My Own Kind of Popular

At one point in the evening, I remember thinking, Are we weird? Is this weird?

It was when Aaron was playing a Chopin Prelude (I think it was a Prelude. I'll have to ask him. I'm terrible with musical specifics.) and we were all sitting in the living room, listening with rapt attention. Mom, Meg (my sister), Dad and me. The living room had become a forest of red and white twisted streamers - candy-striped, crepe-paper columns running from the ceiling to the floor, with red and white balloons attached at the top. And on the glass coffee table, the remnants of a Tags Bakery chocolate birthday cake.

I emerged from Aaron's musical spell for a moment and thought, Here we are, just the five of us (You're doing all this just for us?! Aaron had asked incredulously earlier in the evening. All these decorations and everything and no one else is coming??....), hanging out now for going on five hours for Mom's birthday celebration, and there's no other place on earth I'd rather be than right here.

The agenda for the evening (Really. Dad printed out an agenda.) included numerous performances, all entrancing: Dad singing a John Dowland solo; all of us, sans Mom and Annika, singing a selection of Beatles tunes (Mom's been on this Beatles kick for several months now. And now that I think about it, our performance was probably quite a bit less than entrancing ), me reading my blog homage to her, Aaron playing several solo pieces on the piano, and Meg performing a purely improvised dance/monologue number based on reflections from her recent 3-week creative retreat in Virginia.

Audience members becoming performers becoming audience members. My favorite way to spend an evening. Who cares if it's "just" my family.

But I do recognize that it's probably weird.

Makes me think of high school. And cliques. The first time I became aware of them was in Ms. Steinbaum's 5th grade class. I noticed that Jenny Glickman always had a claque of girls around her, giggling, whispering, passing notes back and forth. And then there were the outliers. The little groups of girls who played quietly among themselves at recess, all the while casting sidelong, envious glances at the screaming, giggling clique hovering around Jenny. This, to me, was the oddest thing.

First, Jenny was boring. She wasn't very smart, or kind, or creative. She was bland. She was the white bread of 5th grade girls. Second, all the other girls in the whole class, as far as I could make out, were scrambling to be her best friend. Why? There wasn't a bone in my body that wanted to be Jenny's best friend, or giggling and screaming with any of the other girls. Or pining wistfully like the other other girls. I rather liked my own company.

From that point, I became fascinated with group psychology, especially as it played out in the halls and homerooms of my schools.

In high school, the fascination deepened, probably because I had stronger faculties for distinguishing, characterizing and ruminating. I noticed, again, the Popular Girls in their Awesome Clique, and Everyone Else who in their own way, wished desperately to be in. Some girls formed anti-clique cliques. (They were the cheerleader-haters.) But just like the Popular Girls, they had their own rules, their own restrictions, and deep down (I knew some of them so I can say this with some authority) they really would have been much happier being one of the Popular Girls.

If any of them reads this, she'll deny it vehemently. But it's true. Wherever you find hate, there you find denied love (ahem: Ted Haggart).

I was a clique drifter. I rode the clique trains from one group to the next, hopping off for a quick cup of coffee around the proverbial burning garbage can, and back on again to move to the next group huddled around their own private fire. And I really enjoyed that. At school, I had no enemies. And yet once I walked through the big metal doors at 3:15pm, I left the entire social structure behind. I was 17 and utterly unaware of the normal after-hours social scene.

To me, after hours consisted of pouring over homework (I confess it. I loved homework.), devouring TCBY white chocolate mousse frozen yogurts with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while watching black and white movies with Alka, or grinding our way through Jane Fonda's 90-minute workout and then flopping on the couch to watch MTV videos with Michelle.

Not once did I wish I was really with someone else, doing something else. To me, I was as cool as could be. I just had vastly different tastes and interests than everyone else.

I credit my parents with raising me with a potent disregard for peer pressure. I'm not quite sure how they did it. Part of it was certainly the by-product of rather unhealthy elitist attitudes, but part was genuine strength of character: The ability to truly look at a situation dispassionately, see it clearly and choose proactively based on personal principles, not groupthink. Because of this, I quickly realized that The Popular Girls were only popular for two reasons: (1) they were having the most fun and, more importantly, (2) everyone else's envy made them popular. By gazing wistfully at them all the time, by pining after what they had or were experiencing, instead of creating something of their own.

So I figured out early on that it's not popularity that the other girls wanted. It was a sense of personal power, of personal pride. What they really wanted was to be able to enjoy a vital, vivid, exciting life, to really get inside a moment and stay there. Well, hell, I thought. I can do that.

So can anyone, if she is willing to do the hard work of creating her own circle of popularity. Even if it's just a circle of one, or two, or five.

Which is why it wasn't odd at all for us to be planning an extensive, five-hour party for Mom, even if "just" for the five of us. Because to us, we five were it.

And what a gift. To feel like my family is it. Where the excitement is. Where the deep love and creativity is. Where the charisma is.

Ok so we might go overboard with our agendas and our marathon political and religious discussions. Ok so visitors and new girlfriends and boyfriends often leave scratching their head, wondering what in the world they just walked into. Because it's weird, it is weird, to do what we do. But weird is just another way of saying charismatic. And charismatic is just another way of saying Popular. And Popular is just another way of saying "cool with myself." And "cool with myeslf" is just another way of saying "centered," "present," "here," "vital," "alive."

And that's exactly what all five of us were as we listened with rapt attention to Aaron playing his deeply moving Chopin, to Dad singing a beautiful tenor solor, to me reading my homage to Mom and as we watched Meg move brilliantly through her improv piece.
*****
And last night we did it again for Thanksgiving (sans Mom, because she had to take a last minute trip to help my Grandma heal a bad back).

I just encountered Dad at a local coffee shop this morning and he gave me one of his signature bear hugs and said, jubilantly, "That was the best Thanksgiving ever!"

I heartily agreed. Even though, in Mom's absence, we (shhh) ordered a full turkey dinner from a lcoal restaurant. But that aside (it was a delicious meal, actually, with all the traditionals: mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, etc. etc. etc.), what made the Thanksgiving great is what happened after and around the food.

First, we went around the table during the meal and recounted everything we were thankful for. Second, we spent a good half hour on a rousing conference call with my brother (who lives in Indiana and couldn't come up), talking about the the military-industrial complex, the disappearance of the electric car, why he is actually going to vote for a President this time around and what place ideals have in politics. Third, after the phone calls and the clean-up, we dusted off my old guitar, tuned it up, broke out the song books and spent two full hours singing: four-part harmonies, a capella pieces, canons (our resounding favorite: "Why doesn't my goose sing as well as thy goose when I paid for my goose twice as much as thine?"!!). Everything from hymns and spirituals like "Now the Night is O'er" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to old standards like "Puff, the Magic Dragon" and "The Sound of Silence." It was fabulous, we sounded great, and by the end of the night our voices were scratchy and our heads stuffed with singing as much as our bellies were stuffed with good food.

So there we were again: a small group of people creating something beautiful, vital, moving. What does it matter that we were only four? That others may have been doing something "cooler," or "better"? In our eyes, there was no better place to be, and no better people to be with.

This is how I learned to be my own brand of popular. We had family gatherings like this constantly, and I simply absorbed the charisma, the ability to fully and thoroughly enjoy a moment, to simply be with the people we were with, doing what we were doing.

If there's one thing my family is good at, it's creating moments in which a kind of magic happens, a soft radiance arcs over everyone, time slows, senses heighten and strong, silent, silvery webs of dynamism, charisma, creativity and deep connection bind us to each other.

May everyone discover this cure, this healing power, this mighty secret.

Ok, Now for a Complete 180

So my first two posts were about extravagant questions. How good and great they are. And then I read a comment posted by my uncle, and it got me to thinking.

He said something about how no one wants to ask the "unextravagant question," and how those posts made him think about what extravagant questions he has asked lately. All good stuff, really. But, still, something tickled the back of my mind, like a whispery little voice, saying, "Watch it."

Watch what?

Well, watch my tendency to value extravagance over simplicity, probably. If there's one consistent character trait I've had since I was tiny, it's a taste for the extravagant. I loved to read, so I read 600-page novels in 3rd grade. I loved to cartwheel, so one summer afternoon a friend and I cartwheeled across the entire campus where my dad was going to seminary. In fact, that was the summer when cartwheeling was our de facto mode of transport.

In high school I wanted to double pierce my ears, but mom would have none of it. So I put four earrings in each single-pierced ear.

In 11th grade English class, Mr. Carey constantly chastised my prolific use of the comma. I used it profligately, for emphasis, apparently far too often.

Dessert? Anything with obscene amounts of chocolate.

Espresso drinks? Always grande. Always a flavor.

I live in a world of superlatives. Everything is always The Best! The Most Amazing! The Funniest! The Greatest! But my uncle's post made me reconsider. Yes, there is a virtue in asking the extravagant questions of one's life. It's like a shot of espresso. It rouses us, stirs us to great possibilities.

But there is also virtue in the unextravagant question. In the seemingly simplest, unnecessary, shy question.

I am reminded of my very first class in college. I went to St. John's College, a Great Books school started by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. Classes are intimate, led not by a professor but by a tutor, and always, always begun with a Question.

In this particular class, we were discussing The Iliad. For those unfamiliar with the tome, basically it's about war. And what goes with war? Booty. As in: Plunder. Loot. Stolen goodies.

So there we were, 8 o'clock on a Monday night, all eager, fresh-faced freshman with our big books and our little lives, waiting with pent-up anticipation as the tutor opened his mouth to speak. So my question tonight is.....

The room held its baited breath and all went silent.......

What is booty?

My brow furrowed and a contemptuously quizzical expression crossed my face. What is booty? Are you kidding me? That's the question? Ohmygod. This is going to be a long year. I got stuck with the lame teacher who can't even ask a decent question. What is booty. Please.

At the end of class two hours later, we hadn't even begun to answer it.

And of course, Mr. Rawn was not lame. He was quite brilliant. It was I, in my constant superlative stupor, who was misguided. And for the next four years, I learned the art of asking the very, very simple question. I learned how those questions, the ones I almost cringed in asking, were powerful, mysterious, complex (and they were almost always the ones everyone else was silently wanting to ask anyway). They were like long, deep tunnels into the heart of the thing. They were extravagant on the inside, and you had to dig pretty deep to discover that.

I am just finishing up my life coaching training with an organization called iPEC (Institute for Professional Empowerment Coaching). In this training, we learn to ask powerful questions. They are powerful not because they are extravagant or sexy, but because they are simple. Even obvious.

Well, Coach, I just can't seem to get out of this relationship that I've been in for years. It's really driving me crazy. I want nothing more than to be free and move on, and I just can't seem to do it.

Interesting, the Coach says, quietly. How are you benefiting by staying stuck?

How am I what?........

Extravagant questions are for encouraging us into great possibilities. They are for flinging outward and upward, to see how high they can take us in our search for our greatest potential. And this is good.

But there is another movement that is just as essential. And unextravagant questions are for that. They are for calling us down and in to the heart of something. They are for tunneling from the surface to the core. And the simpler they are, the more unextravagant, the more readily a thing's essence will open itself to us, because essence is by nature shy, hidden, quiet.

So, in challenging towards possibility: atiprazna. In tunneling into essence: the anti-atiprazna.

And I have a feeling that the two are in fact blood relatives. That at the remote edges of the atiprazna lies the unextravagant question, directing the enquirer back down and in. And that in the deepest core of the simplest inquiry lies the extravagant question, opening out and up.

Happy Birthday, Mothah!

It's my mom's birthday today. She is.....57. I always have to calculate that. To me she will always be 40-ish, which is what she was when I was 16, a sophomore in high school. It helps that she has an incredibly youthful spirit. Perhaps if she slumped around the house in a ratty housecoat with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other, griping constantly about her sciatica or her arthritis, it might be more difficult to retain the image of a sprite 40-year-old. But this is about as opposite a picture as is possible to create of Mom. In fact she sprints around the house in a cool, sleek, chic, hot pink jogging suit with, if any drink is in her hand at such breakneck speed, an espresso, pulled fresh from her ooh la la Italian espresso machine, as she speaks rapidfire through her Bluetooth Plantronics 645 earpiece to high-powered CIOs of companies like (hold on, I have to check her excel spreadsheet.....) Abbott Labs, Grainger, CNA.....See what I mean? 40-ish, all the way.

So, Happy Birthday Mom. This is an homage to the youngest 57-year old with the most spunk and energy of anyone I know. You are a total inspiration.

The Evanston Group, the company my parents run together, was her brainchild back in 1999. I just told the story yesterday, to two new clients of mine (I work for her). I love telling it. I love seeing my clients' heads nod as I tell the story of her brilliant idea, which launched a company that was profitable in the first year of business (does anyone know what a rarity that is? 99% of new companies fail, and precious few of the remaining 1% are profitable in the first year), and which continues to be a brilliant idea, copied by almost no one even several years later.

I was just thinking the other day how much I have learned from Mom about sales, negotiation, saying less rather than more, and always -- always -- finding a "work-around" to the client's protestations of "Can't be done!" "Impossible!" "Never happens that way!" Mom listens, nods obediently, and then slips in through a tiny, forgotten, and nearly invisible window that just happened to be left slightly open in a small back office corner room on the topmost floor.

Mom is a true entrepreneur. And she has a strong spirituality, which has also been incredibly important for my own growth and exploration. She has a natural, easy faith in the universe's support of her dreams and needs.

And she is a dreamer. Not one of those airy, soft, lazy dreamers who loll about under a willow tree, chewing on a strand of wheat and watching the clouds shift shape. Um, no. She is a demanding dreamer. Her dreams are expressed crisply in numbers on excel spreadsheets and large, sprawling questions on her white board (she like to express her dreams in the form of a question -- Ahhh! again with the theme of the question!) -- and an extravagant question, no less. One that seems even unreasonable, radical, rash, undoable. She really likes those kinds of dreamquestions. Because of course, for her, they always come true. And that's really fun, when extravagant questions get answered in the form of a beautiful, resort-like house in her favorite city on earth, or a beautiful granddaughter (she's been dreamquestioning that one for years), or the impending arrival of her son to live in Chicago (she really dreamquestioned that one).

I have watched her dream, and have watched them grow, and have watched her grow with them, and I'm just now realizing how important that watching has been for me. When we dream big, radical, crazy dreams, we are also dreamed. We enter a state of being whose boundaries lie far outside those in which we operate daily. We emerge into a reality that is more watery, where the lines between the possible and the impossible fade away. And we find, as I have found in my own life, that by having the courage to dreamquestion the way Mom does, we grow in proportion to our courage. Dreams are like questions that way. The minute we engage them, they turn and engage us just as deeply.

So, thanks, Mom. For sprawling those crazy dreamquestions on the whiteboard of your spirit for all these years and for sharing them with us. I raise a bone white ceramic demitasse of freshly pulled espresso to you.

Our Own Version of Schroeder

Remember Lucy? Leaning, lovelorn, on the edge of a tiny, squat, toy grand piano as Schroeder pounded out a Chopin Nocturne or two? Ok, so it's not a toy grand piano, and she's missing the angst and the focus, and she's of course not male, but in our own way, I'm Lucy to her Schroeder: me hovering about, entreating her to play and loving whatever happens, because she's her, because she's mine, or rather, because, in an even more truthful way, though I gave birth to her, she is really not mine, can't be possessed, is her own little self, enclosed and unreachable, the way we all are to each other. And, like Lucy, that makes me sad, and full of respect, and each time I see her I fall a little deeper in motherlove. 

Live the Extravagant Question

Where to start? It has to be with a discussion I just had with a fellow Johnnie....

This evening a friend of mine, Angela Steinrueck, and her 10-month old little girl, Julia, came over to hang. After Annika dropped into Dreamland, Julia crawled around happily while Angela and I talked. First we forayed into what kind of schooling we've done since St. John's (a Great Books College we both attended). I mentioned that for two brief months I was in Northwestern University's master's program in journalism, and how, though I appreciated the short-lived glimpse into the underbelly of journalism, I left in part because I was appalled that there could even be a serious debate among journalists about professional detachment versus intervention.

For instance: a man gets shot in front of you and there is no one around. What do you, as a professional journalist, do? To me, there is absolutely, and should be absolutely, no question (as I re-read this blog, I recognize the irony of this statement...). You drop your pen and paper, or your Treo and laptop, and help the dying man. But serious journalists debate this point. Many believe journalists are not and should not be in involved in making news, only in reporting it. They argue that a journalist would be breaking her ethical and professional journalistic code if she were to intervene. As these debates raged around me in my Business Law class, my inner jaw dropped. This was clearly not the place for me. Anyone who could actually seriously debate whether to help a dying man or leave him dying and diligently report on the event was not company I wanted to keep.

I explained all this to Angela in that tone of voice and with those facial expressions and gestures that you use with someone whom you know agrees with you completely: the assumption of shared disdain, the presumption of communal contempt.

Except that when I was done, Angela said, Well, I can actually see their point. What if you were on a plane, say, and a man had a heart attack? I can see calling for anyone who knows CPR to come help, while I record what is happening.

This is what I love about St. John's. There, we were taught not to take ideas personally. We were able to discuss potentially explosive topics with cool-headedness and emotional detachment, analyzing the validity and cohesivness of ideas and arguments themselves, and not getting caught up in defensiveness or feelings of insult. Good, solid friends could, and often did, hold staunchly opposing views and debate them vigorously, without the hint of conflict or tension. And here, in my living room, was a microcosmic example of that training.

Angela disagreed almost entirely with my premise, one I had stated with such an assumption of agreement that I was quite surprised at her response, both that she disagreed with me at all (because, really, how could anyone?!) but even more so, that she felt perfectly free to vocalize her position and defend it point by point. We got into a rousing discussion (cut short, alas, by the sleepy whimperings of my little girl, Annika) which I'm sure would have lasted much longer had we had the opportunity.

It was good to have a talk like that. Good to be disagreed with. Good to be surprised by someone's position, in such opposition to mine, and delivered, as Angela delivers absolutely everything, with good-natured, yet unwavering conviction. Or rather, good-natured, yet unwavering questioning. I just realized...When Angela disagrees, she often disagrees with a question. As in, Yes, but can't you imagine a situation in which......or, Yes, but couldn't you look at it this way,.....or, Yes, but what if.....

And here, look. I have stumbled onto the perfect first post for this blog: the beauty of the question, and in this case, of the extravagant question, the "atiprazna." The question that defies as much as it welcomes, that opposes while at the same time, invites. What is more powerful than this? Statement pales and weakens in comparison. There is something irresistible about this kind of question. Something amicably subsersive; something innocently covert. The way roots slowly and quietly break open stone. Or the way runnels of water gently penetrate rock.

What was extravagant about Angela's questioning of my position was how unextravagantly she behaved. How simple. How unencumbered. It is an art to question this way. And Angela is very good at it. We all are at St John's.

Things are different in the "real" world. Extravagant questions are inefficient. It's much easier to take a hammer to the stone, or a drill to the rock. But something critical is lost when statements replace questions in our dialogues with each other.

What's lost is intimacy. We tend to think that intimacy comes from agreement: shared principles or values, common likes or dislikes, similar opinions and interests. In fact, true, deep intimacy is generated when individuals approach each other from within the context of sharing the danger of being put in question.

What I am left with tonight is the challenge and reward of continuing this art in the "real" world -- a world populated by a host of extravagant claims, but precious few extravagant questions.