The Problem of Hoping and Waiting

You know the popular saying that says each day is a new beginning? I used to have a poster with that very saying emblazoned on it. I have probably lost the poster in one of my many moves. But I do think I live my life in such a fashion - telling myself that each day will herald a new beginning to a better, happier and more successful life. And when things are particularly bad, I may rant and rave during the day, but I still go to sleep hoping that the next day will better.


Frankly, the next day is never any better. I still wake up to confront the same old issues that I faced the night before, the weeks, months and even the years before. Slowly, the hope that the next day will be better diminshes. And I am left with an inner void because the voice that motivates me to hope is now muted.

But I cannot shut it out all the time. I do hear the voice occasionally, but I mostly choose avoid it because acknowledging the voice is painful. It is painful because the hopes the voice speaks of only serve to remind me what I am not, it reminds me of what I have not done, but mostly it reminds me that I am what and where I am because of myself.

I have come to realise that my hopes have been worth nothing actually because I never truly believed in them. And therein lies my problem. If I had believed in my hopes, I would have acted to achieve them. Not wait around hoping that it would happen spontaneously through no effort of my own.

As Alice Koller wrote in her book, An Unknown Woman, "I've arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I've been doing".

I know I should not continue to wait for something to happen when I do not believe it ever will. Instead, I should work on the objectives and things that I actually believe and have faith in, the things I can control, affect and succeed in through my own efforts. And abandon those objectives and things I never will.

I am reading Alice Koller's autobiographical novel, An Unknown Woman. When she wrote it, she was a thirty something woman, who felt the urgent need to reassess her life. She secluded herself in a house in Nantucket with her dog as her sole companion. In her solitude, she wrote the book about her journey to discover who she was and who she wanted to be.

It is a remarkable book. Mabye because I am at a similar place as she was - that is, trying to find oneself.

Certain sections of the book stand out for their profound insights:

"Even when I choose some future good toward which these present minutes point, I won't let there be hours that I only tolerate. I won't ever again put up with unthinking habit or being bored, or ugliness in things or persons. I have nothing important to do, but I have no time to waste marking time. Each thing I touch or see or smell or taste or hear during my day must give me the sense of something good in the doing.

Nor are there things to wait for, except things that I myself set in motion now. Waiting? Why, the stupendous thing I used to wait for was something that was going to be done to me, or for me: to be initiated by someone else, independently of my choice. But there isn't a someone else to make things hapen to me: I'm the only person who can do what I decide needs to be done. And besides, there is no reason for anyone else to do anything at all for me, particularly something as glorious as that thing I expected.

So on two counts waiting is irrelevant. Nothing to wait for, because I'll initiate what happens to me. Nothing to wait for, because these minutes now passing are my life. They are the minutes in which my living is to be done. Whatever I do, I'll do in my own time, and I will do it."

No more waiting.

Time to move on.

Beautiful Old Age

I was at my favourite grocery store today - Trader Joes. After getting my usual grocery stash, I got into a line to pay. There was a woman unloading her cart of groceries onto the counter for the cashier to scan. I turned to my left and busied myself looking at the stuff the store puts on display so as to tempt customers into making last-minute purchases. In this case, my distracting temptation were chocolate raspberry truffles.

When I finally tore my eyes away from the chocolates, I saw that an old woman had moved to my right, slightly ahead of me, her cart at a 45 degree angle to mine. It was easy enough to see that she was cutting the queue - whether unconsciously or deliberately, I could not tell at that moment.

Now I am usually a mild person towards anyone perceptibly older than myself - must be an Eastern thing drilled into me to show respect towards the eldery. But I am also a stickler for principles. And the principle here was that cutting the queue is always wrong (unless you are facing a desperate emergency), and this principle had been violated by someone.

I politely pointed out to the old woman that I was in line, to which she replied in a crotechy Russian-sounding voice that she had been there all along, and insisted that I had not been in the line. That truly irked me because it was not true, which meant that she had deliberately attempted to cut the queue.

If it had been anyone else other than a visibly eldery person, I would have told the person off. Nothing gets me more than a rude person. But this was an old woman! What could I do?!

My solution was to simply stand my ground - I suppose another person would have walked away from the situation. In fact, my boyfriend who had been with only moments before, conveniently disappeared from the scene because as he explained later, he did not want to be involved in a "fight" between two females.

When the old woman saw that I was not backing away, she simply turned her cart and cut the queue on the next line! I was shocked to witness her audacity. A middle-aged woman who was in that line and who had seen the exchange between me and the old lady, rolled her eyes, threw her hands up in the air, and moved her cart into the next line - safely far away from this uncontrollable queue-cutting ripened terror.

If the old woman had reacted differently, and had said sorry that she had not seen me, I would have let her get ahead of me. After all, I do not want to be disagreeable to people, especially to the eldery. But instead she showed a total disregard for me and the others around her and a lack of shame, which is all very unbecoming for a woman at her stage in life.

How very sad.

Beautiful Old Age

It ought to be lovely to be old
to be full of the peace that comes of experience
and wrinkled ripe fulfilment.

The wrinkled smile of completeness that follows a life
lived undaunted and unsoured with accepted lies
they would ripen like apples, and be scented like pippins
in their old age.

Soothing, old people should be, like apples
when one is tired of love.

Fragrant like yellowing leaves, and dim with the soft
stillness and satisfaction of autumn.

And a girl should say:
It must be wonderful to live and grow old.
Look at my mother, how rich and still she is!

And a young man should think: By Jove
my father has faced all weathers, but it's been a life!

D.H. Lawrence

What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage

The book "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage", which was published earlier this year, came about as a result of a 2006 New York Times article, "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage" by writer and journalist Amy Sutherland. The premise of the article, which was that people could be trained to exhibit the behaviour you wanted in the way animals were by their trainers, generated a lot of interest and consequently was the most emailed NYT article that year.

People either loved it, or hated it. Sutherland's premise was essentially treating human beings as animals. Some people accused her of belittling men. But she did not shy away from that accusation - indeed she writes that human beings are "human animals" with our own codes of habit and territorial needs. After the controversy around her article died down, Sutherland walked away with a movie and a book deal. This book, published in 2008, expands on the idea she wrote about in the NYT article, that is, we can use basic animal training techniques on people to achieve the behaviour we want from them. Simple enough.

I remember reading the article that year, laughing aloud as Sutherland described being irritated with certain aspects of her husband's behaviour - like when he hovered around her, talking to her about this and that while she was in the kitchen trying to cook, his sudden deafness when she wanted something done, him leaving dirty clothes and used tissues on the floor, and keeping her waiting at airports and restaurants because he lost track of the time, and so on.

While the behaviour was not something serious enough to warrant divorce, it did dull the love Sutherland had for her husband. So she resorted to nagging to correct her husband's behaviour, but it only made things worse - he drove faster when she wanted him to slow down, and he did not pick up his dirty clothes from the bathroom floor when she asked him to. Rebellion was on hand.

That certainly striked a note with me - who amongst us, females, have not had to deal with variations of this seemingly inconsiderate behaviour from our male companions. So it intrigued me enough to read the book, hoping for an elaboration of the training tactics she had talked about in the article so that I could utilise myself!

The book does expand on this with a light-hearted approach written in an easy narrative style. For example, she writes that about positive reinforcement - reward the behaviour you want, and ignore the behaviour you do not want. And to use"approximations," that is, rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior.

As she puts it "After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband. Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller".

In the animal training world, when an animal does something wrong, the trainer will not respond. He stands still, and is careful not to look at the animal, and then he returns to work. Any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. So if a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away. This is called the least reinforcing syndrome (LRS)

Incredible, but does it actually work on humans?

Sutherland writes that she discovered in the process of using the techniques that she has to examine her own behaviour and reactions to her husband, and the people around her. What was she doing that contributed to the exhibition of the unwanted behaviour in others? Animal trainers begin with the premise that it is "not the animal's fault" - Sutherland accepts this as well, as begins to accept that her husband's behaviour was not his fault. She managed to separate the unwanted behaviour her husband produced from the man that was her husband and whom she loved. That way, she manages to tackle the behaviour and not the man.

In the end, this book does not come up with a magical technique to "train" others, but rather, it tells us that we have to modify our reactions to unwanted behaviour, and it doing so, it help us minimize conflicts with our loved ones. And by rewarding the desirable behaviour, we ensure that we get more of it in the future.

The premise will keep you thinking beyond the finish of the book.

Further Recommended Readings in this area:

The 10 Women You'll Be Before You're 35

I was at Barnes and Nobles the other day, and I came across this book by Alison James - The 10 Women You'll be Before You're 35. I spent some time flipping through the book, and I came away with a good feeling. The half-an-hour spent on the book actually put me in a good mood!

I was thoroughly entertained with James' choice of words, and her frivolous sense of humour in typecasting the various stages all of us women go through.

According to James, the 10 stages women will pass through before we are 35 are as follows: New Graduate, Dollarless Diva, Worker Bee, Party Girl, Body-Conscious Babe, Chameleon, Crisis Chick, Ms. Independence, Wirl (half woman/half girl) and finally the True You.

It starts with the New Graduate stage when you have just graduated from university - you are fresh, young, happy, excited, flighty and giggly, and ends with the True You stage, when you become finally who you really are - that is, you are no longer personified by a stage. The 8 other stages in between are full of quirky snapshots of what your life have been, or could be (if you're not there yet).

My favourite was the Crisis Chick, maybe because it was easily identified as the one most matching my present stage (somewhat anyway). Crisis Chick has a stable job, maybe a boyfriend, and she has a life almost eveyone thinks she should be happy with. But for whatever reason, the Crisis Chick is unhappy, feels that she is stuck in a rut, and she wants to change her life. She is confused and goes through agonizing periods of reflection. She flits between dramatic pronouncements of life changing decisions and helpless self-pity. She thinks of giving up her job to save the world by joining the Peace Corps, so she can give meaning to her life. Then decides she would not be able to realistically survive without showering (or having her other comforts) in poverty-stricken countries like Africa. She hermits herself in her apartment and lives on snack food! I just love the way James portrayed this stage - she managed to trivialize this stage with a humour that does not take away from the actual reality, which can be quite debilitating to people feeling this way. Almost like saying, it's a confusing time, but hang in there through all of this nonsense, and you'll come out just fine.

Now, anyone look for real self-help information in this book should be forewarned though - this will not help you solve any of your major problems. However, if you are looking for a light, fun read to occupy your spare time while relaxing, this would be a good companion book - a true chick lit gem.