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!

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.

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 »

I woke up to an email from Nanette, my publicist. Our article, Home for the Holidays Stress Free, is a full feature, not just a feed, in Yahoo! News. Now that’s good.
So I thought, “Who am I going to email it to?” I thought of busymom.net (Better Parenting through Coffee) and checked out her blog and read about revealing boobs and then read a Fox News story that revealed two boobs, laughed through the next three entries, and then had to stop and get to work again.
Yesterday Chris at Greenleaf Book Group called to tell me that Men Are Easy is on its way. I had to decide on how many to ship to myself. Wow! Months before the pub date–March 1 in the stores–I’ll have it here locally. And who knows? Oprah’s people visit here in the winter. Maybe someone will see it. Maybe that person will think it’s the greatest thing since whatever. . .wait. . .Maybe I should just see if anyone who doesn’t know and love me all actually pays money for it. . .
Or maybe I should forget it all and focus. The list. The Christmas list. I haven’t started yet. I’m going to be with all the men on Christmas Eve, a little frantic, guilty, and helpless, racing through Macy’s, then up all night wrapping. But I think that I like this system. It’s kind of freeing. Maybe the guys have it right.

Conniff’s blog, Accentuating the Negative in the New York Times this morning starts with,

“One of the most daunting and widely repeated insights from recent social research holds, in essence, that your marriage is doomed if you and your spouse can’t muster up five positive interactions for every negative one.”

My response:
Life is more pleasant when you are pleasant to others.
This is an epiphany? I love the NY Times.

I also love the way you (Conniff) picked up on your friend’s comment about positive actions and marriage. It supports my contention about relationships and the title of my book: Men are easy.

Here’s my logic as a systems researcher:

Love is the feeling associated with the clear flow of information, matter, energy between people that results in the formation of social groups. It’s physiological, genetic, and required for our survival. Open up to increase the flow. Close down and decrease the flow. Closing down is a protective mechanism, but any perpetually closed human system, whether a negative spouse or North Korea, fails to thrive.

So, yes, say something pleasant in the morning. Don’t skip the hug when running out the door. But five positive things? In marriage, nothing should be required before the first cup of coffee.