This I Believe: Life Lessons (12 page)

The Courage to Change the Things I Can

Mark Olmsted

I believe in picking up trash.

I've always hated litter; in fact, I once walked out in the middle of a date because my companion threw a wrapper on the sidewalk. In my opinion, it's the most preventable and stupid of the world's sins, and it is all the more infuriating because it has no advocates. For example, although I am also against corporal punishment, there are people who would readily argue that it is a useful and necessary form of discipline. No one ever defends littering—even its practitioners.

Yet I am not one to throw stones. For the first several years of this millennium, I was a drug addict who sold crystal meth to support my habit. My buying and selling certainly contributed to a lot of toxic waste created by meth labs. After nine months of prison and a commitment to sobriety, I knew I had to make amends.

After moving to the enclave of Little Armenia in Los Angeles, my first reaction to the trash-filled streets was to say a well-known prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” As I walked my dog every day, I thought the litter was something I just had to accept. After all, what was I supposed to do? Pick it up?

Then one day, I decided to do just that. With a leap of faith, I went down to Home Depot, bought myself an E-Z Reacher, and just like that, I started plucking the empty cigarette packs, soda cans, fast-food packaging, coffee containers, newspapers, Styrofoam cups, and just about anything you can think of into plastic grocery bags. For over five years now, I have filled at least four bags every morning, one for each block of my dog-walking route. Sometimes, I do it again on different streets in the afternoon, especially if I'm having a bad day.

I believe in picking up trash because it's taught me that you can't assume to know the difference between the things you must accept and the things that you can change—you have to think about it. It's taught me to question the premise of all sorts of assumptions I had previously made, from the idea that the only possible reaction to traffic is anger and frustration to the belief that I was a hopeless addict who couldn't possibly get sober.

Every morning, picking up trash is my answer to the questions: How can I be of service today? What do I have the courage to change? And every night, no matter how much the day didn't seem to go my way, I can fall asleep counting the bags of trash I've picked up, comforted that in this lifetime I've been able to find one thing to do that's unarguably, unambiguously good.

To Hear Your Inner Voice

Christine Todd Whitman

If I have learned nothing else during the course of my life, I've learned to listen to my inner voice. Everyone has one. We call it different things: our moral compass, a gut feeling, following our heart. Whatever we name it, we should always pay attention to it. It makes us who we are.

Nine years ago I was in the second year of my second term as governor of New Jersey. I loved that job, and I was working hard to make what would be my last term, due to term limits, as productive as my first.

Toward the end of that term a U.S. Senate seat opened for New Jersey, and I quickly came under intense pressure to throw my hat into the ring. As soon as I said yes, I knew I should have said no.

Deep down, I knew I didn't want to run for the Senate. I could do much more as my state's chief executive than I could in Washington, where I would be just one-one-hundredth of one-half of one-third of the federal government. And the idea of appealing to special interests for the money I would have to raise didn't sit well with me. My inner voice was telling me loud and clear, “Don't do it.” I didn't listen.

In the end, all it took was one trip to Washington, D.C., as a Senate candidate to know that I just couldn't see this through. So I dropped out of the race, returned the money that we had raised, and went back to being governor. My aborted campaign wasn't one of my finer moments. But it reaffirmed my belief in following my inner voice.

A far more personal moment came when my inner voice told me to do something and I didn't listen. It was the night before my brother's third heart surgery, when I visited him in the hospital. After a walk down the hall and a light talk about our children, it was time to leave. As I saw him lying in his hospital bed I had an overwhelming urge to give him a hug and wish him luck. That kind of emotional display was out of character for us, and I thought it might tell him I was worried, so I didn't do it. My brother didn't survive the surgery.

As I look back I know that most of the mistakes I have made have come when I didn't listen to myself, when I didn't trust my instincts.

There is so much coming at us every day that life can get very confusing, but, as I have always told my children, there is only one person with whom you go to bed every night and get up with every morning, and that is you. Sometimes you stop paying attention to yourself. I believe you need to listen, carefully, to hear your inner voice. And then you have to do what it says.

Keep It Real

Rose Eiesland Foster

My philosophy of life sure isn't the same as it was, say, twenty-two years ago. In 1983, I intended to complete college and become a professional of some sort, fully independent of anyone else, fully self-supporting. Not answering to another and being self-sufficient meant I would be a success. Nice clothes, nice car, nice “stuff”—these were things I felt would grant me a successful life.

But genetics and circumstance toiled with me. My body developed cancer twice before I hit forty, nearly killing me. Two of my adult siblings died from a rare kidney disease. I literally bumped into the man who would become my lover, best friend, husband, and father of my two children. Love leveled me into a state of the highest of highs, and, ultimately, the lowest of lows. My heart, unseen by others, was in for a workout. I discovered that loving and loss are always connected. I hate that. I “lost” my lover to mental illness; I “lost” my sister, brother, and mother to physical illness; and I “lost” the youthful appearance of health as my body adjusted to losing a breast. I had a nice car, some nice clothes, and a nice house. But, on the inside, things looked pretty grim.

Burying my forty-year-old husband, I made a vow to myself and to my two amazing children—that I would spend the rest of my life “being real.” Being real means letting my hem show, letting the tears flow, and telling the truth about things. It no longer means anything to me how things look. All that matters to me now is how things are. Being real means telling the truth, no matter how harsh and stark that might be. It means writing down my actual weight, going without makeup for days at a time, letting my arms flap in the breeze. It means telling my dad every single time I see him that I love him. It means saying aloud how much I miss my husband, or my sister, or my brother. And being real means asking for help.

Where did self-sufficiency and smooth skin and nice nails go? I always thought that asking for help meant I was deficient in some way. “If there is anything I can do, please let me know,” many have said to me. But instead of politely declining an invitation to dinner for fear I might start crying in the middle of dessert, I go. If someone wants to know how I am, I tell them. “Today, I thought about my husband eight hundred times and ate two ice cream cones for lunch.” And, then, something happens. The person who asks me how I am says, “Well, me too.” Tears shed during dinner are met with an embrace and a long talk after.

So my philosophy of life now is just three words long: keep things real. And it hasn't let me down yet.

Important Strangers

Leslie Guttman

The bookstore was warm and cozy. It was packed, maybe because people didn't realize the rain had stopped. I was on a lunch break. I got a weird feeling. Someone was looking at me.

I looked up. A woman with long, black hair about five feet away quickly looked back down at the book she was leafing through. I looked down, too. More people came in the door. The gust of air that followed them smelled clean, as if it had been freshly laundered.

I glanced up again at the dark-haired woman in time to see her slip a book into her satchel and walk off. I hesitated and then walked after her.

“Pssst,” I said, pointing at the satchel. Up close, I saw that she was about thirty and probably homeless. Her khaki parka was filthy, her hair matted. The satchel was bursting with her belongings. She gave me a sorrowful look. Then she handed me the book and ran off.

The manager came up, having seen what had happened. The book was a journal designed for someone who was grieving. Someone like me. It was beautifully bound, the paper creamy and heavy. It had space to write the answers to statements like: “I miss the way you . . .” and “It's hard for me to be without you when I . . .”

“She's been wanting that book,” said the manager. “She comes in all the time and looks at it. Sometimes, she puts it on hold, but then she never gets it.”

Dammit! I thought. Why did I have to be such a Goody Two-shoes? When will I learn to mind my own business? Why didn't I just let her steal it?

I ran out of the store. It was raining again. I caught up with her a block away. “Did you just lose someone?” I said.

“My grandmother,” she said. “I used to talk to her every day, and I miss her so much I can't stand it.” I told her about my stepdad, who had just passed away. His kindness had helped knit our family together for eighteen years.

I told her to wait a second. I knew I was now in a Buddhist fable in which nothing is an accident. When I came back and handed her the book, we both stood on the curb and wept.

For the first time since my stepdad died, I felt understood—as only a stranger can understand you, without inadequacy or regret. Up until then, I had felt alone in my grief. I was reluctant to turn to my family because they were grieving, too. The love of friends had not been able to dilute my sorrow.

But because the grieving thief and I didn't know each other, I had no expectations of whether I would be understood in my grief and no fear of being disappointed if I wasn't. Since we wouldn't see each other again, I could be emotional without being embarrassed or scared it would drive someone away.

I believe life, or God, or whatever you want to call it, puts people in our path so that they can help us, or we them—or both. This encounter made me want to stay open to the chance meeting with an important stranger, to the possibility of unplanned symmetry that is luminous and magical.