Life is what you make it.

Life is what you make it.  

This is a hard concept to understand as a young person.  When you're 10, 12, 14, 16...time moves slow.  Your parents don't know anything, 30 is old, 40 is ancient, and appreciating what you have today because it may not be there tomorrow doesn't exist in the underdeveloped, teenage brain.  It's taken me nearly 45 years to discover this and at times I still regress.

I was recently reminded of this on a trip to Washington DC, when we--the parental units, opted to head North for Spring Break while the rest of the country headed South to the land of all things Mouseketeer.  We opted for historical and educational versus princess tea parties and character parades.  The children would have preferred hats with ears.

We rented a turn of the century row house in the NE quadrant of the city in a neighborhood currently undergoing gentrification.  It sat on a loud, busy corner where sirens screamed throughout the night.  And with the constant hustle and bustle that comes with being planted in the middle of a busy metropolitan area that never sleeps, it could have significantly benefited from blackout shades.  In describing the home, I'm reminded of a Mother Goose rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,

He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;

He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a crooked little house.

Yes.  The house was crooked.  Very crooked.  It had crooked floors and crooked walls, but I didn't mind.  With every out of square corner or creak in the floor, I imagined the life this house had lived for the past hundred years, the things that it had witnessed, and I felt alive.  I was now part of it's history. I fed off the energy of the city and relished feeling like I was in the epicenter of something really significant, something newsworthy.   And for one night I was--as I witnessed a barrage of police cars scream through the narrow streets ending a high speed pursuit just blocks away.   It certainly wasn't a four star resort.  It was better.  And thankfully my children didn't complain about the sights or sounds or lack of room service once. The house was equipped with television and wi-fi and all was good in teenage-brain land.

We spent five, over-scheduled days in the city, and as anyone who is familiar with DC knows, that was not enough.  We filled our days with tours, museums, monuments and memorials covering more than thirty miles on foot and canvassing even more distance by train and yet we left with miles and miles still undiscovered. 

Arlington National Cemetery

The majority of children today and even my own Generation X cannot fully comprehend the sacrifices that the generations before us made for our freedoms.  It, however, becomes a little more comprehendible when you stand facing a wall with more than 58,000 names engraved in memoriam or stand before a field of gold stars representing lives lost with the words, "Here We Mark The Price Of Freedom."  A humbleness befalls you as you walk amongst a backdrop of simple white, marble headstones that date back to the Civil War, and stand silently in reverence as a funeral procession passes for service men still being buried today.  The 45 year old me understood how hallowed the ground beneath my feet was.  I'm not sure the 16 year old me would have.  


At times during the week, the teenage brains preferred to sleep as the landscape of America the Beautiful passed by.  At times they needed to be told to put away the electronic devices.  And, at times they needed to be reminded that life does not offer guarantees, take advantage while the opportunity presents itself.   Life is what you make it.  You can spend your hours brooding.  You can spend your hours mindlessly in front of a computer screen.  You can choose to be unhappy, ungrateful and selfish or you can choose the opposite.  It took me a long time to figure that out and without my yoga practice, I'm not sure I would have ever arrived.  Today I choose happiness. Today I choose to be grateful.  

Because life is what I make it.

Sanskrit Word of the Week: Karma

Yesterday, I slipped and fell.  And at my age I don't bounce well.  Crash. Boom. Bam. Splat. Owwww.  Laid out flat at the bottom of the stairs.

After accessing the situation and determining I would live, my oldest son walked back up the stairs, singing, "Kar-ma, KARRR-maa."  My younger son showed a little more concern, "Should I call an ambulance or something?" he asked standing over me.

Earlier in the day, I had carried the clean laundry upstairs and put it away; only to find that my oldest son, when looking for a pair of socks to wear, had emptied the contents of his drawer onto his bedroom floor.  And then left for Taekwondo.  When he returned home, I calmly instructed him to not only hang up his uniform, but also to re-fold and put his socks and underwear back in the drawer.  When he finished, I checked to make sure the task was completed to my satisfaction.  After determining I could live with the results, I headed back down the stairs.  And then I fell.


My son implied my slipping was a result of the universe punishing me for wrongdoing--in this case for making him undo a mess he made.  He was wrong.  The universe was not punishing me by causing me to slip and fall.  However, the universe is punishing me for sins I committed years and years ago;  it's punishing me for disrespecting my own mother as a teenager--by providing me with my own disrespectful teenager.  In fact, it's downright LAUGHING at me.  Is it too late to apologize? 

KARMA IS A BITCH!

...Or is it?

Urban Dictionary defines Karma as:   The Buddhist belief that whatever you do comes back to you.  For example, if you do something good, something good will happen to you and vice versa.  Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com define it essentially the same way.

Later that evening, we dropped both boys off at their Taekwondo school for a "lock-in" which coincided with Valentine's Day weekend.
Ten minutes after leaving them for our date night, my oldest son called, "Mom, I ripped my pants.  Can you bring me another pair?" 
"Sorry kiddo.  No can do," I sang, "We have res-ser-vaaaa-tions."

Yep.  Karma is a bitch!

A Belated Daily Dose of Gratitude

 I have a teenage son.  He’s thirteen to be exact and a combination of belligerent, obnoxious, and omniscient, topped with a great big dollop of spoiled.  As an infant, I loved him too much.  As a child, I wanted too much for him.  As a pre-teen, I gave him too much and now as a teenager, he expects too much. 

On a good day, he arrives home from school happy, eager to see his mother and brother.  We don’t have many good days.  Monday was a little worse than typical.   And after a slightly worse than typical exchange of words and actions, I had trouble finding 5 things for which to be grateful.

After he stomped up the stairs to his room, he yelled back down to me,” CAN I SHAVE?”

“You’re asking for permission to shave?!?” I yelled back up to him.

“YES!  I wouldn’t want to do anything without asking for approval.”

Taking a deep breath…

“Yes.  You may shave,” I responded. 

The next morning while driving Teenage Mutant Son to school, I noticed his whiskered chin and stubbly face, and so I said, “I thought you were going to shave last night?”

“Yeah...well,” responding with a half-crooked smile, “I didn't have time.  I was too busy having a meltdown.”

I smiled.  I felt grateful that we could have a bad day but then get over it; that our anger and frustration with one another had a finite end.

And upon further reflection, I realized I am blessed in countless ways that I take for granted every day.   That even when I am having a bad day, I need to acknowledge:  I am never hungry, cold, without shelter or unclothed.

 

I realized I too am spoiled.  My yogic path is forcing me to examine myself and take stock in who I am versus who I want to be.  Who I want to be is someone who appreciates every day and what has been given to me, even if it is nothing more than the air I breathe.

 “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” – Buddha