Sometimes we are blessed with
the gift of a new question.
–Richard Foster

In my new book Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times, I talk about a variety of things we can as we dealing with the chaos of change that almost always accompanies transitions. Here is an excerpt from the book about the simple act of making lists.

The act of making a list is deceptively simple—after all, we’ve been making lists since we went to the store to get our school supplies. But List Making, in this time of Reviewing, can be something so much more than a mundane activity done to jog our minds. The ancient meaning of list came from the Old English word hylsnan which means to listen to. So when we make lists during Reviewing who are we listening to? We are listening to ourselves. We are eavesdropping on our own conversation. List Making works like dropping a bucket down into a deep well, a well of memory, desires, experiences. Lists we make reveal things to us, surprise us, remind us. When we make lists, we can explore the unexamined interior of ourselves and discover things about ourselves that we didn’t even know we didn’t know.

Once I was in a meeting where the leader asks us to list all the telephone numbers we knew from memory. Our home telephone number was the first I put on my list. Then my husband’s mobile, my office number, our fax number, my sister’s number in Tennessee, my aunt’s number in Georgia. First of all, I was surprised at how few numbers I knew. Then I realized that the one person in my immediate family whose number I did not have memorized was the number of my brother Frank. This amazed me, given that I have only 2 people in my family of origin who are still alive—my sister and my brother—and I didn’t know his number. Oh, we emailed almost every day and talked on the telephone occasionally. But what the list making revealed to me was that I don’t talk to my brother enough on the phone to have memorized his number. And I wanted to change that. So when I got home, I copied his number out of my data base and taped it under the telephone where it could stay until I had committed it to memory. This is the power of the simple act of List Making.

Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick have written a very good book called List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery. Here are few lists they suggest that I think might be useful when we are experiencing Reviewing while navigating a tough transition:

List the things you think you can’t live without.

List all the prayers, sayings, and chants you’ve been taught that make you feel better.

Think of your own lists…a good/bad list about a time in the past; a list of those things in the past that you’d like to bring forth in the future in a new form; a list of things you assumed before this tough transition happened. Make these lists and see what you discover.

Let me know if you decide to make some lists this month. I’d love to hear what you discover.

Have a great May!

We all know that music can be relaxing, uplifting, memory-stirring, and energizing. But music as a health tonic? Science now tells us much about the power of music to heal our bodies, lessen anxieties, and relieve stress. This last month I read about a new hospital recently built in Lafayette, Colorado, that has music designed into every part of the medical complex…from birdsongs or wind sounds when you leave the parking lot to soothing piano music in the reception area to an Irish harp piece in the emergency room. Every piece of music—and there are 9000 of them in all, so that you never hear the same piece during the day—has been specifically chosen for the part of the hospital where it is heard and for the time of day it is heard. This hospital is in the forefront of a revolution in health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2004 released a report covering 600 studies that showed that design in hospitals—including sound and light—can have a dramatic effect on how fast and how well patients recover from illness.

I say that what is good for patients and visitors in hospitals is good for us at home…why not design our own environments with sounds that help relieve our anxieties or speed recovery from a cold? What about Mozart’s Violin Concertos when we feel blue? What about Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings if our blood pressure elevates? What about the CD “Mozart on the Go” when we want more pep and stimulation? This music can be adjuncts to the other things we do to take care of ourselves…and what a pleasurable antidote!

Mozart’s music, in particular, offers something for just about every ailment or need we might have, according to research. For anxiety, the recommendation is Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.” For waiting time, Mozart’s String Quartets. For getting started in the morning, Mozart’s “Andante, Symphony #17.” Three Mozart CDs which we have had in our home for years and play over and over are Music for The Mozart Effect CDs: Vol. 1, Strengthen the Mind; Vol. 2, Heal the Body; Vol. 3, Unlock the Creative Spirit.

When I was writing Tough Transitions, my new book that will be out in June, I wondered why music seemed to be so helpful when we are going through hard times. Here is what I wrote in Tough Transitions:

How does music help? I’m sure we could read all sorts of sophisticated explanations, but I settle for something quite simple. This is something I learned from one of my early music teachers: that when you press down a key on the piano, you think you are hearing one note, but you are really hearing the key you have pressed plus all its overtones. These overtones—higher and higher sounds on the piano—that you hear at the same time you press the key down produce the note you hear just as all the colors in the spectrum produce the color white you are seeing when you look at a cloud. And what was so amazing that I remember it to this day was my teacher’s assertion that the overtones of a note in music are mathematical, that they occur in specific ratios, that they always occur in the same progression, and that they never change because they are a part of the physical universe. What the ancients called the music of the spheres is related to these set-in-nature harmonics.

So, in my amateur understanding of why I feel better after I listen to Barber’s Adagio for Strings is that I’ve heard order. I’ve heard the natural harmonics of notes and overtones. I’ve heard sound which conforms to a progression of ratios set in the universe. And somehow, in listening to this music, I am returned to balance, to internal order, to a sense of more harmony in my own life.

Music also helps me when I’m spent during times of tough transitions by taking me out of my verbal rational world into a creative, symbolic experience. Beethoven once said that music is the mediator between the life of the spirit and the life of the senses. So here I am trying to figure out how to get my aged parents to pick up meals at the community senior center, and I sit down to listen to Beethoven’s 9th. I am transported to another realm of experience. The music lifts my spirits. I am in this moment cavorting with my imagination, my intuition, my wordless self.

Then there’s the power of the emotion in songs I listen to when I’m disconcerted and trying to find solid earth to stand on. When Emmy Lou Harris sings, “I would walk…from Boulder to Birmingham…just to see your face,” and I’m grieving for a relationship that can be no more, there’s a correspondence, a fit. When I’m despairing over the challenges of a career change and listen to Elvis sing “I Believe,” I am quickened by hope; and when Barbra Streisand sings “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” I am touched by grace. I find a place for my emotions in these singers’ emotions. I experience recognition, relationship, and a deep sense of release.

National Geographic magazine recently wrote about a new documentary called “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” In this film nomadic Mongolians who have a camel that has rejected her newborn bring in a musician. This musician plays a song that brings tears to the mother camel’s eyes and results in her taking care of her new calf. One of the filmmakers says, “The nomads have ways of communicating with their animals by singing and playing instruments. Music can convey emotions and show affection, things an animal can sense.” Animals, human beings…we are all touched and changed by music. (From Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times. You can preorder at Amazon.com now.)

So, on these early April days, may I suggest that we all brew a lovely cup of fragrant tea, sit, and listen to music that will uplift, heal, and invigorate us. Goodbye, winter. Hello, spring.

Love,

When I did the research for my new book Tough Transitions that will be published June 2005 by Warner Books, I found a book, The Beethoven Factor, that made a powerful distinction between people who merely survive a difficult time in their lives and people who manage, even in tough situations, to thrive. In the last chapter of my book I write about these people who thrive, and I thought I’d share a few paragraphs of that chapter with you this month. Here is what I wrote in Tough Transitions:

Researchers have located a new tribe! This tribe is people who grow and change in positive ways even though they experience very difficult times. This tribe is people who don’t just survive but who actually thrive.

Who are these folks? Maybe they’re like that woman we sing about in “Delta Dawn,” sweet but addled…”Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you’ve got on?” Or like Forest Gump with his “life is a box of chocolates”? Or maybe like one of the Sisters of Mercy carrying on Mother Teresa’s work around the world? No, this tribe are just normal folk who are sensible, awake, uncompromisingly honest. So what makes them different?

Well, let’s start with how thrivers approach life: as students and philosophers, not as patients, victims or even warriors. What thrivers are students, what are they studying? If they are philosophers, what do they philosophize about? Thrivers come up with new ways to view a situation they have found themselves in during a tough transition. They learn to apply a new explanatory system to what happens to them, creatively disputing default ways of thinking and inventing new views of the situation. They think like philosophers, asking questions such as, “How can I make sense of this? What can now, in this circumstance, give my life meaning?” Thrivers reflect on where they find themselves at this present time. They know absolutely that it is in their power to construe—explain, interpret, translate, define—what happens to them in life. And only in their power.

If we want to thrive, we need to relax more.

Thrivers know that they don’t have just the typical fight and flight responses available to them, but also a third kind of respond: relax, wait, think, listen, focus. Many of them—especially women—know about and practice a fourth response : connect and relate. Thrivers know they can create a context for their situation by using their innate talents (which researchers assert are available to everyone) for framing, evaluating and interpreting. They come to know through experience that they can count on their strengths: the ability to wait, think, imagine, tolerate, forgive, learn, and change. In researchers’ terms, thrivers have (a) comprehensibility—being able finally to make some sense of what happens even though life is chaotic and unpredictable (b) manageability—being able to find a way to think that is an appropriate match for the event that is impacting them (c) meaningfulness—realizing that investing energy in really engaging with a tough transition is a worthy thing to do because from this work you are able to add new meaning to your life. Thriving is reconstructing life’s meaning in response to life’s most destructive occurrences.

Research says that women increase their ability to be thrivers by connecting with each other.

How can we spot a member of this thrivers’ tribe? I think back into my own experience. When did I know a thriver? When did I know someone afflicted with the “failure to thrive”?

I met a woman once who clearly was failing to thrive. On business in another city, I had dinner with a woman who was a widow. This woman cried all through dinner. At the end of the evening, as we were walking out of the restaurant, I said, “I’m sorry about the death of your husband. How long has it been?” When she answered, “Eighteen years,” I knew something was wrong. Now it isn’t that we can’t feel grief years after a loss (“shadow grief” people call it—like the sun going behind a cloud when you’re on a picnic), but instinctively I knew this was different. Here was a woman who had chosen to make a lifestyle of being a griever. Who had chosen not to replan her life consistent with what had happened to her. Who had no current and active interchange with life.

Here was a person who was not a thriver. Instead she had chosen a lifestyle of failure to thrive.

Just sitting…being with nature…can help us thrive.

Then I think about my dear friend who at fifty has found herself chronically ill. “Catastrophe living,” she call her situation, resonating the title of a book she hs found invaluable. ”How do I live well even while I have to live differently?” she asked herself. Of course, she railed against the illness. Of course, she spent time feeling down and even depressed. But mixed in with these reactions were new ways of thinking. I was having coffee with her once cold morning when someone called from her church. Could she take the lead this week in organizing Freeze Night, a program that brought homeless people in to eat and spend the night in the church when the temperature fell below 32 degrees? She considered and knew that she didn’t have the strength and reserves to take on the project. But I heard my friend offer, “Do give me something to do that I can do from home, even from my bed.” A bit more conversation and she was set to email and call everyone on the Freeze Night team to alert them that tomorrow the standing plan would go into operation and they would be needed.

For the long-term my friend has made other thriver-type decisions. “Since I can’t work in the corporate world (where she had been a wildly successful senior vice president), “I’ve asked, ‘What kind of work can I do?’ “What can I do in this situation that satisfies and even excites me?’” She has now decided to return to school and get her certification in adolescent counseling. She has also made some new friends who talk about things more meaningful to her than weight loss and business competition. She recognizes the power she has to say what her life is going to be like, albeit in a different—and unwanted—circumstance. My friend is without question a thriver.

I hope all of us thrive during this month of March.

Love,

A couple of weeks ago Jerele and I flew to Atlanta, rented a car, and drove forty miles down into the country to the little community called Digby, Georgia, to visit our Aunt Frances. My sister Barbara joined us from Cleveland, Tennessee, because we had wonderful plans for the weekend. Our aunt has been a Braves baseball fan for decades. She watches them on television and listens to them on her radio if they are playing on the West Coast, even if she has to listen late, late at night. Aunt Frances knows the team lineup, who plays where, who the best pitchers are. And, of course, she has her favorite player: Chipper Jones.

Barbara (Elizabeth’s sister), Aunt Frances, Elizabeth enjoying the game

But for all this devotion to the Braves, she had never been to a live game. So this weekend trip was planned so that we could take Aunt Frances to see the Braves in person. We had a grand time. It was a night game, and there was a nice breeze. We ate peanuts, drank our bottled water and enjoyed all the entertainment that goes on in a ballpark, in addition to the game that is happening on the field! The best part of all, of course, was that the Braves finally won the game in the 10th inning when Andruw Jones hit a home run that went soaring out over the crowd!

The Braves’ scoreboard

On Sunday morning we went to church with Aunt Frances. So many people in the service that morning knew Barb’s and my mother and father when they were growing up in the community. They remembered when our parents got married. “Didn’t they get married at Nan and Jack’s in Griffin?” Frances Kierbow asked us. Then she said, “And you know, your daddy preached his first sermon in our house right here in Digby. Everybody came from miles around. The house was so full that people had to sit in the windowsills. They came because they couldn’t believe that someone with the reputation that Tommie Harper had of being the community hellion was actually going to preach!”

And she was right. Our dad, though he had “reformed” when he married Rachel, was still the person you came and got if something needed to be handled in the community. He rode a black horse and packed his pistol everywhere he went. When a tent was put up in the pasture across from the County Line Christian Church and the word sent out that there was going to be a revival (this was 1938), Tommie decided he would go over and cut the ropes on the tent so it would fall and this preacher who was coming to preach the revival would high-tail it back to Atlanta.

Play ball!

But that isn’t what happened. Yes, Tommie had the knife hidden in his boot that he was going to use to cut the ropes of the tent. But, instead, he found himself circling outside the tent, saying to himself, “It’s nobody’s business but mine if I go in that tent and sit down by Rachel.” But Rachel had gone too far up to the front, so Tommie stayed outside, thinking, “I’ll cut the ropes,” thinking, “Maybe I’ll go in.” He often told us children the rest of the story: that he didn’t remember anything else about that service except that at the end, when the preacher asked who would like to come to the mourner’s bench and repent, Tommie found himself kneeling at the altar, while people with a guitar were singing in the background, “He’s the Lily of the Valley; the Bright and Morning Star.”

Tommie said he started preaching to the mules as he plowed the next morning, and by the week’s end there was the preaching service set at the Kierbow house. He went on to preach for fifty-eight years, serving God and his church in many capacities and living a life of faith, prayer, and commitment to the day he died. (He even resumed pastoring for a couple of years when he was 84 years old because a little country church in the hills near Mother’s and Daddy’s retirement house in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, needed a pastor.)

What brought all this to mind for me the other Sunday when we went with Aunt Frances to church was that in the foyer of the church there was a picture of the preacher who came down from Atlanta and preached that revival when our father was converted. Rev. Mamie Akins. Sister Akins, as Mother and Daddy referred to her, has been a legend in our family story…her sweet spirit, the power of her sermons, her commitment to do what she was called to do. As much as I had heard about Rev. Akins, I had never seen a picture of her. I stood transfixed in front of the picture of an elegant looking woman with lovely waves in her hair, ruffles around the neck of her dress, and a corsage on her shoulder. Here was the woman whose dedication to her calling not only changed my mother and father’s lives but, in turn, the lives of my sister, brother, and me.

Rev. Mamie Akins, pioneer preacher

Rev. Mamie Akins faced enormous hardships and dangers as a pioneer evangelical preacher in the 1930s in Georgia. And because she had the courage and conviction to persevere, she became a catalyst for enormous positive change in the lives of people like Tommie and Rachel Harper. I stood there and looked at her picture for a long time. I wondered what my life might have been like if she hadn’t come and preached in the Digby community. I wondered if my father would have remained a poor farmer and a troublemaker. I wondered if my mother would have ever been able to develop her talents of teaching, writing poetry, and organizing and inspiring women in the churches Daddy went on to pastor. I wondered if my sister, brother, and I would have had the wonderful heritage we have today of having had parents who taught us about prayer and faith and love.

Rev. Mamie Akins. Here was a woman whom I had never met. Yet a woman whose calling and commitment had changed my life. I felt inspired and humbled as I looked at her picture. And I’ve spent hours since being thankful for the contribution of a single, individual life.

A new collage idea I tried: making a picture with tissue paper

We all know those moments when we suddenly and with no explanation feel happy. Perhaps we’re doing something mundane like wiping the counter top while we look out the window…then this sense of contentment or joy just comes over us like the morning dew. Perhaps we’re reaching for a board in a workshop or putting up a piece of sewing…there’s a moment of satisfaction and peace, a feeling we could call happiness. We might be putting a baby to bed or feeding a kitten, and we find ourselves feeling full and happy. Someone asked me about these unsummoned moments of happiness the other day. I answered that the only way I could account for them was that they were gifts of grace.

A new place I visited: Lake Louise in Canada

Then my friend and I talked about another kind of happiness… happiness we can actually create for ourselves through our own actions. Dr. Gregory Berns, an M.D. at Emory University in Atlanta, has done research that suggests that novelty is one key to a satisfying life. If we want to cultivate happiness, we can seek new things to do that stimulate and engage us. This doesn’t mean crazy things that require one to risk life and limb, just things that are new. Things that you’ve never done before. Not only does doing new things keep the pleasure areas of the brain stimulated, Dr. Burns says, but the action also helps build emotional resilience. This is because some novelties turn out to be great and some turn out to be something you wouldn’t be interested in repeating.

These new things we can do deliberately fall into categories like:

Physical: try a sport or physical activity you’ve never done before;
Intellectual: like attending a lecture on a subject you’ve never thought about before or reading a book or watching a movie that you would not have thought of reading or viewing in the past;
Social: making a connection with someone new; and
Spiritual: doing something that takes you into the transcendent, such as spiritual experiences, art, music.

I’m making my first snow angel ever

In the past couple of weeks I’ve paid attention when I did something completely new. I went to a political grassroots gathering for the first time in my entire life. I picked up Wired magazine and read things about technology that I ordinarily would not have shown the least interest in. I stepped on an elliptical trainer at the gym, a machine I had avoided in the past. I wrote a psalm for my quiet time that included words of lament about the old age of our dog Dusty. None of these things held a candle, of course, to those moments of happiness that come from grace. But doing these new things did energize me, interest me, and give me a lot of feelings of joy and pleasure. Doing new things is not a quick fix that promises eternal happiness, but I found that they are avenues to satisfaction. Satisfaction can be a very fine thing to experience in the in-betweens of those times of real, grace-given happiness.