From Invisible to Indefatigable

 

indefatigable - adjective - persisting tirelessly

Remember the invisibility cloak featured in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling? Crafty, young wizard Harry could slip into it on occasion and disappear into thin air to become the proverbial, unnoticed fly on the wall for reasons pertaining to subterfuge. Well, if fictive Harry were actual and living in today's world, a cloak would be completely unnecessary. To disappear, all he would have to do is grow old, retire from a given profession and/or surround himself with forgetful friends to feel completely out of the picture.

Case in point: yesterday, I had the ill fortune of feeling invisible sans the desire to be imperceptible– a total, complete, absolute downer because I wanted so badly to stay in the picture or even just be in the picture. A friend and former colleague of mine had texted me a week or so ago to tell me that she had finally decided to retire after nearly fifty years of teaching in the same middle school. For the past five years, indefatigable me tried to convince her to take the plunge and join those of us public school pensioners free from the systemic abuse of the daily grind, and last month, she found the courage to put in the right papers and start a new chapter. It all sounds fine and dandy but upon opening Facebook yesterday afternoon, I saw a photograph of my friend, her friends, and colleagues at her retirement party. The only face out of the frame entirely was mine. Intentionally or unintentionally, someone had thrown the invisibility cloak over me, and I was left out of the mix. Naturally, I felt awful that I had not received an invitation to the affair.

In life, mishaps like this occur. I am sure you've heard the adage, "Out of sight, out of mind." The older you become, the more aware of your own relative insignificance you are, and perhaps, the more fragile your ego becomes. Sadly, we aren't indispensable; we can be easily replaced. When we leave a building, a town or city, a state, a country, a life, the world keeps turning without us. But while we are still around wherever we are, we can strive to be indefatigable, just more on the invincible side rather than the invisible. Another mutual friend who was also left huddling under the invisibility cloak and I decided to forgive and forget and treat our newly retired friend to a makeshift celebratory breakfast. We figured that if the door to one party is locked, we would unlock the door on our own. Do the same and invite everyone you've ever known so that nobody falls victim to invisibility. Whatever you do, when a situation is humiliating, don't throw in the towel, just the invisibility cloak.

Sometimes, solutions come down simple common sense. 

#word-to-words, #spilled thoughts, #vocabulary, #good advice, #personal essay, #vocabulary 

 

The Secret to Staying Young is Not in a Fountain; It's in Paul

 

perdurable - adjective - enduring continuously; imperishable (Google)

Every now and again, you might get lucky enough to witness true timelessness in a person: a human demigod who defies age, i.e. chronological definition. Last night at MetLife Stadium, a few breaths away from NYC, I felt blessed to be one of 50,000 people (Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen included), ranging in age from five to eighty-five, who flocked en masse to celebrate the perdurable Paul McCartney's eightieth birthday, which will be tomorrow. Yes, he'll be 8-0, not an octopus in any garden, but an octogenarian. I know. It is hard to believe that any Beatle could achieve that fate since they were the avatars of youth and a degree of innocence in the early 1960s. Clearly and fortunately, Paul has Dick Clark's Disease, the inability to age because he just flatly refuses to do so, which may just be part of the secret to staying young. 

As some of you already know, I spend time as a professional singer, entertaining audiences in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Surely Sir Paul owns the right number to gain entrance into one of these places, but I don't see that happening-ever. And it doesn't have a lot to do with the fact that he is the wealthiest rock star on the planet with over a billion to his name albeit I am sure it doesn't hurt to have that kind of money. What invaluable, priceless traits Paul possesses that many of his contemporaries don't is an altruistic purpose and the desire to achieve it. Ostensibly his passion is music; he has amassed a treasure chest of original songs spanning decades of musical artistry. He has been blessed with a talent that he feels compelled to share even though he modestly declares that what he does is "just a hobby" now that he has reached the highest echelons of mortality for a man. (The average life span of one these days is just 78.) And he works very hard to share his avocation despite his voice not being what it used to be. He doesn't care. Three hours of nonstop singing and playing and cavorting sans a drop of water to moisturize his pipes (not good, Paul) later, he barely showed any signs of fatigue probably because he spends much time preparing physically. You never hear about his illnesses perhaps because he doesn't have any. He doesn't have time for them. 

Celebrity Paul does lead a charmed life, I'm sure, but none of us needs to be Paul to reap similar benefits. If you are looking to be perdurable, physically and psychologically, don't fly south with the birds in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth in Florida. Find a passion and pursue it to the ends of the earth so that you don't have time to think about the number attached to you. It is definitely working for me because this past week, two people younger than forty thought I was forty, and I am in my sixties. 

It's time to free up that nearly empty bag of Doritos, get up off the couch, turn off the TV, put down the phone, and get going. Doctors have too much money as it is. They don't need any more of yours. Think Paul. Think young. Be young, perdurable. 

#word-to-words, #spilled thoughts, #vocabulary, #good advice, #personal essay, #vocabulary 

Longing for the Customer Service of the Past

 

customer service - noun - the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services (Google). 

I didn't think I would be Googling the denotation of customer service. I didn't think I would have to, but I did because the dearth of it, particularly lately in retail stores, is so terribly obvious in day-to-day reality that I found myself needing to check an online dictionary just to make sure my own understanding of it is compatible with everyone else's, including Google's. It's not. My conception of customer service is more precise than theirs and much more demonstrative. "Assistance and advice" seem a bit vague, yet perhaps purposefully.  

For example, in Home Depot yesterday, there were a half dozen clerks standing in the vicinity of the self-service, check-out kiosks, waving customers to machines so that they, the employees, wouldn't have to serve the purchasers directly. Is this what is meant by "assistance"? Probably. Is it the kind of assistance most would expect? Probably not. Was there advice given? I guess so. One former cashier brusquely differentiated between the machines for me, ensuring that I would wind up at the one that greedily sucked in credit cards rather than cash. So, I guess there was "advice" available. The whole disappointing experience left me a bit nostalgic for the past.  At that moment, I found myself yearning for a whiff of the musty fresh air of a lost era that defined the definition I carry around with me, that which includes adjectives such as "personal," "friendly," "caring," "prompt," "motivated," "dutiful," and "appreciative." Clearly, Google's definition includes only one adjective, "those" that can hardly be considered a descriptive word probably because customer service is so generic now that adjectives appear to be extraneous. 

After leaving the store, I couldn't understand why all of the Home Depot employees couldn't have just stepped up, taken the initiative, and offered authentic "assistance and advice" by going through the simple motions of greeting each customer with a pleasant smile, directing the cart to an open register, checking out the items, accepting means of payment, and sending each buyer off with a quick creative quip.  Okay, maybe not the quip. That would be asking a little much. 

If big retail is wondering why people are relying on Amazon too much, it is because they experience the same lack of genuine care there as they do in stores except Amazon is a lot faster, and you don't have to use your car now that gas prices are through the roof. 

Can we go back to the days when bonafide service distinguished customer service? Pretty please?

#word-to-words, #spilled thoughts, #vocabulary, #good advice, #personal essay, #vocabulary 

Paradise Within

 

paradisiacal - adjective - ideal or idyll, heavenly (Google).

Often it seems as though this life's journey is a search for the paradisiacal, but most view the endeavor to be as challenging as the pronunciation of the word: a mouthful of six syllables, the emphasis being on the fourth. But is it really all that tough?

Yesterday, I decided to drive down to the local Dollar Tree, a store that I equate with a treasure chest as there are usually all kinds of material gems for a dollar a piece. When I walked into the front door, a display of items suggestive of the tropics caught my eye as I was looking for campy, fun treats with which to spoil my great nieces, who appreciate anything regardless of price or level of taste. I headed straight for the brown plastic pineapple drinking cups, complete with frilly green, cloth crowns and straws that grow from them. As I reached out to examine one up close, my attention was diverted to a placard standing beside the pineapple cups. Decorated along its margins with colorful images symbolic of equatorial habitats, it read, "Welcome to Paradise." And on cue, I asked myself, Is paradise a place that you aspire to inhabit or is it something else more obtainable?

To me (and probably to a lot of Buddhists), paradise on earth (at least–I don't know about Heaven) is not a physical entity. It is the state of happiness within and not without of you. To reach the internal paradise, joy, you have to release all negativity that perhaps has sprung from past disappointments. Is this easy? No, but nothing in life is. But as I have written time and time again, your state of mind is determined by choice. Simply put, you choose to think the way you do and to perceive the past and present the way you do. Others may alter your choices, but ultimately you are at the helm of your own happiness, your own psychological paradise. A mental illness or two could inhibit your train of thought; however, if you are sound mentally, changing your viewpoint is doable. 

Paradisiacal is indeed hard to formulate as a word and as a state of being. If you wish to embrace the pronunciation and the idyllic mindset, all it comes down to is diligent practice (which may include mediation) and a mind open to practice. Happiness is on the horizon, well within your grasp, but only if you want it to be.

(By the way, in case you are wondering, yes, I did buy the sign. For a dollar, I couldn't go wrong with a corporeal reminder of paradise's accessibility on earth.)

#word-to-words, #spilled thoughts, #vocabulary, #good advice, #personal essay, #vocabulary