WAIT

Wait just a second.

Wait a minute.

Wait for it…

Are you feeling antsy yet?  Do you want to shout, “Just get to the story lady, I’ve got better things to do than wait for you to get to the point!”  But what would you say if I told you that waiting is the point?

I know, I know.  Nobody likes to wait.  In fact, most of us actively hate it.  Especially in today’s instant world.  Need information? Google it!  Hungry? Nuke it! Bored? Netflix it!  In fact, we can get just about everything we want with a few clicks of a mouse.  At least that’s what Madison Avenue would have us believe.  We are bombarded by advertisements on TV, in magazines and online touting how simple, how easy, how quick their products will make our lives.  And I suppose it can be true on a surface level… I mean, I love EasyMac as much as the next person.  But lately I’ve found myself becoming frustrated at the realization that the stuff that really matters is very rarely simple, quick, or easy. 

There is no Google for real life.

And so, we spend our lives in a state of growing irritation about all the things we are forced to wait on – for studio notes, a much needed paycheck, the insurance settlement, test results.  We wonder how long do I have to wait until the project gets the Green Light, or the pregnancy test shows a plus sign, how much longer until I find my soul mate or at least someone who will watch Modern Family with me and not judge me for my four leaf clover pajama pants?

This week I have been noticing how many times a day I utter the phrase, “I can’t wait until…”  As in, “I can’t wait until I have time for a vacation.”  “I can’t wait until I have a bigger house.”  “I can’t wait until someone buys my pitch and makes my movie so I can win a bunch of major awards.”  My most ridiculous “can’t wait” moment came while I was watching Oprah’s Master Class series on OWN this Sunday and actually said, “I can’t wait until I’m as wise as Maya Angelou so I can tour the world giving lectures and reading my poetry.”  Ridiculous, because I’m pretty sure no matter how long I wait, I’m never gonna be Maya Angelou.

The real problem with saying I can’t wait is that in reality, I have to.  Because most of life is in the waiting and so, in a way, how we wait determines how we live.  If we are impatient and antsy, always focusing on what we are waiting for more than on what we already have, we will never be satisfied.  How quickly we forget the thing we waited for and wanted for so long and then got!  There’s always something more to want.  And so waiting feels like a punishment, which is why we end up running from it, instead of relaxing into it.  But if we could relax we would discover why patience is such a virtue.

Waiting gives us time to reflect on our lives.  And it is only in the waiting that we really learn the lessons of what all of the doing means…

When I found myself divorced at 30, on my own for the first time in my life, and embarking on what I hoped would be a successful career in screenwriting, I was paralyzed with worry when I sent out my first spec script.  I hoped it would not only help me support myself, but that if it sold, I would be so busy I wouldn’t have time to think about my broken heart. But the studio execs who had the script to read weren’t working on my timetable, and so I found myself forced into a holding pattern for feedback.  I sat by the phone plagued with visions of what my life would be depending on whether they loved it or hated it – my whole future seemingly hanging in the balance.  I felt more alone than I ever had, and the isolation just seemed to be amplified by the wait.

Finally, when I couldn’t take the silence in my studio apartment for one second longer, I decided to get out and go for a hike.  I took a path I had never tried before and as I walked, I began to feel the icy fingers of panic grip me.  I had to take a break and wait for the waves of fear and loneliness to subside as the question consumed me – when would I ever find love?  Too worn out to move, I sat and waited for the anxiety attack to pass.  It was then that I finally noticed the world around me -- the tall weeds and busy bees, the sun peeking through the clouds. 

And that’s when I saw The Tree. 

It was standing in front of me with two thick branches spread wide like open arms stretched out for a hug.  I felt myself drawn to the welcoming embrace and so stepped forward, closer to the tree, and was stunned by what I saw: carved into a heart in the bark were my initials.  No other names or letters…just a simple KH in the center of the tree.  Well, you can bet that I stood there and wept as I let the answer to my question wash over me…I didn’t have to find love, I only had to look and see that love was all around me.  I didn’t need the approval of some executive to tell me I was worthy or that I mattered.  I like to call moments like that God Winks.  They are subtle but powerful, and oh so easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. It took a forced waiting period to get my attention and show me that like Dorothy’s slippers, I already had the love and acceptance I was desperately searching for…they were with me all along. 

I try to remember that tree, that moment of unexpected grace, whenever I am frustrated by not getting what I want when I want it.  I’ve even come up with a little acronym to drive home the point when I forget:  When we WAIT, We Are Imparted Truth.  I know, how very Gary Busey of me – but it’s true.  Which is why now I can’t wait for the opportunity to wait…

Who's That Girl

I can remember the exact day it began. The day I learned that by changing my hair, I could look like other people…famous people. And since everyone loves famous people, I reasoned, everyone will love me too.  I was five and about to be the flower girl for my cousin Jill’s wedding. In preparation for the big day, my mom rolled my hair up in pink spongy curlers the night before and promised me that if I slept in them, I would awaken more beautiful than ever.   So I endured the plastic jabs in my scalp as I tossed and turned all night until the blessed morning came and I sprang from my bed the next morning, ecstatic to see just how glamorous I was going to look.  Carefully, my mother and my nana pulled the curlers from my hair, giggling at how adorable I was, until finally, they turned me towards the mirror – and I burst into tears.  My hair had shrunk!  How did that happen?  It used to be a straight curtain past my shoulders and now it was collected in bunches of springy curls nearly up to my ears. 

I was inconsolable – until my sweet Uncle Mickey knelt down and told me with a wink that I looked exactly like Shirley Temple.  Me?  Look like a movie star?  Like the girl who sang and danced on TV?  The girl everyone loved?  Trepadatiously glancing in the mirror one last time, I saw it -- I did look like her!  I beamed.  And when wedding guest after wedding guest gushed over my hair for the rest of the day and into the night, I was soon hooked. 

As I grew older, the celebrity inspirations changed, but the quest to have their hairstyles, and the attention it could garner, did not.  At seven, after having seen GREASE and the rousing reception Sandy received from her perm, I happily braved the noxious fumes myself as my Aunt Bev gave me a home perm in her kitchen sink. I continued to get my limp locks permed into crunchy curls for the better part of a decade as an obsession with the Material Girl took over.  The hard green and blue curlers and small squares of paper were actually more constant companions than my friends in those years as my family moved around between four states. 

In middle school, as my eyebrows filled in, people called me Brooke Shields.  And then in High School, when I began using Sun-In to highlight my dishwater brown hair with golden streaks, I had more than one boy tell me I looked like Kathy Ireland, asking cheekily if I could fill out a bikini like she could (sure, with enough padding I could.)  In college I worked at a hair salon to help pay for tuition, but also because of the glorious discount.  I became a hair model, walking the runway for Vidal Sassoon, rocking an oh-so-hip Claire Danes bob. 

After that I got a little cocky and took the follicular misstep of trying to cut my hair to look like Audrey Hepburn’s famous coif from ROMAN HOLIDAY.  Sadly, I looked nothing like my dark haired idol, and spent many nights willing my locks to grow.  Turns out eating vats of jello and shampooing with Mane ‘n Tail does not help, no matter what Seventeen magazine says.  The only thing that did work was time, and after enough of it passed, I was elated when a classmate in chem lab remarked that I must be Michelle Pfeiffer’s doppelganger.  I liked the comparison (who wouldn’t) and even began to sharply pluck my eyebrows to complete her look.  

As my hair grew longer and longer and I began to aggressively highlight it so by the time I graduated and moved to Los Angeles, I was actually stopped on a corner in Beverly Hills by a homeless man who pulled his overstuffed shopping cart beside me at a crosswalk and said emphatically, “You look exactly like that actress, that Reese Witherspoon.”  I took it as a sign and enrolled in acting class where one of our first exercises was to come up with a “logline” for each other, a description to help an agent sell us to casting agents.  My classmates dubbed me “The love child of Mena Suvari and Denise Richards.”  Inexplicably unhappy with that comparison, I immediately found a famous salon, Juan Juan in Beverly Hills, saved up my money, and had a very talented (read: expensive) colorist give me strawberry blonde hair.  The woman in the chair next to me immediately proclaimed me to be the spitting image of Nicole Kidman. 

I’ve had Meg Ryan’s shag, Farrah’s wings, and Gwyneth’s matching Brad Pitt boy cut – however somehow I never got around to getting “A Rachel”.  It was exhilarating to transform my entire image, and therefore what others thought of me, with just a trip to a salon.  But over time, the work and expense to keep it all up took its toll.  So when I traded in acting for my deeper dream of writing, and stepped out of the limelight, I decided it was time to go back to my natural color -- whatever that was. 

I allowed my roots to grow out, astonished to see grey hairs mixed with the light brown that I remembered from my pre-teen years.  I found a colorist and asked her to match the color as best she could from my roots to the ends, saying goodbye to my golden locks that had inspired the moniker “Golden Holden” that my reps delighted in calling me.  And as the stylist turned me towards the mirror, just as my mother and grandmother had all those years ago – I cried.  I didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror.  She didn’t look like anyone I’d seen on TV or in the movies; she didn’t look like a celebrity at all.  My husband couldn’t understand my despair – how could he?  What man has ever spent countless hours and unfathomable amounts of money to look like someone else?  How could I explain that without the borrowed identity of the stars, I felt like I no longer had any identity at all? 

That night, when he caught me searching myself in the mirror for the umpteenth time, my husband smiled tenderly and said, “You’re beautiful.”  I looked at my reflection and lamented out loud, “But I don’t look like anybody!”  He laughed and said, “Of course you do, you look like you.”  I look like me?  I took another look, and just like that, I could see it.  Moreover, I could see me.  I looked like me!  Not Madonna or Elle Woods or even Golden Holden, but Kara.  I finally recognized the girl in the reflection, not as a wannabe starlet, but as a long lost friend.  She smiled back at me and I could feel the years of comparing and curling and dying and trying just melt away like mousse under a faucet. Emboldened I took one more step towards follicular independence – I got a pixie cut.  And with the weight of the hair gone, the weight of expectations disappeared too and I began to feel, well, free.  Free to just be me.  And it feels pretty darn good (especially on a hot day when I can feel the breeze on my neck!) 

Want Is a Four Letter Word

Perhaps it is the Perfect Storm like convergence of life events in the last month (moving into a new home, major script deadlines, New Year’s, and my 40^th Birthday – whew!) but I have begun to notice a particular phrase popping up in my vocabulary with alarming frequency.  “I want.”  As in: I want more flowers in the garden, I want to finish my novel this year, I want to find the perfect media cabinet, I want to go on a vacation, I want to sell a spec, I want to get a movie made, I want to win an award for said movie, I want to win a lot of awards, I want to write more poetry, I want to read more poetry, I want to eat healthier and exercise more, I want to dye my hair back blonde, I want to add to my family, I want to find some place to volunteer, I want to make the most of every day, but I don’t want to have to work too hard, I want to look great, I want to feel great, I want to be great!    

Do you see what I mean?  None of those desires is necessarily a bad thing on it’s own, but lately I am beginning to believe that wants are like Gremlins – they tend to multiply until they have completely taken over your life.  And the more you feed them, the harder they are to kill.   Which is why all of this “wanting” is getting exhausting.  It has me focused on the wrong things – making me fixate on what I don’t have instead of allowing me to enjoy what I do. 

As a lover of words, I will admit that I have an etymology page bookmarked on my computer for easy access.  And so I looked up the origins of the word “want” and what I discovered chilled me to the core.  It comes from an Old Norse word vant, which means “to be deficient” or “to be lacking”.  The Old English word wanian evolved from there and it means, “to diminish”.  After discovering the origins of the word, it makes so much sense why all of the wanting I have been doing has taken a toll on me.  It automatically puts me in a negative frame of mind!

Wanting diminishes the amazing things and people in our lives already all around us.  It diminishes our very selves by making us feel that we must search outside of ourselves for happiness and fulfillment.  When we focus our attention on all the things we want, it puts us in a state of lack and skews our perspective.  Suddenly we find ourselves on a metaphysical hamster wheel, running to fill our perceived “deficiencies” only to discover a new want right behind the old one… and so we just keep spinning.

With that in mind, I decided that in this New Year: I want to stop wanting.  I am going to start by just a simple shift in the words I speak.  I will treat “want” like a four letter word and do my best to cut it out of my lexicon.  Instead of saying, “I want to finish my novel this year” I am going to say, “I will finish my novel this year.”  In exchange for declaring, “I want to sell a new spec this year” I intend to declare the more positive version, “I hope to sell a new spec this year.” 

Interestingly enough, the word “hope” derives from Old English word hopian which means to "wish, expect, look forward (to something).”  See how much better it feels to come from a place of looking forward to something, rather than feeling like you’re not enough and that you’ll never have enough?  Some scholars even make the connection to the verb hop suggesting that hope originally meant, “leaping in expectation.”  Don’t you love that?  It implies movement, a positive action towards something.  So out with the passive wanting and in with the hopeful leaping for me!

I wrote a poem a few years ago about this very point…obviously it is something I have struggled with for sometime. It is an ongoing battle, but a worthy one, and so I keep up the good fight. Reading this is always a good reminder of the ideal, and I hope it inspires you similarly.

invocation

take my many wants

balled tightly in my fist

pry each finger loose

and shake them out

like cold ashes

leave me empty-handed

that I might grasp

what is true

I hope that when I find myself “in want” of something, I will more and more take the time to really ask myself if it is true that I am lacking, or am I just letting something unimpor

Snakes, Dementors and Planes...Oh my!

I have a Raiders of the Lost Ark poster in my office, directly across from my desk -- there's Indy, holding his whip over one shoulder, his dreamy eyes looking out from under the brim of his fedora, daring adventure to have its best crack at him, damning danger with his steadfast resolve. There is no doubt: Indiana Jones is a bad ass. And he's a hero. But that's not why I love him. 



I love him because he's afraid of snakes.



Dr. Jones teaches me that being afraid doesn't disqualify me from being the hero of my own life.  Some people see fear as a weakness – but what great hero doesn’t have some weakness to overcome?  Superman has Kryptonite to contend with, Mikey from the Goonies has asthma; Harry Potter was raised as a muggle and has impossibly high expectations to face…not to mention that unsightly scar.  In movies, as in life, we are not inspired by the person who has never had to struggle; we are moved by those who have prevailed against all odds.  By those who, like Katniss, do not wilt when the odds are not ever in their favor.   Because, as all of our favorite movie characters know, we only get to experience the triumph of overcoming if there is an obstacle in our way. 

I quite often think I would like to live my life along the path of least resistance, but then I think about my life as a movie, and how utterly boring a movie with no obstacles would be.  Imagine if Andy Dufresne had been let out of jail after only one day, or if the Joker was an only slightly annoying birthday party clown at Bruce Wayne’s party, or if Ferris had been allowed to take the day off.  Snooze-fest!  And if I wouldn’t want to shell out fifteen bucks to watch someone mosey down easy street, why would I want to shell out 80 odd years living on it?  Screenwriting 101 says a movie must have “stakes” because conflict is the only thing that will propel the story forward.  And I believe the same is true for life – we only move forward when we are challenged, and we can only truly succeed when failure is a possible outcome.



And sometimes, as Indiana Jones shows us, we may find that the very thing we fear may be the key to our success.  After all, if it had not been for all of those pesky snakes, he and Marion would never have discovered they could break through the wall of the tomb and escape.  Those snakes showed them the way out…and it is very possible that if we look at our weaknesses, and ask ourselves what we can learn from them, we can turn them into strengths, breaking through the walls of the proverbial tombs in which we find ourselves trapped.

I have found myself caught up in the dark caves of fear and doubt many times in my life – whether it be my constant struggle with a fear of flying, or the more prevalent what-will-everyone-think-phobia.  But as a screenwriter I know that at a certain point in every story the hero must go into a dark place to confront fear face to face in order to emerge victorious. Frodo had to climb Mount Doom, Dorothy went into the Wicked Witch’s castle, Wesley and Buttercup had to make their way through the Fire Swamp filled with Rodents of Unusual Size, and the Goonies had to descend into the tunnel under the fireplace before they could discover One Eyed Willie’s rich stuff. 



That is what movies teach us – that there will be dark and scary woods to travel through in every life – but if we do not turn back, we will discover that the treasure is waiting for us on the other side.

The greatest power that fear has is to make us believe it can somehow keep us from becoming the heroes we were all meant to be. But when we remember it's okay for heroes to be afraid, not just okay, but a requirement really -- it takes all the air out of terror’s tires. Fear becomes a rusty old car on blocks -- it may have an engine, but it's not going to go anywhere. As Gary Busey might put it, fear is just an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real. And trust me, I know; it can appear very real at times. And sometimes, like Harry Potter, we have to fight from letting it take us over body and soul (just a reminder, chocolate can be a great remedy when fighting the Dementors). But mostly, if we just keep moving forward, whether it be by leaps over tall buildings, by whip, or by Nimbus, before we know it, the things that scared us the most will just be old pieces of junk off in the distance, markers of how far we've come. 

 


So, tell me: who is your favorite movie hero and what is his or her weakness?  How has it inspired you accept your own weaknesses and overcome your own fears?

This poem makes my heart smile:)

Line & Landscape: Time Machine:

Jan 7, 2014

Time Machine

for Kara

lately, there's been talk at my house
of building a time machine:
my son has his theories
and though skeptical still
I'm starting to believe

when it's finished, I'll give you a call–
there will be no heady talk
of unfinished symphonies, books:
dreams freed like butterflies
through nets softened by years

rather, I'll extend a simple invitation
to walk once again past the peacocks and zebras
of Croftboro Farms
miles down the winding, whispering
tree-canopied Camden Lane

we'll enter that old Walmart plaza
light with childhood laughter
content, my sister
with nothing more
than a cold coke on a hot summer day.