Note:  I used to write a newsletter for my coaching business.   However, I found newsletter making to be a hard slog.  Practice makes perfect, but I got fed up with motivating myself to practice.  So, I parted ways with that initiative last year.  A few of the articles weren’t too bad.  This is one of them.

Last month I sold my car, and learned something unexpected in the process: how to get over my hump when it comes to asking for help.

Prior to listing the car, I’d done my homework about the car’s value, how to price it, accepting payments, etc. But I hadn’t thought about how to handle the showing of the car, particularly when it came to personal safety. In a flash the world being a nice place with nice people who would make a fair offer on my very nice car to one full of people with evil on their minds. (I was selling my car just weeks after suspected serial killer Gary Hilton’s atrocities hit the local news.)

Although my imagination was on a tear, my common sense chimed in to say that I simply need to have someone accompany me whenever I made an appointment to show the car. (It also advised me to calm down and get a grip.) While the solution on the surface was simple enough, below the surface there were rumblings. To make it happen I would have to {gulp} “impose” and ask for help. For an independent-minded person such as myself, that’s not the way I prefer to handle things. I prefer to mow my own grass.

Luckily, the desire for self-preservation won out over independence, although that opened another can of angst. I still had to chew over who to ask:  who would be most willing, most available, least resistant?  Then, I chewed to death all the various reasons why my request would be a huge imposition: they had kids who had birthday parties and skating lessons, or worked 60 hours a week, or always had plans on the weekend, or turned off all communication devices the moment they entered their art studios, or some combination of all of the above. While these were legitimate reasons why my friends might have to say no, in truth I was making up ways to talk myself out of asking anyone at all.

But this was a case where the rubber had to hit the road.  In order to confirm the appointment to show my car I had to batten the hatches on my hang-ups and get on with asking for this favor. As it turned out, the first person I tried was both available and more than willing to help me out. A single woman herself who works long hours and is often busy on the weekends, her response was nonetheless an immediate, “of course!”

To make a long story short, my friend went with me a couple days later to show the car. It took all of an hour and then we were done. As we drove home I told her how hard much it meant that she had been there for me, and how hard it had been to ask for help in the first place. When she wanted to know why, I explained how I had turned a small request into the equivalent of donating a kidney.

We laughed about my wild imagineerings which when spoken aloud sounded completely absurd.  We swapped stories of how in hindsight  we would have spared ourselves all sorts of grief if we hadn’t tried to go it alone at various times.  And, I saw first hand how I can make life a little easier by not making a request for a little help a big deal.

More notably, I saw how I I’ve become more comfortable with being the one who helps a friend rather than the one who is helped, that I’ve forgotten that others want to express their friendship by being the one to lend a hand.  But those ruminations will be savored another day.  Today, I’m grateful that the next time a similar situation arises, I now have the positive proof with which to challenge my thinking.

Yesterday a friend described a dream in which she met the Queen of England. The Queen, she said, was perfectly gracious, (and generous) providing her with an equally gracious butler who told her not to worry, that everything she needed would be provided. She awoke infused with a sense of peace, of finding protection beneath a queen’s wing.

Last night I dreamed of a cobra. I was at a wedding at which apparently everyone’s pet dogs and cats were also invited guests. I’m having a conversation with someone when out of the corner of my eye I see a snake slither out of the room. I look around and no one else seems to have noticed. In the dream I imagine that I’ve imagined the snake, so I go over to the window next to the door under which the snake escaped. On the lawn outside, the cats and dogs are doing their thing. No sign of the snake. I lean out the window and beneath I see the snake attacking a squirrel. The squirrel is already stiff. It’s a goner. And then the snake puffs out its back, and then I know there’s a cobra lurking amongst us. I awoke at the point when I’m most concerned about the safety of the dogs and cats within striking distance and when I’m wondering how to alert everyone without causing a panic and ruining a wedding.

And yet this wasn’t a cold sweat dream prickled with anxiety. I woke with a sense that the cobra didn’t represent a menace or the squirrel a tragedy, and that to apply that literal interpretation to what’s happening in my life was off. Way off. It feels like something has been attacked and killed, but it’s not me. I’m safe and sound.

Anyhoo, our ducks, Claude and Mimi, have returned. For three years now a mating pair of mallards have camped out in the stream that runs along our yard. I can’t say for certain it’s always the same pair, but we use the same names. We’ve never seen any offspring, but we know they’re working on it. Duck congress is a raucous, rough affair. For the most part Claude is gentle and attentive, that is until he gets the itch to procreate. Then he’s a different duck, a duck who will not accept no for an answer. There’s all sorts of thrashing about, Mimi squawking as if it’s Armageddon. I want to interfere. I want to give Claude a good scolding. But I resist for all the obvious reasons.

They’re out in the stream now, the pair. It’s bucketing down and the stream current is pretty swift, but they’re side by side and by all appearances they’re taking a nap.

Here’s a photo of the pair on a nicer day.

Note:  I used to write a newsletter for my coaching business.   However, I found newsletter making to be a hard slog.  Practice makes perfect, but I got fed up with motivating myself to practice.  So, I parted ways with that initiative last year.  A few of the articles weren’t too bad.  This is one of them.  It was originally a five-part series that I’ve condensed into one.

There’s no oomph thief like the cold, gray days of February. (The fact that it’s a short month is nice but not enough.)

Let’s face it, though, be it the weather, a person, a place or a thing, there always lurks in the shadows a joy thief capable of stealing our energy, our optimism, or our precious oomph.

Half the time we can’t even see the thievery about to happen. It’s not until the droopiness and boredom begin to feel perpetual that we realize our verve and oomph have been lifted, that like emptied frames on a museum wall, there’s just white space where once there was something vivid and meaningful.

Here are a few ways to recoup your oomph.

Oomph Tip #1: Keep A Feel Good File

Now and again I’ll get an email from someone who lets me know that something I’ve written or done has struck or stuck with them — in a good way. Fan mail, I adore it. And, I store it in a snazzy file folder (plain vanilla cardstock won’t do) I call my Feel Good File.

There’s other stuff in this folder as well — a few old love letters, thank you notes from clients; kudos from friends and colleagues; performance evaluations from my Corporate America days; kindly, informative handwritten rejection letters received long, long ago from literary journal editors to who I submitted a short story that ultimately didn’t make the cut, but still…they took the time to write a note.

I need to be reminded of sometimes that I’ve done good work, had a positive impact, held a place in someone’s heart. Especially on really, really crappy days when everything seems misaligned or to be falling apart.

This folder with its collection of emails and notes and reports acquired across a couple decades are a refuge from my own lopsided self-perceptions, evidence of small but still significant success stories. When I flip through it, reading this note or pausing over that photograph, my perspective shifts, and once again I can see what others saw – in me, about me, around me.

Oomph Tip #2 – Mood Props

The following items have one thing in common: they pick me up when I’m feeling blah.

• A orange-red glass egg cup in the shape of a chicken.
• A fortune cookie fortune that reads: “You are heading in the right direction.”
• An illustrated postcard of La Grande Roue (ferris wheel) in Paris covered in snow and outlined in silver glitter.
• A bar of vanilla-papaya-oatmeal soap bought in the village of Kilauea on the island of Kauai.

Sometimes good memories can hoist us up.  At times I prefer these tangibles. Unlike a memory, I can hold the egg cup and the stone in my hand and feel their weight, trace the outline of the ferris wheel, open the egg and unroll the fortune curled inside, sniff the soap.

Oomph Tip #3 – Pull Some Weeds

You don’t have to own a yard. (A patch of city park will do.)

You don’t have to buy a book that shows you which ones are weeds and which are not. (Go with what’s obvious.)

You don’t need a strategy. (Be in the moment.)

You don’t have to compose a eulogy for the plants that will die so that other plants will live. (Those weeds had a good run.)

All you have to do is put your fingers in the dirt and yank a few dandelions or crabgrass tufts.

When that first small patch is cleared and you glimpse the other plants that have been struggling to grow beneath the weed canopy…or, you survey the weed pile at your feet and lose count…or, you can at least see the potential of that newly emptied space you will see how the power to recoup your oomph thrives in your hands.

Oomph Tip #4 – Sleep

The relationship between being overtired and under-oomphed is fairly straightforward. And yet as reported in an article on sleep in the New York Times Magazine last November, “there is a sometimes-stunning failure to see sleep’s cause-and-effect relationship to what we do while awake.” So, um, that’s why we get so cranky and muddled after staying up too late? Um, yeah. When we don’t get enough rest, our energy runs as hot as an igloo and our oomph has the pouf of a pancake.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve espied my dog sound asleep in his basket plumped with pillows and fleeces, his little pink tongue sticking out, snoring away, and thought, “damn you.” By contrast on such occasions, I may be awake but I’m not AWAKE. More likely, I’m thinking how nice it would be to take a nap, even a little itty bitty nap, to just close my weary eyes and dooooooooze off…but then I SNAP to, all thoughts of slumber busted, because my mind starts rolling over X, Y and Z that I have to crank out before shut-eye.

Now, of course I don’t really resent my dog’s ability to sack out, but I so covet his ability to forgo his cares and snooze. Granted, his cares are different from mine (somebody has to bring home the bacon that buys the bag of dog food). But I can’t deny that when it comes to identifying the party most responsible for my inadequate sleep, the buck stops with yours truly.

When it comes to our sleep habits, we can be our own worst enemies. We sneak in one last cup of high-test coffee late in the day. We worry, stew, plan and putter late into the evening, thus winding ourselves up when we would be better served by winding down. We make a lack of sleep a badge of honor, a sign of stamina and grit, a desirable quality. But that’s a misguided notion with potentially dire results.

In March, 60 minutes aired a segment called the Science of Sleep. Some of the featured research showed that rats began dying after being kept awake for five days, thus indicating that sleep is as essential as food to our survival. In another experiment, after an extended span of sleep deprivation previously healthy people showed symptoms of diabetes. In yet another study, overtired participants were shown to be more likely to overeat because the body stopped regulating their appetite.

If you’re tired of being tired, start with assessing the habits that might be compromising your ability to get your z’s, such as how much caffeine your drinking or a tendency to update your Facebook page at midnight. To that end, explore how you need to set yourself up to fall asleep, i.e. do you need to have your teeth brushed and be in your jammies by 10 PM if you want to be sawing logs by 11?

There may be a quirky part of you that tries to undermine your efforts to get more sleep. It’s that little voice that says you’re invincible, that sleep is for sissies, that staying up to watch the Mary Tyler Moore marathon will cheer you up more than anything else. Don’t let that little voice fool you, though. There’s more at stake here than your oomph. Sleep, as more and more research shows, has a profound impact on the quality of so many things, not the least of which is your life.

So, off you go…nighty-night. Please. turn. off. the. lights. and. go. to. sleep.

Today’s appointment at the French consulate taught me two things: a) I’m going to have to get used to pissing people off; b) I can’t take it too personally.

When you arrive at the consulate there are two doors. To your right is the door to the waiting room for people seeking a visa. The door on the left is for all other consulate business. There’s no attendant or receptionist on the visa side. There is one on the other side, but that does NOT mean it’s OK to ask that receptionist anything whatsoever regarding the visas. (We discovered that at the last appointment regarding my visa application.)

So, today I arrived knowing which door to open and which door to not open. Except that the door to the visa waiting room was locked. And of course, there’s no point in knocking because there’s no one to open the door.

In the states if you have an appointment, you’re expected to announce yourself, to let the person at the reception desk know who you are, what you’re there for, and who you’re there to see.

At the consulate, it’s a different story. To announce yourself must be against protocol. Because when the receptionist buzzed me in, and I stated my business I received not an invitation to sit down but an icy stare and was sternly told that visas are handled at the other door.

But the door is locked, I said.

And it’s still over there, she said. I was thus dismissed.

So, I stood in the hallway and waited. And waited. And waited, unsure just how long I would have to hold up the wall.

Finally a group of people returning to the non-visa side of the office approached. They said hello. I said hello. One of them paused and inquired if I was there to see anyone. I explained who and why. He took my papers and told me to please wait. I have an opinion about this request, but I stifle it and its attending four letter words to myself. At least he said please. I thank him and count to ten.

A few minutes later, a woman arrives at the visa window. I hear a click, and thus I gain entrance. It takes all of five minutes to complete the process, and voilà, I have my visa in hand. Formidable! The woman is very nice, which emboldens me to ask her {gasp} a question about obtaining a form, the certificat de changement de résidence. This form allows you to ship your household goods into France without having to pay a tax.

I’m told that the form is available via the other door. Never mind that there’s merely a wall separating the two sides of the office, separating me and this one little form. In my head I think where’s the effing logic to this set up, but that’s another thought wedgie I suppress. Apparently this form can only be dispensed by someone on the other side of the other door, so that’s where I’ll go next.

Then it occurs to me that I’ll have to speak with the ice queen. Ugh. I suck it up and ring the buzzer. She looks up. Sees me. Grits her teeth. I draw a question mark in the air. She lets me in, and I do my best to request the form en français.

She says something back to me in French. I have no idea what. I say excuse me. She asks me my nationality – as if she doesn’t already know! I tell her. She runs her hands along her temples so that I know just how much I’ve pained her and says, “Our morning hours are over. This office is closed.”

I understand that I’m not going to get that piece of paper today. The form could be taped to the end of her nose. The room could be wall papered with it. She could be sitting on a stack of them. But, procedures are procedures: the office is closed and therefore I cannot have one. Even if I say please.

So, I leave, pausing at the door to see if the office hours are even posted. They are, but the etching in the glass is so dull I have to squint to make them out.

My takeaway from this experience has nothing to do with stupid bureaucracy or snotty bureaucrats or how rude the French can be. I can find rudeness and rule monkeys anywhere in the world.

It’s learning to live with the fact that in the years we live abroad my foreignness will irritate some people. My strange ways, my lack of understanding, my linguistic botches, my this and my that will royally piss them off. Unintentionally, but that’s beside the point. The fact is, I’ll be on the cold side of the glass door and accessing the warm side isn’t a sure thing. I’m going to mess up and miss some cues – not all the time, but often enough.

It’s humbling. It’s enlightening. If I don’t let it get to me, let it make me feel small and crumpled, let it plunder my thunder and pillage my humor, I will be fine. And then some.