What a creative way to perform Bach:

Today is Beverly Cleary’s 95th birthday. Her books, especially the Beezus and Ramona series, have been very popular with my daughters over the years.

When I was a kid the Runaway Ralph book was my favorite. The idea of a mouse who rode a motorcycle was compelling to me.

The New York Times posted a profile of her today. I especially like this part:

How does Cleary explain her popularity? “I wrote books to entertain,” she told me. People often asked what she was trying to teach in her books. She would reply, “I’m not trying to teach anything!” This was the same attitude she had when she was first reading. “If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book,” she remembered.

And:

An only child, whose parents were forced to sell the family farm, Cleary was painfully shy. Troubled at school and beset by bad teachers, she didn’t learn to read until the third grade. Though, as she remarked tartly in our conversation, “My mother always read to me, so why should I learn to read?”

What ultimately drove her to write for children, she recalled, was a book she noticed when she had a job in a children’s bookstore in the 1940s. In it, a puppy said: “Bow-wow. I like the green grass.”

“No dog I had ever known could talk like that,” Cleary said. She wondered once again, as she frequently had while working as a children’s librarian, “What was the matter with authors?”

Her conclusion: “I knew I could write a better book.”

I let my youngest daughter take a personal day off from school today, so as to give her have some down time away from both her sisters and the classroom. I’m now going to see about reading some Runaway Ralph to her, in honor of Beverly Cleary.

“Whatever one’s fate may have in store, the task, if we are up to it, is to serve the individuation imperative, to become as nearly like ourselves as we can manage.”

-James Hollis

So what is this “individuation” Jungian psychologists are always yapping about?

I’ll let Hollis explain (from his book Creating a Life):

One of the most profound of Jung’s contributions to the field of psychology is the paradoxical concept of individuation. Even today the term is misunderstood as egotism or self-absorption. Such a path is seldom if ever the path of ego gratification, creature comforts, vacillation and flight. It is the cruciform path of the Self which will seek its own fullest being whether the ego cooperates or not.

Just as Dietrich Bonhoeffer surely prayed for his release from Flensburg K-Z Lager, so he also prayed that in that mad place he might know God’s will for him. He had been brought there because of his opposition to Hitler; it was not God who put him there. But his task, while there, before he was hanged, was to find and serve his fate with as much fidelity as he could manage. That is the model of individuation. It is not the path of solipsism, isolation, self-aggrandizement. It is the path of defeat which may lead to a life well lived.

He put the sin in Wisconsin.

________________________

I realize the “he” in this story is vague, so, for fun, here are some possibilities:

A CEO:

A politician:

A thief:

Or, more likely, a combination of all of the above.

Imagine you could lose weight… have control over your anxiety and depression… prevent dementia and other debilitating side effects of aging… improve your brain power at any age… all without taking meds or making trips to the doctor.

Well, you can, says John J. Ratey, M. D., author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

Yep, you guessed it. Exercise is the best medicine.

If an inexpensive pill came out on the market that could do all that, with no negative side effects, we’d probably be all over it.

But the word “exercise” can tend to make one recoil. It’s work, after all.

I spent most of my adults years thinking exercise was good for cardiovascular health, maybe losing a few pounds or at least preventing future weight gain, replacing fat with muscle, and that’s about it.

As it turns out, those are probably the least of the reasons you should exercise.

The Mind-Body Connection

Dr. Ratey says “exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function.” This is based on hundreds and hundreds of research papers published within the last decade.

He has chapters devoted to how exercise helps with learning, stress, anxiety, depression, ADD, addiction, hormonal changes, and aging. I’ll focus on just three of these in this post.

Anxiety: Nothing To Panic About

A group of cardiologists took psychiatrists to task in a 2004 New England Journal of Medicine article for failing to note that exercise is an additional means of treating anxiety.

These doctors said: “Exercise training has been shown to lead to reductions of more than 50 percent in the the prevalence of the symptoms of anxiety.”

Dr. Ratey says there’s nothing wrong with taking medicine, but if you can achieve the same effects through exercise, you build confidence in your own ability to cope.  ”Teaching the brain that we can survive is crucial to overcoming anxiety.”

Depression: Move Your Mood

A landmark study in 1999 at Duke University found that exercise worked even better than medicine over the long term.

Dr. Ratey says:

Unlike many anti-depressants, exercise doesn’t selectively influence anything – it adjusts the chemistry of the entire brain to restore normal signalling.

It frees up the prefrontal cortex so we can remember the good things and break out of the pessimistic patterns of depression. It also serves as proof that we can take the initiative to change something.

Aging The Wise Way

Getting old is unavoidable, but falling apart is not. Exercise is one of the few ways to counter the process of aging. According to Dr. Ratey:

The major implication is that exercise not only keeps the brain from rotting, but it also reverses the cell deterioration associated with aging.

Here’s how exercise helps keep you going when you’re old:

1. It strengthens the cardiovascular system.

2. It regulates fuel (keeps glucose levels from skyrocketing).

3. It reduces obesity.

4. It elevates your stress threshold (i.e. combats the effects of too much cortisol, which brings on depression and dementia).

5. It lifts your mood.

6. It boosts the immune system.

7. It fortifies your bones. Did you know more women die every year from hip fractures than from breast cancer? Eek.

8. It boosts motivation by increasing dopamine, which in turn guards against Parkinson’s.

9. It fosters neuroplasticity, which improves your brain’s ability to learn, remember and execute higher thought processes.

Mental exercise is just as important for the elderly. Dr. Ratey mentions an ongoing study of several hundred nuns over the years in Mankato, MN. These nuns challenge their minds constantly with mental puzzles, public debates about issues, keep teaching long past retirement age, etc. Many of them live to be one hundred or more. They all donate their brains to science after they die. Here’s what Dr. Ratey says about one of the nuns:

The interesting thing about Sister Bernadette is that she scored in the 90th percentile on cognitive tests right up until she died, but when her brain was examined postmortem, it showed massive damage from Alzheimer’s disease… In other words, she should have been utterly lost to the ravages of dementia. Yet despite the damage in her brain, she remained mentally sharp.

So what types of exercises are the best medicine according to all these studies? I’ll write a post about that soon. In the meantime, feel free to read the whole book and find out.

Below is a video of a 57-year-old woman who talks about how wonderful it is to have gray hair.

First here’s a photo:

Her advice to anyone wondering if they should rock their gray hair or keep coloring it:

“Do it. You can always color it but do it. I’ve had the best time of my life with silver hair.”

Here’s the video:

(H/T Advanced Style)

When my daughters talk to me about their teachers, they rarely talk about the subject matter but about something funny the teacher said, how the teacher made them feel, and the stories the teacher tells about his or her personal life.

I thought of this while reading how Carl Jung, while giving talks to educators, would tell them that teachers don’t teach their subject. They teach themselves.

I can’t recall a thing I learned in fifth grade, but I will never forget how my teacher made me feel at ease about being an introvert, as she was an introvert herself and never ragged on me about being quiet during class discussions, unlike the other teachers I had up until that point.

I also can’t remember anything I learned in my 8th grade math class but I will never forget how the teacher told us the story of the childhood wounding she received that made her decide to forever avoid men and become a lesbian.

I will always remember how to read music and play the violin, even though I’ve barely touched it in 25 years, thanks to the orchestra teacher I had for 7 years. I stuck with the violin that long, not because I was any good at it, but because I liked the teacher and his stories. He freely gossiped with us (I loved that), worried about us like we were his own children, and invited us into his home once a year for a spaghetti dinner that he prepared and served himself.

One day I entered my high school psychology class and noticed a Moonie there preparing to give us a talk. My best friend and I turned on our heels and marched directly to the office to tattle, as we intuited this was probably against school rules. Yep, it was, and she was reprimanded. We were quiet kids who usually didn’t assert ourselves like that and my boldness took me by surprise. The next time we had class the teacher came up to me and gave me the most sincere apology I’ve ever received. I had a great rapport with her the rest of the semester with no ill feelings. I can’t recall her name, or anything I learned in that class, but I’ll never forget what she taught me through her apology.

I still retain a smattering of French, and that is thanks to my high school French teacher, a reserved man with high expectations, but who also had a dry sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye that communicated more than his words did. I knew he liked me even though he never said as much, and even though I was far from proficient in French. I won’t forget how he showed up at my high school graduation and told me it was the first graduation he had attended. His watery eyes and quick hug said more than his words could ever say. I was deeply touched. The way he made me feel, and what he taught me about himself, is probably the reason I took far too many French classes in college.

My favorite high school English teacher taught me much about herself, including how a devastatingly dry wit can put teenage boys with huge egos in their place. She could even find something witty to say about Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was required reading in our textbook. I loved what she taught me about herself and I suspect that had a significant role in my choosing English as a major. Fortunately I had the opportunity to tell her that when I ran into her in a store several years ago. She died on Christmas Eve 2009 .

So it would seem the ability to be vulnerable and authentic is something the best teachers excel at and probably matters a lot more to our kids than the teacher’s credentials and it sure beats being lectured at. They also probably wouldn’t mind if all of us adults were more like that.

As I indicated before, I’ve been afraid of running since I was a child, so five weeks ago I started using the 9 week Couch to 5K plan to see if I could finally run 12 minutes without stopping, something I was unable to do as a child.

Today was the day in the program where you run one 20 minute interval without stopping.

This was a big jump from Wednesday, when it was two 8 minute intervals with a 5 minute walking break in between. That wasn’t an easy time and the above toon is an accurate reflection of what it was like.

So since Wednesday I was dreading today, fearing I wouldn’t even make it the 12 minutes, let alone 20. I slept poorly last night and had a stressful dream about going to the gym this morning and forgetting to use the treadmill. Ha.

I went to the Milwaukee art museum with my oldest daughter yesterday and I became a bit winded after climbing the stairs to the third floor, so I said to myself, “Dammit, I can’t even climb three flights of stairs without getting winded, how the hell am I going to run 20 minutes tomorrow?”

I internally yelled at myself some more this morning: “What am I doing setting running deadlines for myself when I have enough deadlines in my life? If I couldn’t run 12 minutes as a child when it’s logical I should have had the energy to do it then, then why do I think I can do it now all these years later?” As you can see, I was still in the throes of my running complex, even as I stepped on the treadmill this morning.

I had planned to listen to part of a Janelle Monae song, three U2 songs and Madonna’s Celebration song (I figured if I was still running by that point I deserved to listen to a song with the word celebration in it) and guessed that those would add up to roughly 20 minutes. I didn’t dare look at the clock on the treadmill. I fussed with the TV occasionally for a diversion, switching back and forth from Today Show and Good Morning America.

What happened was nothing short of astonishing to me. The 3 U2 songs rolled by effortlessly and I felt no strain. I thought to myself, “Wow, now I finally see what they mean when they call running ‘moving meditation.’”

During the Celebration song I worried slightly that maybe these songs were falling short of the 20 minutes, but at the end of the song there was only 10 seconds left of the 20 minutes. After I hit the 20 minute mark I had the overwhelming urge to cry with happiness.

Coincidentally, earlier in my run Good Morning America had a segment on crying at work, and they concluded it was OK to cry at work but I wasn’t so sure it would be OK to cry at the gym. Ironically they also said by the time women reach their 40s they are pretty good at regulating emotions. Hahaha

I couldn’t completely suppress my tears so I went and sat in a corner on the BOSU ball where no one could see me, hid my face in my arms, and let myself cry for a while, but not as much as I wanted to. I wasn’t at all expecting I’d react that way, as I always reserve these types of tears for the achievements of my children and other people I know, and even strangers, when I read/hear their stories, but I can’t remember the last time I cried because of something I achieved.

I know, I know. Who gives a crap that I ran for 20 minutes, it doesn’t solve any world problems, people a lot older than me can run for so much longer than that, yadda yadda.

But here’s the thing: ultimately this had nothing to do with running, it had everything to do with deconstructing a fear and then overcoming it. Now that I’ve succeeded in doing this with one fear maybe I’ll be able to do it with others. And, more importantly, you can too.