Pink of Perfection

My, does it feel good to be home. But it always feels a little awkward coming back: walking through your own front door to a strangely quiet house, reappearing at work, resurfacing on your own blog. (Hi! I missed you!) I was away longer than expected. Hurricane Irene wreaked airport havoc just as we should have been boarding our flight home, and we couldn’t get home for another week. That was certainly an exercise in letting go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We went to Washington to attend a wedding, the kind that takes place in a 1930s summer, where you’re greeted with an ice cream social and the groom processes to the alter with his ecstatic trombone leading a ragtag marching band. We arrived a week early to drive up to the San Juan Islands and settle ourselves into a cottage on a bay. You know how whipped into a fever life can get right before a vacation? You’re aching for a break, but there are nine thousand details to attend to before you can even head to the airport.

As soon as we walked into this tiny little cottage and I sat down, looked out past the birds in the front yard and onto the water, those tight-fisted stress knots in my shoulders and brain loosened and dissolved. Salt air can do that. I read in the mornings and did yoga on the front deck. I hiked steep mountain paths through the woods, and bought dungeness crabs, clams, and oysters from the seafood operation down the road. They kept a very gorgeous red rooster strutting around the front yard and a bouquet of dahlias on the counter. In the evenings, the hot tub, a glass of wine, and my very juicy Ava Gardner biography awaited. We cooked on the grill and ate outside, and I fell asleep in the sunshine. Even a rainy day felt right. We sat by the fire and ate chocolate chip cookies with our books on our laps, a ukulele and a guitar at our feet.

All that relaxing set the stage to ride the ferry back to the mainland and point our car toward the wedding. We sat in an arc of chairs in front of the water on a day bright with sunshine and expectation. We listened as two dear friends and very kind, special people shared the most honest, thoughtful vows I’ve ever heard. Wedding ceremonies so often get caught up in promises hard to visualize. What does what you’re saying look like in real life, like, on a crappy Tuesday when it’s raining and you don’t have any clean socks? These vows were as much about love and support as living a life that meant something together––starting now. They spoke about the everyday and their promise to show up each morning––to make it fun, to work hard, to keep being curious, to be creative, to cook. I wanted to say, I do, too. Instead, I cried behind my sunglasses and squeezed Sebastian’s hands, and thought of all the ways I wanted to keep showing up in my own life. I realized with a bitter pang, one of those knots reappearing in my throat, just how absent I had been.

The wonderful thing about weddings is how often they encourage everyone present to make their own commitments. When a couple is brave enough to take a giant leap together into the unknown, and you are witness to their nervous smiles, their cracking voices––it always makes me want to love better. But this wedding made me want to live better. I came to vacation worn-down, exhausted, barely myself. My friends stood in front of their family and friends looking so excited. They reminded me of the adventure of life, especially in its most quiet, quotidian moments. There’s magic there, if we make it. On that incredible day, we all ate and laughed and danced to Michael Jackson into the night. But I knew part of them couldn’t wait to get back to their kitchen table, the desks, their garden out front. I couldn’t either.

I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. ––Audrey Hepburn

Don’t you love when someone sends you something––a card in the mail, a text, a link––at exactly the right time? That is what happened to me on Friday, when I felt July weighing heavy on me and wanted to get out from under its thumb. My coworker sent me a link to Tonya Leigh’s blog post, The Life Seduction Challenge. Tonya’s list made me feel instantly better about everything, and it made me want to share a similar challenge here, but with a Pink of Perfection twist. That is, finding the delight and beauty in the everyday.

And the whole fun experiment feels right: here we are with a fresh new month, ready to be made into something a little more fabulous. Need a little spring in your step? Every day for one month choose one item off the list. And for thirty-one days in August (or whenever you decide to get going), feel life get a little more luscious. I’m in!

1. Give something broken a new life (a skirt, a squeaky wheel, scuffed shoes).
2. Put something beautiful on a bit of blank wall you see every day.
3. Wear something you love that you think “just isn’t you.”
4. Send a thank you note, for anything.
5. Spend an afternoon reading.
6. Cook in a vintage apron.
7. Have luncheon: a slow midday meal with cloth napkins and wine.
8. Go out of your way to do something kind for a stranger (offer a seat, hold the door, leave your copy of Us Weekly on the elliptical).
9. Donate five items from your closet that don’t make you feel unstoppably gorgeous.
10. Take care of a nagging life admin item (a trip to the post office, filing an insurance claim, making a doctor’s appointment).
11. Buy an utterly frivolous piece of lingerie.
12. Invite friends over for cocktails, dinner, or brunch.
13. Wake up an hour early to have a leisurely morning.
14. Try something that looks like pure fun (accordion, crochet, burlesque).
15. Dance. In public, in the living room, with a partner, with yourself.
16. Flirt with a stranger. (Smiling counts.)
17. Get rid of five things in your home that don’t bring you pleasure.
18. Go to a parfumerie or department store in search of a signature scent.
19. Buy flowers for your home or office.
20. Make a recipe from a fruit, vegetable, meat or fish you’ve never cooked before.
21. Walk barefoot in the grass or on the sand.
22. Have a media-free day.
23. Write down everything you feel grateful for.
24. Hold a baby.
25. Pet a puppy.
26. Ask someone to tell you their life story.
27. Read a biography of your favorite glamorous screen star, or the bravest, most badass real life heroine.
28. Eat fresh berries, straight from the green paper pint.
29. Create an occasion to wear your most impractical pair of shoes.
30. Write down your wildest dreams.
31. Take one itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy step to make one real.
32. Have a proper weekday coffee break: ceramic cup, idle gossip, and staring out a window.
33. Visit a playground and swing.
34. Make lemonade. (Literally or figuratively.)
35. Go to a junk or antique story; consider what your favorite object has seen in its life.
36. Jump in a body of water. Float.
37. Give someone a hug; let them let go first.
38. Look at the stars.
39. Replace one utilitarian item you use every day––a measuring spoon, a file folder, a key chain––with something really, really beautiful.
40. Pamper your body with a massage, an overdue haircut, a trip to the sauna, or a soak in the tub.
41. Research something that sparks your curiosity (Arthurian legend, photosynthesis, investing). If you’re still curious after a 15-minute google session, dive deeper.
42. Make a collage of beautiful images that resonate with you.
43. Read aloud to someone you love.
44. Forgive yourself.
45. Forgive someone else.
46. Spend an hour in silent reflection.
47. Dine by candlelight on a weeknight.
48. Take a walk after dinner.
49. Wear your no-fail, cheer-me-up lipstick.
50. Give a genuine compliment to an acquaintance.
51. Have a glass of champagne, just because.
52. Spend one day taking pictures of everything you find beautiful.
53. Describe your perfect day in writing.
54. Block out an afternoon (or day) on the calendar to make some (or all) of it real.
55. Select one drawer or surface and organize it.
56. Write a love letter.
57. Do something you loved as a child.
58. Upgrade your sleep wear, or go Marilyn-style.
59. Do the one thing you were relieved/sad wasn’t on this list.
60. Pretend for one day that you are as confident and amazing as you want to be.

Special thanks to Tonya Leigh for the inspiration (and several of the ideas on this list)!

Update: Wonderful Pink of Perfection reader Sarah and my blogosphere kindred spirit put together a wonderful printable of this list overlaid on that irresistible Audrey Hepburn image. Print and enjoy!

I’m still adapting to some of the ways my schedule has changed in the past couple months, and I’m none too quick to adjust to the changes. My life feels like an experiment: week after week, I’m running tests and collecting data on what works: quick dinners, mood-boosters, and ways to make time for myself. And like any expedition into the unknown, there’s a lot of stumbling and a lot of frustration. But I still feel as strongly as ever that little tweaks can make life feel peachy and lush–it’s just a matter of finding the right solutions and treats.

Recently, I grabbed a clear sheet of paper and wrote, “Things To Make Me Feel Good About Life This Week” at the top. It wasn’t a to do list, it was more of a “to delight in list,” and included some life-improvers that can be the first to go when life speeds up and gets hectic. Buy some flowers. Pick a new book. Try exercising in the morning. Book a vacation. See my best friend. By the end of the week, this sleepyhead had managed to make it onto the elliptical machine before reporting for work duty. Small bouquets of sweet williams sat on the dining room table and by the new novel I had at my bedside. I didn’t make it to the dry cleaner to have a skirt hemmed or to the shoe repair for new soles on last year’s sandals. But I had a vacation getaway to look forward to and a living room picnic with my friend that smoothed out those wrinkles that always seem to arise in the day-to-day.

These are the little lifesavers. Maybe they’re not systems for optimal productivity or solutions for magical weeknight dinners. But they do have everything to do with life satisfaction and enjoyment. Who cares if you paid the bills on time and made it to the post office if you haven’t been lost in a novel, searched for the perfect drugstore lipstick, or found time to plant new geraniums on the windowsill? If I don’t get these in––the dates with friends, the little moments of delights and pleasure––than doing the laundry, writing a thank you note and rocking at work feel a lot more hollow.

My little lifesavers this week: flowers (of course), try a new rosé with some friends, Wednesday night yoga in the community garden, and giving myself a manicure while watching Drop Dead Diva. Hemming that skirt and getting my sandals resoled need to happen, too–but that’s another list.

What are your little lifesavers this week?

Mine started in first grade with the sentence, “May funny boy way who?” and embarked on a nonsensical meditation on a boy in my class named Clinton, with whom I was in love. I wrote a cast of characters on the inside cover (“Mom–my mom”) so that one day, when this tome was discovered among my papers, the reader wouldn’t be hopelessly lost. This diary was pastel blue with a lock, a schmaltzy quote about dreams, and a castle in the clouds on the cover: typical––though tragic––little girl stuff.

I’ve never been able to stop, and I credit journals for keeping me going through middle school, my teens, a melancholy, lovesick stay in Italy, post-college confusion, and whatever you’d call this period of post-post college confusion. (PoPoCoCo?)

At my first real office job, my boss was a wonderfully chic, astonishingly smart woman of the old school New York variety (rumor had it she had taught herself Russian in order to read Anna Karenina “in its purest form.”) You could set a clock by her workday routines––the morning pot of tea, her toaster oven lunch, an afternoon seltzer––but one unpredictability that enlivened our days together were her visits to my cubicle for a chat. It’s hard being an assistant, especially when you have just been puffed up for four years with the idea that your thoughts are illuminating to an unprecedented degree, the importance of your mind’s work irrefutably unassailable. It’s a long way to fall to mass mailings and spreadsheets, and my boss understood this. So she dropped by my desk to ask what I was reading (“You’re too young to really appreciate Madame Bovary; it’ll mean more when you’re older.”), and to ask about my personal life. In my three years as an assistant, we got to know each other pretty well, I think, and this all relates to journal writing for the pearl of wisdom she tossed out one day: “journal-writing is therapy for the poor.”

Some might have called her a bit of a snob, but I found her hilarious and likable in a scathing Dorothy Parker-kind-of-way.

She had been poor, at least in gentile way of an art history doctorate student scrimping by in New York at the time when sitting in the nosebleed seats at the ballet cost as much as going to the movies. She would write for pages and pages, she said, and sort things out for the cost of a notebook.

I don’t think writing in a journal is quite the same as therapy, and I do think the one-two punch of journal writing plus therapy can really get you places fast. But we’re not talking about sitting on the couch today; we’re talking about carrying around a little notebook. Some might argue that their blogs have replaced their personal writing, but I think they’re so different. After the idea wore off that my first grade crushes (and eighth grade depression and high school malaise) would be of any interest to anyone but me, the writing changes. You’re not writing for art or for laughs–you’re just writing to sort your own stuff out, to make sense of what’s happening in your life and in your head. Perhaps most helpful (and most amusing) is the record of it: you can see patterns, recognize triggers for certain behaviors and mood, and suddenly be reminded of the perfect brunch you ate with your beloved nine years ago that certainly would have fallen through the holes of memory.

And there is nothing more exciting, more like turning the page on a new chapter of your life when you begin a new notebook. I am deeply in love with this cheerful, colorful one, purchased at Target for the nice price of $3.99 (I’d link, but sadly, you can’t buy them online). Do you still write in a journal? Do you think it can help you make sense of the chaos of life? Do you think this sounds like juvenile stuff? Or did you fall back into journal-writing with something you tried as an adult, like Morning Pages?

It wasn’t the snow day we had hoped for. Yes, it did snow, and a thick white blanket covered town giving garbage cans queenly crowns. But there was still work to be done, and there were no pork fried dumplings to be had. Truth be told, I felt a bit sad about it. I thought I would glide from a deep sleep into a day that exists outside of time. The kind of day with stolen kisses and afternoon movies and latte art and peacefully, cozily looking out the window of our favorite Chinese restaurant surrounded by blue and white china and tiny cups of jasmine tea. But then the alarm clock went off.

It reminded me of a time in sixth grade when I stayed up half the night with my older brother and sister watching The Bodyguard (it was 1993, after all) certain that school would be closed in the morning. I bet all my little 11-year-old chips, and in the cold light of day stood beside a snow bank, cranky and light-headed, waiting for the school bus to arrive.

Sebastian pulled on his big, heavy black boots and kissed me goodbye. I stayed tangled up in the white sheets for awhile. I felt robbed of something that wasn’t even mine. Do you know that feeling?

I consoled myself by getting back to dairy a day earlier than my detox suggested. I brewed up a spitting-hot espresso maker of coffee and poured in organic half and half until it was that perfect color I hope to someday paint the walls of my mythical house in the woods. I painted Benetint on my lips and cheeks. I tried to cover the blemish on the end of my nose that won’t. go. away. (Do you know that feeling?) I tied a Bardot-esque thick black ribbon in my hair and turned on my favorite college radio station. I gave myself a tarot reading. Cards about waiting, nonaction, surrender, and trusting in the future appeared. I took this as a sign to dip my little boat in the river of the day that is––instead of the day I wanted––pulled on my boots, and stepped out into the snowy day. I picked something up for you:

Don’t you love these little pom poms?

Once when I was in college, I sat on my wooden desk chair holding the lipstick red cordless telephone to my ear, listening to a friend from high school. He was trying to impress me with stories of school in Montreal, how he could smoke pot on the sidewalks freely, when a friend in distress came in and sit on my bed. “I have to go,” I said, “a crying girl just came in.” His response still leaves me smiting today: “You must be in heaven. You always loved a person in crisis.”

I thought about this on Friday when a reader emailed me. “I was wondering if you had any advice on heartbreaks,” she wrote. “I don’t know how to overcome one!”

I’m not in the advice business, of course. If anything, I think of what I do sometimes as “different ways to think about the same old problems,” and it’s in service to others as much as it is a help to myself. A lover of crisis? You’re talking to a girl who loves security, not mayhem. But compassionate? Definitely.

So I thought about this email a lot over the weekend. Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I cried over any guy but the one I married. But when a friend drew the three of swords in a tarot reading on Saturday, I viscerally remembered that feeling of everything falling away––hunger, interest, energy––and feeling only the numbing ache of a broken heart. For me, the behavioral fallout often included self-destructive distractions, weeping into pillows, and at its worst, totally withdrawal from life. I don’t know if you can willfully mend a broken heart any faster than the natural regeneration process. But I do know what you can do until time puts the pieces back together again.

Make your life a luxurious cradle for yourself as you mend. One friend’s mother instructed her to “change the karmic energy of her bed” by finding new sheets she loved, free of any old associations. Treat yourself kindly. Buy a silk bathrobe. Make wholesome, nourishing dinners. Take yourself out to the movies. Read a mystery. Find luxurious smelling candles. Soak in a bubble bath. Let people caringly touch you: get a massage, get a haircut, get a manicure. And grieve: Tell a friend you need that proverbial shoulder. Write in your journal. Write a letter to the heartbreaker you’ll never send. Remember the bad parts of the relationship, too. Think about what you learned, what you want out of your next relationship, what are your non-negotiables, and what you deserve.

Some people deal with heartache by not acknowledging their feelings; others by dwelling on the break too much, too long. You know yourself. You know when, as Glamour so brusquely puts it, you need to “move the eff on,” and when you need to queue up The Bourne Identity and a facial mask and wallow away a Saturday afternoon.

But when heartbreak strikes, I like to think of Jane Eyre, perhaps unrecognized as the best break-up book of all time. Jane let go of love–the only she’d known in her life– because of her sense of personal integrity and self-worth. She wouldn’t settle for a bum deal. Even without ever directly experiencing it, she knew in her bones, in the very cells of her body, what she deserved.  That unwavering belief gave her the will to wander out into an unknown world with nothing but the clothes on her back and start over–no friends, no money, no family, no fallback. And when another man offers the prospect of a loveless marriage, she walks away from that offer, too, still knowing that a deep, passionate love and a marriage of true minds is what she requires for union. Jane Eyre has grit, a diamond-hard tenacity of spirit that comforts her in her darkest hour. She knows what she deserves, she doesn’t settle for anything less, and in the end, (SPOILER!) she gets just what is rightfully hers. Through these inevitable, unavoidable heart aches and disappointments in life and in love, that’s the kind of happy ending we all should hold out for.

In yoga, teachers will often ask you to set an intention for the class, or they’ll gently provide one, often in the form of a theme to consider. What they don’t say is, “What’s your resolution for this class? Are you finally going to beat handstands at their own game?”

It’s the time of year for resolutions, only so often their focus is on what isn’t working: the habits we want to break, the junk drawer we want to surmount, the unfulfilling job we want to escape. In our effort to be “better,” we have to improve something that’s, well, not good. Our focus is on the negative. There’s this terrible thing about our lives or ourselves that we will finally triumph over! And it will happen in 2011!

“Resolve” sounds gutsy, fierce, and strong––all good words. But I worry that in our rush to resolve this or that, we are trying so hard to “fix” things that we bring all our attention to negative spots in our lives. It’s like something I read in a book about child rearing once: when a kid is doing something you don’t want them to do, it’s harder for them to grasp, “Don’t do that.” It’s like sitting in meditation and thinking, “Don’t think.” That’s exactly when the thoughts arise, because your mind has to invert that direction in order to find out what it should do. Instead of instructing with a negative, the book suggested, instruct with a positive, saying something like, “Use the fork like a forklift to get the peas in your mouth!” to get them to stop poking themselves with it in the eye. (Note: I’m not a parent, so I don’t know anything about anything.)

But I do know that when we focus our attention on what’s not working in our lives, it can swell up like a blister. What you resist persists.

And what about what you embrace? Could it swell, too, and fill up the crevices of your life? Could it push out what’s not working, minimize it so much until its role becomes so tiny that it finally atrophies and falls away?

That seems entirely possible to me. Bringing more attention to what is working seems an awfully nice way to increase the good in our lives. What’s working for me? Checking in with how I really feel about things, like my relationships or the pile of clothes on the bathroom floor, and acting from that honest place of awareness, for better (hopefully) or for worse (well, that happens, too). Reading in bed instead of surfing the internet. Going to my favorite yoga class. Nurturing the sense of community in my life. Jumping at every chance that comes along to do something physical outside, whether that means dancing in a driveway or snowshoeing across a field. All of that is working for me, and I want to embrace them even more so this year, till they swell and take over. What’s working for you?

Photo: erix!

In our house, we keep time capsules. It’s our way of dealing with life’s most excruciating moments. So, whenever things get really bad and unbearable, we sit down and right about three things: 1) what we’re unhappy about now, 2) what we’re grateful for in spite of the bad stuff and 3) what we hope for in the next twelve months. Then we seal the envelope and write on the outside in big cautionary letters, “Not to be opened before [the date 12 months hence].”

We’ve been writing time capsules since December of 2004, a cold winter when we felt desperate: I had just moved to New York. I was achingly lonely, afraid of my boss, so terrified of screwing up at work that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I missed my friends from college, I had $40 a week to spend on things other than groceries, and my boyfriend lived far away in New Jersey, his car having just sputtered to its final death, steam pouring out of its hood on a dark country road.

That first time capsule always makes us laugh when we read it now. The center of our disappointed world was that broken-down Bronco. But Sebastian would soon move 10 blocks south of me in Brooklyn, and I would grow to deeply admire my boss and even make a friend or two. I sound so very young and unsure of myself, and reading it makes me grateful for the aging process, despite these new fine lines I’ve noticed at the corner of my eyes. The time capsule is like a snapshot of exactly where you are in a moment in time, like those treasured old photographs of your parents, picnicking by a river and still so in love.

We recently split the seal on a time capsule from this time last year, and the picture was grim: I didn’t know where my next paycheck was coming from, I sounded untethered and uninspired. What struck me most of all was the sad, mournful timbre to the time capsule: I sounded lonely.

I got an email from a new-ish friend a few weeks ago. For the past year we’ve been getting to know each other over oysters and Monday morning emails. She was counting her blessings, she said, and thanking me for my part in hers. I’m embarrassed to say that her thank you reminded me of just how many people have played a part in my being in a much happier, hopeful place this year. I’ve got a lot of thanking to do.

What I needed in 2004 and this time last year was a community. I needed a circle of women to talk my head off with, who would help me see things from a different perspective, introduce me to new writers and new ideas, friends who would listen to my tales of woe and then make me laugh about them. But these things take time to develop, especially if you’ve got sky-high expectations for what community and friendship should feel like. Six years after moving to New York and starting my grown-up life, that community is clicking into place in a way that makes me feel so different about my life.

We forget to tell our friends how much they mean to us. It feels cheesy and florid and overwrought. So we wait until we’ve had too much to drink or someone’s getting married to let it all pour out in an urgent outpouring. The people in my life don’t need scented soaps and gift certificates: they need to be thanked. You’re first.

I love this space, not because I hold forth and blab about cookies and cocktails, but because of the community here. It’s like––to speak in television terms––the Peach Pit or the Double R Diner. I always know someone’s going to be sitting at the counter, ready to bust out with something pithy, wise, or funny. It’s really the best, and something I thank my lucky stars for.

Here’s wishing you all a relaxed, love-and-eggnog-filled holiday, with lots of pajamas, good food, winter walks, and so much laughing your belly aches.

And thank you.