You Are Welcome

A couple of years ago, my husband Brian encouraged me to say “you are welcome” whenever someone thanked me. It has been one of the most eye opening and difficult correctives to institute into my daily interactions. Typically, I say “thank you” when someone thanks me.  I am often uncomfortable acknowledging that I deserve someone’s gratitude.

I am not alone. At the end of most recorded interviews, the interviewer will say “thank you” to his or her guest.  The interviewee will respond with “thank you.”  When orators say “thank you, thank you, thank you” to an audience that will not stop clapping, no real gratitude is being offered or received.

When people both say “thank you” to one another, there is no acceptance or closure in the interaction. It is two moments of gratitude that meet in the middle of the air, then evaporate.  When we say “you are welcome”  to someone who  says “thank you,”  we bring radical closure to our interactions. Someone offers gratitude and we accept.

Remembering how to give and receive gratitude is practice in beginning and ending experiences in our everyday lives. This micro practice of “thank you” followed by “you are welcome”  is actually powerful time management because we learn how to honor our  interdependence with one another and move on.

I recognize there are times when both parties, giver and receiver, are truly grateful. In that case, saying “thank you” and “you are welcome” twice  is a clunky, yet still appropriate response.

While I still find it counter-cultural to say “you are welcome” in a world full of “thanks,”  I am learning  that this new discipline around gratitude is teaching me how to begin and end experiences more powerfully. While it might take courage to accept gratitude from someone else, it seems foolhardy not to try.

E-ddiction

Julie Morgenstern is a well-known organizing and  time management consultant.  One of her best pieces of advice is never check e-mail in the morning.

I like Morgenstern’s advice. I try to follow her advice. I avoid Facebook and e-mail before 12 noon.

I fail. I fail almost everyday. Morgenstern’s argument that e-mail is a time suck or that it creates a “frenetic cadence to the workday” have never motivated me to actually succeed with regularity. She describes our relationship with e-mail in terms of it being an e-diction (my word).

What is missing in Morgenstern’s efficiency strategy is a hard, cold stare at why I use e-mail and Facebook. Here are some possibilities. Email and Facebook provide contact with real people. It is easier to feel a sense of completion. Each time I check in, I stand at my very own water cooler.  I am not alone. I might even laugh.

Instead of saying Never Check Email in the  Morning, I am going to say to myself  ” Can you stand to be alone for awhile?” Can you keep the faith that the world will be OK without you for awhile? Will you turn off that bell on your computer that alerts you to the arrival of another e-mail?

As I read further into Never Check Email In the Morning, Morgenstern lets up on her expectations and narrows the morning down to one hour. Can we wait one hour to check our email? We can try andl we’d better own up to the emotional needs and crutches that feed our constant checking as well.

Many of us do not have control over our mornings. Some of us have supervisors and colleagues who are standing by. I wonder if there is a way to help a supervisor understand that we will be more efficient and powerful if we wait until 12:01 PM to respond.

Curb

When it first began in 1974, curbside recycling was for newspapers.  Nearly forty years later, recycling now includes such objects as beer cans, wine bottles, frozen pizza boxes, diet soda cans,  kitty litter boxes, and yogurt containers.  Walking beside the curbs in my neighborhood, I like to analyze the food, beverage, and household consumption evident in my neighbors’ recycling bins. I try to figure out why one neighbor needed the Red Bull last week. Wow, this half of the block still subscribes to the local newspaper. Any magazines?

According to Christian Lander, the author of Stuff White People Like, white people like to recycle. Lander says white people like to think they can buy anything without feeling guilty about the consumption or waste that results. While I have no idea whether or not my interest in recycling comes as result of my racial background (and I know people of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds who recycle in my community),   I like to peer into my neighbors’ recycling bins and try to make sense of their previous weeks.

Once I check for content, I assess the organizational skills of each neighbor.  Are boxes broken down? Is paper separated from plastic?  Are there great mounds or tidy piles? Is everything thrown together or is it separated out? Are there any items that are not recyclable?

What and how much we put out on the curb  each week says a lot about how we spend our time.  A recycling bin is not just a place of transit anymore. It can serve as a weekly diary of our lives.  You are more than welcome to visit my curb next Monday morning. You will learn a lot about how I spend my days by what ends up in my blue bin.

Nature/Nurture

Back-to-school days always take me back to my own childhood. Because I live in my hometown, the heat, the smells, and the increasing bustle inside this college town remain the same.  The nervousness and anticipation I once felt about who my teacher might be or who would be on the class roster are now thankfully a distant memory. My children are now pacing the floors.

During this back-to-school era, I have been thinking about what else my children have inherited from me.  Fortunately, two guides have helped me think more deeply about this question of nature and nurture.

Over the weekend, I met Rod Fincannon who is a photographer and teaches at East Carolina University. In a recent exhibit, Rod focused on issues of identity by taking iconic family photos and then photographing himself in the same manner as the photographs portrayed his mother, grandfather and other family members.  See the two pictures above.  Rod’s grandfather is on the left. Rod is on the right.

Rosanne Cash has put out a memoir, Composed, about what it has been like to be the daughter of musicians Johnny and June Carter Cash. Rosanne writes about her journey to discover  the differences between what has been unusual versus universal about her own life and how she has witnessed her family ties in her own everyday life.

Fincannon and Cash think, photograph, and write about how the nature and nurture of our family members can make our experience of time a constant. Both artists reflect upon how their identities have been shaped by their own particular family trees.

Whether you are going back to school or not, now is a good time to think about how your identity has been shaped by next of kin. Fincannon and Cash provide intriguing examples for how to begin.

Birthday Week

Birthdays mark the most intimate passage of time. As a result, they are containers for both fear and hope. What we hope and plan to do on our birthdays is often a corrective for what we may lack in our everyday lives.

President Obama celebrated his 49th birthday with a visit to Chicago, a dinner out with friends, and a night of  sleep in his own bed. Over the weekend, his Birthday Week included an off-the-record basketball game, then barbeque at the White House. His wife and children were out of town.

What is evident in President Obama’s Birthday Week is a conscious or subconscious unfurling of wishes come true. Whether it was the President, the First Family, aides or friends who conceived of and coordinated this week is immaterial. The wishes were realized like clockwork. Go home to Chicago. Check. Spend time on my own. Check. Be with good friends. Check. Bond over basketball. Check. Raise money for 2012. Check. Know that my family loves me. Check.

Based on the evidence of Birthday Week, President Obama needs to be alone or in the company of good friends more often than he is able. He wants to spend more time in Chicago than he has been able to figure out. He wants to remember who he is, not what others want him to be. His family was not negligent in their absence during Birthday Week, as so many columnists suggested. They knew he needed more time alone and to be with friends than his everyday life allowed.

It is sad that it takes birthdays to arrange weeks just the way we like them.  Is it possible to live birthday week each and every week? Is it possible to do more of what we want to do each day than to store our wishes up for big days?

Ennui

One of the most underrated temporal states is boredom. Learning how to shift from apathy to engagement is a critical skill for everyone.  I am coming to realize, however, that learning how to deal with boredom may be a dying art form.

There is little more annoying as a parent than to hear your kid say he or she is bored.  The common corrective, however, has created a situation where many of us parents are not giving our kids the chance to crawl out of their own holes of ennui. Let me explain.

Many school districts have introduced year-round schools. Instead of one long summer, children and their families can plan around periodic three week breaks. During the three week breaks, kids either go to camp, go on vacation or hang out at home.  While these schools have many attributes, a key one is a shorter period of time within which to manage boredom and the chaos of absent child care for school-aged children.

Camps, for kids who are out of schools, are typically organized around particular themes designed to stave off any possible boredom. They work from tight schedules and deliverables with topics such as drama, media production, and science endeavors.

What concerns me about camps, in particular, is we may not be providing our children ample opportunity to get bored. I recognize the need to send children somewhere so adults can work. I worry, however, that my children and everyone else of their generation will miss the experience of figuring out how to climb out of tedium.

What if camps had no themes?  What if they were empty rooms where school-aged children had to dream their way into excitement?  What if we taught anti-boredom management skills?

Crawling out of boredom can be messy and require the loving technical assistance of others.  And boredom  can be a generative state for us all.

Sixty Minutes

At my bus stop, there is an estimated time of arrival sign. The only problem is  the sign is almost always wrong. The other day, the sign flashed the exact same time for my bus over and over again. The sign said my bus would arrive in  60 minutes. A couple of minutes later, the sign said the bus would arrive in 60 minutes. Five minutes later, the sign said my bus would come in 60 minutes. The time never changed.

Being in the presence of a malfunctioning sign was worse than having no sign at all. Even though I now know the bus schedule by heart, I expected this official sign to impart the truth.  Instead,  the sign taunted me with a time that did not progress.  What if sixty minutes was actually right?  What if the bus was going to be perpetually one hour away?

As hot as it was that day, there was something reassuring to know that the time could not possibly be accurate. But somehow the official nature of the sign made me nervous as I doubted its message. What if I was still at the bus stop in fifty-nine minutes?

The sign got me thinking about all of the projects we begin but do not maintain. They sit there as proof that maintaining a good idea is always more difficult than the initial act of implementation.

When the bus arrived ten minutes later, I glanced at the sign as it continued to flash the big 6-0.  Oh, good. The bus is early.