I tricked my husband into seeing The Holiday. Cameron Diaz did There’s Something about Mary and Jack Black is a guy’s guy, right?
He rolled his eyes at the movie’s preoccupation with relationships. It’s a relatively new thing for my 60-something husband–this insight that the primary concern of young women is relationships–and, even though I spent four years writing a book about women, men, and love, he’s continually amazed by the extent of it.
He was particularly grossed out by Jude Law’s weird daddiness. Law and Diaz lying in the pink tent with his two little girls with the stuffed animals gazing at handmade stars hanging on strings. Please. Cameron Diaz shows at the door? A real man hits the grandparents on his cell in an instant. The little girls and tents can wait a day. They’ll survive.
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How to be the perfect girlfriend video!
How to increase the compatibility of men’s simple needs with the complexity of a woman’s mind and modern life. ;-)
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Yesterday I commented on Susan Kaiser Greenland’s post on Arianna Huffington’s Fearless Voices site. She and her husband founded a nonprofit, Innerkids, for teaching mindfulness.
Here’s my comment:
Mindfulness is a way of being that doesn’t require studies to prove its effectiveness. When adults are mindful, children are mindful. It reminds me of dog training class. The poor little needy dogs are out of control and “mindless” until their owners get a grip on what dogs need. The dogs are fine when the owners are trained.
Training, studies, doctoral dissertations, and journal reviews are such slow processes. Although I strongly support the research, it’s all to prove the obvious: That we need to slow down and pay attention to our feelings and our thoughts, to broaden our perspectives, and to have fun with possibility.
I wrote a book, Men Are Easy, http://www.menareeasy.com/blog… because I could no longer watch the mindlessness of our culture’s approaches to relationships and family. The good news is that mindfulness is in sync with our natures. It feels good. Maybe it will even become fashionable!
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In the New York Times and in his blog yesterday Daniel Goleman wrote an excellent description of performance and stress in the face of testing. It was a message to those considering the No Child Left Behind Act soon to be up for Congressional debate. I made the following comment:
No Child Left Behind is a last ditch Industrial Age attempt at a simplistic, socialistic-style solution to a complex problem. It goes along with the Bush administration’s focus on prisons over education and war over human development.We are a culture in rapid transition, where none of the old industrial systems are working all that well. School is one of them.
My book Men Are Easy describes the evolving system of marriage and how to live in it creatively and mindfully. The same advice applies to work, school, and all other continually evolving systems.
The best thing parents can do is to practice mindfulness and then teach mindfulness to their children through example and practice. This world demands the ability to respond thoughtfully to one’s own reactions, to open up and calm down in the face of threat and failure, to think clearly in emotionally-charged situations, and to learn to trust one’s self to do the right thing in spite of surrounding craziness. Often we have to design our own systems of support on the run, as we go, and that requires skills that are not taught in our expensive universities.
The good news is that out of the breakdown and chaos much more interesting and creative educational systems will emerge. Our digital age children are going to show us how to do it.
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They’re like diets and budgets. The second I resolve to eat or spend less, I sneak behind my better self and scarf a chocolate or buy yet another book on Amazon.
I’ve got a refrigerator stuffed with a drying turkey carcass and leftover carbs, a 2-foot pile of papers stashed in the closet of my study, and a car that hasn’t been run through the carwash in a month. It’s time to for teeth cleaning, a skin check, and mamotorture.
It’s time for making a list. Not a “to do” list. An Awareness List. A list of everything unfinished, hanging over my head, bugging me. They are what Coach U calls “tolerations.”
The list inspires a process. Here’s what I wrote in Men Are Easy about the benefits of the list: Read the rest »
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