Play as good as you are, not as good as you can

Words of wisdom come from everywhere. My husband happens to be a very open conduit. When assessing the recent standings in Final Four and the surprising loss of a favored, stronger team to a lesser, weaker one, he said prophetically, "They played as good as they could, but not as good as they are."
   I was dumbstruck, because even though some could say this sounds like double speak, I beg to differ. I know exactly what he means.
   I know how to play as good as I can. And I know the difference between that and playing as good as I am. There is a big difference. And athletics is one arena that can best exemplify that. Though I have never played team sports, I do pay attention to them because my husband is a long time fan of most sports. This basketball tournament is always fascinating to watch because of the upsets. Teams that shouldn't be winning, do. And why? They awaken to who they are and tap into the capabilities of the players and the team synergy that must have needed a highly stressful, competitive environment in order to emerge.
   Runners will talk about "hitting the wall." I am fascinated by this concept, because it applies to life as well as physical endurance and accomplishment. When runners hit the wall in a marathon, their bodies are physically spent. Everything has caught up with them and they have no more to give. It's actually a physical condition--a depletion of glycogen which results in sudden exhaustion. But runners who are winners tell me that when the body fails, the mind prevails. (Or spirit or soul.) And that's when they run "as good as they are." Not as good as they can.
   When I write, I know the difference between writing as good as I can and as good as I am. I write as good as I can all the time. But the continual challenge is to go beyond that. To tap into the capability that lies within me--to knock down the wall of good enough and enter the world of personal best. There's divinity there. And I have felt it. It's not easy. Like the runner, it requires pushing past the point of frustration, personal exhaustion, the desire to collapse and give up. It means plumming deeper, not accepting fear or personal victimization as a viable reason for giving up. In most instances, it means letting go of ego, control and even logic. And just allowing. And doing, always doing. And when the dust settles and I read what is in front of me, I am awed. Because I did it. And I didn't think I could.
 

Good Sunday reading!

If you have nothing much to read to day, I have a grand suggestion. Click on the bottom link and check out the latest issue of Lake Erie Lifestyle. Yours truly has written three articles for this issue, one of which I am very proud of. It's a profile of Joe Travers, an Erie-born drummer who plays with Zappa Plays Zappa. Even if you're not a music fan, it's a great story about how this amazingly talented prodigy followed his instincts and honed his talent in what felt to me like a predestined path.
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011303279995
For the entire edition and to check out my stories on "Paw-sitive Reinforcement" (yes, a dog training story) and Getting there is Half the Fun (different ways to travel other than by car), click on this link.
http://www.goerie.com/section/lel

Enjoy!

A week of sleeping dangerously

Day Five--The insomnia continues.
   There are two kinds of insomniacs...those who falls asleep and can't stay asleep, and those who can't fall asleep at all. I am both. But this week, after a long stretch of long, somnambulist bliss, I have suddenly suffered with the former type. I fall asleep, but then sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., I am awake.
   When I wrote the book, "The Insomniac's Manifesto," I did so after spending most of life awake. Back then, I was the kind of insomniac who jumped out of bed and immediately, in my dad's words, "made myself useful." That meant usually writing and researching on the computer. But if that didn't appeal to me, I would do housework. Lots of men's dress shirts got ironed between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. Housework is less painful in the wee hours of daylight. I once washed the kitchen windows--inside and out.
   But those days are over. Now when I go through a bout of sleepless nights, I usually do one of two things: quietly watch early morning television or just lie there in bed, listening to my husband not snore. He is the quietest sleeper on the planet in the wee hours of the morning. I find myself checking several times to make sure he is still breathing. It's my job as an insomniac to make sure that everyone in the house is fine. When my son lived with us, I would always listen for him as well. Thankfully, he snores like an Amtrak train, so it's easy to know his heart is still beating.
   All in a night's work. But this week, while I was lying in vigil listening for sounds from my slumbering partner, I wrote my column in my head for next week. You'll have to check it out and see just what two hours of wakefulness can do to the creative brain.

My column appears Thursday

Please check out the new column this week. Go to my website at http://www.lenoreskomal.com/ and click on the "Links" tab and you will see the GoErie.com link. You can read the column and even check out my online video and accompanying blog which gives you a bit more about the column topic. Enjoy!

Another day in paradise

Now I get it. As a kid, I never did. Except for snowstorms and sunny, bright days--depending on which, it meant a fun day of sledding or splashing at the beach--I never paid much mind to what was going on with the weather. I don't remember it affecting me. Never understood my grandparents and parents lament about the dreariness of winter and the sogginess of spring. Who cared what was going on outside?
   Now I do. Like most of my friends, the first thing I do each morning is check on what the weather is going to do. These long transitional days of early spring now grind on my nerves like tinfoil on mercury fillings. The overhang of low-lying clouds and lack of warmth is just plain unattractive. And though I know how lovely Mother Nature is when lush with green and speckled with color, right now, she is looking pretty haggard and worn out. And if I let it, she can mirror how I feel.
   But enough of that. It's just so ironic how one's perceptions change the older one gets. Seeing the sun, though taken for granted on so many summer days, would be a miracle. I guess I'll just snuggle up to my space heater, keep a watchful eye from my window and be comforted by the truth that the sun is there. It's just hiding.

PS If you would be so kind, please click on the Facebook badge and hit like. It helps that page grow and I will be posting upcoming speaking events on it for the summer and fall.

My new website is up and running

Yes, as of 5:00 p.m. we are live. Well, the website is now official, which you most likely know if you are reading this right now. Thanks for stopping by. Drop a comment if you like and let me know how you are. Even better become a fan and follow me. And click on Facebook badge and hit the like button if you want to find out about my upcoming events on Facebook.
  Not that I am technologically savvy, but I am trying. Thanks for stopping by.

Spring, the biggest tease of all

My father used to say, "A sunny day doesn't make a summer." To take that literally, might I add it doesn't make a spring either?
   Warmer temperatures these days don't fool me. It's around this time of year that I am reminded of a young man that used to rent our attic back in the days when my then-husband and I were newlyweds and in need of offsetting the mortgage. Living in a large house in a Ivy League college town with a teaching hospital, we found no shortage of nice, brainy grad and medical students who wanted a little space in a quiet, safe neighborhood to dump their belongings. One of these young men was from Florida.
   After suffering through his first New England winter, he was more than ready to chuck his parka, don some shorts and ride to school on his bicycle. It was mid-March when the first tease of Spring erupted in unseasonably warm balmy breezes. Against all of my warnings, confident that he knew best and I was off my nut, he aired out his room by throwing open the windows and did a massive Spring cleaning. He packed away his down comforter, warm boots and heavy coat and fleeces. Tossing on his riding shorts and helmet, he lit off to school with sunshine on his back, assured that Spring had arrived.
   I felt sorry for him two days later, when the temperatures plunged back into the 30s and snow fell on Easter. Pride wouldn't allow him to admit he was freezing. Allowing him that, I left a few extra blankets at the attic door.
   Moral of the story? Reread the opening sentence.

Laziness, not necessity, is the mother of invention

Contrary to the popular saying, I have found in most cases, it has been my own laziness that has prompted me to create some new way of doing something. This has evidenced itself in my kitchen, when lacking several ingredients for a recipe, I have improvised because I simply didn't want to make the effort to get in my car and drive the two miles to the grocery story. I have also noticed this tendency when I sew, often using blunt needles or off-colored thread to mend pants and socks, arguing to myself that no one sees the hemline of a pair of pants, anyway.
   Today, I discovered that my inherent laziness could very well revolutionize the way I iron my clothes. Granted, ironing is the one domestic chore I don't despise, but in order to do it right, I have to get out my board, haul out all the necessities, including the iron, starch, spray bottle, stain remover and then clear the space to set up shop.
   Noticing the dress pants I pulled out my closet had an annoying, off-center crease and a couple of obvious wrinkles thanks in part to my overstuffed closet which collapses all my clothes into a small cramped space, I sighed. I didn't want to have to go through my ironing ordeal just for a 30 second job. Walking into the bathroom, I spied my flattening iron, plugged in and ready to roll. I use it to flatten my bangs, dutifully following instructions from my hairdresser and striving to be hip
   "Hmm. I bet I could use this to re-crease my pant legs," I thought, patting myself on the back for being so clever. And guess what? It worked. A few prolonged moments pinched in between the hot prods of the hair flattening iron, and viola! The old crinkles were pressed sharp and crisp. A rare genius moment for me. And it has got me thinking of how I can use it to iron my husband dress shirts.

Time change woes

Why is it everyone gets so tired when we have to change the clock forward? I can vouch for myself--I feel like someone let the air out of me today. Maybe it is in part because of the letdown from yesterday's talk. Even with the low turnout, I feel it was a success. Sadly, not many folks turned out to hear about our beloved Emma Lazarus. The discussion we all had afterward dissected the reasons, all speculative, of course. The time change, the lack of interest in life of Emma Lazarus, the lack of interest in me, the weather and overcast skies--you name it, we discussed it. We human love to know why. Why our expectations have not been met.
   But I went into the talk with no expectations. Let me correct myself. I went in with only one expectation that I would do my best to convey to whomever wanted to hear, the importance of this woman to history--our collective American history as well as her impact as a female, a poet and a Jew.
   Her story is actually everyone's story. Her short life (she died at 38) was a continual discovery into her own identity--coming to terms with the sometimes disparate aspects of her personhood in a time yet to break free from the oppressive reins of Victorianism.
   Hopefully there will be another opportunity for me to talk about her. It's one way I can contribute to making sure her memory helps secure her a place in our current conversation.  
  

If you've got nothing to do Sunday

Come to my next speaking engagement at the Temple Anshe Hesed at 930 Liberty St. in Erie, Pa. While it's snowing outside, it will be warm with intellectual and inspirational exchanges inside. The talk starts at 10:30 a.m., but make note that this is the spring forward day of Daylight's Savings Time, so that will be 9:30 a.m. our time.
   I am speaking on the topic of Emma Lazarus, who is best known for writing the sonnet the accompanied the Statue of Liberty, entitled "The New Colossus." The words, "give me your tired your poor" have been indelibly linked with the spirit of freedom that the statue has come to stand for, especially with the waves of immigration it welcomed for over a century. But Emma Lazarus was much more than just that sonnet. She was an intellectual who was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other aesthetes of her time, being heralded as one of the foremost poets of her ear. She sadly has been lost to history like so many other prominent women of her time, and many do not even know who she is today. She was also Jewish, and had to balance her multiple identities as a woman, American, Jews and poet--something she would be straddled with her entire life and finally made some sense of before she died.
  Hope to see you there!

Here's to Dr. Seuss

If you have a chance to read this week's column, which will be posted on Thursday at goerie.com, please do so. I delve into my own admiration of Dr. Seuss and share some of the reasons why his works have become classics. It's enormously difficult to become successful in the world of children's books. Just ask any aspiring writer and illustrator. Writing for children, especially for beginning readers, is so much more than just picking a clever theme, inventing a cute character and stringing together monosyllabic words for a few pages. It's an art, a science, and an academic challenge and one pioneered to a large degree by Theodor Seuss Geisel.
   All of that aside, Geisel also wrote with his heart as well as his head. His beliefs about the world and humanity translated into much of the work that has been published and tops the list of beloved children's classics.
  It was his birthday last week, and in homage, Read Across America day was named for him. It doesn't get much better than that.

Music soothes the savage beast and feeds the muse

There is a running joke around here that if it weren't for my son's participation in something known as District Chorus and Regional Chorus, I would have have written nothing of any worth in the past 10 years.
   When tackling book projects, I am fond of listening to music as a backdrop to my writing. No music connoisseur I, the stuff usually comes from whatever I have hanging around that seems to fit the nature and theme of the topic. But thanks to my son, I have drawn from his vocal performances to keep me on task.
   A musical kid, my son participated in these vocal opportunities during his years in high school. And as an ever generous mother, I purchased not just the laminated photos of the full choruses, but the accompanying CDs from the concerts as well.
   This has been standard operating procedure for me since my son started performing in public arenas with  the regional youth orchestra at the tender age of 10. But the one difference between me and perhaps other parents who paid their obligatory financial homage to the orchestra, I listened to the CDs. And when he transitioned into singing and the above state competitions, I became faithful to those musical tracks as well.
   But what sealed the deal was downloading those CDs into my computer's music library, which makes it easy to listen to the music by just clicking on an icon. My last two novels were written completely to the sounds created by these now-defunct, one-time choruses.
   If these kids only knew how they inspired me, well, I doubt they would believe it. I have become so familiar with these tracks because according to my music library, I have listened to some of them hundreds of times. I can pick out specific voices, including my son's.
   And at least just for a little while, I am transported back to another time, sitting in the audience before a stage of robed young choral singers who look and sound like angels.