I am blogging no longer on seeking but on my own website at inezhollander.info

Dear blog readers of SEEKING-- this is to let you know that I have been creating my own website in the last few days. Go to www.inezhollander.info, press on BLOG on the welcome page (and do check out the other pages) and continue the blogging experience with me. Hope to see you there,

Thanks,

Inez

thank you Mike

I haven't blogged for months but received the sweetest message from Mike, who found me and Lynn Ruth by accident. Lynn Ruth and I have been waxing on and on about what wisdom is and how we should try to keep focused on staying true to ourselves...Lynn Ruth has more wisdom to offer than me because she's been more places, learned more and has written more about it and more insightfully. I still feel like an amateur, if not a fraud, most of my days, but apparently Mike was drawn in by all of our comments. Thank you Mike: you spurred me on to blog once again.

My last message was about giving unconditionally because I see so little of it in some of the members of my own generation-- maybe it takes someone to write a book with the title "10 things to give before you're dead" rather than the self-indulgent 100 places one needs to visit before one dies.

I am still clueless about what I want to do next in life, but I do want to live more selflessly, change careers and mean something in/to the world...but even these words seem narcissistic at best and I haven't quite figured it out yet. It may come, as I explore this issue more deeply in this resumed blog. Lynn Ruth, are you in?
Inez

but how do we know what our diamond is?

Lynn Ruth, you have always struck me as someone who is driven and knows what she wants to do in life. You know your diamond, yet making it shine is not always the easiest part...
At 41 I still don't quite know what my diamond is and while I think I want to write and be read, I do have other talents too that I do not explore because I write, work and have to take care of my family. Writing sometimes feels too self-indulgent and violates the social being I want to be. Making a difference in the world, doing something for someone that they will remember the rest of their lives, being completely selfless...I am not sure my generation knows what that is. When I help out in kitchens that serve meals to the homeless, I am struck by the fact that there are so few people of my age/generation there. When I was helping out with the White Cross Memorial in Lafayette one Sunday, there were some high school kids but once again, no one my age (except for my husband). What does my generation really care about? What drives us? What's our diamond? How will we contribute to the world? How can we make a difference and how much of our lives and times should we give unconditionally? Can we make the kinds of sacrifices our parents may have made and how do we teach our kids to be engaged with the world, to do something sometimes that does not serve oneself but helps others? Does altruism still exist? I know it does when I look into the eyes of my Berkeley students and that gives me hope, but at the same time, they are a minority where they could have been the norm. I would like to think we progress and become more enlightened but sometimes it seems we're moving closer to the dark ages where diamonds can't shine altogether.

BTW Do people still read this blog or are Lynn Ruth and I floating aimlessly in cyberspace?

Polishing the diamond

This past several weeks have been filled with small, hurtful annoyances and these annoyances have taken up far more energy that I care to admit. I was speaking to a Buddhist friend of mine and she said that my only goal in living my life should be to polish the diamond that is whom I am becoming. If I concentrate on that, the hurts and face-slaps, the insults and upsets will fall away.
I have thought about her advice and I believe that she is showing me the only way to survive personal tragedy. I remember when I was brutally attacked in Redwood City and when I awoke, stitched up by doctors, bruised and aching because of an unexplained attack by an unknown assailant, I told myself, "That man has taken 36 hours of my life. I am not giving him any more."
This has been the way I have tried to operate ever since, but it has not been easy. Living alone as I have with no support system to back me up, I have had outrageous things happen to me and I tend to dwell on them. I am still angry at the man who stood over me and forced me to sign a check for services he never gave me. I still am furious at the policeman who trivialized my fear when I reported him. My stomach churns when I relive Renee Villanueva lying and producing false evidence to get out of paying me the balance she owed me for my automobile, and I seethe when I remember Richard Romanski who judged in her favor despite written evidence to the contrary because she was a wasp like he was. In these past two weeks, I have had money stolen from my bureau drawer, my precious dog Dorothy ran away and I am convinced she has been stolen because she knows her home and would return if she could. I entered a comedy contest and got more laughs than any of the contestants and did not even place in the voting for reasons I cannot fathom.
I have been so busy nurturing these minor grievances that I have not noticed that I am in a play I love, in a part I have learned and enjoy. I am not noticing that I spend my Tuesdays with the most wonderful famiy I have ever discovered teaching two adorable intent little girls to love to play the piano. I am ignoring that I have more energy than ten people I know who are twenty years younger. I am forgetting that every week I make at least one, usually two visits to senior homes and entertain people who otherwise would be stuck in their stuffy rooms with nothing to do but remember the emptiness of the day that just ended.
And so I am trying to slough off those angers and polish my diamond. It becomes easier every day. After all, these people who have attacked me and think I am so weak, have gained nothing really... a ten year old car with worn out tires, a few hundred dollars that I will earn back, a puppy that is not housebroken and will soon suffer the endless medical problems of age. I still have ME. No one can take that from me and only I can make it into the beautiful experience that has become my way of life. I am no Pollyanna. I do not like the people who have stepped on me and I have to exert immense will not to wish them harm. But when I realize that the time I waste hating them is time lost building my lovely castle of life, I know that all that has hurt me is trivial in comparison to the joy of traveling the road I alone carved out and knowing that I am going at last in the direction I want to travel.

Why nice people suffer

My marvelous friend Nick Leonard observed that the nicest people we know are those plagued with depression and personal insecurities while the nasty, pushy ambitious people we both avoid because they are so unpleasant seem to forge ahead on their chosen path, shouting their successes to the world. Why is that?
It breaks my heart that the sensitive, loving people I care about suffer from addictions, depression and deep unhappiness. And so I offer this answer to Nick and all the rest of you who ponder such a sad reality: Sensitive people evaluate their lives. They read, observe and consider all the alternatives to the path they have chosen. They are uncertain because they are wise enough to realize that there is no right or wrong. There is only what is now. They care very much, not just about their own homeostasis but about others'. They have the capacity to love more than themselves. They hurt when they see pain. They bleed for a sick, unhappy world.
Sometimes, because they are good, caring human beings, the destruction and slaughter both psychological and phsysical that has become a trademark of our age overwhelms them. They turn to drugs or alcohol to dull the pain. They redirect their grief at mankind's malaise into themselves and become suicidal or depressed. They forget that the only person they can ever help is themselves. They forget this because they are so generous and they care that much about humanity.
How can we not adore them?
On the other hand, bullies, loud, over-confident people don't bother to think They don't evaluate the quality of their lives. They grab every ring they can and tell us it was gold. We believe them because they are so brash and insistent. They tell us how marvelous they are and we envy them because we, who are intelligent and perceptive, know that we ourselves have such a long way to go before we get to where we hope to be. We wish we could be as confident of ourselves as they.
In reality, it is the responsive and feeling people who are actually living their lives. They experience the pain that creates growth, and they will reap the glory of honest achievement
I promise you that
Those others...those pushy, obnoxious, agressive pushers only think they have gotten somewhere. In reality they are running with much racket, and very fast, but like Alice, they never move forward. They remain stuck in the same rusted rut they created in the first place.

never finished

Last week I sent my manuscript Silenced Voices to Ohio University Press. Whenever I send stuff out (big stuff this time, all 250 pp long) I am reminded of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird in which she talks about the screaming insecuriy she feels once that story or manuscript is out of her hands. A book is never finished and certainly a non-fiction book like mine: new research surfaces sometimes even before the shelf life of one's book is over. But first this one has to make it into a book and of that one can never be sure. I wrote a friend in jest that after I put three years of my life into this book it might be nice if a contract came through and while it looks like this may happen, I am not counting my blessings yet as rejection is part of the game-- and if that's the case I might pull a Sylvia Plath, I wrote my friend, "coz Xmas funerals have an irresistible ambiance". I am joking, daunting fate if you will, but writing like all the other arts in which we produce something that is intensely personal, has to be recognized (and depersonalized)by the public for it to become truly legitimate. We write because we must and we should never write with a audience in mind necessarily but it is the audience, the reader who closes the circle and makes the process complete. So a manuscript is never finished, until it is read, accepted for publication, read & edited, published and read once again. And in the author's mind the book may still not be finished if recognition by the readers and critics stays out. And then writing has become an intensely lonely business, a waste of time perhaps, a trivial pursuit of what could have been but never was. I am writing this because now that the manuscript is out of my hands, I feel powerless and insecure. Redundant even, now that the story has been told...it's an odd business to be in and sometimes I just wish I had become a plumber or a garbage woman,
Inez

STAYING ON YOUR PATH

I think each of us knows the direction our life should take but so many outside influences divert us that we often wake up one morning and say, "How did I land in THIS mess?"
To me, Inez, your first priority is to nurture the two lives you and Jon have created. They are your legacy; they are the gifts you are giving to the world and to yourselves. I suppose I am overly idealistic about children because I never had any and I wanted them even more than I wanted what you do to get them. I can think of no other mission more important than to give your children the weapons they need to become all they can become.
I teach piano to Lisa's Chloe and last Tuesday she showed me a book her teacher asked her to write about herself. The essay was entitled ME, and she wrote, "I am wonderful, amazing and very, very special...." I looked at Lisa and I said, "You have succeeded."
Your two youngsters must not just HEAR that they are magnificent gifts to you and Jon, they must see and feel their value if they are to venture out into an impersonal often rocky world and make the mark they need to make.
As you know, I never had that sense of personal value and it has taken me years and years to establish the self love we all need to move forward with confidence knowing that our direction is the right one.
Let me also point out that no one knows what another needs. You as a parent can only give your children tools to explore their potential. You cannot and must not tell them what it is they must do or should want. When they are not given proper resources, they will take twice as long to accomplish half as much. And to waste time in our lives is an unforgivable crime .....because time is all we have.
I firmly believe that my first book would have been published when I was 30, not when I was 68 if I had not had to first overcome all the negativity smothering me in my world.
We must always take responsibility for who we are and once we do that that we can take pride in what we become. But children are ahead of the game of life if they are given a solid foundation of love and encouragement. Those of us who first had to force our way up through the sands of insecurity, had a longer road to follow before we could get to level ground. In many ways, I believe that battle made me strong, but in others far too vulnerable and sensitive to the judgement of others.
Don't let any task interfere with giving your chilrern that stolid stepping stone to their own definition of happiness. In doing so you will find your own mission in life and that includes your writing, your marriage and your teaching will blossom even more fully because you have nurtured the very reasons that you do need to move forward in your life. Those children define who you are. They cannot keep you from accomplishing your goals because they are the stimuli for you want to become.
I often wonder why I push myself to become more of what I am and I know it is only for me. If I can offer what I have learned about the endless possibilities in us all, then perhaps I have given a small gift to humanity. You, on the other hand can multiply that gift by more than three. What a marvelous oportunity! So stop whatever else you are doing and be a mother to your youngsters. You cannot do a better thing for them or for yourself.