I Held My Breath for a Year

September 3rd 2019 Dear Summer, You have flown by and we have filled you with much more action than reflection. So the time has come for some reflection on that... which protects and nurtures wellness, healing, and self-awareness. It is one thing to do all the wonderful things that we have done this summer to promote self-care and keep relationships healthy, but it is another question to ask about our healing. Do I feel better? Do I have positive systems in place that will provide me the kind of resilience needed to thrive in the coming months? First of all, I start and end with self-awareness. How am I doing? Hmm. Very well, but a more focused question is this: what habits have I gained this summer that are positive and what habits do I need to modify or pay better attention to? I start with the word habits because habits are what you do consciously and unconsciously to manage what I term the four bases of self-care. These bases are sleep, exercise, diet, and reflection. Let’s start with asking about sleep. How am I sleeping? How is your sleep? To me there are three things to note about sleep: duration, quality, and consistency. When you are starting out on the journey of self-care, sleep is #1. It is first base. You can’t do a lot without it. If you’re not sleeping well, then everything becomes a challenge, especially mood. I think my sleep duration still needs work. I need a bit more. After all, sleep is intimately connected to exercise and diet: I have weaknesses in those other two areas that impact my sleep. So, if I need to sleep longer how do I do it? Strangely enough, one of the positive habits that I’m learning is not to stress out about sleep. If I don’t sleep well, then, first, I need to be aware of it. In the words of Jackson Browne, who I saw this summer in Sandpoint, Idaho, no more running on empty. Once I am aware of my sense of energy gained from sleep, then I can say to myself: you have to watch your mood today; you might need a nap today; you need to pay attention to your energy levels so you don’t go into the red zone trying to do things that may cause further harm than good. Sleep quality is also something that I am working on: I need to find ways to reduce interruptions at night and at dawn. Finally, sleep consistency is the big thing for me. Yes, I am doing a better job tracking my sleep over ten days so that I can make decisions about my sleep with the right data. Tracking my sleep, energy, and mood over ten days has turned out to be very important to my overall wellbeing. So good job on that one. Next, exercise is second base. I’ve done a good job on exercise this summer, but I still have a long way to go. I’ve enjoyed golf, tennis, biking, swimming, and hiking every week this summer. I have probably done more this summer than any before it, so why am I still so hard on myself? Yes, I think that’s a very good question. My self-assessment habits speak to my tendency to see gaps and instead of victories. I am hard on myself in ways that need better understanding. I need more positive regard for myself. How do I do that? More on that soon. The third base is diet. I think my eating habits continue to need strengthening, particularly reducing late night snacking and improving vegetable intake at dinner. But we are doing well, especially buying the right things at the grocery store and making sure that meal planning happens. I give Alberta and I good marks for all the healthy meals that have been prepared. Our teamwork really pays off. Eating fresh cilantro, parsley, basil, and heirloom tomatoes from Alberta’s garden is such tasty joy. Finally, reflection is the last stop, home plate. I think the core of my reflection habit is maintaining a daily journal which I did not do in August but have maintained for many years. Journal writing is nutrition for the soul. It doesn’t just make life better, it makes it juicier and much more meaningful. Reflection helps make the most of the gift that is life. According to James Clear’s wonderful book Atomic Habits, habit building begins with small habits that compound into systems that help us achieve optimal self-care. My habits around four key areas need continuous attention, but not in the manner where one is always setting goals. Frankly, a guy like me doesn’t need more goals. On the contrary, for me the key is to build a habit of self-awareness so I can watch and understand my own thoughts. What am I thinking? What am I not thinking? Who the heck is doing the thinking? I need to build small and easy ways to be more aware of what I think about. One of the best things for me is to do this: write down ten things every morning that I am grateful for. So here they are for this morning. I am grateful to be alive, to breath air, and fill my lungs with a sense of energy, love, and soul. I am grateful for my family and the people around me who love me. I am grateful to live with a body that is healthy, strong, and relatively pain-free. I am grateful for plants that nourish us and offer us nothing more than beauty. I am grateful for the sky and sun and clouds. I am grateful for how tenuous, delicate, and fast-moving life is for within the rushing river of time, I can find lasting meaning. I am grateful for self-awareness, so that I can reflect on my time here, to be grateful for nature and all my relationships, and to sense through my body and mind, a gentle spirit of acceptance. I am grateful that life is good. I am grateful for you who reads this and those who don’t as well. It’s OK. It’s all good. Thank you for being you. Finally, I am grateful for the silence and emptiness of this page that makes life feel so wondrous, full, and beautiful. Sincerely, Sae

Sunday Letter to a Friend - May 27th 2018 Dear Friend, Sorry I don't recall you being in Maui or you getting hurt. The downside of being hurt is, yeah, being hu...rt. The upside is that it can represent our desire to try new things and do things that require some sort of risk. Risk is one of the key topics concerning wellness that I have learned. It's like a tao fulcrum. Sometimes our desire to risk emotionally teaches us that we still really need to feel, still need to take chances and feel alive. But when the risk is not necessarily appropriate or involves potentially involving other people, risk can be a self-centered disregard for others in favour of our less noble appetites. To be blunt about it, researchers correlate emotional affairs with mental instability. Many of us go through difficult periods and an affair is a strong indicator of the need for more self care, more self listening, and perhaps living more closely to an awareness that isn't just focussed on our harming ourselves through filling our immediate appetites. I have come to consider that most of the world's big problematic issues--from colonial capitalism, mega corporations, environmental degradation, to global patriarchy--are less about solely external situations and more about what lurks inside us as we address the confusion as well as the liberation of our desires/instincts. In short, externally appearing problems reflect the extent to which we understand and listen to the pain and trauma of our families and our cultures. That's why hurt people hurt people without knowing it. That's why trauma can last for tens of generations. That's why the most typical sign of trauma is self-trauma, the surprising yet typical desire to pursue self harm--to self-sabotage our happiness, to punish ourselves for our own shame, failures, guilt, and moral injuries. On my better days, I have this feeling that so many people are walking around in the midst of trauma. Even being a witness to trauma can be triggering and release unconscious or generational forms of non-physical suffering. Even the word "pain," I realize, is so easily misunderstood. We use dichotomous thinking to consider pain, even though we know better, as merely an external phenomenon, not our body’s reaction to something we need to learn something from. So we mask the pain, deny it, or find ways to address the pain, but not the cause. So many live with the consequences of denying our spiritual, moral, and emotional injuries. In general, my physical pain is a manifestation, a signal. Retail therapy, as you have said, and many other similar pursuits are just that, a signal that we need to learn something from. Not being able to be alone, sit still, live in awareness--these are examples of non-physical pain that seems so harmless because denial and fear and habituation anaesthetizes us from awareness. How is self-awareness created, sustained, and extended beyond the self? Mindfulness, in many forms, may be one of the keys. My addiction to my own sense of goals and objectives is also a kind of signal to me to be more forgiving, more patient, and more willing to hear my intuition about the state of my non physical energies. My goal, if I have one, is simply daily self-care. Eat. Exercise. Sleep. Do each with mindfulness. I have to work pretty damn hard at not reverting back to the person who used goals to self-flagellate. In my life, I have perhaps achieved a few things, but looking back I missed a lot of the process, a lot of the deep quality of seeking that is the essence to achieving something meaningful over a long term. So today my energies go to experiential goals like inquiring daily about self-care, living in the moment, and caring for others through listening. In the end, this may be how we enjoy life as you put it in your note. For me it's the essence of the joy I seek. A kind of joy that feels like a bulb illuminating what already exists, an illumination of the simplicity and depth of being "with" the world, being "caught" in its embrace, achieved by a kind of releasing with the waves holding your body up, a sort of letting go of ourselves so that we recall our belonging to a larger form of being, with our relatives the rocks and trees and birds. Have a good Sunday, my friend.

A Letter to Your Life: How Much Time Do You Give to Time? by Stan Chung Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. ... Gandhi Dear Life, The dark house creaks. He pours water into a glass. He twists off the cap and pops two painkillers. A dull throb vibrates the back of his head like a car alarm going off on the other side of town. In the morning, she watches him shaving. He chooses a navy tie. She knows he is worried about money. She is only worried about everything. In silence, they take turns with the morning paper. They eat the same breakfast. They are always quitting coffee. Time, he says to himself at his desk. Is this how I should be spending my time? There are meetings to consider. Work to plan. Strategies to discuss. Why does everything take so much time, she wonders aloud in the boardroom. Why do the most important things never seem to get done? At mid-morning, even though they work miles apart, each waits in line for coffee. Later that afternoon at 3pm, they do not realize that they are wondering about the same thing: how much time is there? On the commute home, others in a thousand similar towns are doing the same thing: moving but not moving. * * * On a vacation, they are walking along the beach. The rain is like mist. Look at those trees, he says. Yes, she says. The way the limbs are so twisted and gnarled. They’re shaped by the wind, he says. By the conditions. I don’t know how they survive. The constant wind. The salt water. The forces. The forces, she repeats. Good thing they bend. At the cabin, he pours pinot noir from the night before. The rain patters against dark windows. There are three categories of time, she explains. The first is all the stuff that takes less time than we think. He says, hardly anything takes less time than we think especially the little things. True enough, she says. And big things, too. It takes only a few seconds to be kind. It only takes a second to be grateful. Right, he says. I find it very considerate, she says, to tell someone that something is going to take a bit longer than expected. True. In the end, it saves everyone from worry and wondering if you should ask what’s going on, he says. For sure, she says. It’s like when you’re shopping and the clerk says, I’ll be right with you. You appreciate the courtesy...it doesn’t change how long it takes but your expectations change. * * * On the way back from vacation, she flicks the high beam on. The trees haunt the sky. Cell phone light glows on his work-lined face. The second category of time, she says, are... Things, he says remembering to look up at her, that take more time than we think. Right, she says, how many things take more time than we think? Nearly everything, he says, some things take years, decades, generations. Yeah, she says. The more things change, the more they stay the same. She sees the moon glistening on the wet road. Suddenly, she thinks of her family. The time between visits has become decades. Most of the longer projects at work, he says, are actually underestimated in terms of time required. Sometimes we start too fast and then the energy just evaporates. It’s easy to omit how important it is to plan the plan. Some projects don’t even get done, and we continue the pretense or the expectation. Yeah, he says quietly, some things don’t heal on their own. They just become something else. Like feelings you don’t know are there, she sighs. Our expectations become real. Right, he says. Great Expectations. Life has a funny way of becoming what you expect. * * * Honey, can you pull over? he says. They are commuting to work. Sure. she asks. What’s wrong? The third category of time, he says, is all the stuff that takes exactly as long as it should. You mean estimating how long something will take and then taking exactly that long? Yeah, he says. Plan all planned. Done right. Done on budget. Done on time. Remind you of anything? Like visits from in-laws? Ha. I don’t know, she says. Knowing how long something will really take means checking with all the people involved and understanding how to bend. Maybe life is like a reno or is it like farming, she continues. A reno can take forever. In farming, not only do you have to plan to buy the seed, there is only a few weeks to plant or else the season is over. Life is like farming but people treat it like a reno that never ends? he says. You’re only given exactly so much time and then it’s over. Everything boils down to death with you, honey. It’s so cute. That’s cause it does, he says. Death gives life its urgency. Urgency or anxiety? she says. Remember how long it took to make your last big business decision? You know the one that saved the organization? About one afternoon with everyone there, he says. The pressure was on. If we didn’t move fast, we would have lost the opportunity. Yeah, hmm, it kinda was life or death, she says staring at his hands. I kind of like you, you know that? She touches his cheek. The morning moon hangs in the sky. The road stretches in the distance like a forgotten promise. * * * I know what you’re thinking, she says later after the day is nearly over. You always do. How many opportunities do we lose by not seeing life as incredibly time sensitive? She asks him. True, he says. But that depends on what time sensitive really means, right? We spend more time planning our last purchase than we do planning to be with people. Why does buying the right product take longer than choosing the right life? Why do we think that just ignoring something will change it? How much time do we waste trying to avoid the loneliness of the moment? she sighs. How much time do we not live? Like how much time each day do we actually live? I want to do things with you, he says nearly choking. I want to live life fully. I want us to make the most of our time together. * * * He wakes up in the middle of the night and decides not to think about work. He’s glad to be sleeping in his own bed. He listens to her breathe. He reaches for her. Let’s make some time, they whisper. In the morning, each writes what is urgent, what can wait, and what is going right. They will decide how to make the most of each day. Is there a good time to choose what is important and what matters most? Every morning, she says. Every single day of your life, he says. A time to work, to play, to learn, to love. And time to give to time. -- Stan Chung is the author of Global Citizen and I Held My Breath for a Year. Contact him at [email protected].

Dear Sad Friend, This is not the best analogy but sadness is like a bad cold. Not a happy feeling but it’s short term. Sadness and a cold have ...to be watched because they can be a messenger for something more. Grief is different from sadness. It’s longer term. It’s like a serious bacterial infection. There are treatments but it can stay with you, perhaps always. If you seek treatment, you may learn to accept that grief will never fully go away. Grief impacts your immune system, too. It makes you act funny. You have to slow down and learn to care for yourself in specific ways. It is especially challenging not to feed grief with addiction. But grief is survivable and there will be good times. Trauma is different from grief. Trauma is like shock. Often you don't know you're a victim. You see it when people are in a bad car crash. But, please know this--there are other kinds of crashes. There are no proven drugs for trauma. Nothing works overnight for it, but three things: time, patience, and love. Love is a potent treatment for trauma, but it’s a specific kind of love. It’s unconditional love, the kind that can bounce back from being abused, hurt, and ignored. You may know this but this is how trauma succeeds: it makes accepting love nearly impossible. It’s so insidious that it can last for generations, infect an entire people, and often become something else. Like violence, addiction, or depression. But there is hope, especially if you recognize trauma and learn the thousand small things that can protect you, like gratitude lists, thinking of others, daily self-care, and receiving the hand of friendship. Anxiety is the dance partner of other illnesses. It can be quite sudden, like a heart condition. In a split second, you can go from feeling fine to believing you’re going to die right there. Unfortunately, you are told to get used to feeling like this. Nobody sees that you feel hyper-alert, like every alarm in your house is going off. But there is hope. There really is. Anxiety can be tamed by expressing it and receiving therapy. You will get better, even though anxiety is a complex and misunderstood partner to many illnesses. Depression is the major red flag of our time. It’s a systemic issue like cancer. Both illnesses are serious. They visit in many forms and range widely in severity and survivability. Treatment can work amazingly well, especially if you put together a team and practice being proactive about nearly every aspect of your life. Depression can go undiagnosed for years. You think it’s just you and that you’ll get over it. Plus, you can’t really see depression. It’s not like a broken arm. Friends can be silent about it, too. Depression and cancer are extremely common: everybody knows someone who has it, yet it feels like you’re alone in a packed stadium. The treatments are confusing with many different paths, many kinds of caregivers, crazy miracle stories, and so very many opinions. Everybody has an opinion about depression. We have made it our most common illness. Depression is powerful enough to tell you what to think, what you should do, and even who you are. But people will say you look fine. Buck up. Cheer up. Wake up and smell the roses, they will say. But the spark of life often flickers and you think about being gone, that you’re too much trouble, that you don’t matter. But this is the disease talking, not you. You’re going to be okay, but maybe never quite the same. So you learn to find yourself incredibly grateful for the smallest things. You’re overwhelmed by basic kindness, and you find yourself less hard on yourself, more deserving of good things. Yes, you can manage depression. And maybe one day you realize what you didn’t fully realize before. How precious is life. How beautiful. How powerful the force of love. It really is. I am not an expert. I have tried to say some simple things about sadness, grief, anxiety, trauma, and depression -- please recognize them early and learn how to protect yourself. Your friend, Stan