Back to the Future

BACK TO THE FUTURE

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back (Chinese proverb)

Beijing,1946-1948: As in any civil war, the last few years of the Chinese civil war were a combination of desperation, violence, chaos, and near-constant fighting with the most unnerving enemy of all: towering uncertainty.

While political and field battles raged across the country clashing out the ideals of a fading Nationalist government against a surging and ultimately victorious Communist party, in a small non-descript alley amid Beijing’s maze of hutongs, one family made their way into yet another home. Another home, another city, another new place to stay in search of safety and peace while trying to ensure some degree of normalcy.

Led by a powerfully determined matriarch, several Chang children dutifully organized themselves into the neighborhood known today as Hou Hai. Named “Back Seas” due to the lovely location just north of and thus behind the Forbidden City, this leafy area was home to swimming lakes where people brought their old wooden bird cages and enjoyed the ancient marble and stone bridges that gracefully arched across the narrow streams connecting the lakes. Indeed, it is said that even today one can tell where old vanished bridges once stood based on the location of the tallest willow trees that relied on the moving water streams. Or so say the old people who still call the area home.

Beijing,2015: The younger people there, however, only know of these ancient trees and bridges through stories. With an envious lake front view, most of these old hutong alleys have become cozy hangouts for bars, fancy restaurants and Starbucks coffee shops. But if one ventures deeper back into the alley maze, there is a very special little house with an even more special number: No 52. It was here that my father, our much beloved patriarch, spent what would be a final few years of his life in China.

The house of course is not the most special part. Like many traditional hutong houses, it is low lying, somewhat dark, and according to neighbors and people on the street, prone to mold and dampness like all other houses in the alley. The side entrance remains the main door, while the front area has been subdivided into a commercial space selling yet another menu of nameless cocktails.

But once Pop Chang stands in  front of that side door, something very special happens. The years fade away, as does the random second floor addition and roof-top garden that has sprung up on top of the house (residential regulations be damned!) Instead of the current year of 2015 and the honk and beep of traffic, I hear basically nothing but my own thoughts of the years and life that lay ahead for my father. Of how he would eventually sail from Shanghai to Taiwan, make his way to Washington State and Minnesota before landing in New York to then meet and marry a woman from Germany.  Of how he would play such a foundational role in shaping my life and that of my brother in ways that he could never have imagined when scampering over those long-lost bridges of HouHai.

And of how unbelievably mystical it is to see him, more than 50 years later, walk up to that same door with his family around him. And to know that all is well. 

Wheels Up!

There are several kinds of people: those who watch things happen, those who make things happen, and those who wonder what happened

-no idea who said this but I’ve always liked it

The thing that’s so great about that above quote, is that any and every family system will have all of those above people. And each family member will have the opportunity to play each role at different times, depending on the circumstances. Consider, for example, the current Chang clan family trip. 

Last summer, it was Berlin and Prague –taking in Mom Chang’s family roots in Berlin neighborhoods amid daily ice cream treats, endless wursten mit pommes on every corner, and rides on beloved yellow double decker city busses. At any given moment, there was someone watching things happen (Pop Chang, as yet another mystifying Berlin behavior manifested itself), another member making things happen (Mom Chang taking charge to get us through the city transit system to her old kneipe/neighborhood), and many times we were all together wondering what happened (as in, “where did Pop go? “)

Having mastered that family trip we have collectively decided to embark on the next phase of Project Chang travels: tackling Beijing in July to see where Pop spent some formative years. With rented apartment secured, maps in hand, determination anchored in our collective ability to tolerate more family quirks, joys and intergalactic personality traits, we are wheels up from LAX to Beijing, non-stop.

It will be quite the ride.  And I for one can’t wait.   

    

                                 

Wheels up from LAX!

The Sound of Silence

Hello darkness my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

With the sound of silence

                             -Simon and Garfunkel

One of the under-appreciated benefits of living a development expat life is that many quirky, odd or otherwise willfully neglectful appearances of inattentiveness in social or professional circles can very often be explained away by an airy wave of the hand while sighing the following: "I'm jetlagged.". As in, "oh my, I've just flown in from Nairobi and I'm just wrecked...that layover in Dubai really did it for me when I landed there at 1am" or, "Even though I just love being based in Bangkok, that 15 hour transpacific flight to Atlanta --via Seoul --is just killer." Yeah yeah, it's great to be back in HQ but sorry folks I may just need to reschedule this meeting once my body no longer thinks I'm in [insert latest emergency location.]. In case anyone reading this is feeling a bit defensive, please know that those examples are all things I have said in my life. And probably not just once. When you are off saving humanity and gathering up even more heroic stories to tell random folks about how it's all just so complicated and people "there" are so just courageous, etc one really has a great trump card to soothe away peoples' concerns that you may just not be optimizing your emotional intelligence. I mean, someone will surely rush off to get you another strong cup of fair trade, sustainably grown and appropriately harvested dry roasted organic coffee. Added milk is for wimps. Now, what was I writing about? I may have dozed off a moment.  

Cue forward out of that global roaming lifestyle and instead to an established process of re acclimation back home and what do you have? No excuses really, to explain why it's difficult to sleep at night sometimes. No internal disruptions of body clocks wondering why it's light out when you feel asleep on the inside. No automatic digestion going on without it being anywhere near a meal time. No appreciation of waking up with a nice big stretch on a fluffy pillow while rolling over with the confidence of a solid comfortable REM experience.  Oh sure, maybe a bit of jet lag here and there for a couple of hours' time zones or a big blowout summer trip...yada yada yada. But for anyone looking to step off the global international development roaming road, understand that saying goodbye to chronic jet lag can mean saying hello to that friend in the dark: insomnia. 

Ah, insomnia. Even the name sounds upsetting. I bet if you would ask innocent little kids on the street if insomnia was a good or bad thing, most would know just by the sound of the word that insomnia is generally not appreciated. That it's unwelcome. That's it's a cause of much eye rolling, tossing and turning and because it's the US, it's also a great reason to produce a full range of non habit forming but apparently very effective sleep aids. 

You are getting very sleepy. 

Blogs and other writings often tell of the happy, cheerful kodak moments in life. Love those! And I'm also at the moment, trying to inject my writings with more personal authenticity and wholeness --which in my case then means sharing that insomnia has for the past few months, been a good friend to me. This is a new friendship in my life, and one that I am working out how to engage with. The first hurdle has been to release the idea that I AM UNIQUE IN EXPERIENCING INSOMNIA. Turns out, I'm not as special as I thought. More than half of all adults routinely experience occasional bouts of insomnia due to stress, anxiety, exercising too late at night, overeating, over drinking, over living and over thinking. That last one is my nemesis: over thinking. The thing at night for me, is that most sentences start with "what if..." and spin off into a scary, more uncertain place. It's not the "what if I have every dream come true? what if I'm so happy with everything in my life that I can't take it? What if I'm so successful in every aspect of my life that I just don't know what to do with myself?" No no, dear reader. It's the spooked little gremlins that irrationally ask "What if all my happiest/most successful/sexiest/funniest/most loving moments are behind me? What if I never get in the physical health I want to achieve? What if I never finish writing those chapters?" and most worrisome of all in the middle of the night...

WHAT IF I NEVER FALL BACK TO SLEEP, NEVER EVER EVER?

Fed up with the "what if " machine --and with thinking about buying yet another under eye concealer -- I decided to re-wire my relationship to insomnia. And it was fittingly about 2:27am when this happened and I was staring out the window. I was the only person awake in the world, of that I was sure. I asked --to no one in particular but with undoubtedly profound insight-  "what if insomnia is a good thing?" and set about finding approaches that embrace insomnia. That embrace the darkness. That embrace the silence. That validated my stubborn belief that it's not me, it's some kind of misunderstanding between myself and life. And off I went, to get my PhD in Google surfing. Of course, there is a ton of stuff out there and most comforting to me was selecting content that explained how in some indigenous cultures in America, insomnia is considered a gift (why is it always those "indigenous cultures" that seem to know this stuff better than anyone else?!?!)  That the velvety darkness of deep night is considered a sacred time. That insomnia is a time when spirits wake up and visit the people lucky enough to be awake to receive their messages.  That in effect, those who experience insomnia may possess some sort of intergalactic ability to commune with the spirits. That in the end, insomnia is a process by which those more spiritually open can tap into subliminal messages from the night fairies who are busy sprinkling their magic message dust. 

What a relief to know it's not that I'm over-analytical, neurotic, obsessive and/or a worrying nitwit who just needs to get her priorities in order and stop fretting about life! It's America, damn it! Pull yourself together. I get it now. It's not the 3pm latte or the gluten bread. I'm actually somewhat telepathic and speak a spirit language with little sprites I can't see. Can you feel my relief through these writings?

Joking aside, this re-wiring of my relationship to insomnia created a predictable twist: as soon as I started feeling less stressed about what my insomnia meant and instead saw it as connecting more deeply with my own authenticity - my worries, dreams, desires and concerns --I started sleeping better. You saw that coming, I'm sure. 

Am I missing my insomnia? Not really. I'm sure I'll chat with my night fairies sooner than later. 

Chrome Home

We all thought he was phoning home. No.
He's actually programming his flat screen.

 

Oh those good old days. Simple days when you raced home from school, kicked off your shoes, did homework, gobbled down that dinner, jumped in the tub and then eagerly plopped down in the family room to jostle with pesky siblings for the best spot to...watch TV. The anticipation itself was almost as enjoyable as those beloved opening show tunes. And not just anything but *the show* you loved...and it was going to be on at a certain time, day and only ONE time before you had to *GASP* ...wait until next week's episode. Oh the glory to wonder what it all meant and what would happen next week? Would Blair finally go out with her crush? Would Fonzie get kicked out of school? And of course, who shot JR?

No one cared back then how close you sat to the screen.

After our exciting evening, well we'd have to wait for a while, sometimes a whole season of wondering through afternoons spent staring up at ceiling walls while our lava lamps spun out hazy blobs of contemplation. Sweet torture. Ah, those days, those memories....

The Art of TV Contemplation

Wake up, people, and join the 21st century American TV market. In my experience so far being back home in the states, a chat about TV is basically this:

Person 1: I'm going to watch some TV. Want to?

Person 2: Sure. Pull up the DVR list

Person 1: Ok.

No more "what's on tonight? what time is it?" or the like. Far less "it's Sunday, so that means Show X is on" or, "oh, I need to wrap up this call since Season 1 is starting in a few minutes..." Yawn. Archaic statements of the past and/or habits of the outdated and outmoded. Time is not the only one waiting for no one. Seems TV is out the gate also. 

Over the last 10 years, I've not had a TV except for when in Kenya, and I can tell you that was a sight to see. As a former TV editor, I love video, pictures, images and moving media; working at a cable station was a dream job - hello paycheck related to watching multiple screens! Fast forward to being in Nairobi, and having not just a tv but one with a DVD player and a video rental place down the road ( aww isn't that sweet, a place that rents movies. Cute!). We are talking watching 5-6-7 episodes of LOST, Big Love and Lipstick Jungle with breaks only for nature and nutella. Remote(s) in one hand, beverage in the other. Full stop. 

So you can imagine it was a bit of a shock to recently re-enter the TV/ Digital/Cable/DVR landscape ( I have no idea what that means, actually, but it sounds good.). To switch on one of my brothers' TWO big flat screens - that are mounted ON THE WALLS - and absorb the fact that there are about 500 channels to scroll through (once I can find the correct scroll button, of course)..well words fail me. When glued in front of such a screen, all I see is Verizon on my horizon.

You say Hulu, I say Hawaii

To be clear, lots of these explosive channel options and hanging TVs are available in the places I've been, and in many ways are even more advanced that some options in certain parts of the states. Sort of like how the cell reception overseas out runs many coverage areas in the states, as some countries simply ignored dealing with shoddy landlines and went straight to mobile technology. I take full responsibility for my elementary level of TV genius, and like the classic break up line goes: It's not you, it's me.  Being in Asia was like being in the wild west of the technology frontier with the cowboys and cowgirls swinging not lassos but cable lines. 

So what does it mean, then, today, to watch tv? It seems to mean whatever you want it to mean, whenever you want.  Customization, baby. You can still be all old school and "appointment view" meaning you do something as basic as plan to watch a show at a certain time on a certain day. Or you DVR it (I guess that's a verb now) and watch it whenever, which could be never based on some friends I know who never get to their lists. It could mean flipping open your laptop --ha! I just dated myself again, due to the prevalence of tablets! --and watch online. Identifying the number of options is like asking the length of the horizon.

But honestly, there's a new thing I have yet to get -- Google Chrome can now plug something into something somewhere and you are then connected. To what exactly I'm not sure, but here's what I do know for sure: I bet any random 12 year old on the street could explain it.

Is that a new Rubiks Cube?

Family Matters

" A dysfunctional family is any family that has more than one member in it. " 

- quote of a beloved Chang family friend

Family comes in many forms

Sigh. That cheeky friend of my family, who as a social worker has likely worked with every kind of family configuration possible to assemble, gets it. There is nothing like the word "family" to launch any range of possible reactions. I mean, think about it, what comes to your mind when hearing that word yourself? Who appears in your minds' eye, what are they doing, how old are you, and what does your physical reaction tell you? As a typical human, there is probably the expected flood of emotions: memory, nostalgia, a mental smile, pangs of regret, loss or wistfulness. Feelings of happiness, gratitude and optimism for more times to come. Maybe feelings of missing someone so much it pokes at unexpected places. Maybe its a reminder that its someones' birthday today and/or its time to call them back. Perhaps its time to unclench those fists and/or stop swearing.

In this year of transition, a significant amount of my life has been devoted to reconnecting with my immediate nuclear family, my extended family and all the loved ones in that campsite. I'm lucky to have my Mom and Pop around to enjoy them, and to have them, as Pop Chang says, "live for bugging you from morning to night" be it in person, skype or cell phone. Such fun to be part of the Aunty brigade to my delightful 5 year old niece and nephew. Hillary Clinton was right --it does take a village to raise a child in that there are all kinds of support systems available to my brother and his wife due to having their families within very close proximity. And they generously envelop us all in their sprouting unit.

One thing about being back home around family is that, well, you are around them. There is a breathing room that provides a more relaxed environment of really actually getting to know people again, to see who they have become and how that reconciles with the memory of who they've been while I've been overseas. For example, my brother has always been a natural athlete. He was the one who, when we were in early elementary school, would dash towards our backyard fence, leap towards the top and just amble over it. I, on the other hand, would skip towards it, stop, and look up and down the fence to see where there might be a gate entrance to pry open. Not a fan of the "leap and lower" method. Kai just dashes into the gym and gets going. I approach, consider, and then make my move after contemplation. No pure diving into the spin class for me. I ask about the instructor's general level of torture first. Kai has already completed his lower body workout by then.

Fast forward several decades later, and I again appreciate that natural athleticism in my brother. How? Let's see...as a school principal, his workday starts about 7am. By that time, Mr Kai Chang Principal has already likely done the following: gotten up about 345am, skipped off to the gym for a good hour long weight workout, showered, dressed, maybe baked some salmon fillets for lunch (yes, you read that correctly) and is ready to help his kidlets get ready for school etc.  Come weekend, well, the surf is best usually around 6am so he can be found peering at the waves in the beach pier parking lot, looking for the best spot (and very likely rode his bike down with his board strapped to his bike...what's a little more cardio in the grand scheme of things?!)  On a weekend in So Cal, lots of folks are calling it a night around the time he's dropping his board into the water.  So at least my brother is still himself. It's good to know with all the change in the world, some things stay safely predictable.

There's such a nice pacing to reconnecting with family again after years of condensed and intense home leave visits. No longer do we need to jam everything into a few weeks of high impact sprints before the long haul trots of waiting 6 more months to see each other: nope! No more last night nostalgic dinners before checking in the next day for a trans pacific flight and managing skype calls. No more pangs of somehow feeling like I'm missing out on some undefined broader sense of my own personal development and experience, of being the only one not part of the larger family unit that is literally in the same place. 

How lovely it is, to just say, "see you tomorrow " and to have it be true day after day.

And of course, proximity breeds even more familiarity and those chestnuts of family dynamics. We all know how someone can just call us and have *that mood* conveyed over the phone in about 10 seconds. People around us, well, they also know us. I am sure that for my family, having me back is also a transition due to seeing who I have become, on a daily basis. Remembering our individual pacing styles; Mom takes 3 seconds in between questions, Pop takes many more and my pacing depends on the time of day. I can at times think my brother's not been listening to me at all, then he pipes up with a gem of an observational statement that lets me know he's been tapped in the whole time. He's just been quiet --which some people would call good LISTENING! How's that for a newsflash!

Are there flip sides to such proximity? How much time is there to discuss that. Boundaries get challenged, life and little choices get evaluated with "a look" ... ("oh, you're wearing that to the cold beach tonight?"..."Do you think it's a good idea to do that?"...love those non questions!), Do I miss what I used to nebulously used to refer to as my "old life"? At times and only certain aspects. But I have to be honest - to come downstairs and have my Pop say, "Hey (Pop-speak for "good morning"). Want to go over to Little Saigon for dim sum breakfast?" and to travel with him to his first home town when arriving in America....to speak german with my Mom all the time as we reflect on her WWII Berlin childhood with the ease of knowing that we're sitting on the couch together instead of talking over skype...and to grab dinner and a movie with my brother and sister in law and just yak afterwards....well there's nothing like it for me.

For a long time I missed my family --including my family of friends --in ways that felt like a dull ache. I felt like I was not just missing them in terms of wanting to be with them and have them near. I felt like I was also literally missing them --meaning, missing being a witness to their lives, and felt too like they were missing out on experiencing me more directly in their lives.  This intensified the pressure for my overseas life to be infinitely more satisfying and fulfilling in order to be worth what it felt I was missing in life currency and experiences. To be sure, I loved my life then, and I love it now. There are people who have come into my life during those years for whom I care deeply. And it was time to regroup and dive into those home grown missing moments. Those moments have been attended to, have been something that has drunk deeply and richly this year. Another step of re balancing and recalibrating. 

Dorothy was right. There's no place like home, in whatever shape it exists.

May 2013, Huntington Beach, CA. Sunset. Perfection.

Get Smart

"Is this the power button?": Max and 99 at work

By the time I was a little sprout in the 1970's, my future work in television was confirmed thanks to watching our spanking new TV as much as I could. Angels said good morning to Charlie, the Fonz said hey and Arnold wondered what Willis was talkin' about. But nothing came close to the masterful and suspense-filled sitcom showcasing the irreplaceable Don Adams as Max and the mesmerizing Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in Get Smart. And 99 was who I wanted to be - smart, sassy, always knowing how to handle any situation and all that 1970's satin just made a complete fan out of me. I mean, we didn't even know her real name, she was that mysterious. When it was time to remove my bicycle training wheels, my belief that 99 would definitely manage on two wheels helped me get it together on my bike to wobble down the street gripping my handlebars. She probably wouldn't have kept a front flower basket holding her Barbie dolls, but whatever; I channeled my mini-99 for at least one block before skidding off into the bushes and scraping both knees with aplomb. Victory was mine!

Fast forward many years later and it's time once again to access my Inner Agent 99. Complicated international development politics and contradictions? Nope. Bureaucratic donor reporting and partnership issues? Ha! I wish. Figuring out how to work my new android phone to track my data usage and to find the nearest Trader Joe's? That's what I'm talking about, people. The smartphone. 

Those phones sure are smart. And there are many of them, lurking in wait for the unsuspecting customer. I swear I could feel them watching me from their display cases as I walked by. Apple or Samsung? Widgets vs Apps. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or pre-paid? What is a widget, anyway? I ask because I just saw yesterday that I have many of them on my phone homepage (when I can get to it.) Instagram now has a photo of my socks and I'm not sure how it got there; pinterest sends me pictures of cooking results on a board I can't find anymore. Twitter remains a distant possibility but for someone as high context as me, I think it would just be the last draw to summarize anything in a handful of words...or tweets, come to think of it.

CC: "I have ways of making you speak to me!"

It is not easy to select a smartphone. Here in California, the question of what kind of smartphone to get is 99% of the time met with the most incredulous of stares. It is the home of Apple and Steve Jobs, after all. Thus the idea that anyone would consider anything else is about as unbelievable as getting charged for rice in Chinatown! Expressions of such wonder over what possible reality could unfold through such a question. After surveying about 100 people over the last few months and getting some pretty strong reactions, ("oh, I thought you meant which iphone to buy...you mean you might buy something other than an iphone?!  I have no idea what to suggest...I just would never think of anything besides a mac/iphone...")  I gave up and made my own independent decision. The fact that the LA County School district just ordered new ipads for all the students speaks yet again to the GENIUS that was Steve Jobs. I do love going into an Apple store and just touching everything there - and who doesn't love every single second of the heart warming iPhone photo every day and music every day commercials? The piano music just grabs me from the first note...that little girl in the pink bunny suit taking her own picture fills my eyes every time...the guy running while snapping a shot is just the model of multi tasking....and the uber fit girl jumping rope to her own beat is one cool chick and did I mention I want her abs?....and then, and then, and then....

My questioning does not intend to give flack to the mac. It's simply born out of an innate curiosity about what motivates people to do what they do, and the basic fact that THIS GIRL NEEDS SOME TECH HELP FOLKS! And it's not just what people use, it's how they use it and what people have stopped doing that's so interesting. Here's a sample of the tech advice I've received since returning back to the States:

"if you buy that smartphone, you'll have lower apps access --only about 30,000. This one over here, has access to about 45,000." - so that's what's been missing in my life: 15,000 apps.

"No one picks up the phone and calls anyone. A text message is the only thing that gets answered." (more than a few people have added, "oh and Claude, no one says 'sms' in the states. They send a text, not an sms.")

"If you call people without first sending a text saying you will call, people are less likely to answer the phone. Or they'll think you're in trouble and calling for help because it's so out of the blue."

"Why would I call someone? If I did, then I'd have to listen to everything they say." --my personal favorite tip. That person better not have been talking about me.

Getting all those insights reminded me of the secret Starbucks menu  - once you are in the know, the world is simply a different place.

"buy a biscotti and give it to the barista..."

I like sending texts. I like getting them. And I also like hearing someone's voice on the phone. But time marches on, phone or no phone. I get it, the value of texts is great because its quick, convenient, and gets around bad reception --both the phone and personal kind. It helps to secure a more customized way to manage communication and can be less distracting than a phone call. And if there is one word that sums up coming back home to sort out what one wants in a phone, it is customization for sure. I find it funny that on a regular basis, I receive text messages that easily took longer to type out than to just call directly.  But come to think of it, that perspective more likely means I'm a slow phone typer. Apparently, it's true --as a 40+ year old, I am automatically on the wrong end of the Bell curve when it comes to driving in the fast lane of the tech highway. Maybe I'm not even to the on-ramp yet?

To be clear, I love my new smart phone. I just don't love being so outsmarted. Does it even make sense to have a smartphone in the age of ipads and the like, I wonder. Any tips out there? Hello? Can anyone hear me?

Maybe I should text you instead.

The final choice. Where is 99 when I  need her?

Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice, wear your own watch.

Back in my expat planet days, my pre-home leave rituals included pulling out a nice clean piece of white printer paper where with my big fat sharpie marker I would write two words across the top in big letters: TO BUY. New sneakers, workout clothes, some yoga gadget, ziplock bags, cosmetics, jeans and that gem of a no brainer - bras (hello, show me a 5 ft 10in woman who says she can buy bras in Asia and you're seeing of course a LIAR!). Sometimes, depending on my mood and actual exercise levels, the list would reach to the back page. Once ensconced in the land of plenty, I would keep that list nearby while also learning to be online savvy with amazon.com or zappos.com prior to my long haul flights. Family and friends, when informed of the incoming packages to their addresses would murmur understandingly and make appropriately supportive sounds of appreciation.

I could at times be known to book dates for Target or REI before family lunches or trips to the beach. But hey, I was on home leave and as such was afforded a larger leash of understanding regarding my clearly understandable and natural thirst to buy stuff. And it wasn't like my overseas locations didn't have stuff or anything, it just wasn't the kind of stuff that I needed, apparently.

One thing I very rarely bought was a magazine. Loftily considering myself  immune to the pulls of marketing and advertising, I would have explained that the things on my list were not just any old stuff things but instead were critical pieces that I needed since I could not get them "back home" in Kenya, Nepal or wherever that place was. The argument went something like this: I don't shop at all there, so it's ok to shop here in fewer larger swoops. The term I believe, is called "binge shopping" and yes dearie, that self help literature has it right that DENIAL is not a river in Egypt.

Now, with some longer exposure to the beauty mag ads and to fitting right into the typical demographic for such page splashes, I'm thinking the following: I'm an easy mark. Example? the other morning, after rising from a night of restless sleep and monkey mind, I splashed cold water on my face and peered into the morning mirror. What was that? I wondered, peering more closely at my sleepy complexion. Was that laugh line there yesterday? And that there, is my forehead blotchy like that all the time? No worries, I think I read somewhere yesterday about some new cream that will smooth out uneven complexions and reduce signs of wrinkles within 48 hours. 

O_M_G. I'd gone and done it. I fell right into the trap of marketing and patronizing promises of rolled back time and fresh-facedness before even having had my cup of decaf coffee. Nice going, marketers! Consider yourselves brilliant and mission accomplished. One step of neurosis for Claudia M Chang, one giant step for Consumption and Insecurity Ltd.  I snapped out of it but couldn't help but notice that I'd not had that kind of morning narrative literally in  *years.*

Don't get me wrong. I'm not getting up on a soapbox and decrying the pitfalls of consumption and consumer power of purchasing. Personal choices about managing our physical, emotional and spiritual lives are totally  that --personal and everyone has an inherent right to exercise those choices without judgement. Stepping into a Sephora can make me forget my first and last name and I'll admit it loud and proud (and had my above morning moment stayed on longer than that first mirror glance, I'd probably still be in that shop now, lost among the shelves of goodies.). What bugged me about that moment was the slice of concern I felt over my physical appearance and life journey going seemingly in some pre-determined and inarticulated wrong direction. Of being late for something but not clear what. And because I chose something other than compassion and care to my reflection, that marketing moment of concern moved right on in  --one moment too many, I'd say.

Guys are not off the hook either. From the number of mags I've seen promising guys all the muscle tone in the world as well as everlasting virility for general mantasticness  - well it seems there is an equal opportunity platform for these various pitfalls.

Proceed with caution...and compassion.

The idea that there is something wrong with your appearance as it naturally is and that you can fix it with this PRODUCT is not new. For as long as people strive to learn, grow, and improve, there are welcome and true ways to help bring out the best in ones self. But wow. It's quite a shock to be immersed again into the near constant assault that is the women's magazine industry that bombards one with constant messages about some nebulous nirvana that awaits simply through a snap of the wallet. Let's not get started on photoshop. So it seems that these publications all rest on the assumption that who we are au natural is just not good enough. Or am I missing some deeper message of appreciation, that I'm worth it, just like the L'Oreal hair color ads explain?

Each time I'm passing a magazine, which in pretty much any store is about every 5 seconds, I now notice a ticker tape question stream running through my head: What if we all accepted ourselves completely and totally as we were, especially physically but in all aspects of our lives and path? What if we did that even while recognizing things we wanted to change about ourselves? What if we were truly in touch with every aspect of our lives and beliefs, especially about authentic love for ourselves and others? And finally, what if we could sit comfortably with any discomfort about things we wanted to change with kindness and humor? 

I bet those mirror meetings would look a lot different.
 

Good morning Sassy!