Category: Inspiration

What Do You Really Do?

When asked the question, “What do you do?” most of us reply by reciting a role we play. When you think about it, if you say, “I’m an accountant,” you haven’t really replied to the inherent action part of the question. The doing part. Most of us see ourselves in roles—mother, barista, graphic designer, farmer—which is really just a set of clothes we wear most of our waking hours. It says nothing of who we are, what we care about, what our talents are, how our work makes us feel, what we think we give to the world.

Off and on for the last year or more, I’ve been evaluating my business and asking myself if I’m following my passions enough, serving the people I really want to serve, and putting things out into the world that are a good representation of my skills and talents and values.

In all the resources I’ve come across, one of the most often cited aspects of this exploration is learning how to say what you do without putting people to sleep. “I’m an accountant,” is a surefire way to put someone to sleep. No offense to accountants.

If that accountant were to say “I make one of the most unpleasant days of the year easy for people and sometimes even pleasant,” he or she would have your attention. Everyone wants an unpleasant day to be easier and even pleasant. They’d be curious to know which day you were talking about. Then they’d be curious enough to ask, “Well, how exactly do you do that?”

Now you’re having a conversation because you’ve captured their attention with a need they can relate to. People want to see themselves in there somewhere.

Even if you were a member of a circus, which sounds infinitely more interesting than what most of us do, you’d still cut your listener off. A role as an answer is a dead end. There’s nowhere go. “I take people out of reality to a magical place,” is the kind of answer that starts a conversation.

Recently, at a party, I met a woman who was a third grade teacher. I liked Pam instantly. I was working through exercises myself to answer that very question, “What do you do?” When I asked her what she did, she answered like most of us do.

“Can I help you reframe that?” I asked. “Here’s what you really do. You help shape young minds to thrive in this world.”

Her face lit up and a smile spread across her face like I’d just planted flowers along her career path. We were in a room full of web-savvy people. If she had said “third grade teacher” to anyone in there, she probably would have received only polite nods.

Just then a young woman walked up and introduced herself. When she asked Pam what she did, Pam stood up straight and threw her shoulders back. She looked at me and whispered with a smile, “I’m going to try it out.”

So, what do you really do?

Be Easy to Move, but Hard to Knock Over

Have you ever been through or watched someone go through a short but intense romance? One that resembled a tug of war where each person’s fears and desires yanked the other this way and that.

Even when things are good, the rush of infatuation is often powerful enough to throw us out of whack, making us forget who we are, what we stand for, or even that we can stand. As I watched a friend recently go through this kind of discombobulation, I recalled a phrase my tango instructor said in class one evening:

Be easy to move, but hard to knock over.

We’d been going over a subtle but powerful exercise in finding that right balance between movement, connection and resistance, to flow with our partner. Easier to feel than be taught, but it does help to hear the words — and hope that the body will follow. When it works, two dancers move in unison applying just enough resistance to create energy, and therefore, movement. If one person is off their axis the duo becomes unstable, which can happen because of too much movement or surrender. The flow is lost. Likewise, if there’s too much rigidity, movement can’t happen. Again, the flow is lost. Read more

Year of Produce: March, The Final Chapter

This month marks the final installment of a “Year of Produce” in which I charted my fresh produce purchases in illustrated form for a year starting in April 2010. I was curious to see if I put my money where my mouth is about eating locally and, by definition, seasonally. Yes, 2010 was so last year. But April is so now! Which means you can start all over again if you missed the whole thing. Scroll down for March as well as a mini image of each month that links to that month’s post. Each one has some combination of recipes or recipe links, preparation ideas, thoughts on eating locally and other good stuff. So please explore!

With this final post I offer:

• A tally for the year
• Thoughts on what is local
• My observations on the project
• March recipe links
• How to eat seasonally, affordably (prompted by a question someone asked me) Read more

Year of Produce: February

At left is my new Meyer lemon tree that I purchased from Graceful Blades (no website) who lovingly grows fruit trees and will be at the next Hillsdale Farmers Market Sunday, March 20, weather permitting. A cheery gift to myself in these dark months.

I wonder if there’s an equivalent phrase like drunk dialing, as it relates to writing blog posts in a weird frame of mind. No, I’m not drunk. Just fried. And why am I posting then? Well, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “Sometimes you have to go into a blog post, not with the content you want, but the content you have.”

And to quote a former boss, “Done is beautiful.”

This being my my second-to-last produce log for this yearlong project, I had visions of waxing culinarily about the secret joys of eating in winter and the anticipation of freshly cut asparagus around the corner. All lovely stuff. All stuff I have no energy for. This is instructive. I can write a rather long post about what’s top of mind—rush projects, little breathing room to collect oneself or allow for margins of error, the dissatisfaction of churning out work too quickly.

Writing about the nourishing and writing about the sapping both require effort. But each requires a different kind of effort. And to honor the former requires a shifting of gears, a collecting of oneself, allowing oneself to go deeper into a place that isn’t easily accessed when you’re working like a flurry of restless gnats. At a recent coastal writing retreat, one attendee said that she was telling her father how hard it was for her to relax when the opportunity to relax was there. He would always remind her that you can’t go from 60 to zero at the snap of your fingers. Read more

Year of Produce: January

One benefit of neglecting your garden, especially in winter, is that you might find a surprise if you bother to visit it—such as this lovely rose-like head of chicory (radicchio). I left it alone rather than harvest leaves for salads so I could grow a whole head. Torrential downpours followed by an extended cold snap all but destroyed the plants.

Then, a warm dry(ish) day lured me into the garden, which I had been avoiding because I have yet to remove the last of the tomato plants! The chicory bounced back with splashes of fuschia painted on the leaves. I also discovered so many scallions, I had to force some onto a friend.

This variety—Castelfranco variegata—hails from the Veneto region in northern Italy. There’s a ghostly white variety, too. Its flavor is enhanced by cold weather, like many hearty winter greens. You can buy seeds from Nichol’s, a local Oregon nursery but they’re currently sold out. Who knew it was so popular? Read more

Year of Produce: December

To spend a quarter of December in Peoria, IL, called for extreme measures. Peoria might have an excuse in winter when it comes to fresh local produce. But from my casual observation, finding locally grown (and human-edible) produce is a challenge. The rich dirt of the vast surrounding farmland is home only to corn used for cattle feed and Twinkies. Rumor had it that a new gourmet market opened. I’d believe it when I saw it. But while an expensive gourmet market might offer better-looking organic produce than the limp bundles of kale at Kroger, it doesn’t address the problem of how little local land is used around the country to grow food for people who live there.