How to End One Year and Begin Another

If our calendars made sense the new year would start the day after the December solstice. We make it through the shortest day and longest night (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). We begin to turn toward the light, toward warmth, toward growth.

Or maybe instead of immediately writing a new date we would have a set of "un-days". Days that appear on no one's calendar (except those that bring you wages or benefits). Days with no work, no expectations. Time dedicated to wrapping things up, taking stock, making everything clean and organized or catching up on sleep. Whatever it takes to feel refreshed and recharged, ready to begin again.

We don't have that. Instead we have a hurly-burly of various traditions that mark the turn toward the light but in so doing create expectations and pressure.

Buy this, cook that. Wrap this, decorate that. Don't clean to create a fresh, calming space -- clean so that people can be impressed by your housekeeping and then mess it all up so you have it to do all over again.

That's what I grew up with. My mom created a beautiful Christmas every year with delicious food, she selected and wrapped gifts with care, she made dozens of cookies of various types to create those magazine-ready plates, she decorated the whole house and everything smelled good. She also didn't work full-time outside the home.

We're done with that model and it feels pretty damn good.

It helps not to have small children who are subjected to social pressure that creates expectations that fall on parents. We have grown kids who profess delight with the cash and gift cards and whatever we feel like cooking.

This year it isn't exactly a "help" that I ended up really sick with a respiratory flu the week before a planned two-week vacation. The days that had few meetings, that I would have spent writing and analyzing and dealing with the email backlog in peace and quiet, turned into days lying on the sofa with generic cough/flu syrup, a water bottle, my Kindle, and some pillows to soften my fall into the sleep that kept dragging me downward to the horizontal.

Oh well. It is what it is.

That's the key to my winter holiday plan: It is what it is.

Examples of what this looks like as I do the things I enjoy, maintain continuity with my memories in ways that work for who I am today, and keep it manageable:

No Christmas tree. 

Instead, Second Daughter and I spent a very pleasant day (on a weekend before the flu hit) going through the ornaments. I had accumulated a bunch I didn't really care about, and had some I got to give each of the kids a start on their own collection. We sorted these out and made a box for Youngest who wants to build up her collection.

I used the ones I like to decorate windowsills and hung them from lamps. We have a cheerfully decorated living space that will be easy to clean up and I emptied one of the storage boxes from the garage as part of my ongoing downsizing.

No giant spread of forty-'leven kinds of cookies. 

I experimented a week or so ago with a vegan shortcake. Pro tip: don't substitute ground almonds for part of the flour or you'll have a gooey something that tastes good but isn't shortcake. Next time I may try this cardamom snickerdoodle recipe instead.

While Second Daughter was there for the weekend I made a batch of cinnamon stars from the 1963 Betty Crocker Cookbook I grew up with because they sounded interesting and were pretty easy. I also made (with her help) the one cookie I'll make every year due to popular demand, the candy cane cookies topped with crushed peppermints/sugar from that same cookbook. Talking about this cookbook on Twitter led to a fun exchange.

My grown kids always request candy cane cookies, from this 1963 Betty Crocker cookbook. Fair amount of hand work for relatively few cookies but they're delicious. Making them this coming weekend. pic.twitter.com/8OeOFKSSsk

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) December 8, 2019

It was my mom's and I baked out of it as a kid. I will own it until I die and will it to my children.

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) December 8, 2019

In years past I've made spritz with my mom's old cookie press; frosted cookies that took forever and honestly were more interesting to look at than to eat and thus not worth the effort; snickerdoodles with green and red sprinkles because snickerdoodles are The Cookie for me as long as they're bendy in the middle; and various other treats.

Cooking what I feel like eating, spread over a few days instead of in one massive blowout that encourages overeating.

The flu is passing and cooking is one of my favorite things to do when I have a whole day and no time pressure. Yesterday I made a batch of Sarah Gailey's lasagna (did you know "lasagna" is the singular and "lasagne" is the plural?).

Today we made a grocery run to get ingredients for things I feel like cooking and eating over the next few days while Second Daughter hangs out for some cuddle time and Mom cooking. These recipes let me make maximum use of oven heat and will yield some leftovers I can freeze for future lunches. The list is likely to include:

• Portabello mushrooms stuffed with something along the lines of quinoa, sweet bell peppers, and pine nuts, topped with vegan romesco or muhamarra (it's a toss-up -- love them both)
• Roasted butternut squash with really good 25-year-old balsamic vinegar (the kind that pours like rich syrup, from The Oilerie in Burien where we did some tasting on one of our coffeeneuring dates as part of my birthday celebrating that stretched over a few weeks) and some chili garlic oil my younger sister gave me on one of our sisters' weekends, with the option of regular feta or a vegan feta I found in a nicely expanded vegan section at Fred Meyer
• Roasted broccoli because I love it
• Champagne mashed potatoes, another Sarah Gailey recipe she shared in a series of tweets starting with this one
• Waldorf salad with a vegan cashew cream dressing (the one from the recipe below) or the yogurt-based dressing from this vegan Waldorf salad recipe
• Vegan broccoli/red grape salad with dressing options: Thai peanut or a balsamic vinaigrette because I have those on hand. To this recipe I always add shredded red cabbage, grated carrots, and some diced sweet bell peppers in various colors. It's beautiful and tasty.
• Southern lemon pie with a saltine cracker crust that I'm going to try converting to vegan. I link to the NPR story with the recipe because that's what got me started making this. I found a recipe for vegan sweetened condensed (coconut) milk and picked up some vegan spread to use in the crust in place of butter.
• Vegan cream of mushroom soup. Super simple and so delicious. Last time I made this I had some cauliflower I needed to use up. I boiled that and a few potatoes, pureed them in the food processor with some homemade veggie broth, and made that part of the creamy base for the soup. It was fantastic. I add celery to this recipe.
• Decidedly unvegan cornbread from an old New York Times Magazine recipe that involves pouring whipping cream into the middle to create a custardy center, baked in a heated cast iron pan for a crispy crust.
• Vegan nog, which takes all of about 5 minutes because I have nut milk and coconut milk on hand and make cashew cream ahead and keep it in the freezer

This sounds like a lot. But my mom would have done something like this list plus a turkey, gravy, three more kinds of pie, glazed carrots, peas and mushrooms in a wine sauce, and rolls, all for one day in which she also trotted out at least half a dozen homemade hors d'oeuvres platters and the forty-leven cookie varieties.

I'm doing my cooking spread out over at least two days, maybe three. And this list is only one in my head, not something to which I've committed that a dozen or more people will show up to eat at a specific date and time.

No gift shopping on a timeline. Don't get me wrong; I love giving gifts. I like giving them at times people aren't expecting them as a "just because".

I don't ignore the gift-giving element at this time of year; I'm enough of a product of my upbringing that it would feel pretty cold not to give a gift now. But it's sure easier when I don't have to fight people at the mall.

I gave Eldest Daughter and her beau a movie gift card early so they could use it for the Star Wars opening and they now have half a dozen or so movie dates to look forward to. (She also got dental work paid for, which is a little challenging to wrap....) Second Daughter is going to get a shopping expedition to prepare her for some international travel with things she needs (or things I think she needs, like mosquito netting and a rechargeable flashlight -- shhh, don't tell her). Engineering Student Son gets a gift certificate for the online gaming platform he frequents. Youngest Daughter -- yep, another gift certificate.

Seriously, I remember the year my mom finally gave up trying to guess at my personal style and instead just sent me downtown with her credit cards as one of the best Christmases ever so this is not a copout, this is responsive parenting.

As for Sweet Hubs, the other thing I did to make the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year pretty perfect was to book a getaway to the hotel where we spent our honeymoon. We'll celebrate our date-a-versary there: the 14th anniversary of our first date, which happens to fall on my parents' wedding anniversary. We'll have a fireplace, a spa tub, a view of the ocean, and no expectations other than being together.

That's how to end the old year and start the new year. Relaxed, happy, content, in love. It is what it is.

Five Ways Microsoft Word Teaches Buddhist Principles and Practice

Start by opening.

Sit with the possibilities of the blank page. This meditation will help you attain Samadhi, or the mental discipline required to achieve mastery over one’s mind.

All is impermanence. Things change. You have to accept and move on.

When you change words in something with a hanging indent, bullets or other formatting, it looks wrong until you accept that change. Then it falls into line.

You have made a change and the effects will be felt but this does not show immediately.

Let go of attachment(s).

The Buddha taught us that attachment causes suffering. This is certainly true at work, where an email with an attachment almost always brings more work (i.e. suffering) than one without attachment.

Let go of the need to control outcomes. Suffering ends when craving ends.

You can delude yourself into thinking that you have control and drive yourself into negative feelings of anger, even rage. Or you can accept that sometimes things just don’t work the way you expect them to, let go of your attachment (perhaps delete it), and free your mind.

Thus will you attain nirvana and enlightenment.

A Life Manifesto. Or, as Oprah Would Say,Live Your Best Life

For me the word manifesto has distinct political connotations. Wikipedia backs me up on this. Seeing it these days attached to “life” as in “life manifesto” has felt a bit funny, even for someone like me with a long history of political awareness and engagement. Am I supposed to nail my 95 political beliefs to the door somewhere? (Confirmed as a Lutheran in high school—can you tell? It didn’t stick though.)

But then hey, it’s the new year. Time for a fresh start and all that. Resolutions? Nah. Too trite, too frangible, too much effort followed by guilt. Manifesto? Hmmm.

Mousing around yesterday I encountered Gwen Bell’s piece on preparing your life manifesto. A lot of these pieces have you creating visions of the future life you want to lead, very specific goals (which have to have deadlines to count as goals), or the life list/bucket list of things to do before you die (the ultimate to-do list with the Grim Reaper running the timer).

Her article is no exception. It does have fun options from the artsy-craftsy magazine collage approach (Eldest Daughter is all over this one) to the techno-enabled Lululemon Goaltending free worksheet for goal-setting.

These all have a fatal flaw for me (plus Eldest Daughter has all the good magazines at her new apartment). They seem to be about doing rather than being. We are human beings, not human doings.

Rather than the to-do list approach I think it’s more useful to have a to-be list.

As in, what kind of person do I want to be? Then I will just be that person in whatever “doing” circumstances life happens to hand me or I develop myself (which, as I’ve pointed out here and here, I have a tendency to overdo).

Another way of describing this list is as a set of values.

My career and life pathways may explain my preference for this kind of manifesto. Setting out without any specific career goals beyond “I’d like to work in publishing” and “I think politics and public service matter” with my two bachelor’s degrees from Washington State University under my belt took me to some amazing and wonderful places: VP of a (really really) small publishing company, the Idaho state legislature, short-time history teacher and later chairman of the board at North Idaho College, grad student, and my current role of nearly 13 years heading up communications at WSU Spokane, where we’re building the health sciences/medical campus of the future despite the rocky economy.

I usually describe my career path as serendipitous. Then I go on to say that serendipity is what happens to people who are paying attention. The readiness is all, as Hamlet noted, whether your personal sparrow is falling today or next year.

If I had started out with a really specific career goal and focused only on that I might have missed some wonderful opportunities. Being open to the possibilities and saying yes when it scared me a bit has had tremendous value.

The key linkage between things I’ve loved doing—serving in public office, teaching, communicating, drumming up support for bike commuting and active transportation—is that all of them require that I master a body of specialized knowledge and information and communicate about that content persuasively to other people in an effort to convince them to support a specific action or direction. That’s me. So I’ve got the “doing” part of Barb Chamberlain pretty well nailed.

The upbringing I received from my parents is worth a post of its own. That and all I’ve learned from all this doing have shaped my to-be/values list. The kind of person I want to be—and on my best days am—will (for starters):

• Pay attention and give time to the people I love. Every day.
• Understand the impact of my actions and purchases on the environment and choose to live lightly.
• Care about the living conditions, earning power and families of the people who make things I purchase and choose not to exploit people who aren’t lucky enough to live where I do.
• Think about the well-being of my community and the ones around us and invest my time in organizations and efforts that make this a better place to live.
• Treat every person with the dignity and respect we should accord each human being and create meaning in relationships.
• Be kind.
• Add value.
• Breathe.

Or, as someone much wiser than I explained it, I will strive to live with right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration (the Buddhist Eightfold Path, for those who may not recognize it).

Note that you can’t cross these off and be done with them. A to-be list is much, much more challenging than a to-do list.

Your turn

What am I missing? What kind of person do you want to be, and how will that shape your doing?

Related posts:

• It’s All in the Attitude
• Biking as Downtime and Other Musings on Overproductivity
• Overdoing: The Seven-Course Meal Approach to Life (written, oddly enough, Jan. 1, 2009--so I do have annual rituals of self-examination)
• Thanks for Asking: Unsolicited Advice on How to Live
• Not a Bucket List, Not Resolutions, Not Really
• Green Is the Color of Money: Growing a Sustainable Local Business Approach
•  The SISO Method for Life Management
• Don't Buy That Case of Stuff on Sale. I'm Serious.
• Yet Another 11 Little Secrets
• Stuff I Didn't Do Today, Or, I Know What Happiness Tastes Like
• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me

Bonus item: A really relevant cartoon that is posted on Flickr (c) all rights reserved so I'm just linking, not embedding.

Social media: Drinking from the firehose, being the ocean

Over a year ago I read three questions from @RickButts on Twitter. To experience them the way I did, scrolling back through a few pages of tweets that came up while I was catching up on blog posts in my Google Reader feeds, you have to see them in reverse order, last one first:

• Do we REALLY need all the new resources that provide useful information - when it comes as interruption to our goals?
• By this I mean higher thinking vs over-focusing on trivial to useless information?
• Do you think reading Twitter stream every day makes you smarter or dumber?

The same day, I read a blog post from Zen Habits on the six gifts we can give our loved ones of presence, love, compassion, voice, healthy lifestyle, and belief in them (don’t just read the list of words here—go read the post. Just don’t forget to come back).

The combination of these two inputs made me think about the amount and type of input I receive—and what my output looks like.


Am I present in these spaces, as well as for my family? If not, I shouldn’t waste my time and yours. But it’s really, really tough to be present—in the sense of being mindful and aware—in the online medium that invites you every nano-second to click away to another bright, shiny new toy.

You only learn social media by doing: reading and commenting on blog posts, setting up a Facebook page and finding friends, starting a blog (which I did with no clear idea of its voice or purpose—definitely something to do differently the next time), creating a Twitter account/finding people to follow/attracting followers.

This is professional development for me, keeping up on the latest communication tools. Doing all this as an individual let me learn before applying the lessons to my institution so the mistakes are in my name, not theirs.

Drinking from a firehose is time-consuming. There’s just no way to accomplish this in a standard 40-hour work week; I spend plenty of late nights and weekends. As I noted a year ago, I tend to take on an overload when I plunge into something anyway.

I’ve brought that same intensity to my social media explorations. I didn’t just focus on the main channel, whatever that might be—Facebook? Blog? Twitter? I checked out all the tributaries with the same gusto. Or, you might say, I flitted like a hummingbird from flower to flower, sipping sipping sipping (although the attraction to shiny new objects makes me more magpie than hummingbird).

The learning experience has been great. I’ve used the lessons for work—we won an award for my use of the Twitter account @WSUSpokane as an identity-building tool and I was named a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research. I’ve also built some online presence for the volunteer organizations I love like Bike to Work Spokane. I became an invited blogger—love the sound of that—on Cycling Spokane. I now speak regularly at local and regional conferences on Twitter and other uses of social media. I even got interviewed on Gov 2.0 radio.

In the year since I read those tweets and that post, the reasons to be thoughtful about inputs and outputs have only increased. 

• I’ve subscribed to and unsubscribed from quite a few blogs, seeking the right mix of creative inspiration, fresh insights, and a manageable Google Reader queue. 
• I’ve scrubbed the list of people I follow on Twitter several times and finally instituted a comprehensive use of lists to help me remember why I wanted to follow a particular account in the first place. (I don't use utilities like Tweetdeck to organize--I prefer to view Twitter as a river flowing by and sip from the stream as I have time.)
• I keep making another run at using LinkedIn more effectively to find resources and connect with people—I know it has value I haven’t found because I haven’t put in the time. 
• One of these days maybe I’ll really start utilizing LaunchPadINW, the local social network.

What I’m trying to do in all these spaces is be more thoughtful about whether I’m truly adding value when I tweet or post versus just distributing random mist. A sense that I’m adding value will keep the firehose manageable for me.

Mindfulness is the secret. The tweets that just pop out like a flood—say, when I’m live-tweeting a conference—aren’t mindful ones. If I’m making a conscious decision about whether or not to subscribe, follow or tweet, it will mean I’m aware and present in the moment. That will slow me down.

This question of value will continue to grow in importance for all of us as the volume just continues to increase. Otherwise how will our little drops of water jump out above the torrent and get noticed?

Bearing in mind, that is, that our sense of being separate droplets is an illusion. We’re all the ocean.

• Deep thoughts on attention as a scarce resource by Daniel Tunkelang

The Zen of Fingernails: Giving Up Attachment

I’m obsessively attached to my fingernails. Well, we’re all attached to our fingernails, except for George Clooney in that one scene in Syriana that I totally couldn’t watch.

What I mean is, I really want to have nice fingernails. Long, strong, no peeling layers, worth polishing. Fingernails that lead you to make extra hand gestures when you talk and cradle your coffee cup gracefully, tenderly, with both hands, just so people can notice how pretty they are.

Alas, I am doomed. Although taking calcium did help with the peeling problem that dogged me for years, I just cannot grow out a complete set of 10 good-looking fingernails of the same approximate length and maintain them for more than 24 hours.

Every single time I reach that day, that moment of nirvana where I realize that they’re long and well worth polishing with a pretty color in place of my usual clear protective coat, something happens.

I grate one while making hashbrowns.

I hit our granite countertop straight on and break one.

I’m crocheting and a microsnag gets caught in the yarn and tears just far enough that I can’t file it smooth and save the nail.

Or—in one horrendous accident right before my wedding in July 2007—I actually cut straight across the nail and into the thumb with a knife that slipped, and I wore a bandage through weeks and weeks of growing it out. Nothing says long, strong sexy fingernails like a cartoon character bandage on your thumb. At your wedding.

In a domino effect that never varies, once one goes, the rest start dropping like flies. Nails that were beautifully smooth and strong develop tiny tears down low, close to the cuticle line where it will really hurt like a son of a gun if it catches and tears, so I have to cut the nail back to protect myself. I hit countertops, encounter graters and knives, and lose the length one way or another, usually on at least half of them before the carnage stops.

I cut them all back because I hate that look of mostly long nails and a few short freaks, and start all over again.

My special bonus handicap in this quest for perfection: When I was a kid, maybe 8 or so, I smashed a finger in a solid wood door that was at least two inches thick.

I remember going to yell to my brother Don that Mom said to take out the garbage. In turning away and slamming the heavy door shut, I have no idea how I could catch the middle finger of my left hand in the door so badly that the fingernail was torn off, but I did. (For one thing, I’m right-handed; for another, just one finger, in the middle of the hand? What the--?)

I marched into the kitchen where my mother was washing her hair in the sink (this was before they added a showerhead in the upstairs bathroom in our very old house in the country, outside Lewiston, Idaho). I stuck my bleeding, ravaged finger under her face and said, “Look what I did!” Must have still been in shock, since I wasn’t yet crying from the pain.

The sudden appearance of a bloody stump under her sudsy head gave her such a shock that she couldn’t drive, so the garbage-toting Don had to take us to the hospital. They gave me a shot, sewed the fingernail back on, and told me that if I was lucky I wouldn't lose it completely. There was enough attachment in the nail bed that it did grow back, fortunately.

But I have three little notches around the nail, one on each side and one off-center at the base, where the stitches went in. So that nail is nothing like the rest of my fingernails, and I often develop one of those little microtears at the site of one of the side stitches.

Through the luck of the genetic draw I have tapered fingers and nice oval fingernails—except for Mr. Blight on my left hand. That door-slamming accident cost me a lucrative career as a hand model, I’m quite sure of it.

In a weird Lamarckian coincidence, my mother also had a childhood accident that smashed the middle finger on her left hand and ruined the nail. In her case she was behind a rocking chair when her visiting grandmother rocked back and mooshed her finger.

Mom’s quest for beautiful fingernails led her to various failed attempts in the early days of acrylic nails, leading to a nasty nail fungus and terribly weak, soft fingernails that she had to leave unpolished for a long time. She’s now back to fake nails, I notice when I visit her in the dementia facility; someone comes in and does the nails for the ladies who still have enough cognition for vanity.

I never went the fake route. It’s my own nails that I want to have as a thing of beauty and a joy forever. For over thirty years I have sought fingernail perfection, and my nails have fallen short.

The origin of suffering is attachment: one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. In life all is transient; nothing lasts forever. Because the objects of our attachment are transient, loss is inevitable. Thus I suffer because my long fingernails are inevitably temporary adornments.

When the day comes that I let go of my attachment to fingernail perfection, and the accompanying suffering over the snags and chips of daily life, it will be a sign that I have grown spiritually.

Or that I have finally gotten acrylic nails.