blahg, blahg, blahg…

Back home after a week of camping in the Adirondacks. I feel a bit melancholy with the approaching end of my vacation and tense already being back in the “real world”. To try to hold onto the peace of the past few days, I thought I’d make a list that reminds me just what some of those things are that bring such contentment:

• Dragonfly lands on my shoulder
• Quiet of darkness
• Starry skies
• Views from the top of mountains
• Swimming in a mountain pond
• Time to play music
• Time to sit and be
• Long, long walks
• Hikes up big hills
• Soft serve ice cream
• Cooking on the camp stove
• Watching fireplace embers
• Reading good fiction
• Laughing at Zebbie’s smile
• Sleeping bags zipped together
• Summer rain showers
• Being offline for awhile
• Simple tasks around the campsite
• Having no need for “vitamins”
• Being with my bunny

And now to figure out how to keep some of these alive and well until we return again.

I read the following this morning:

“A friend asks you to sit down for a cup of coffee, and you surprise yourself by saying yes, giving yourself permission to look into another’s eyes and find there exactly the thing you had been about to rush off in search of.” (Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall)

Thinking about it later, I was reminded that there is a book titled Getting to Yes. It is a book about negotiation – the art of negotiation, as they say. Its subtitle is “Negotiating Agreement without Giving In”. That says about enough, doesn’t it? I avoid such books, such trite yet pretentious tomes that fill the best seller lists. They annoy me. It annoys me that people are so easily deemed “experts” for stating the obvious; that they receive huge sums of money to espouse common sense, disguised as wisdom, and peddle it on the popular book and talk show circuits.

But all of this aside, I wonder more how we come to yes – the much more important “yes” that Simmons writes of. This is not the yes of corporate board rooms, but the yes of living. How do we get to that place where we readily offer this kind of yes?

I was recently described as being manipulative and mean spirited in something I did, something I said. To me this sounds much more like the yes of the “Getting to Yes” book, the kind of behavior one is taught to seek in a world that I want no part of. And it gives me pause to have been so misinterpreted.

I’ve spent the better part of the past couple of days with those little white buds plugging my ears, tunes streaming from my iPod directly into my brain. Synaptic snapping. I love music – listening to it, becoming absorbed in it, dancing to it, playing it. It moves through me like nothing else. Add a dose of caffeine and… well that’s another story.

Oliver Sacks latest work, Musicophilia, comes to mind, as does that of Mark Johnson and his “Playing for Change” project. I think of the story I overheard on NPR this morning about the African Children’s Choir. And I think of Lynn’s dad, Lee, who left us so suddenly recently. A lifelong musician, he played gigs with his friends right up to the very end of his days. And his friends gave the greatest testament to him, as a person, at his funeral when they played on without him. Through tears, they played the music that they all loved.

Music is infectious. It is innate. And its potential for positive is limitless. I often joke with friends and coworkers that I wish my life was a musical, that it would just break out into song at any moment. As I think of the New Year dawning, I think that I’ll resolve to keep that dream alive in the coming year – and beyond.