Traditionally, it is served in a large communal bowl with handles and passed around at celebrations for Twelfth Night and Christmas Eve. (Wassail and wassailing clearly predate germ theory.) This would have been the wassail Shakespeare knew.

The original wassail was simply warmed mead—ale brewed with honey. Roasted crab apples, dropped into the mead, burst tartly to create a drink called “Lamb’s Wool” drunk on Lammas Day, which is nowhere near Twelfth Night (more about this later).

The word “wassail” was first noted in the 12^th Century by the Normans as characteristic of the English, but seems to have been in usage for several centuries before that, a cobbled hybrid of the various groups who were always invading England in the dark old days—Vikings, Danes—with perhaps a dash of the native Druids. At any rate, by the time William the Conqueror arrived, wassailing was as English as Tooting Bec.

Digression #2: For the etymologists among you, Merriam-Webster reports the Middle English version of the word, wæs hæil, washayl, developed from the Old Norse ves heill “be well,” from ves (imperative singular of vera to be) + heill healthy. (Think on that next time you have a skull-splitting hangover.)

Besides going from house to house singing Christmas carols, “wassail” is also a term for “riotous reveling.” Listed among its synonyms are: bender, drunk, carouse, toot. Wassailing in this context involves imbibing liberal amounts of alcohol and enjoying oneself with friends in a noisy, lively manner. Of course, it’s entirely possible to do this in conjunction with singing Christmas carols for a real Wassail Whammy.

The point of all this caroling and carousing in medieval England was to awaken the cider apple trees while frightening away the evil spirits who might interfere with a good harvest the following year.

And it’s still going on. In a scenario straight out of the British ITV series Midsomer Murders, the Apple Orchard Wassailing takes place at Carhampton each year on January 17, the date of Twelfth Night before England adopted the Gregorian calendar. The Wassailers build a bonfire and pour cider around the trunk of the biggest apple tree.

They then—and this is my favorite part—hang cider-soaked pieces of toast from the branches. In theory, this appeases the robins who represent the “good spirits” of the tree. Personally, I think it’s the sort of thing that happens when the cider is flowing a little too freely. But wait, there’s more. Someone (hopefully, the soberest) fires a shotgun overhead to frighten away evil spirits and the assembled group sings “Old apple tree, we wassail thee . . .”

Digression #3: I promised you a note on Lammas, the origin of the drink Lamb’s Wool (you’ll find a recipe below). Shakespeare mentions Juliet’s birth on Lammas Eve, but Lammas Day, August 1, predates the Bard by centuries. Pagan in origin, Lammas was the first of three autumn harvest festivals in the medieval agricultural year (marking the end of the haying that had begun at Midsummer). Among the romps enjoyed in this merrymaking was the “loosing of a sheep” in the meadow among the mowers “for him to keep who could catch it.” (God, I love the English!)

So, as we prepare to ring in the New Year, having fired up the Yule Log (relinquishing the dark half of the year and celebrating the rebirth of the Oak King on Solstice Night), and hung up the Mistletoe (representing the seed of the Divine, and gathered long ago in the forest by Druids at Midwinter), let us wassail loudly and joyfully in a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

To quote Dr. Chasuble (The Importance of Being Ernest): Isn’t language a curious thing?

 

RECIPE FOR LAMB’S WOOL (WASSAIL)

Author Roberta Trahan contributed this Americanized, easy-to-make version of a traditional Old English recipe when she was a guest host on Stephanie Dray’s website.

Ingredients

3 apples, peeled, cored & finely chopped

3 tablespoons butter

3 (12 ounce) bottles dark beer

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a casserole dish, bake apples and butter for 30 minutes or until the apples are soft.

In a large saucepan combine: apples, beer, brown sugar and spices. Heat until hot, and serve (unstrained) in mugs.

If you’d like to try your hand at the more authentic old-world brew, click here.