Country Mouse Takes a Vacation

I remember the summer my dad's cousins came to visit us from rural Wisconsin. I was about 5 years old. It was their 25th wedding anniversary, and their big plans were to spend the weekend in the "Big City" of Minneapolis and then drive "Up North" to the beautiful shores of Lake Superior. It was like something straight out of Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion."

After their weekend in the city, however, they decided it was enough. They skipped the rest of the trip, and went back home. Even as a young child at the time, I remember thinking "What?!" It made no sense to me. I have thought about it many times over the years. I could never grasp why they would want to return to their small town instead of seeing a new part of the world, even if it is just one state over.

But, I learned something recently that has helped me to put it in a new perspective. It's called the "Openness to Experience" trait. It is a personality trait identified and studied by psychologists. People who score high on this trait enjoy new experiences, new ideas, novelty, diversity, and travel.

This would be me.

I have spent significant amounts of time in Africa and Europe. I never order the same thing at a restaurant. Actually I prefer not to go to the same restaurant more than once unless it really deserves it. I will purposefully walk a different way to the grocery store just to go down a street I have never gone down before. You get the idea. I recognize that I am an extremist of the "Openness to Experience" trait.

People on the opposite side of this trait like things that are familiar, dependable, and safe. They are the people who go to the same restaurant and order the same thing, and preferably sit at the same table and have the same waitress. They like to be surrounded by things that they recognize, and prefer that you not try to change them, thank you very much.

This would be my dad's cousins.

It turns out that knowing where someone falls on the "Openness to Experience" trait can actually tell you a lot about them. It predicts what books they like to read, what foods they like to eat, and what political views they hold.*

The majority of people fall somewhere in the middle of the "Openness" continuum. We all find comfort in familiar things, but also like the excitement of trying new things. But, my dad's cousins and I are on opposite extremes. And over the years, when my parents told them of the places I was living and studying, they had a similar reaction as I had to their abandoned anniversary plans: "What?!"

For years we have stood on opposite ends, just staring at each other with awe and wonder.

We're like the City Mouse and the Country Mouse in the classic fable. And when they left Minneapolis nearly 3 decades ago, it was just as Aesop had written. They left the city mice to return home where they could live in peace.

(* For more information, see Jonathan Haidt's TED talk regarding the importance of recognizing the Openness to Experience trait.)

Zoom Zoom

As a sensitive and emotional person, often very small things have a disproportionately large effect on me. Something my husband says can spiral into a black hole of self-doubt. If the slightest thing doesn't go according to plan, I have been known to flip out and call the whole thing a failure.

It feels like my mind is a camera. For me, it is very easy to zoom way in and focus on one particular thing. And my reactions (or over reactions) are caused by the fact that I can't see anything outside the frame. Finding a way to zoom out is far more difficult because it means you have to expand your perspective.

It is much easier to just take the whole camera and point it at something else. We all have distraction techniques, right? Watching television, a certain game on your smart phone, spending hours on Pinterest, or even grabbing a bag of chips or a glass of wine. These are all ways to escape our minds. Everyone uses different escapes, but we all have them. And there is nothing wrong with escaping occasionally.

But, when we are done escaping, we always come back to the same situation we were escaping from. Nothing has changed. The more challenging and more rewarding technique to learn is to zoom out. Putting your situation in a different perspective can often show you new possibilities you hadn't seen before. It opens your mind to creative solutions that were previously blocked out. Do you know how to activate your zoom?

Because of the way our bodies and our minds work, there are a couple of things that are common for everyone. First, do something physical. For me, I like to go for a long walk and get as far out into the open as I can. It could be another form of exercise, yoga, stretching, singing, at least stand up off the couch or your chair. Whatever you do, be sure to breathe deeply. This sets off a whole series of things in our bodies that help to get our minds "unstuck." Notice this is the opposite of what we do to escape or zone out. Secondly, connect to something or someone outside yourself. Give your mind something new to contemplate. Literally try to zoom your mind out and think about something bigger than yourself, people in a different place experiencing different things than you.

This takes practice, but when you do look back at your own situation, which is still in the frame, it often looks and feels a lot different.

(NOTE: Can you spot the person in the lower right corner of the picture?)

Sleepless in Switzerland

There are a lot of things that keep us up at night. Children are notorious for interrupting a good night's sleep. From those challenging early weeks when sleep merely taunts you between feedings, to nights sitting up with sick kids or snuggling up with a child who sneaks into your room and says, "I'm scared."

In fact, I think mothers sleep differently than other people. I know the slightest sound or call of a child will wake me instantly while my husband continues to snore away next to me. Of course, I don't hear his alarm clock go off in the morning. It's like our subconscious knows the delegation of responsibilities.

Some people are kept up at night worrying about problems, or from being sick or in pain. I recently tore my MCL sledding in the mountains. Being horizontal was the worst, and every time I shifted positions at night, my knee would fall painfully out of alignment, wake me with a jolt and make it difficult to get comfortable again. At the same time, I had two sick children and we had just put our youngest in his first "big boy bed." Needless to say, I haven't had a really good night's sleep in a while.

I am the first person to defend the importance of sleep. It is a terrible feeling to be stuck in wakefulness when all you want to do is doze off but you can't. Those kinds of sleepless nights can feel endless.

But something else has kept me awake recently as well -- creativity. It is a completely different experience to be awake because your mind has so many new ideas. I didn't want to fall back to sleep for fear of forgetting the inspiration. I felt like a comedian or artist who keeps a pad of paper by the side of their bed (or a smart phone in my case) to write down the jokes or visions that come to them in the middle of the night. Only after recording them could I relax my mind again and drift off.

It is like a literal and figurative Awakening.

When something causes your mind to go into overdrive, or when you have an original idea, don't push it aside so that your can roll over and go back to sleep. Acknowledge it and follow it, as it is sure to lead you toward your dreams.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The other day, I sat down to write a bio for my website, and it was way harder than I anticipated. I'm a pretty self-aware person, that wasn't the issue. The problem was fitting everything in. There are the roles that I play in my life (wife, mother, entrepreneur...), the facts and statistics (where I live, how old I am...), there are the adjectives that describe me (creative, independent, emotional...), there is the narrative of what I have done, there are other things I like to do, the list goes on. I had to make choices about what to say and what not to say.

Then again, we all do that all the time. How we introduce ourselves depends not on our own self awareness, but on who we are talking to. When I am talking to other moms with young children, I focus on completely different things than when I am talking to other expatriates with no kids.

The people we spend time with become a mirror that reflects a certain part of ourselves back to us. We tend to hang around the people who provide a reflection that we like. But it is always a partial reflection, or a distorted reflection, like those crazy mirrors at a carnival where parts of us look really big and stretched out while other parts shrink way down.

It seems like the essence of who we are shouldn't change just because we emphasize certain parts of ourselves. But, if you hang out with the same kind of people all the time, you start to associate with the reflection you see. And the parts you don't see can fade or disappear out of view.

I have spent the past 6 months as a stay at home mom in Switzerland, with almost no break. We don't have any good babysitting resources, I don't speak the language well enough to do anything useful in the community. But, last weekend, my husband and I were able to stay overnight in a hotel without our children for the first time in a really long time. We were hiking through the mountains toward our hotel, and I couldn't stop smiling. I had the feeling that my soul was expanding. And I realized I was seeing a different reflection of myself, one that I hadn't seen for a long time. It was like meeting a part of myself all over again, and thinking "oh yeah! I remember you!"

Right now, "mother" is the dominant role that I play. For some people, it is "employee" or "spouse." These are all good role, and I love my children with all my heart. But spending a little time away and reawakening another part of myself made me a more whole person and an even better mother. Everywhere you read about parenting, someone says "make time for yourself." What they really mean is check your reflection in a different mirror.

Chalk it up to Experience

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I loved college. I was learning new things everyday, both inside and outside the classroom. I took everything from astronomy to modern dance. I got my first apartment and had to learn how to cook for myself and support myself. I took the opportunity to study abroad - in Zimbabwe! I joined groups and had different jobs. I tried everything that even remotely appealed to me, mostly to figure out what I really like. And, let's face it, who I really am. It was a chaotic time, but that was okay because there was nothing holding me down and the only person I really had to answer to was myself.

Oh how times have changed! Now I have a family that relies on me. A husband whose career choice is top priority. Three beautiful and spunky kids who require almost all of my time and energy. A house that comes with more responsibilities, including a mortgage. The sense of freedom I had in college is long gone.

Sound familiar?

This didn't happen overnight though. The years after college were still filled with new things. Getting my first job, buying our first house, having our first baby. All of these things are packed with learning experiences. After this phase, I know way more about the real estate business, the importance of a good credit score, and the inner workings of an infant's digestive system than I ever would have imagined in college.

But, somehow, these things took over my life. Or rather they became my life. What's the difference, really?

This is the life I wanted, right? The husband, the house, the family. Don't get me wrong, there are so many wonderful and challenging things about being a wife and a mother. But there are enough blogs dedicated to that already.

What about the ambitions and passions that used to define who I am? They can get pushed so far back in our lives and in our minds that they don't even register anymore. But they are still there, somewhere deep inside. As women, the depth of our souls is often covered by the roles that we play.

So how do we tap into those parts of ourselves? How do we reawaken our passions and ambitions? The same way we did in college - new life experiences.

My first career was in the field of experiential education. It sounds pretty academic, I know, but stick with me. I managed study abroad programs in Africa, India, and Chicago for college students. I loved these programs because they highlighted the fact that learning and growth happens just as much outside the classroom as it does inside the classroom, if not more! To continue our own personal growth throughout our lives, all we need are new experiences that expand our knowledge of the world around us and challenge us to figure out how we fit into it.

When was the last time you tried something new? Went somewhere you've never been? Did something challenging that made someone else say "Wow!"

Right now, I am in the middle of a built-in experiential education program. I am spending a year in Switzerland with my family. We came here for my husband's job (of course), but the experience has been incredible. Skiing and hiking in the Swiss Alps, weekend trips to European cities, and learning a new language are just the icing on the cake. For me, the daily challenge of making sense of another culture, relearning how to do everyday things a different way, and helping my kids to negotiate life here has reminded me of my strength and given me a renewed passion for life.

But, you don't have to leave the country to create new, meaningful experiences. There are a multitude of opportunities just waiting for you if you are ready to find them.

Be An Escalator

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My two-year-old son, Henry, LOVES escalators. There is one right at the front of our grocery store here in Switzerland. When I take Henry shopping, we can't get our cart before riding the escalators first. At the top, we simply walk about 10 feet to the left and ride back down again. I think the guys in the electronics store on the second level think of me as the crazy American mom who rides the escalators.

When we first got here, I had to hold Henry's hands so he wouldn't fall over. But now he can do it all by himself. That wasn't without some effort. I remember the first time he held his hand out to me and I said, "You can do it!" An expression of disbelief and fear crossed his face. He looked at the moving staircase and then back at me, as if to say, "Really?! Are you sure?" I smiled reassuringly and nodded.

He watched the stairs for a while. I think he was building up his courage. I even had to pull him aside a few times to let other people by.  But eventually he stuck out his little foot and stepped on. He quickly brought his other foot along and caught his balance. Then, he immediately turned to me for two reasons.... First, to make sure that I was right there with him. And second, to celebrate with me, "I did it!"

The pride I felt in that moment was about more than just stepping on an escalator. It was about watching my son find self confidence and independence. It was from seeing the joy in his face that he did something - anything! - on his own, when he can't even see over the railing yet.

As mothers, it is easy to become like stairs. We are so committed to our children doing well and having good lives, that we lay out the upward path and point the way (or hold their hands, or even push them sometimes). But as I was riding up the escalator with Henry, I realized that the reason he was able to take that step on his own was that he had seen me do it a hundred times.

It's scary, as a mom, to think about not being needed by our children. And it's true that kids won't always need us to hold their hands. But, being an example is the most powerful thing we can do for our kids. If we want our kids to live to their fullest potential, then that is what we should do too! Kids are so much more likely to watch what we do and say, "If my mom can do that, then I can too!"

If we are stuck in our own lives, like a static staircase, no matter how hard we point upward, our children are likely to step on us and then sit down and make themselves comfortable. But if we are like an escalator, moving our own lives forward and upward, our children will want to come along for the ride. And when we say, "You can do it!" it will mean something because we already have.