Quick Pic

Barbara: Okay, saw this on Facebook and it just soooo resonated with me that I had to share it with you guys. Doesn't it make PERFECT sense?!

Okay, here's a question. I got this photo from someone's public wall post. Do I link to them and/or give them credit? Or does that infringe on their privacy? And if something appears on someone's wall and doesn't appear to have any other credit, does it implicitly mean it's their own creation, or might the wrong person, in fact, get the credit??? Help!

What’s the WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN??!!

Barbara: I was chatting with a friend the other day when it came up that this question haunts many of us on a daily, even minute-ly, basis. We wonder, we worry, we ruminate, we prepare, we stress out, we––in worst-case scenarios ( ;-) )––even sometimes succumb to a zillion nightmare answers to this question. And so, in trying to prepare ourselves for the worst, we become undone by it before it even happens. Or, ironically, our worries trigger that worst-case scenario.

A friend of mine had a vivid, emotionally terrifying nightmare: her best girlfriend was furious with her, crying and screaming, and the crux was that my friend did not like her friend’s new guy. When my friend woke up, all she could think about was the possibility that she and her best friend might actually have this terrible conflict in real life. Her worst fear was losing this friend. So she pondered all the possible reasons a scenario like this might happen, and then of all the possible ways she could avoid it. She spent so much time imagining every possible permutation of events that when she finally did meet her friend’s new boyfriend, she felt fully prepared. No one—NO ONE—would be able to say she didn’t get along with the guy. Sad twist, of course, is that her best friend believed that she was in fact trying to STEAL the boyfriend. The horrible nightmare came true because she’d been working so hard to prevent it!! (Happily, my friend was able to explain this whole mess and all was understood and forgiven.)

My whole life, I’ve tried to emotionally prepare for the worst. I really believed that if I was prepared, it wouldn’t shock me so badly or hurt me so much when it happened. Thing is—and I know we all know this, but it bears repeating––it’s never what you expect that happens (or how). I have never, not once, been able to prepare myself out of a life shock or drama or tragedy.

Deb actually helped me deal with this suffocating habit by sharing a great coping strategy. She was telling me about her dear friends’ struggle with the fact that the husband was dying of cancer. One of this couple’s strategies was to try and avoid immersing themselves in the emotional turmoil of the worst-case scenario. Obviously, a worst-case scenario had presented itself and that scenario was already playing out in the worst possible way. So she and her husband learned that if they imagined the worst, they were in fact living the scenario TWICE—once when they imagined it and then again when it actually happened. They were suffering twice as much, and wasting precious time in the grips of despair. So they decided to safeguard their present by living in it. Now if you take this logic to our often WRONG predictions of the future, then you see that we are also living the worst-case scenario unnecessarily.

Shit happens. We can only strategize when we’ve good and stepped in it (or had it flung in our faces).

Of course, we can all be prepared for bad scenarios in some kinds of concrete way––take that self-defense class, buy that alarm system, watch what you spend, eat healthily, let your friends know you love them—but having an imaginary script written for all the emotional upheavals that will or might take place in our lives only mocks us when nothing turns out the way we advance-screen it in your minds. 

Deb: This has been an ongoing struggle for me through my life, Barb. I am wired for panic. My people are panickers and I have carried on this fine tradition. But over the last years I have really worked on trying not to go to the dark side and I have made large inroads. I still have my moments, of course, but largely I find that my major knee-jerking has ceased. I stop and breath, and I don’t go there twice anymore. 

Anal With A Side Of Barb

Barbara:

 (to “Barb” something: a verb meaning to over-complicate, muddle, or confuse a thing; a noun indicating the over-complicated, muddled, or confused result.)

I’m not anal about everything—my house is clean but not sterile (the same can be said for my kids, my car, and my purse)—but there are some things that trigger instant anality within me, and they all involve organizational skills that in turn trigger a frenzy of irrational Barbings.

Filing and spring-cleaning are two examples that come to mind. The blog is another. Just ask Deb: I am anal about fonts, spacing, ellipses, em-dashes, lower and upper case, timing, and postings. But I’ve also Barbed it so much as to make the postings and pages a mess of embedded rules and regulations. The thought of changing our blog, as much as I would love to try a refreshed look, sends my anal anxieties swirling into virtual orbit. 

But the real test to my anal/Barbing is coming up. My darling hubby has a milestone birthday this year. I won’t reveal it in case he cherishes his privacy (okay, it rhymes with the Shmig Shmive Shmoh), but suffice to say, I got a lotta plannin’ to do.

We can’t have a huge, open-door party as I don’t have the space. But he has lots of family and friends who want to honour him, so I have to finesse a guest list. Not so hard––anal-brain loves making the lists … but did I FORGET SOMEBODY??? Barb-brain devises a series of odd charts and counter charts … and somehow leaves people off one or the other.

I saved my own ass by deciding not to throw a surprise party (my husband says it’s okay, he knows he’s turning 50.) (OOPS, shit!) Anyway, the real truth is my Barb brain would have combusted under the onus of adding “surprise” to the mix. Anal-brain hates that I went the “easy” route on that one; Barb-brain sends me kisses every morning.

When it comes to keeping track of the guest-list, anal-brain copied a friend’s e-vite formula and was able to send out a summons. But this required reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading the copy, never feeling I got it just right. Barb-brain had to pull me away from the computer because anal-brain was weeping and braying that I screwed the whole thing up and that a drugged monkey would’ve done a nicer job!

Barb-brain checks the rsvp list every five minutes, anal-brain makes copious calculations based on Barbed math. The result: I literally have no idea how many people are coming.

And the worst part is: I have to look and sound like a seriously cool cuke or none of this will be fun for anybody. It is SO NOT PRETTY!

Okay, thanks for the shoulder. I’m good now. Just had to vent a bit. Real Barb is back and she is neither anal nor muddled. Just a little spent. Phew.

Deb: I love the Barbing it, the whole concept. It personalizes something we all do to some degree. The thing I love the most when Barb “Barb’s it”, is that it is always with the best intentions. She is on the job trying to solve the problem, trying to find the path of least resistance. The thing is ... she doesn’t. She Barb’s it. And it has given us more laughs over the years than I can say.

Barb: Well, if we are supposed to bring ice cream to the dinner party tonight, why don’t we take a cooler full of ice and I will pick it up on the way to your house and then you can take it from there when I go home to change and bring it to the dinner?

Deb: Or I could just leave a few minutes early and buy the ice cream on my way over.

Barb: I just Barbed it, didn’t I?

Deb: Yes. Yes you did. 
Laughter.

Worried Sick

Barbara: Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay about “compassion fatigue” (I couldn’t find the essay itself, but this is an excellent article that discusses it). If you don’t know it, she talks about how there’s a real danger that we can become immune to the tragedies around us because we are so inundated with images depicting them. She calls this phenomenon “compassion fatigue”.

I don’t know about you, but I am not in danger of succumbing to compassion fatigue; I’m at risk of collapsing under the weight of fatigue brought on by my compassion.

I am virtually vibrating with my concerns and fears for Japan right now, never mind that those concerns are piling up on top of recent worries about New Zealand and renewed ones about Libya and Haiti, and on and on. I try to drown myself in my work, which helps in the moment, but I come out of it exhausted and inexplicably weepy. I feel powerless. I feel impotent.

Lori Landau posted an interesting article yesterday about her own thoughts on this. Lori suggests that in order to take care of the world, we need to take care of ourselves first. This is such a simple and powerful logic, I have to repeat it here. We’ve blogged a lot about personal trials and tribulations and how to lend a helping hand in times of need. But a unanimous consensus among us is that in terrible times, we are bound to “hit a wall”. This is when we most need a break to recuperate and heal. For each of us, this process will involve something different. Lori recommends meditation. Her point—and rightly so—is that through meditation, we can also increase our communal energy. And that communal energy can bind us together and give us an exponential healing power, even in the worst of times.

Now I am terrible at meditating. I’ve tried it to little avail. But I can see the beauty and truth in joining spiritual forces and BELIEVING. If there is one thing that exemplifies the best of the human spirit, it is our ability to prevail, adapt, and grow. We can’t give up now. We have to believe in ourselves, in each other, in good. Let’s not get so fatigued that we succumb to it, that we settle, that we give up. “Believing” might not be meditation in the classic sense, but it’s the kind of meditation I, for one, can grasp. It gives me energy when I most need it.

Deb: Barb, wonderful food for thought. I too have been struggling with this. I look at the photos and it looks exactly like a disaster movie. It looks unreal and surreal and as a result, it is hard to grasp. So I find myself instead focusing on the individuals.

I was struck by a photo in the newspaper of a little boy. He must have been around three or four. He was standing in front of a man in full radiation gear, as the man waved a wand over his tiny self. His eyes were wide and his little arms and legs were spread-eagle. He looked not terrified but aghast. At least as aghast as a tiny boy can look. And I sat staring at the picture of his sweet face and thinking that no matter what happens in the rest of his life, this is the defining moment. He will never ever ever forget this moment. It will shape who he is, and who he will become.

I have meditated since I was twenty. I kept it up for years and years. I picked it up during menopause and it was a great help, but since then I have strayed again.

So Barb, you have inspired me to slip into my Transcendental Meditation and send loving thoughts of peace and hope and healing to the Japanese people. And as I repeat my mantra, I will think of them, one human at a time, through the face of one tiny little boy.