Making Sure HIs Heart Is In The Right Place

To Love or To Be Loved?... That Is The Question

Last night, on her Oscar Special, Oprah Winfrey paired up important performers to interview each other. Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman interviewed each other in Hollywood. They both came across as personable, very approachable and very charming people.

In the course of their questioning each other, Russell asked Nicole if it was better to love or to be loved. What an extraordinarily difficult question. I actually don't remember how Nicole Kidman answered the question.

But I truly think that all or us need to take a moment and ask ourselves the same question:

For you and I, are we people who find it more important to be the one giving love in a relationship or is it more significant to us to be the one who receives love?

My answer would be that it is as important to be able to give love to others as it is to be able to receive love from others. I need to have both things in my life at the same time for my life to work.

You may see things differently. That is okay too. You have to live your life in a way that works for you. I welcome comments anytime to one of my posts. I would especially like to hear from you on this particular issue.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman

Doing It Right The First Time

I Owe It All to Dear Great- Great Grandpa Count Dracula

It is now exactly 2:48 AM. I couldn't sleep so I started multitasking in order to make myself sleepy. Obviously that tactic did not work very well for me, because here I am only now bleary eyed enough to try to fall asleep.

Actually, I know why I am something of a night owl. I always have been. I figured out the source of my problem when I traced back through my genealogy and I see where I got this somewhat annoying habit from. Right there, about150 or 200 years back, Count Dracula appeared in my lineage. If you would have asked me a week ago if I thought I was descended from the actual Transylvanian Count Dracula, I would have called you crazy. But I guess I am. I mean my family chart wouldn't lie, would it? Somewhere along the line, a friendly vampire passed on to me the gene for being a night owl and that is my working theory on the subject of why I am still awake.

My wife has an alternate theory. She thinks that I have just pushed my sleep cycle completely out of synch, because my daily schedule has been completely skewed. And there may be a bit of truth in what she says as well.

Even though I suspect my wife is 100% right and I am not, I am still going to stick to my own take on the situation, at least for a little bit. My theory makes me a much more interesting person, don't you think?

A Moment of Reflection at the End of the Day

One day has rolled into another. There is a recognizable rhythm to my days now. And things on which I must focus... things to do, people to call, dinner to make... staying focused on finding a job. With Mom starting to fade now, we have to stop by more often to help her deal with situations she can no longer manage on her own. Today was a busy day, but I felt that it was a productive day, too. It is a very pleasant feeling to know that with each new day, I am becoming yet a little more functional once again. The times of craziness and chaos are finally coming to an end.

My life is now punctuated with a welcome predictability. And a remembrance of things of I had momentarily forgotten. And I have added a few bits of knowledge to my accumulated store of hard won wisdom.

After a really tumultuous five or six years, I have learned that one of the hardest things that I have had to do is to let go of relationships and of things which I really thought I couldn't live without.

I reluctantly had to let a cherished relationship just fade away, because it was one of those chance things that happen to us in life that have a very short half-life. Someone comes into our lives at a critical point in time and the two of us help each other to survive a difficult moment. And the difficult moment passes. When that happens, that relationship became awkward and painful... that relationship had no chance to make it after the crisis in both our lives had passed. I went one direction. She went another. Nothing is quite so painful as to watch something very precious wither and die. But then, over time the pain has diminished and now I can accept that this is the way it has to be. What is truly strange to me is that as hard as I might try now, I can no longer what her face looks like. The few things that I do remember of the time we spent together is becoming a distant memory, the stuff of something I must have dreamed or something. Now I realize that this forgetting is a godsend because I have to live in the present moment and holding too tenaciously onto that memory no longer serves any purpose now that I have moved on.

Marilyn and I are getting rid of things we have held onto for years. However, doing that is becoming easier as we are focusing on living our lives more fully rather than having to constantly deal with what to do with the things we have acquired over the years. "Holding on to our treasures" and "figuring out how to pay for those 'precious' treasures" sucked up an awful amount of our time. We just realized just how much time we squandered in acquiring and keeping these things. Marilyn and I now realize that living our lives fully is more important than acquiring things so that we can look good or feel good. Even knowing this, however, we still find it very difficult to part with some of the miscellaneous things we have acquired over the years. In fact, letting go of some these objects can be downright painful, at least until they are gone. And then quickly enough we forget about them and we move on.

Letting go of cherished beliefs is another matter entirely. I will write about this matter in greater detail at another time. I built my whole existence on a set of beliefs about how the world worked and a set of expectations about what my life was going to be all about. For me, being forced to revise my view of the world and to rethink the basic assumptions about my life was excruciatingly difficult. I had to go through eighteen months of painful therapy to accomplish this feat. Thankfully, it was something I desperately wanted to do, otherwise I would have failed in my attempt to turn my life around.

Today, I also remembered that old saw that we either have nothing on our agenda or we have too many things to do and not enough time to get everything done. There never seems to be a middle ground.

Over the last three years, I cleared the decks. I jettisoned a lot of unnecessary baggage I no longer wanted to carry around with me. For awhile I had a lot of time on my hands. Momentarily there was no structure to my life. Soon, I wasn't going to have a job. For better or worse, where we work and what we do defines us and serves a critical support beam in the structure of our lives. On New Years Eve, my job ended and suddenly I really had a lot of time on my hands. Too many changes had taken place in my life in a very short period of time. I was thrown completely off balance for a time.

In trying to find my way back home, I learned to live my life one day at a time. When life is dishing out crap, the only thing I can effectively do is just hold on as best I can, until I can get a handle on the situation. So I just began to take things one hour at a time... one day at a time. Now things have come full circle. I am once again reminded that things go around and then come back around full circle. We go through these cycles of difficult times to good times and back. I am now living in better times. I plan to savor the moment because I am fully aware that my situation can change for the worse in a heartbeat.

I really feel a bit strange right now. I am relatively relaxed... serene... at peace with myself and my family and with the world. I am even at peace with my Mother, who can drive even the most patient person to absolute distraction. I have not enjoyed this very pleasant state of mind for a very long time and I am really unaccustomed to this luxury. However, I like feeling this way very much. More of the same, I say.

This is the end of my day and this is how things are playing out in my neck of the woods. Thanks for stopping by.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman
Houston, Texas
USA



When I was rushing about at a

Getting Lost in the Evening News... and Finding My Way Back

I used to be something of a very addicted newshound. Every day I would pick up a copy of the New York Times and always listen to the news on NPR. My day was not complete unless I had gotten up to speed on what was happening across the country and across the world. Deep down, I may have thought that if I was at least aware of what was happening in the world, maybe I could somehow have an impact on what was happening in other places... or at least see it coming, if some pending disaster was headed my way.

I suffered from a syndrome that goes along with being a newshound. My friends, also inveterate newshounds, and I would sit around and have passionate conversations about what was going on in the world. In the course of any evening, over a bottle of decent wine, we would endeavor to solve the world's problems. And even if we really didn't, we very clearly knew how we would solve the problems we discussed, if we actually had the power to do so.

With my own life momentarily in chaotic disarray, I am focusing on my own problems and issues. If I take the time to make myself aware of anything, I take note of what is going on in my own life and in the lives of the people who are immediately important to me. I have just enough time and money and energy to barely do that. For now, that is enough for me to try to do.

It is not that I am no longer concerned about what is going on in the larger world beyond the defined boundaries of my own existence. I am less fanatical about being "totally informed" because I have realized several things.

First, I couldn't digest all the news that there is to read, if I wanted to. With a deluge every day of new information from the world of politics, science, society, the environment, not to mention the world of arts and entertainment, there is no way I could even catch up 0n even a small fraction of all that news. Even if I could, a lot of the daily news isn't all that important or relevant anyway. With so much to "know" these days, I really need to be somewhat selective in what I try to absorb.

More importantly, I have discovered that from day to day, the news doesn't really change a whole lot. The names in the news may change or the places where the news takes place may change. The new technologies that we use may change a bit and get increasingly high tech. But for the most part, the same sorts of things are happening over and over again, each time a minor variant of what happened in the past. So I no longer get the sense that I am really learning something significantly new anymore.

Besides which, in trying to save the larger world, I was neglecting the more pressing matters in my own life. Having done that, I have paid heavy price and I am trying now to put my own house in order once more. When I have take care of that matter, I will be able to once more take an interest in local and world news. Only when I reach that point, I will try to strike a balance between being aware of what is going on in the world and being aware of what is going on in my own life. If I cannot take care of myself, how in the world can I even try to take on the problems of other people.

I will be like a parent on an aircraft on which the oxygen masks have dropped down in an emergency. I will have to first put on my own oxygen mask and then assist my child to put on hers. That would seem to be the most logical thing to do. But then, like a lot of folks, I did not always do the logical thing in the past. I am trying to be more focused on my own needs so that I can prevent my life from unraveling again. It is a modest start, but it is certainly a move in the right direction. In the meantime, the world and it's problems will have to rock along without me for awhile.

Calling A Truce with the Media

I am rethinking my own personal relationship with the media. Aha, you did not know that I had a "relationship" with the media. Well I do. Up until now it was an uneasy one, because no matter where I went, no matter where I turned, some form of the media was screaming for my attention. Buy this, want this, come here to this vacation spot, watch this television show, come see this movie, purchase this magazine so that I can have better sex or make more money. I was and am still being bombarded from every angle at every hour of the day.

So why am I calling a truce? Because I no longer take the assault upon my life personally. This is not about me. All these voices coming from everywhere are simply attempts to grab an audience. See me, hear me... pay attention to me. People get paid to create magazines and send out emails... to talk on radio and to create television shows to inform me and to entertain me. And every one of those people who do that are calling out to me to stop for a moment and pay attention to whatever it is they have created. They are trying to sell their "product" to me and get me to become part of their demographic. That is just their job. Okay. I have no problem with that.

Because I no longer take what is happening personally, I can now calmly pick and choose which parts of the media world into which I want to tune and for how long I want to do that. I am simply weighing my priorities and making some choices in this regard. Nothing more than that.

In one of his poems, Robert Frost noted that this country was mostly about buying and selling things. In theory, most of what we do in our lives is focused on one of those two activities. Even when we are trying to get a job, what are we doing? We are trying to sell others on hiring us. Why should the media industry be different than any other industry.

In fact, because it is the nature in a global village to have mass media and mass advertising that reaches out to people in every part of the world, even the smallest business situated in a country a continent away can be out there trying to grab our attention from halfway around the world. Some products and messages are so common as to be found everywhere on this planet. Coca-Cola is one such product. We are not surprised to see Coke ads, whether we are in Venice or in Beijing. Also consider, for examples American blue jeans. Blue jeans are pretty much the fashion icon for young people and old people alike, in every part of the world. So whether it is fashion, entertainment, news or cultural values, all are being reflected in and being altered by the long reach of the media. The media is a force unto itself, now, and with the creation of the internet, the media, in whatever form it takes, is powerful enough a force to be truly feared by totalitarian governments, who go to great lengths to limits it's reach.

I figure that the media moguls are sort of like fisherman. They entice us as best they can with some kind of bait and then throw out a huge net. They then reel it in to see how many people they can catch in that net for that issue or that performance or that episode of their production.

Life is always busy and there are never going to be enough hours in the day. Seems that there is no place I can go to buy additional hours that I can use each day. So I am going to have to make hard choices as to how I am going to use my time. Apparently the ball is in my court. So I will have to get a better grasp of the situation and then become a whole lot more selective with my time and my money when it comes to interacting with world of news and entertainment.

First, it makes little sense for me to get angry, to get upset or to resent the intrusion of the uninvited media into my life. In the modern world of the twenty-first century, that is going to happen, no matter what I do. Media spam is increasingly going to be a factor in my life, whether it takes the form of unwanted emails or the form of unwanted noise from the television set or the radio. Coolly and deliberately, I need to set the limits of how much of this very distracting din I want to let into my life and then impose those limitations on everyone who wants my attention.

Secondly, I will need to find a place somewhere where I can find a respite from all the many tentacles of the sensory intruders. I am not really sure where that will end up being. Maybe the library. Maybe the park. It may be as simple as turning off the television set and putting on a cd of my own choosing... setting the tone and mood of the minute. Hell. Maybe I should just turn off all my electronic and digital playtoys and read a book. Hey, that is a thought. A little retro maybe, but a good thought nevertheless.

Maybe now, I can be more at peace with myself. Having made this decision, maybe my life will become less frantic and nerve-wracking, with fewer heart-wrenching decisions to make... such as whether I should watch Las Vegas on television or Grey's Anatomy.. And maybe I won't feel so guilty as often now, because less and less will I have squandered some precious time indulging myself in some of my more guilty pleasures. If I were really honest with myself, I would admit that some of the things I do to pass the time, though immensely pleasurable, aren't really necessary to my existence.

This process of rethinking my life is really liberating. I am weaning myself out of the habit of always having to have immediate gratification while the television is on or there is a coupon in the newspaper for 30% off everything in the store. I won't be loading myself up with a thousand competing demands on my time and my energy. What I really want is to simplify my life and to make each day just a bit more manageable. With this new take on my personal relationship to the media, I am one step closer to accomplishing that goal.