Happy Friday! After a fun trip home to Pittsburgh last weekend, I'm excited to spend this weekend hanging out in Madison. And by hanging out I mean "bundling up in excessive layers and finding my scarves, mittens, and hats" cause baby, it's cold outside. (And snowing!) (I'm not sure which emotion that exclamation point represents.)

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Wishing you a relaxing weekend! Seven fun links as you watch the clock at work this Friday (I'm always looking out for inveterate time-wasters):

1. I've always loved Mark Twain quotes. This one is my recent favorite. (For obvious reasons.)

2. Read Harry Potter to avoid ER trips! Expecto Patronum means "I await a protector" in Latin! And 23 more facts about everyone's favorite series wizard in this John Green video from mental floss. (My youngest sister and I agree that the last one is the cutest!)

3. "The expectation for women to get married in their 20s is completely tired and outdated" says this Elle article on why millenials are waiting to wed.

4. "A Healthy Sense of Leisure" is one of the Pope's top ten tips for becoming a happier person.

5. One of my dear friends lost a college friend to suicide. Her parents started a foundation in her honor. Their powerful video encourages people to break the stigma around mental illness. (and shares this startling fact: there are twice as many suicides each year as homicides.)

5.  Twin Love: Adopted Twins Separated at Birth, Reunited on Facebook (proving all isn't wrong in the world of social media.)

6. This Isabelle Allende TED talk is part hilarious, part sad, and all thought-provoking.

7. Underrated* throwback rap song of the week. (what's up fresh, it's our turn baby.)

A snap from a Pennsylvania hike with the family last weekend.
Or as I like to call it: The End of the Fall as We Know It.

Have a delightful weekend - and stay warm!

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*I'm not actually sure how highly this song was rated. But it couldn't possibly be rated high enough for me to say it was NOT underrated. 

You are a Human Being, Not a Human Doing

When I was going through my bad period of clinical depression in college, I saw a psychologist named Linda once a week for an hour.

In short, I loved the experience. When people talk about "the college experience" I know they mean more "drinking beers in the shower to get ready to go out and pre-game simultaneously" and less "life-changing free psychological services" but, to this day, the latter is a college experience I cherish.*

Now as I said before, clinical depression is generally an internal battle, not a result of external factors. But, obviously, just because you're depressed doesn't mean you're somehow immune to life's annoyances and tiny tragedies.

So, often during my weekly hour with Linda, I'd talk about grades on tests, writing papers, fouling out of basketball games, going to lame parties, not being invited to "cool" parties, and whatever. Regular run-of-the-mill college crap. ("Depressed people! They're just like you!" ;) ) My focus was often on things I was doing, the seemingly impossible ever-growing to do list, and things I thought I was doing poorly.

Linda continuously reminded me:

"You are a human being, not a human doing."

Years later, I still love that simple, yet powerful, sentiment.

We are so obsessed with metrics in our society, that we often see ourselves as equivalent to our "results."

We go from asking ourselves in High School: What's my  SAT score? What's my class rank? What colleges did I get into? 

To College: What's my GPA? What sorority/fraternity did I get into? What's my team's record? 

To Life after college: How much money do I make? Where do I live? What car do I drive? How many likes did my facebook picture get? How many hours do I work a week? 

Not realizing, of course, that the whole time we're asking ourselves all of the wrong questions, shining the light on relatively unimportant things. Our lives are not our resumes; our lives cannot be distilled down to a single sheet of paper.** We are more than a carefully curated list of concrete accomplishments.

We are the little things, the tiny actions, the subtle nuances, the fleeting thoughts, the passing emotions. The growing friendships, the intimate bonds, the open smiles.

Your essence cannot be contained on an 8 1/2 x 11 inches of space, you are so much more expansive than that. And when you leave this world, and someone does try to deduce your entire, dynamic life into a tiny newspaper blurb, it will look nothing like your resume. You will never read an obituary that looks like this:

Ashley was a center starter on her basketball team, she scored 8.9 points per game, got 9.2 rebounds per game, and died with a 3.85 GPA. She left behind a six-digit job offer and a signed lease on an awesome apartment in the most expensive part of town. She was survived by her beloved Audi A-4.

Salaries are not mentioned in obituaries, but people are always mentioned. Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, husbands, children, grandchildren, are always mentioned. So why do we define ourselves by what we DO? We need to define ourselves by who we are, and how we love.

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So, I'm not a psychologist (neither was Walt), and actually never took a single psychology class in college, so if you want to ignore me, I'm not offended :) But I just think you deserve to cut yourself some slack if your To Do list seems insurmountable, your resume looks disappointing, or your "metrics" aren't up to society's standards. And just be. It's enough. Thankfully, you are a human being, and not a human doing.

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p.s. Have you read the Tao of Pooh? From amazon: "While Eeyore frets, and Piglet hesitates, and Rabbit calculates, and Owl pontificates, Pooh just is." It's a lovely, quick read.

p.p.s. ICYMI: my blog post on depression turned Thought Catalog article and I'm so excited for all the support from everyone about it :) A little thing, but a big step for me. There are 30+ comments, and most aren't mean. (ha!)

*I'm no prude, but never have I ever drank a beer in the shower. (You can put a finger down.)
**Even if it is pink and scented.

Do you meditate?

Although I wrote a book review on Beautiful Ruins I forgot to include my favorite quote from the book! (I know, I'm really adept at book reviews. The New York Times called me up about a full-time Book Reviewer position the other day and I was all "Nah, because then who would instagram pictures of my cat?" I know what you're thinking and, no, Stephen doesn't have instagram. It's hard dating such a Neanderthal ;) )

Here's the quote:

In my defense (as you can see), the quote isn't actually from Jess Walter, the author of Beautiful Ruins, but from Milan Kundera who, according to Wikipedia, is the Czech Republic's most recognized living author. Yay! I'm Czech too, so we're probs related. This quote prefaced the final chapter of the book, and it stuck with me long after I put the book down.

Last week, I was watching a TED talk by Andy Puddicombe where he encourages us to mediate for 10 minutes a day, and the quote just came to me.

Here's the video: 

Andy argues we don't spend near enough time taking care of our minds, and that we should use meditation as a preventative method (not just when we're beyond stressed.) He says "we're so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live, and we miss out on the things that are most important to us."

"The present moment is so underrated, it sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary." Maybe Andy and Milan should meet up! I'll be there too since, you know, I can't imagine they wouldn't want me there.

I strongly believe mental health matters, and I buy into the concept that if we exercise for our bodies, we should so something for our minds. But is meditation that thing? I've never tried!

The first time I heard of meditation (as something that "normal" people in the Western Hemisphere do) was in high school at a conference for student athletes. Honestly, I was unimpressed with the lady who sat us in a room for 30 minutes and told us we should focus on some random object for 15 minutes a day, just sitting there and doing nothing but thinking of that object. I remember she had a little purple elephant in the room that she forced us to stare at in silence. It's so easy to be unimpressed as a high schooler. If you are speaking as if the world doesn't revolve around me, I'm confused and uninterested. I was thankful to get out of that room.

Years later, I recently heard of the officially-labeled "Mindfulness" movement at work, when a co-worker adamantly recommended this book:

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Have you heard of it? As the cover suggests, it's written by a Google employee. I think mediation has the rep of being done exclusively by Buddhist monks or yoga teachers with dreadlocks. But Chade-Meng Tan is actually one of Google's first engineers, who now focuses on training their (obviously top-notch) employees on using mindfulness techniques at work and in their personal lives. 

What do you think? Is this something you would try? Or have tried? If you have tried, I would appreciate any tips. I added it to my 101 in 1001 list to mediate for 10 minutes a day for a month. I'll report back if I haven't fled to a monastery and/or been hired by Google by the month's end.