Quietly Revolutionary Ideas

Ten ways to help you feel alive this holiday season (and after)

There is a lot of discussion these days in regards to being present. I love and appreciate the practice of mindfulness, from Alan Watts to Ram Das to Jon Kabat Zinn, but it’s become an overused phrase and I often find myself numb to the language surrounding it. Yet I still seek to find presence. I’m no champion meditator, but often I find that employing an unorthodox action jolts me into a place of presence. The holidays are a time of so many events, activities, duties, to-do’s that we can lose our sense of the now. Below I have included a few practices that have worked for me.

1. Kiss the palm of a person you love.

There is a big difference between kissing the top of your loved one’s hand (feels a bit courtly) and kissing their palm. When each of my daughters were born, I relished in studying and kissing their wrinkled little palms and feet. There is an unprotected vulnerability to an open palm. It is offered only to those you are closest to. In November I was gifted the privilege of being bedside with my dying mother. I kissed her palm and knew, even in her semi-conscious state, that she received my gesture of devotion. It’s hard not to feel alive when your lips are pressed to the palm of your beloved.

2. Write a letter. With a pen.

I can get really emotional about snail mail. There is the excitement of receiving it in the mail, the tactile nature of the handwriting, the stamp choice, the type of envelope. Writing a letter to someone, in an age of easily shot off texts, DMs, and email means that you made an effort to think of someone and shared this most intimate aspect of self with them — your handwriting. I also love a typewritten letter (my most accomplished writer friends use typewriters still) which is slightly less intimate but heroic and charming in its own right. Letter writing is a dying art and I would argue a pathway to presence. Write a letter to your child and slip it in their lunchbox. Jot a note on a postcard to your oldest friend from school. I once penned a letter to an old boyfriend on an airplane barf bag. The more original the better, and there isn’t a way to fail. The mere act of sending a letter is a winning gesture and a step toward mindfulness.

3. Go for a night without electricity. Everything by candlelight.

I have an acutely nostalgic memory of the “Storm of ‘82” which produced in Santa Cruz a massive amount of water damage, mudslides, and redwood logs floating in the Pacific Ocean down at the end of our block. I was seven and the drama and excitement of the storm was made memorable by there being no electricity for several days. We huddled around our fireplace by candlelight and ate dinners with friends in a neighbor’s garage who had a big Coleman camping stove. I remember we ate beans and franks from little blue metal camping mugs. I could not have been any more enchanted with the whole experience, disaster aside. There was community and an aliveness I didn’t feel in my daily life with electricity. There is a romance to being set free of electricity. We forget that it’s a choice — we don’t have to use it. Once in a while, I do this when I’m by myself. Especially in the mornings with a cup of coffee, a New Yorker magazine, and my cat. It’s hard to explain the difference but I liken it to one of those local cherry tomatoes in August that vibrates on a different frequency than one shipped from Chile on an airplane. Sans electricity we are one step closer to the life force of mother nature.

4. Ceremonially burn something in the fireplace.

As long as we’re on the topic of fire, lets discuss the pleasure in burning things. We’ve all seen little kids sit mesmerized by the shapes created by flames in a fire. It’s harder to do when you’re an adult and you’re laden with a brain full of responsibilities. But I have found that burning something I don’t care about, or that I want out of my life, is a meaningful symbolic gesture that makes me feel alive. We’ve all seen the jilted lover in movies sit at the fireplace burning photos of their ex. But how about burning an old to do list you have conquered? A bill from something already paid? Receipts. Fruitless lottery tickets. The paper you got a C on. Whatever gives you pleasure to burn, toss it in the fireplace. I swear it makes me feel something as the paper turns to smoke in front of my eyes.

5. Adopt a talisman.

Aside from a wedding ring, I haven’t really had a talisman until recently. When I say talisman, I speak of some artifact (a string bracelet, an amulet, a vial of your grandpa’s beloved cologne) that is worn or carried on your body in memory of something or someone. I was recently given a beautiful wooden Japanese netsuke, a miniature sculpture originally meant to be a button fastener on the cords of an ino box, but now enjoyed mostly as small, intricate antique works of art. Usually my netsuke lives in my bedside jewelry dish. On occasion, however, I slip it into the pocket of a loose pair of trousers. Waiting in line at the pharmacy grocery store, or at a cocktail party, I reach for it in my pocket. My hands now know it differently than when it sat inertly in a dish at my bedside . Now two senses (eyes and hands) know my netsuke. That feels like a kind of presence. In the 1970s my father used to carry in his suit pocket a little grey stone he’d found on the beach in Bolinas years before I was born. It clanged around in there with his loose change and money clip. I will never know what that stone meant, but I was enthralled by the power of that little stone. I now connect in my mind my father’s stone and my netsuke in a lineage of talismans.

6. Shock the system.

It’s healthy to shock the system every now and then. Contrast is an education. There are the cold plunge devotees, the lemon water with cayenne people in the morning. If you live by the ocean, an icy morning swim can be a piquant start to the day. Personally, I like to walk somewhere odd and immersive as a tool for presence. When I lived in San Francisco near Polk Street, my daily commute on foot was up and over Nob Hill to get to my office in Jackson Square. One day I decided to walk through the Broadway Tunnel, which is only designed for speeding cars, save for an abridged 2-foot sidewalk meant only for maintenance crews and paramedics. The tunnel is lined in pale yellow tiles with horrible fluorescent lights. The echo caused by the cars inside was absolutely deafening. Not to mention the exhaust fumes that smelled and tasted like wrapping your lips around a Datsun’s tail pipe. It was a kind of hellscape, to be sure. But a relatively safe one to partake in, that lasted only about 10 minutes of walking. And once I could exit on the other side, I remember truly savoring the contrast of the soft city hum, the freshness of the air, and breakfast scents emanating from Chinatown bakeries. Aside from childbirth, I may have never felt as alive as after walking through the Broadway Tunnel.

7. Bathe instead of shower.

Showers can be enlivening and restorative. But for me, showers are not as prone to inducing mindfulness as a proper bath. One is literally submerged in water in a tub. If you want to, you can dunk your head beneath the surface and really feel in an altered state (i.e. “out of your head” and alive.) Aside from thinking or singing, there is not a lot of multitasking that a tub soak accommodates. If I make time for a bath, I know I have made one more step toward a commitment to being present — I handle the soap in my hand differently, shave differently — I look around the room envisioning a remodel. A tub is like a tea ceremony with oneself. It can be designed with therapeutic tools (epsom salts), escapist accoutrement (a dry martini, a Raymond Chandler audiobook) or just in silence with your own tub-scape of bubbles.

8. Sit in bed with a fat Sunday New York Times. Savor the rustling sound.

There is no more romantic notion to me than a tousled bed covered in a splayed Sunday New York Times. It bespeaks a lazy day, and one of ideas. The sound that a newspaper emits, when it’s being rustled as you flip pages, is one of the loveliest kinds of music I know. If I notice that sound, I know I am present.

9. Lower your voice to a faint whisper.

As a culture, we have become very loud. We are brash and showy and self-promoting. We are becoming all the things I try to teach my daughters not to be in the world. A few times in my life I have met extraordinary people who do not raise their voice above a whisper. It is remarkable. I especially loved an older gentleman at my shabby country club in Santa Cruz, who used to employ next-level cussing court-side at a tennis match, but said it all in such a faint, hoarse whisper you had to be in kissing proximity to him to hear it. There is power in a whisper. People actually hear you better — they lean in — there is an attentiveness to listening to a whisperer that I find sexy. On a more nurturing note, I love reading children’s books at bedtime in a whisper — giving characters a conspiratorial voice. Whispering is unusual and can trigger a kind of presence in both the speaker and the recipient of the whisper.

10. Poach an artichoke to perfection. As you dip it in melted butter and bring the petals to your lips, fathom that you are actually eating a flower.

Poetic acts with food are a path toward presence. Try slowly pouring aged balsamic slowly over your vanilla ice cream. Or tearing the washed leaves of a lettuce head rather than chopping them up with your nifty knife. Nothing quite compares to the ritual of a steamed artichoke, however. Each petal in your hand, dripping butter — it’s about as sensual as it gets. And then there is the reward of getting to the artichoke heart, which you have worked toward methodically and earned. You might slice it into tiny bites to make it last as long as your glass of Sauvignon blanc. Eating like this is a form of prayer. Or akin to sex. Or maybe both.

In summary, I wish you well this holiday. If you find yourself in tizzy, just know that presence is only one unorthodox gesture away. Long live the quiet revolution of presence.

I am so glad you are here. Thank you for reading. xo

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