Me, 2008, that's a doctoral 'hood'.

January 2012 marks my return to a place I prepared for academically but never mentally: teaching university students. I went from undergrad straight into graduate school and then on to finish a PhD. Along the way I lost sight of what I really wanted because of the grumpy academics that lined the walls of the English departments I studied in. Their officiousness (and multiple marriages) were not desirable qualities.

If I had been honest with my twentysomething self, I would have also known that my academic persona didn’t jell with the person I thought myself to be. I was in a small circle of friends who married immediately out of college and began the business of setting up their own households. I had no such prospects in sight: only scholarships for more degrees.

“I’m never going to use this degree,” I said. “I’m getting it because I’m young, not married, and I can do it now.”

None of this was false. Nor was it particularly helpful in building relationships with my advisory committee or the other graduate students who had publicly made scholarship their full time pursuit. The disconnect between how I spent my days and how I saw myself grew so large I left my PhD program immediately after finishing courses.

I went to work full time at a prestigious university, not as an instructor, but in Student Affairs. Now unless you’ve ever been depressed, scared of your roommate, or bored to tears, you don’t even think of student affairs. If you do, you think of it as a stepchild of the university: the place where less serious people go to stay affiliated to academic life. Depending on the institution, you may be a glorified babysitter.

Neither extreme was the case at the two places where I worked. The other professionals were thoughtful people, passionate about their work. But one thing bugged me: it seemed like the best part of their lives had passed them by.  They were always talking about students as if they were their hopes for the lives they never lived — the brilliance they hadn’t developed.

I did what I had by now perfected: I went sideways into a career change. From student affairs professional to publishing-know-it-all, I spent hours at the desk working for others. All the while the books, articles, chapters I was writing in my free time (nights, weekends, summers) were piling up. Publications kept piling up: publications I considered my hobby.

Five years went by. And when I decided that I was done working for others, a week after I quit my job, an offer came. At a university. This time on the teaching side.

Here I am: Five years later, many lessons learned, sure. But back where I started, those years I kept emailing drafts to a committee on the other side of the world validating my credentials to initiate others into how to read and write critically.

What have you been running from? What aspect of yourself are you hiding because it will set you apart from those around you?

Don’t take five years to let it burst forth. Turn now, today, to face it. And then see how you can support it.

My only regret is that the energy I put into keeping up the pretense that this isn’t what I wanted, I could have put into getting better at writing even earlier.

Statue "Resolution" installed as part of a City of London’s Street Scene Challenge initiative.

There’s a lot of hemming and hawing about New Year’s resolutions: the last few years it’s become fashionable to be against them. Ninety percent of them are broken, experts say, and gyms love January as a month they rake in more income than at any other time of year.

If that’s what you’re looking for, this is a different kind of post. It’s a post in favor of making goals — which of course could be made during any month — and the momentum gained by a fresh start when the calendar turns a page, not forgetting that beginnings are also about perspective: 2012 is when the Mayans thought the world would end and this has led to some of the most entertaining tweet/quips on social media.

We have seen in the New Year as couple in a variety of exotic destinations: Dubai, Jordan, Ireland, Vegas, and Doha. This year, feeling pummeled by a hectic work schedule and life with a one year old, we passed aside bragging rights in Jamaica for a spa retreat in nowhere, GA.

If you interview (or read) successful people, from any field, they tell us over and over again that goal setting is what separates those with good intentions from high achievers. Goal setting and then the tenacity to meet those goals.We can’t blame the New Year for not giving us the resolve to make our dreams come true. We can only blame ourselves for not believing enough that we can live that life, the shimmering one full of the pleasures of doing what we are good at, where we are best selves, not owned by our possessions, but using them for good.

For me, the end of the year is a ritual, not imposed by others but by my tendency towards a love of nostalgia. 2011 was hard in many ways as it brought seismic changes in both the wide world and my own tiny one. Last year I wanted to be in better physical health (too much good eating and not enough movement) and devote myself to writing full time.

I set New Year’s resolutions most Decembers; evaluating what I would like to change about the way things have happened in the months to come. Writing in a journal daily, my rough, unedited, rambling, prayerful morning pages in the tradition of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, also helps prepare me for this annual tradition. An average journal takes me through about three months of ups, downs, and all arounds. When all the pages are used up, I return to the front and make a list of all the lessons I learned during those three months. This means four times a year I get to reflect on the themes, battles, victories that make up the twelve months of that particular stage of my life.

I have piles and piles of these books as I’ve been writing daily since 1996. Some day they may be read by our child(ren) or even grandchildren. For now they are a testament to time spent with drawing from the world in an effort to better understand it.

And that’s what I love about the New Year. You get a chance to stop and start again. Like pushing stop on a DVD. You have a choice: you can pick back up where you left off, or you can start anew. I have made exercise a weekly habit: some weeks have more workouts than others.  I quit my job to write full time and have published three ebooks. Instead of seeing the odd week, like this vacation, with no work outs (since I’ve left the workout DVDs — without which I am lost — at home) or the delay of a book I had scheduled to release in December, I choose to relish the weeks I hit my 120 minute goal of cardio and nearly 410 copies sold of three titles.

This gentleness to myself is something I picked up along the way. Something else  I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t set any goals at all.

What about you? Have you had success with New Year’s resolutions or goal setting at another time of year?

Oh and for 2012? I’d like more of the same please… I’ve still got some pounds to lose and stories to tell.

I love Ramadan, have from the first time I experienced it in Qatar. The fact many places are closed in the middle of the day removes the temptation to run around the city in an exhaust induced daze, wilting from heat and hating humanity. Instead it’s sort of like desert hibernation: I withdrawn into myself for entertainment until friends are free in the evening.

This is the end of the second week, exactly halfway through. Muslims (and those wishing to share the experience) have not eaten food or drank water from sun up to sun down for the last fifteen days. The contrast between day and night is often dizzying. At work everyone is somber, quiet, waiting to go home and wile away the hours until sunset. At night the city comes alive as cars careen the streets taking passengers to visit one another, manage errands that have been delayed, and in general stay up until the wee hours in the morning for the last prayer before sunrise.

This particular year is my first time as a full time freelance writer. Instead of spending the better part of the day promoting the work of others, create as much as I can; the words keep forming on the page, sentence by sentence, until my next social obligation. Rather than decline into stasis, Ramadan allows me to make use of all the hours I have to myself, uninterrupted by lunches or afternoon meetings. But already, as others, I’m thinking about the time when fasting will end and we return to “normal.”

In the past few weeks, as others have strained not to swear, fight, lie, or any of the other things that would invalidate their fast, I’ve started to withdrawn from that great sustainer I’ve depended on for most of my life: friends. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older, have started a family, am married to an introvert, or some combination of all three, but I’m starting to wonder about life as it was before.

Photo by Vinod Bahal

What I’m not missing during Ramadan are the negative interactions that tend to be a part of life in a very small community. When people “are people” as the saying goes, how do you deal with the disappointment? The questions all boil down to a central theme with an elusive answer: why don’t more people treat others the way they want to be treated? Said another way: why aren’t people the same kind of friend to you, you are to them? My only solution seems to be to avoid the cause of the problem.

I wanted to say hi, a friend said, because I don’t want to be one of those people you’re talking about who only call when they need something.

I used to not mind, the person who called after a long time, suddenly popping up, ten minutes into the conversation asking, (you already saw this coming) for a favor. The call was also a chance to renew a shared relationship – no dancing around the word friendship – and so a connection would be revived.

In Doha this context shifted slightly: there was suddenly less room to avoid those who in a larger pond would likely only be acquaintances. Seen at the same events, with the same likely suspects, you’re forced to have conversations about summer, Eid, winter holidays; or the plans for whatever vacation was around the corner.

It was hard to tell in the first few years who was genuinely interested in you as a person and who just wanted a night out on the town (especially if you are a generous person who often reaches for the check). In a high school like atmosphere where you live, work, and befriend those in your proximity, these aren’t friendships but rather alliances of a sort, of the feudal kind, made to beat back the threat of boredom and loneliness.

The extrovert in me didn’t mind having repetitive conversations. After all, extroverts just love to hear themselves talk, about anything. Then a funny thing happened. The predictability of the conversations started to fray at my other defining characteristic: a love of variety.

Where are you from, where do you work, how long you been here became a litany that even me, hyper extrovert, began to dread.

Because if people liked your answers, then they hold on to your contact details. Most people call this networking. Surely that term applies mostly to reciprocal exchanges of information, referrals, favors?

For an extrovert personality with a serious helping handicap, this situation became parasitic. I was like an injured athlete at the competition. I couldn’t look away, but I knew it would only do me further injury to get involved.

The list of people who called once or twice a year began to grow. One year blended into two, then three, most of the out of the blue calls were around getting g someone a job or passing along a resume. And now they all have invariably the same theme: can I help them get their book published; give them advice on getting started in writing, recommend an agent?

The fact is I really like people. They were my favorite hobby in fact: meeting new people, learning about them, keeping up, and collecting them as part of a human menagerie. Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller The Tipping Point even coined a term for the type of person I am: connector.But the obvious evidence that people were counting on my weakness, in fact playing on the fact I rarely let an email go unanswered (even if on maternity leave) or couldn’t not reply to a cry for help grew apace with the sinking suspicion of being used was mounting. And the end result was that my usefulness to people, that very thing I used to love to give away freely, was now the thing I hated about myself.

The vulnerability left me exposed to others, who had called for a reference, or asked for a piece of advice, the same people who never answered when in the same town, or who were too busy to invite you along to a party you’d already sent a gift for, these people who gladly took the first fruit of your time.

Yet, when it came time to return the favor, when you need a referral, follow through, a sign of caring, the idea of reciprocity vanishes. The lights are on, yet no one comes to the door to answer your knock.

Photo by Steven Depolo

Make no mistake, all the people I’ve helped over the years, they were thankful. Some even had the grace to be slightly abashed. I know we haven’t spoken all summer, I’m sorry for that…. one recent text began. I replied. Of course I did. To delete would be to become someone I don’t know. But the more of these I get, the more I realize this is the kind of reputation I want to consider reforming.

They know they can behave badly and yet rely on inert goodness.

But is the definition of grace. Unmerited kindness.

 Joy is spelled Jesus Others You, the pastor said last week in the service. I listened, thin lipped, as a knife twisted in my heart, where all of these unrequited actions stemmed. I have practiced the JOY philosophy since first hearing it’s rationale as a teenager, the message singing straight to my core like a hot arrow.

But joy is the last word that would describe how I feel about people.

Here I am, torn between a religious ideal and giving up on humanity all together. Shall I continue in my endless well of assistance because in eternity I may have the reward – please let it be the type of friendships I give – for my trials?

Or perhaps I will become one of those hermit writers; living at the keyboard and speaking only when spoken to. The question then is equally murky: How long would it be before someone did, just for the sake of company?

For 2011 one of my main priorities will be people not just goals. While goals are important and I’ve written about goal setting elsewhere on this blog, this year will be more about who I am to those around me in addition to what I can do for them. This is a major shift for me but brought on by the sense of loss of the passing of four friends in 2010 as well as the introduction of a new member of our family. In the end, people are what matter and what last.

This is why the baby and I extended a week of our family vacation to do a road trip to my alma mater and then down to the town I grew up in. Since most of my childhood was spent moving house, the seven years I spent going to middle school and high school in the same place seems more rooted in me than many others. Not accidentally I spent another six years doing a BA and then MA in another city.

Now in mid-30s, there are only three cities I have spent six or more years in and Doha now has that distinction.

I’m not sure what the next year will hold but only that I hope not to feel less alone during it. In stopping and talking to friends on our impromptu road trip, I realized everyone is searching for the same thing. Happiness. Or Happyness as they said in the Will Smith movie.

There are no easy answers given our complex world. The more technology we have, the more we seem isolated from each other.

I do know that happiness for me is going to be practiced on a daily basis. Whether it’s the exercise hour I got in or the chat with an old friend or an article that got written to deadline, each day will present it’s own victory.

What are your secrets to happiness? Share your daily happiness with me. And let’s share the journey.

While interviewing for a job in 2005, I had a famous phrase I found myself repeating during the day of grueling group process: "I don’t care what people read, as long as they do." At some point over the course of the day long inspection my slogan was amended with "even if it is Harry Potter." This was the ultimate call sign of my liberality since I was a doctoral candidate at the time in literature no less. With this statement I was indicating my openness to popular trends including the boy wizard that was taking the world by storm in 800 page installments.

Since that interview my life has been very diasporic and that job a gateway leading me down the path to this very moment . If I had foresight that afternoon I would have known that my life was about to take a very nostaligic turn, taking me back through the early countries and cities. of my childhood but this time as a sentinent adult.

Soon after I left that job, I began tracking younger iterations of myself all over the world, wondering if I would see the child or the adolscent in the corner of my eye if I turned quickly enough.

First an invitation to a conference in India to  the same city where my father studied for his own PhD which I had no memory of at all.

Then traveling to the first city I lived in the U.S.in Palo Alto, California to show six students from Qatar University around the same campus where my father was a postdoc.

And now, a member of the staff of a joint venture working for the very publishers of above mentioned 800 page series on boy wizard.

Is this how life is for everyone and mine is just showing the threads earlier than most, I wonder, thinking I’m seeing the front and back of this tapestry in progress, part amazed by and part baffled at the symmetry.

Have you come full circle in an unexpected way? When? How long did it take you to catch on?

Amazingly, last night I was confronted with the anger of strangers, and had the desperate urge to laugh! I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been focusing on letting go of anger and taking those intervening breaths (I cannot stress how crucial those are) or if I was just satiated from a good meal and catching up with a friend, but as we climbed over the knees of people not wanting to move to let my friend and I slide across a crowded row to our seats. The main act – Placido Domingo – hadn’t started. The lights weren’t low. The orchestra was warming up.But the looks these people gave us could have stripped us bare for daring to disturb their peaceful mintues before the start of the performance.

So instead of returning their gargoyle like stares, I giggled all the way to my seat.

Placido and a young soprano – Ailyn Perez – were fantastic and generous with their encore performancs.

But after the show, a strange thing happened.

The staircase closest to our section, the nearest exit, was closed off by a group of teenage ushers. They had clearly been instructed by someone else, for some unknown reason, to keep us from exiting in the most expedient fashion. In light of the 500+ people crowding the theater, many people were notably angered by this inexplicable barricade. I saw grown men harass these teenage girls as though they were committing one of the most henious crimes of the year.

“Can I speak to your boss?” one man was insisting, “It’s going to take me at least 20 minutes to get out of here if you don’t let me out this way.”

Now, I’m not saying that I wasn’t worried about how long it was going to take me to get out of the parking lot. Or that my friend and I hadn’t considered ducking out during one of the many encores, so as to avoid the traffic. We stayed instead and tried to just enjoy the evening and let the traffic take care of itself.

When I saw the rage in the face of this man, and a few others bunched up around these teenage girls, one of who was pleading:

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” I saw the destructive power of rage and its impotence.

We moved another set of chairs and proceeded directly down the tiered seating until we finally got to the floor and slipped out the door. Amazingly, the parking lot attendants were directing people in a sensible fashion and we made it off the island (man made PEARL project in Qatar: http://www.thepearlofthegulf.com/SubTemplate1.aspx?ID=166&MID=86) in about fifteen minutes. We marveled that we got off the island more quickly than it had taken us to get on.

And we left the opera with sounds of Placido and Ailyn in our ears: not the steaming fury of impotent rage.

Here’s one more reason for restraint.

Angry outbursts. 

The Lentan season is a time to turn inward (like the Muslim season of Ramadan) and focus on those things that keep you from being the person you could be. Lent is the Christian invitation to focus on what saps our energy and attention from God.

Typically, people will ‘give up’ something – often something they love – chocolate, or soda, or a particular kind of distraction such as television or the radio, in order to be willingly humbled each moment in the day when you have a desire for that particular taste, object, or activity. 

In the past I’ve given up meat, Tositios, regular Coke, and a whole list of tangible items. This year’s decision came as a surprise even to me on the heels of the observations of a visiting friend. As I was taking her around town, I would give her the emotional history of my relationship with particular individuals.

“She used to hate me,” I’d say after we’d met someone in the hallway, “but then we became friends.”

“He hates me,” I would say and shrug as we left someone’s office.

“Do they hate you?” She asked me, startling me one afternoon when I was explaining something about a local group. Her use of my own phrase helped me hear myself and the casual way I was describing serious issues.

The upside to this discussion is that it helped me realize how much I relish the angry emotions: rage, hate, burning anger, bodering on malice. I realize how I’ve been holding the strong burn of anger close, almost as a friend, using it as a crutch for coping with the demands of living overseas (or just the bumps of life in general).

 So, for the next forty days, until Easter (the end of March), I will give up the luxury of being furious. 

What will I do with my energy in the meantime? 

Stay tuned and find out.

Making a list is a great way to keep track of what needs doing. It’s also a quck and easy way to jot down what might be on your mind. Here’s a list from a workshop I was in this afternoon. A list of what matters as of 1:45 KSA time:

1. Sunny days
2. Happiness
3. Good friends
4. Getting things done
5. Connections
6. Doing
7. Exercise
8. Love
9. Eating
10. A clean house
11. A warm heart
12. Being prepared
13. Honesty
14. Magazines
15. Love
16. Email
17. Technology
18. My family
19. My nieces
20. My love
21. Cooking a good meal
22. Being organized
23. Reading
24. Books
25. Having what you need
26. Sleep
27. Soft sheets
28. Staying current
29. Friendships at work
30. Love
31. Finishing things
32. Taking care of your body
33. Meeting new people
34. Doing what you say you will
35. Having fun
36. Traveling
37. Hot sunny days
38. Being outside
39. Eating your favorite food
40. Love
41. Saying the truth
42. Not holding grudges
43. Letting go of anger
44. Not keeping rage
45. Fighting boredom
46. Learning new things
47. Having dependable friends
48. Eliminating the toxic
49. Finding a reason to smile
50. Making errands easy
51. Breaking bad habits
52. Not giving up
53. Planning to succeed
54. Ignoring those that hurt you
55. Living for tomorrow
56. Setting your heart on the good
57. Remembering the good
58. Focusing on hope
59. Sharing with others
60. Feeling your own power
61. Believing anything is possible
62. Dream
63. Search for truth
64. Hope
65. Believe
66. Trust
67. Laugh
68. Trust
69. Love
70. Believe
71. Wait
72. Wait for patience
73. Keep trying
74. Never give up
75. Letting go of the past

Rumi once wrote “This being human is a guest house.”
And I think:

We are all on our way somewhere else. 
But in the meantime, we are here together. 
What are we supposed to do in the meantime?

People are surprised by pain, tragedy, disaster. 
But this isn’t our final destination; we are on the way.

I am not surprised.

The goodness of the day can be challenged by the next,
or the other.
Or the last.

We are all somewhere on our way to something.
While we are here, we can help each other get to the place we want to be.
It’s like realizing that you don’t have to be perfect or healthy or whole.

You don’t have to be anything but patient.

I am not perfect – not yet.
I am not eternal – not yet.
I am here in the meantime, on my way to the next.

Being human is like being rented;
this is borrowed space.

This being human is a guest house.