Overcoming the Habit of Fear

The more I read on neuroplasticity, the more I realize that everything, anything can become habit.  Confession: fear has become a habit for me. And along with the fear habit comes another habit: the habit of "no",  "no, I don't think so" ... and "oh, I don't know"...   

How did this become a habit? I'm fundamentally a "yes" person, but living in Guatemala involved risks that were new to me. I took to managing those risks with great discipline, living under strictly self-imposed rules: never let your guard down. never walk alone at night or in remote places. limit travel. keep your money close. All good ideas...

The problem was that once that fear habit got going, the thin line between reasonable caution and pessimism blurred. And in a challenging environment, the fear habit nourished other types of fear: of rejection, of failure. All things equal, I began to take fewer chances in general. I became less assertive. I sought fewer novel experiences. I didn't ask for things as much when I felt people would say no.  I didn't speak up as much when it might offend people. Fear and pessimism were good. I obeyed them, and they protected me.

Life here is very different, in a small rural city that has only seen two murders in the past 120 years. Regardless, my fear habit has persisted.  That's not to say that "yes" hasn't been inside me all along: it's just that "No" now speaks in a much louder and more convincing voice. 

I've realized that rather than protecting me, "no" is now just limiting my possibilities. I'm tired of it. I want "yes" to speak up much more. I believe that anything can be habit-forming, including "yes", but it takes time. You have to listen for that negative voice, and the things we're most accustomed to are often most hidden from us. Sometimes it helps a lot to push yourself into new surroundings, even if briefly, where you have to be conscious of yourself.

Maybe that was why I went rock climbing last night, for the first time since college. It was "yes" that got me there, but don't get me wrong: "no" was there, too, gripping me to the wall. 

I wasn't even a fourth of the way up a route and I was struggling. A nice red hand-hold tempted me from three feet away. Fear assured me: you're going to fall. "No" said: Don't try. The dull, familiar weight of pessimism was infuriating, and something sparked. I pushed off and leaped for the hold.

I took a massive fall, but that's entirely besides the point. It was the first time in more than three years that I've screamed "YES", when "no" was pulsing throughout my being. 

I know now that I'll get back on that wall. If I learn to climb it, it will be in series of similar falls and spurts. And when I fall, it will be against the echoes of a resounding "yes!"

I think it's time to make it a habit.

Valentine's Day Hugs

Hugs are awesome.

Sadly, I sometimes go weeks without them here.

Adults in my town tend to reserve hugs for a few special occasions: birthdays, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day. When I get a real hug from an adult, it's amazing. But these are rare occasions.

It's the kids that keep me breathing. I'm always amazed by them. How creative and energetic they are. How willing they are to let go of differences and care about a slightly awkward pants-wearing giantess with glasses, light hair, light skin, and light eyes. Their minds are so open.

I'm thinking of this because on Tuesday we celebrated "Day of Affection and Friendship," the Guatemalan version of Valentine's Day. To the extent that it's celebrated in my town, people might eat a special snack or cake, exchange hand-made cards, or simply exchange hugs. It's a low-key affair.

I happened to fall into a celebration at a school, which required me to teach an impromptu and very short-lived lesson on Valentine's Day English vocabulary, eat double snack, and accept endless hugs from a bunch of adorable kids. Life is hard ;-)

I was mobbed by at least four different groups of students looking for hugs. And two students I had never met before made me a Valentine's Day card, which totally made my day. I doubt I will ever achieve this level of rock-star fame again.

There is a LOT going on right now, as I approach a week left until my official close-of-service date. So much more to do before that date, and before I leave for real later on.

Better to get as many hugs as possible while I still can!

Rekindling a Sense of Wonder

Today we went to the woods with a group of young people interested in tourism, to evaluate a new hike, and see what we would see.

And we were surprised.

None of the young folks had ever seen snow in the forest before, although they live just kilometers away. Up until today, some never thought it was possible.

They were pretty amazed.

Actually I was pretty amazed, too. It was like hail, in perfectly round balls, but covered the ground, emanating cold like a late summer snow-pack in the Cascades. But it wasn't in crunchy sheets begging you to post-hole - more like slippery sand.

So uphill wasn't bad. We slipped and slid up to the summit, where another wow-moment awaited us.

It's possible that more pictures of snow and ice have never been taken in such a short amount of time.

So many times we try to encapsulate in words or pictures or textbooks what simply can't be communicated effectively in such a way. Today was a reminder that we are often impacted most when the world teaches us through our own sense of wonder; even more so when that sense of wonder is shared.

Thanks to the woods for a great day. I'd like to spend every Sunday of my life in the same way.

The Guatemalan Feria

What happens when Guatemalans get together to celebrate their patron saints? Fireworks lit off within 10 meters of their 450-year-old church, that's what happens. (As an aside, when the first shell went off, I nearly hit the ground, certain that some sort of gang warfare had just broken out. The man next to me commented, "Don't worry! It's just fireworks." I might have pointed out that in New York, we rarely light fireworks 30 feet away from a crowd of 400 people. But no need to get into all the complexities of cultural differences in risk perception, or we'll be here all night.)

My reaction to feria last year might be chalked up to cultural differences. The whole thing struck me as crowded, uninteresting, and mildly grungy. The streets were filled with rigged carnival games, marimba bands, "costume dances" where grown men gyrate their hips for hours on end while dressed as Xena Princess Warrior, ladies selling peanuts and bland biscuits in ring shapes. Impromptu cantinas covered in Gallo beer advertisements, food stands selling lots of exotic stuff that scream trouble for the digestive tract, strange drunk men, carnival rides ready to break apart in mid-air and throw their riders to certain death. In case you don't get the idea, space is rented to the vendors in units of 1 square meter. A Guatemalan feria is a US county fair or street festival on steroids.

Now that I've come to know the feria, I could talk about it from the perspective of the town and its significance in local culture, for better or for worse. I could talk about the human need for community and collective ritual and holidays centered around those things. I could... But instead, feria comes to mind this year more from own perspective. This year I realized my need for community; my need for collective ritual; my need for a holiday I could participate in. This year the feria struck me differently.

It might be that this was my first feria living in the center of town, away from my Evangelical host family, my first feria free to experience the Catholic culture here. My first feria since I've made good friends here. My first feria where there were people I was excited to run into on the street and pass time with. My first feria where I had someone to drink a beer with, watch fireworks with, eat cheese-filled tortillas with.

It might be that this was my first feria where rather than being surrounded by strangers, rather than feeling isolated by fright or indignation or indifference, rather than being the unwanted foreigner, I was finally invited to participate among friends.

It might be that this was my first feria where it felt like my town, and not just someplace I was living.

It might be that I was finally home.

Balance

Mom and Dad’s visit went off pretty much without a hitch. I’ve been back to work for about two weeks now, and I’ll be excited to put up a guest post from them soon!

In the meanwhile, I’ve been reflecting a lot about balance. Over the past year, I’ve often felt like I was ricocheting from one thing to the next – work to dinner to binging on the Internet to sleep to work to the bare necessary housework to lunch to the bare necessary social interaction to work to dinner, and so on and so forth. It’s so easy to become addicted to repetitive, meaningless thought and action – and so hard to break those patterns.

Unlike my first six months in Guatemala, having a laptop has made me feel like I have to be “on” 100% of the time. The only problem is that’s just not realistic in terms of mental energy.

So getting home, numbly standing around for 5 minutes thinking "What am I doing?", putting on the computer and vegging out on blogs and Facebook until my boyfriend comes on Skype, feeling guilty about it, and falling asleep the minute we hung up, has become the norm.

Last week, I finally struck more balance than I’ve experienced in at least a year of living here. Part of it was surely Mom and Dad’s visit - almost 10 days of hot showers, clean hotel rooms, parental coddling, being the boss of your own schedule, and no cooking, cleaning, or work, will leave a psyche somewhat rejuvenated. Their trip was something I had been planning for awhile and I was also just psyched that it all turned out so well.

Immediately following that I had a crazy week with a day of food poisoning, a handicrafts workshop, a meeting of the local economic development commission, finishing our SPA proposal for the sign project, and two walks up to the park in two days (about 13 miles and 3000 ft gained and lost - great exercise!)

After the second walk, I’m not sure what it was, but some small voice in my head told me to turn off the nagger inside me and focus on doing something cool, new, break out of the pattern, tackle some of the things on my to-do list that I always brush aside.

So the next day I bought, chopped, and over the next three days subsequently ate a full head of turnip leaves, something I’ve been meaning to do forever. I stayed away from the office (Trap of Distraction and Death to Productivity) for two afternoons and thought about my Masters’ project, something which has been needing attention.

I started adding other little tasks to the day – deleting a few emails every day to break up the big task of cleaning my Gmail box – setting a bedtime regardless of the boyfriend – giving myself 5 minutes for Facebook and my favorite blogs, no more - doing whatever dishes are in the sink nightly, just to have it off my mind.

I'm realizing that changing habits for the better is all about breaking big jobs down into smaller jobs, and then making these smaller jobs daily habits. Chab'aku, poco a poco, little by little, as they say here. The sense of accomplishment becomes this self-reinforcing thing: cool, we've got that one thing pretty under control, now let's take on that other little thing in the back burner.

Rather than being overwhelmed, you begin to strike a balance between wanting to control everything and wanting to control nothing.

Let the apple fest begin

Today I made apple sauce. It was the amazing inauguration of what I am planning to turn into a month-long Applefest celebration. What is Applefest, one might ask? My last two years of college I lived in the Loj - a cozy house with 10 other gals on the main drag in town - where each fall the housemates got together one Saturday around the apple harvest and invited the community to eat an enormous array of dishes involving apples - "Applefest".

There's just something about eating in local season that makes me happy, and for me, the apple is kind of my quintessential local food. Born and raised and educated in New York, I always associated apples, and their various products, with home and fall and friends and well-being and other emotions that seem too complicated to explain in words. Indeed, I would even go far enough to say that my emotional relationship with apples in a sense could be equated to the Guatemalan relationship with corn.

So I honestly found it vaguely disorienting to walk past the plaza one morning and see the vendors with enormous piles of local, blemished, worm-ridden, delicious apples, looking like they were right off the tree in my grandpa's backyard. 3Q/lb. I mean, of course we have apples here. We have potatoes in spades, why not colder-climate fruit, too? There's an apple tree in my friend's yard. I just hadn't realized I'd see this food that reminds so distinctly and emotionally of home in a place that feels so physically and emotionally and culturally distinct from New York - a place where the leaves aren't changing and we shouldn't hold our breath for snow. So it took me a week or two to wrap my head around it and buy some cinnamon, but then I did. Apples? Why yes I will, thank you.

It's amazing how strongly smell evokes memory. Preparing the apple sauce sent me back instantly to apples past: picking apples in our backyard with Mom when I was 3, to make apple crisp - what a revelation that you could eat things that grew outside and didn't come from a supermarket!, cider with friends after a geology field trip, cooking for Apple fest until late at night, window-shopping the bazillions of varieties at the local farmer's market in my college town in Central New York, picking apples with my boyfriend in the rain in Upper Michigan on a friend's farm, making fresh apple sauce for my pop-pop, bringing apple crisp with maple syrup and fresh whipped cream through the snow to a potluck...

The apples I picked up are more cider apples and not really cooking apples, but I'm not going to complain, and I don't think anyone else is either. My host sister even gave some apple sauce to her baby, who is just starting on solid foods, and he loved it. Now the only thing to get is some maple syrup!

On another note, time seems to be flying the past week and when I look ahead I only see appointments, social engagements, pending research, housekeeping and personal to-do lists, and work commitments whizzing past me. This is great. For the moment, being busy keeps me happy, and suddenly I am getting solid ideas of things to do and imagining attempting real work here. And at least I will have some comfort food to accompany me in these next weeks before the apples finish!

Y mañana, un descanso...

Have you ever sat waiting for a pot of water to boil while fire ants danced in your trousers?

That’s about how I feel right now!

Tomorrow I’m heading to the capital for a dentist appointment, and to reunite with a particular loved one, who is coming to visit for two weeks! (I’m a bit more excited about the visitor than the dentist, no offense to my dentist, of course.)

To top it off, today I had a good meeting with the consejo municipal – my first official meeting with them since the introductory one -, my cat is getting fatter every day, and I finished and printed out all of the materials I have to hand in at the Reconnect meeting this upcoming week – including a 6-month work plan, which my counterpart approved of, and which will take me up to Christmas (and probably for years beyond, to be realistic). So things feel wrapped up really well, for the moment; and when I get back from Reconnect and 5 days of vacation it’ll be back to the madness and figuring out what the heck’s going on, except this time in context of actual planned activities! Adelante, friends, adelante.

It sometimes seems like I couldn’t possible deserve such goodness out of life. But I’m thankful for it while it’s around.