D i e n u

Randy and I are separating.

It was my idea.

I don’t really want to talk about it right now.

But I guess when you put your life out there, you have to be as willing to acknowledge the bad as you do the good.

So yeah.

I know there’s a color and a ribbon for pretty much every disease out there. And they are all important.

But the red dress symbol is especially personal to me.

Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the United States. Probably because the symptoms we usually associate with a heart attack are true for men, but not so much for women.

My mom died of a heart attack nine years ago. She was only 46. If she had known more about the symptoms, if she’d gotten better treatment, if we’d known how to respond, she might still be alive today.

Tomorrow, Friday February 6th, 2009 is National Wear Red Day. I’ll be wearing red in memory of my mom. And I’ll tell anyone who asks about what to watch out for and how they can help.

Will you do the same?

It’s too late for my mom, but it doesn’t have to be too late for the women in your life.

For more information about the the impact of heart disease on women and to estimate your own risk, visit the American Heart Association’s website at GoRedforWomen.com.

And in case anybody asks, here is some information about women and heart disease.

Six Risk Factors for Women
- High Cholesterol
- High Blood Pressure
- Smoking
- Sedentary Habits
- Obesity
- Diabetes

Of course, there are other risk factors like heredity and age, but the six risk factors above play a big role. And the important thing about them is that you have the power to affect them.

Symptoms of a Heart Attack

- Chest pain:

The most common symptom for men and women. it usually happens right in the center of the chest, lasts for more than a few minutes, and comes and goes. it can feel like uncomfortable tightness, pressure, squeezing or pain.

While chest pain is the most common symptoms, women are far more likely than men to experience other symptoms that you might not associate with a heart attack.

- Discomfort in other areas of the upper body (one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach)

- Shortness of breath, with or without chest pain

- Cold sweats, nausea or lightheadedness.

The afternoon before my mom had the heart attack that killed her, she thought she was getting the flu. 18 hours later she was dead. Had she known that her nausea and lightheadedness were symptoms of a heart attack, she could have gotten help. But she didn’t.

Now you do.

I’ve been watching the Olympics all weekend and I’m surprised to find that it’s stirred up some objections I didn’t even know I had.

Now, I would never call myself an isolationist, or a nationalist, or even particularly patriotic. I spend more time bitching about the things I don’t like about this country than I do talking about what makes it great. (Which, in itself, is probably a sign that I’ve got it pretty damn good, right?)

But watching the games over the last two days, and seeing and reading stories about all the athletes participating, I’ve noticed something that doesn’t sit right with me:

I see Americans playing basketball for Russia, Kenyans running for the U.S., guys from Michigan playing baseball for Japan, people from China standing up as table tennis champions for America and all across the board, a kind of strategic “let’s mix and match people from all over the world to make the best team we possibly can.”

And that kind of bugs me.

In my mind, the Olympics has always been about each participating nation highlighting their strengths, about sharing pride for your country, and about bringing the world together by featuring the very best from every nation in the world.

I know a lot of athletes leave the U.S. and play for other countries because they weren’t able to make the American Olympic team. And I can understand how, if you’ve spent your whole life dreaming of the Olympics and aren’t given the chance to play for your home country, you’d go somewhere else just to realize that dream.

But individual dreams aren’t the point of the Olympics. In my opinion, if you’re not good enough to make your country’s Olympic team, you do what the rest of us mazillions of people do: you go home and you watch it on TV and you cheer your ass off for your country.

And I understand that some countries are naturally at a disadvantage. I understand that Kenyan runners are often faster than American runners.

But isn’t that the point? Hasn’t the Olympics always been about pitting nations against each other and letting the best country win? And hasn’t the joy of the Games always been partly about watching smaller, less powerful countries beat the crap out of the big and strong nations?

A tiny part of me worries that my reaction to this is a sign of some underlying racism or something, like “keep your athletes in your country and we’ll keep ours here.” But I don’t think that’s what it is.

To me, it’s another example of the “win at all costs” mentality that is consuming our world.

If your country doesn’t have enough stars to field an Olympic team, just go get some from another country. All you have to do make up some loopholes to call those athletes “citizens”, even though they’ll train for the games with your nation, then go back to their home country as soon as it’s all over.

And if you’re an athlete and can’t make the team for your country, you can just go play from someone else whose standards aren’t as high. Then you can face your home country in the games and show them how wrong they were. Because don’t they know it’s all about you?

Geez, look at me getting all fired up. Somebody get me a rocking chair and let me tell you all about how you kids don’t know how lucky you are.

Why, in my day…

I haven’t been able to talk to my sister on the phone for three weeks.

On May 20th, she got on a plane and flew to Fort Jackson, South Carolina to begin her first day as a soldier in the United States Army. She’ll be there until her graduation from basic training on July 25th.

I was on a ferry from St John to St Thomas, the day she called me and told me she was enlisting. She said, “I have to tell you something. You’re probably not going to like it.”

Inside my head, I scolded myself: Be Supportive. Be Supportive. Be Supportive.

Out loud, I said: Oh my god. And I cried. A lot.

I asked her if it was too late to change her mind. I asked her if I could call the recruiter and tell him she didn’t mean it. I asked her if she needed a lawyer, if we could find a loophole to get her out of this mess. And, the thing I’m most ashamed of, I asked her why her husband wasn’t going instead of her.

It was already a done deal, she told me. She was doing it because she wanted to provide a life for her children, medical insurance for her family, and a sense of stability and structure for herself.

She told me she was doing it because she’d never had the chance to figure out who she was other than a mother. Because she wanted to get out of Arizona and this seemed like the best possible option.

Before she left, she let me look through all of her paperwork. There was a form asking her where, if deployed internationally, she’d like to go. The choices included Guam, Germany, the Phillipines. There was no mention, on that form, or in any of the paperwork, of the word “Iraq.”

She was supposed to be in basic training for 10 weeks. The Army has recently shortened the timeline to 8 weeks. I’m sure you can guess why.

After basic training, she leaves for advanced training. She’ll be in Texas, learning how to be a medic. And she’ll be finished at the end of November. And suddenly, the presidential election takes on a new kind of meaning for me.

I asked her what happens then. She said there’s a 50-50 chance she’ll be based overseas. She said they didn’t tell her where.

I got a postcard from her at the beginning of this week. All it said was, “Unfortunately, I can confirm all your bad suspicions but oh well I am having fun experimenting with new things.”

Which is a perfect distillation of who my sister is and how different we are. If I were the one writing letters from boot camp, you can bet everyone would be receiving eight-page treatises on every experience I’d had, what we ate for every meal, who I liked and who I didn’t and an itemized list of all those bad suspicions I had confirmed.

Not my sister. While I’ve always babbled out my thoughts, fears and concerns to anyone who would listen (or read. Hello internet!), my sister’s been the stoic one who does what needs to be done and makes the best of every situation.

Fortunately, her husband got a letter on Wednesday with some more information. He read it to me over the phone, so I could hear that she was doing well, that she had successfully climbed the Victory Wall (whatever that is) and that, while she hadn’t made a lot of female friends, she’d become a mother figure to several of the guys in her platoon and that they gave her encouragement when she needed it.

At this moment, as I sit on the couch in my robe, drinking sparkling water and writing this on my laptop, my sister is probably on a five-mile run, in near 100-degree heat, while carrying an M16 and 15 pounds of gear on her back.

Her husband is in Arizona, struggling to take care of their three boys by himself. He misses her so much. I talk to him almost every day and every time we talk he tells me that this is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. His voice cracks when he tells me how he dreams about her at night and how hard it is for him to wake up in the morning and remember that she’s not there.

And I think about how many families across the country are going through this same thing. I think about my friend in Kosovo, flying helicopters for the military, while his wife and seven-month-old baby wait for him here.

And, though I try not to think about it, I remember a man I met a couple months ago, whose son had been killed in Iraq. I remember he had the son’s truck in his garage. They’d shipped it from his base and he had backed it into the garage and hadn’t touched it since. We were looking at something in the garage, and I backed up and almost brushed against the dusty side of the pickup. “Be careful there,” he said to me.

Inside his house, at every turn, reminders of what he’d lost. He sat down at his computer and showed us photos of his son, videos from his time in the military.

I asked him how he felt about the war, figuring that he’d be angry for losing his son to a battle that nobody knows exactly why we started in the first place.

I’m proud of my son, he said to me. It’s easy for people who don’t have anything at stake to criticize the war and walk around with protest signs, and say that we’re wasting lives out there. My son’s life wasn’t wasted, he said. He died protecting our country so the rest of us could be safe.

From the beginning of this whole messy war, I’ve argued that we shouldn’t be there. That we’re fighting the wrong enemies, in the wrong way.

And I still feel that way. But, ever since the day my sister told me she was becoming a soldier, it’s become a lot more complicated.

Before it was a matter of principle.

Now it’s personal.

When I added this item to my 101 in 1001 list, I imagined something like a weekend trip to a spa. Something relaxing. Maybe a little indulgent.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that. But it was a trip by myself. That’s for sure.

I went to Kaufman, Texas for a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat. It’s hard to put into words exactly what the experience is like, so I’ll start by sharing the daily schedule:

4:00 am Morning wake-up bell

4:30-6:30 am Meditate in the hall or in your room

6:30-8:00 am Breakfast break

8:00-9:00 am Group meditation in the hall

9:00-11:00 am Meditate in the hall or in your room

11:00-12:00 noon Lunch break

12noon-1:00 pm Rest and interviews with the teacher

1:00-2:30 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room

2:30-3:30 pm Group meditation in the hall

3:30-5:00 pm Meditate in the hall or in your room

5:00-6:00 pm Tea break

6:00-7:00 pm Group meditation in the hall

7:00-8:15 pm Teacher’s Discourse in the hall

8:15-9:00 pm Group meditation in the hall

9:00-9:30 pm Question time in the hall

9:30 pm Lights out

Yep, you are reading that correctly. We woke up at 4am and meditated for a smidge over ten hours every day.

Waking up at 4 in the morning is hard, but that fact that you wake up to the sound of a gong vibrating in the predawn darkness, well, that helps a little.

Did I mention that we did the entire retreat in silence?

For the entire time, all students are asked to observe “noble silence.” This means that, not only do you do not speak to your fellow students, but you do not look at them, do not gesture, do not smile, do not communicate in any way.

The point of the retreat is to get inside your own head and stay there. So they take away anything that could distract you from that goal. Like speaking. Or reading materials. Or iPods. Or cameras (which is why you won’t find any photos in this entry). Or any communication with the outside world. No calls home. No e-mails. No letters. Nothing. They even segregate men and women at all time, so you won’t be distracted by a good-looking meditator across the dining hall.

It’s just you and your thoughts. For ten days. And it is hard and boring and miserable at times. But at times it’s also liberating and joyful and calming and incredibly exhilarating.

Which is the whole point.

What I learned at this retreat — the whole point of learning this form of meditation, in fact — is that there are things that feel good in life and things that feel bad in life. But none of these things, the good or the bad, none of them last forever.

So instead of wasting your time running toward things that feel good and away from things that feel bad, Vipassana teaches you to just watch, to observe the moment, without judging, without trying to run toward it or away from it. And by watching, you learn that everything passes. And you learn that it’s not worth it to get worked up about much of anything, once you understand how ephemeral it all is in the first place.

I learned on this retreat that I can stay quiet for ten days. I’ve learned that, surprisingly, I enjoy periods of silence. On the very last day, noble silence is broken and you’re allowed to talk to your fellow students, to share your experience and hear what it was like for them. And while I was glad to hear what the other women had to say, after a while I had to escape to my room for some quiet. Which was a new, but not unwelcome, experience for me.

But it wasn’t about the silence. That was just the means to the end.

What I really learned is a lot bigger than that.

I’ve spent most of my life looking for something to make me happy and running from the people and places I’ve blamed for my own unhappiness.

I think that’s probably true for a lot of us. We grow up believing that people and things outside us will make us happy or unhappy.

The right job, the right house, the right spouse — if we can only get everything just right, we’ll be happy.

And if we’re not happy? Well, there must be something outside of us that is causing us pain. We must be in the wrong job, in the wrong house, in the wrong marriage.

Vipassana teaches you to stop looking outward and to instead look inside, to see that happiness is a choice we have to power to make. That’s why the technique requires you to sit quietly for a long time — because the process of sitting is a metaphor for this bigger idea.

There is pain in life — the technique doesn’t pretend that it will spare you from pain. That’s why you sit. You sit until your back hurts. Until it is burning and throbbing and you think you could maybe cry if you let yourself.

So you shift and try to run away from the pain.

Which works for a moment.

But it always comes back.

And you moan and cry and whine inside your head. You think to yourself “what the hell am i doing here? Oh this hurts so bad. Oh i can’t handle it. Oh will the hour ever be finished? Oh my
god it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts.”

And, of course, you are miserable.

But then, sometime around day three, you sit down to another hour of pain and you close your eyes and you decide, “Fine. My back hurts. My back hurts and it would be nice if it didn’t hurt but it does and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So instead of whining and crying and trying to move into a better position, I’m just going to suck it up and see what happens.”

So you do. You sit still. When the pain comes, you don’t try to shift your position. You just sit quietly and watch it. And you are shocked to realize that, if you just watch and wait, the pain eventually fades away. It will come back, yes, but then it will go away again.

And you realize, for yourself, directly, what the teacher has been saying for three days when he says that everything in this world, good things and bad, everything arises and passes away. Arises and passes away. And you realize that the pain in your back was nothing compared to the pain you created in your head. You realize that you took the pain and you held onto it and you magnified it and you made it a hundred times worse than it had to be.

You start wondering what could happen if you tried the same thing in your life. If you refused to hold on to the negative stuff. If instead of magnifying your unhappiness and feeding the flames, you just let it go. Just sent it back from wherever it came.

Well, I tried it. And it works. It takes a lot of practice, but it works. On the way home from my retreat, I had a three-hour layover. Not a big deal. I used the time to write in my journal and catch up with the people I hadn’t spoken with in ten days.

Then the plane got delayed another hour. In the past, I would have thrown a fit. I would have heaved a bunch of loud sighs. I would have called home and bitched. I would have slid down in my airport chair and felt all kinds of sorry for myself.

This time, I just shrugged and kept on reading my book. Because I’d learned that me being upset about the delay wouldn’t make the plane come any faster. So why waste my energy on getting upset?

The retreat was amazing, one the hardest and most intense and most important things I’ve ever done.

But the hard part is just starting. Because it’s easy to be even-minding and calm when you don’t have to talk to anyone and your only job is to sit quietly for ten hours a day. When the entire program is structured around meditation, it’s easy to make time for it.

I’ve found that the technique only works if I practice. That I have to meditate every day if I want to really remember, deep down where it counts, the things I learned at the retreat.

But I’ve also found that I want to practice, that I want to stay in the peaceful place I discovered. Even when it feels like the rest of the world is on a mission to get me fired up.

If you even think you have an inkling of trying something like this, I say do it. It’s amazing. And it’s free to attend. Every student’s retreat is paid for by a student who has taken the retreat in the past. You are not even allowed to pay until the course is over. And there’s no dollar amount expected — you are asked to pay whatever you think you can afford and whatever you think it is worth.

And I can tell you that it’s worth a lot more than I could afford to pay.