Last month—April 10, to be exact—marked the third anniversary of my exit from the salaried workforce and my entry into what I’ve taken to calling Plan B Nation. After four-plus years at Harvard Law School, where I’d handled speeches and other behind-the-scenes writing for then-Dean (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan, she decamped for Washington, D.C., and I decamped for parts unknown at the peak of the Great Recession.

It was, to put it diplomatically, not an easy time. The economy was in free fall, plus I had no idea what to do next. Which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing because, had I known what I wanted to do, I likely couldn’t have done it. (Did I mention the Great Recession?) Floundering in spring 2009 put me in excellent company. Yes, I was freaked out and unemployed, but I certainly wasn’t alone.

In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the road I’ve traveled since those anxiety-ridden days and feeling a lot of compassion for the me who so stolidly trudged through them. I’ve also been thinking about what I’ve learned and what might be worth sharing. Here are five of the biggest lessons that I still carry with me.

1.  Transitions take a long time.  

I’ve written about this before, and it’s a really important point.  In New Pas­sages, best­selling author Gail Sheehy ball­parks two years as the min­i­mum time needed to sta­bi­lize fol­low­ing a lay­off or other “life accident.”  Five to seven years is common.  A related point: Transitions tend to meander—to be less like ladders and more like the classic labyrinth, where you wind your way slowly towards the center, almost arrive, and then suddenly find yourself on the outer rim, and then, just as unpredictably, back at the center again. I often find it helpful to remind myself that this is just the nature of the beast.     

2.  Sometimes the grass is greener because it’s greener.  

I put off leaving the Boston area for more than a year on the theory that wherever you go, there you are. Could moving to another place really make me happier? I’m happy to say that the answer is an unequivocal Yes. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that moving to an area that I love is probably the single most important step I’ve taken to move my life forward.  In particular, moving to a place where I have a strong network of friends has made everything far easier—as well as a lot more fun.

3.  If you don’t know what to do for sure, start moving anyway.

Transitions, by their nature, generally involve a temporary loss of clear inner direction.  That was certainly the case for me: I was searching without really knowing what I was looking for (which, not surprisingly, made it really hard to find).

Looking back, one of the most useful things I did during this time was to take action even if nothing felt quite right—to experiment, try things out. That’s how I came (lackadaisically, glumly) to write my very first personal essay—which led to a blog on Huffington Post, which led to writing for Salon, which led to this blog, which led to writing for SecondAct (including Notes from Plan B Nation, my new monthly column), Psychology Today, and a bunch of other stuff, which, remarkably enough, actually does feel right and for which I feel really grateful.

And you don’t need to take my word for it: I’ve since come across similar advice in books by career guru Barbara Sher and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. “You won’t encounter accidental good fortune—you won’t stumble on opportunities that rocket your career forward—if you’re lying in bed,” Hoffman writes in The Start-Up of You. “When you do something you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations and opportunities.” I couldn’t agree more.

4.  Be kind to yourself.

We’ve all heard a lot about mindfulness by now, but this quality doesn’t really get you very far unless it’s paired with self-compassion. Psychology professor Kristin Neff is a pioneering researcher on this topic, and her book Self Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind is geared to a popular audience and provides an excellent roadmap for further exploration.

5.  Let yourself be surprised.

The biggest difference between lucky and unlucky people may be that lucky people are open to seeing the unexpected. (For more on this, check out this reported research.)  Expanding your peripheral vision can do a lot to expand your opportunities.  I’ve found it to be useful—as well as fun—to consciously expect the unexpected. (Most recent example: I’m about to go off to look at a potential new home that I discovered last night on Facebook.)

♦

Strangely enough, my Plan B Nation life has turned out to suit me far better than the life I had before. I’m finally doing work that feels both meaningful and creative. I have a great community in a place where I love living. The road I’ve traveled to get here was pretty remarkably hard, but that doesn’t tell me I did something wrong. It simply tells me that I’m human.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

“Live the questions now,” the poet Rainier Maria Rilke famously exhorted in Letters to a Young Poet, a message that has since found its way onto countless inspirational greeting cards and posters. “Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Great advice so far as it goes but also incomplete: For the Question-Driven Life to work, we have to choose our questions wisely.

What is wrong with me?

Why is this taking so long?

What is his problem?

I’m pretty sure these are not the sort of questions Rilke had in mind, and yet all too often they’re the ones I find myself living.

In Reality Therapy, a book I skimmed some months back while unpacking boxes from storage, psychiatrist William Glasser stresses the importance of staying focused on our basic needs in the here and now. (In Glasser’s view, we have two core psychological needs: the need to love and be loved and the need to feel that we are worthwhile to ourselves and others.)  In this spirit, I’ve found that asking the question “What do I need right now?” can be a big help in cutting through circular brooding tape loops.

The Fluent Self’s Havi Brooks offers another take on this question that I really like, one that incorporates her own quirky lexicon: “What can I do right now so I can feel safe, supported, and sovereign?”  (As a side note, when I first played with this question a couple months back, one of my scribbled responses was to try joining Click Workspace in hopes of making my writing day feel a bit less isolated. Guess where I’m writing this post right now? And quite happily, I might add.)

A few more questions that have served me well recent months:

What is useful in this?

Is this necessary?

What do I need to take time to appreciate?

Such questions have the advantage of being both distracting and empowering. It’s far easier to stop dwelling on a topic when I swap it out for another. (Baby, meet pacifier. Dog, meet chew toy.) Plus questions tend to put me in a problem solving mode. They’re a way to take control of a problem that seemed to have control of me.

Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg determined that the mere act of observation affects the behavior of quantum particles. While the science of this is far beyond me, I see an analogy here: The interpretive frames through which we view our thoughts transform the thoughts themselves. Viewing a problem through the right question may in time turn it into an answer.

What does “live the questions” mean to you? Please share your thoughts below.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

You’ve doubtless heard the maxim that “You don’t regret the things you do. You regret the things you don’t do.” I’ve never understood why so few are bothered by the major logical flaw here: You can’t do two things at once. Choose X? You can’t choose Y. Regardless of which path you choose, there’s something else you won’t be doing.

I think about this a lot when I’m questioning past choices or starting to second-guess decisions made months or years ago. More and more, I’m convinced that regrets aren’t signs of bad decision-making but rather reflections of temperament and cognitive style. Regrets don’t reflect objective truth. They’re simply interpretations.

A couple years back, I dipped a toe into the critical maelstrom surrounding the book Marry Him, writer Lori Gottlieb’s exhortation to younger women to marry that nice if slightly dull boyfriend instead of holding out for true love and risk ending up (like Gottlieb—and me) single at midlife.

Along the spectrum of Marry Him commentaries—which ranged from the virulently pro to the virulently anti—the review I wrote for the Chicago Tribune fell somewhere in the middle. While I certainly got where Gottlieb was coming from, I couldn’t buy her solution—and not because of its dubious politics but because I couldn’t see it working. (Indeed, with some dark humor, I couldn’t stop picturing a sea of future middle-aged women, cursing that stupid book that convinced them to marry the guy they’re divorcing.)

The fact is, life is risky. There are no guarantees, no fail-proof roadmaps to a fairy tale ending. The answer isn’t to blame ourselves or to look for ways to game the human condition but rather to do the best we can and accept our essential limitations.

I recently interviewed psychology professor Kristin Neff, a leading expert on self-compassion and author of a book by that name, and was struck by what she had to say on this topic: “We love to have an illusion of control because it makes us feel safe. In an ironic way, I think what happens when we criticize ourselves is that we’re saying ‘Oh, I should have had control.  If it was something I did, then I did have control, I just made the wrong move.’ When in fact, the reality is that I didn’t have a lot of control. I did my best, but I couldn’t make things turn out the way I wanted them to. In a weird way, sometimes it’s less scary to people to blame themselves than it is to admit that we human beings often don’t have a lot of say over our lives. It’s hard being human!”

My thoughts exactly.

The notion that our biggest regrets tend to stem from things we failed to do bears a striking resemblance to the maxim that “the grass is always greener on the other side”—the salient difference being that the two are invoked to make opposite points. Here again, I’m reminded of the 28 conflicting legal rules famously set forth in a 1950 law review piece. When judges go about inter­pret­ing laws, there are “cor­rect, unchal­lenge­able rules of ‘how to read’ which lead in hap­pily vari­ant direc­tions,” the author dryly concluded.

For her part, along with urging readers to make haste and marry, Gottlieb set out to do the same herself, albeit belatedly.  Her primary strategy: Be less picky. She expounds on academic research that places people in two relevant groups: “maximizers,” who demand the very best, and “satisficers,” who do fine with good enough. As Gottlieb sees it, the solution is clear. She just needs to switch teams.

It wasn’t until after my review was published that this thought occurred to me: Gottlieb has a beautiful child, a successful writing career. Wouldn’t a true satisficer start by focusing there?

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

I’d pretty much made up my mind to call off my 2012 Life Experiments experiment starting this month. I’d already aborted Life Experiment #3 (taking a photo a day during March) after less than a week, and more and more, I’d been feeling that I needed to prune my to-do list, rather than adding to it.

And then, it hit me: That could be the focus of this month’s Life Experiment. And so it will be. For me, this month is going to be all about doing less.

But first, I want to take a moment to appreciate how hugely much I accomplished during the month that just ended. All too often, I tend to ask myself: What have you done for me lately? I also have a default answer: Not nearly enough.

In fact, that’s rarely if ever true, and it certainly wasn’t true in April. And because things tend to feel more real if I write them down, that’s what I’m going to do. So here it is, my personal selective account of What Got Done in April:

• Researched and wrote a 3,000-word feature story for Psychology Today (now slated for the magazine’s October issue)
• Wrote and delivered a 30-minute talk—“Inside the Downturn: Thoughts on the Psychological Costs of Longterm Unemployment”—to our Regional Employment Board.
• Signed on to write a monthly column—“Notes from Plan B Nation”—for Entrepreneur Media’s SecondAct.com (first installation forthcoming this month)
• Completed 2011 taxes (thanks Turbotax!), sorted out health insurance issues, and wrangled a sick cat (thanks Wendy and Susan!)
• Applied for jobs and conferred with editors about future freelance projects, including an upcoming book review assignment for the Chicago Tribune.
• Guest posted on The 52 Weeks
• Finished up co-facilitating Seeing Their Voices, a workshop for foster kids that will culminate in a photo and writing exhibit at the statehouse this June.

I also did purely fun stuff: A South Face Farm Sugarhouse outing with the Baskinettes. Lots of coffee dates. Movies. Two lovely seders and an Easter hike with friends.

Does that seem like a lot to you? It seems like a lot to me—especially since I’m not naturally inclined to multi-tasking. When left to my own devices, I’ll always go deep rather than wide. But there are times—this past month, for example—when that’s simply not possible.

And here, I have to give a shout-out to breadcrumbs and basket weaving, aka Life Experiment #4, which helped me more than I could ever have imagined it would. Metaphors have tremendous, if often unrecognized, power. I could say a lot more on this subject, and at some point I will. But for now, I’m going to stop. Or rather: I’m going to start doing less.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

It’s been almost a month since my last post. Blogging experts may differ as to the optimal frequency for posting, but on one point, I’m confident they all agree: It should be more than once a month.

That being said, I had my reasons. This month has been breathtakingly busy. Though, admittedly, any such assessment is a relative one. I once marveled at a prolific writer friend’s ability to churn out books while also holding down a full-time job. “I could never do that,” I said. “No,” he agreed, reflectively. “You need a lot of time to hang out.”

He had a point. And while “a lot” may also be a relative term, I definitely do need some. Which brings me to how I made the decision to take a break from blogging.

Here’s the thing: This blog isn’t just about my life; it’s also a life laboratory. I am both subject and object, both creator and data. When I sit down at my laptop to write, I’m not thinking only about the writing but also about the writer. How is she feeling? What is she thinking? How is she relating to this singular act of putting words on paper?

For pretty much all of my life, I’ve been an achievement junkie. Degrees. Jobs. Books. You name it. I’ve been really really good at getting things done, at erecting whatever psychic dams are needed to stem the emotional tides. You might say my motto has been: Act now; feel later.

But while this strategy may have its place, it also has its limits. I see this more and more. Like adrenaline, it’s good for emergencies, not so good for the long haul.

I’m still figuring out where to draw the lines—still following breadcrumbs—but in the meantime, a few salient markers are starting to emerge.

For one thing, my life works best when I hold my plans lightly. To put it diplomatically, this is not my usual M.O., which tends towards command and control. The metrics for this are simple. Accomplish your goals, and you have succeeded; fall down on the job, and you’ve failed.

Predictably, I began the month with this idea in mind. Even with my other projects-in-waiting, two posts a week struck me as a fairly modest target. But in the days that followed, my stress level grew, and something started to shift. A single question presented itself: What is the real point? This didn’t feel like edging towards procrastination or squirming out of work. Rather it felt like a small first step towards taking care of myself.

So what is the real point? Why did I start blogging? Last fall, at a particularly difficult crossroads, I went in search of ways to feel more grounded, more connected, and well, happier. Blogging has given me all these things, which is why I keep at it. Would strong-arming myself into twice-weekly posts really build on this foundation? It seemed to me that the blog could wait. And so it did.

“There comes a time in life when you have to stop doing things for instrumental reasons,” my first-year moot court partner told me, explaining why he had no intention of trying for a spot on the Harvard Law Review. More than two decades later, I still recall those words. They seemed important at the time. Now I understand why.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

So if you think I haven’t been blogging as much: you’re right.

Over the past few weeks, my personal Plan B Nation has become an increasingly busy place, and while that’s mainly a very good thing, it’s also entailing some readjustments and recalibrations.

As you may have read, last month’s Life Experiment—taking a photo everyday as I learned to use my new digital camera—came to an abrupt end only days after it began.  I realized I simply couldn’t add another thing to my plate. While at first I saw this as a failure (bad!), I ended up realizing that it was doing what any good experiment should: Giving me useful information.

In that spirit, I’m taking this month’s Life Experiment in a somewhat different direction. Instead of focusing on an activity, I’ll be playing with metaphor and shifting perspective.

I recently wrote about how I’m trying to bring more playfulness into my life—to still get things done but to have more lightness in the doing.  For much of my foray in Plan B Nation, Getting Things Done has felt like accomplishment enough. On some days simply getting out of bed felt like a pretty big deal.

But lately, I’ve come to wonder if things have to feel so grim. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the role of metaphor. Which brings me to breadcrumbs and basket weaving, aka Life Experiment #4.

On Breadcrumbs …

Instead of marching through a to-do list, I’m a bird following bread crumbs.  Breadcrumbs are: Nourishing.  A bird doesn’t order itself to follow a trail of breadcrumbs. That comes naturally. A trail of breadcrumbs invites you on. You don’t have to think about it.

I’ve been playing with this over the past few weeks, and I like how it’s feeling.  Looking for the next breadcrumb is way better than pushing myself to Be More Productive.

and basket weaving

Another big challenge has been feeling that I’m moving in too many different directions. By nature and habit, I go for depth rather than for breadth. I like to focus on one thing, to give it my full attention.

Of course, that isn’t always possible—it isn’t for me right now—so I’ve been mulling over how I can keep doing lots of things but feel a little less stressed. The answer, at least for now, seems to be basket weaving.

Instead of seeing life as pulling me in disparate conflicting directions, I’m thinking of my various activities as strands in a single  basket. The challenge is weaving them together. The challenge is creating a whole. What I was viewing as a source of stress has become a creative project.

Which isn’t to say that I really like being all this busy. I’m hoping (expecting) that by April’s end, things will have settled down. In the meantime, I plan to do what I can to hold the situation lightly—to follow the trail of breadcrumbs and practice basket weaving.

Note: My interest in how metaphor can shape experience was sparked by The Fluent Self’s Havi Brooks–if you’re interested in reading more, she’s written loads on the topic.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

This month’s Life Experiment has been a total bust. Except that it’s also been a total success. Let me explain.

As some readers will recall, I began this month with the idea that I would take at least one photograph each day. I was interested in how this would shift the way I moved through the world and also viewed it as an opportunity to learn to use a recently acquired but languishing digital camera.

All of this made sense in theory. In practice? Not so much. Here’s how it played out.

At the end of a harried Day 1, I snapped a hasty photo with my iPhone. (Better than nothing, I told myself.)

Day 2, same thing.

By Day 3 or 4, I’d forgotten about it. Ditto the days that followed. Until at some point over the next week I realized that this wasn’t happening.

My first reaction was to get stressed out over my follow-through failure. What was I going to write this month? What would I say to you readers?

But the more I thought about it, the more I saw another possibility.  After all, this was billed as an experiment. No, it hadn’t gone off as planned, but that was entirely different from saying that it had been a total loss. I decided—as an experiment—to adopt a different perspective, to detach the experience from the goal and ask what it had to teach me.

Here’s what I found:

1. I need to reconnect with my core purpose.

When I embarked on monthly Life Experiments at the start of 2012, my goal wasn’t to create yet another to-do list. Rather it was to explore how changing one thing in my life might lead to other unexpected shifts. Over time, I’ve started to lose track of this, and my “experiments” have come to feel more and more like 30-day Challenges. Be more productive! Just do it!  That wasn’t what I’d been aiming for, but it’s where I ended up. Time for some reflection and retuning.

2. I need to do less, not more.

The reason I wasn’t taking photos was very simple. I’m really really busy!  Over the past six months, I’ve gone from struggling to fill my days with meaningful activities to a jam-packed schedule, with freelance deadlines, workshop facilitating, friends, exercise, and life maintenance all vying for time. This is in many ways a good thing, but it also has its own challenges, which I need to find ways to address. (Also: I need to take time to appreciate how far I’ve come!)

3.  I need to do more to infuse my life with playfulness.

I recently wrote about an ah hah recognition that I need more playfulness in my life. During my time in Plan B Nation, I’ve taken a lot of pride in my ability to simply carry on, to put one foot in front of the other during hard and uncertain times. There have been days—and not a few—when simply getting out of bed felt like a real accomplishment. It seemed like enough that I could say, in the words of 12-step programs everywhere, that I’d managed to “take the next right action.”

But I’ve come to see that, while this approach can be helpful in times of crisis, it’s not (for me) the best approach to life over the long haul. Over the long haul, I want to be happy, not simply to endure. Getting things done is certainly part of a happy life, but it’s far from sufficient.

Language plays a big role here: The more I think about this issue, the more aware I am of how the words I use shape the quality of my daily experience. Tool kit. Task List. Marching orders. This is the language of command and control. This is the language that, all too often, I use when I talk to myself (when issuing marching orders).

It doesn’t have to be this way.

For example, instead of “next right action” how about “breadcrumbs”? Think fairy tales, think Hansel and Gretel and the trail they left to find their way back home. (Okay, so in the story birds eat the bread, but I still like the metaphor.)

♦

Over the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about what qualities help us thrive while traveling Plan B Nation (and other psychologically harsh terrains), and it seems to me that one of the most important is the quality of openness. By this, I mean the ability to see alternatives and possibility where we might easily see failure.

In a feature story about famous accidental discoveries, the Daily Beast recounts how the discovery of penicillin came about after Scottish bacteriologist Andrew Fleming noticed that mold had started to grow on some cultures he’d left exposed. Years later, he toured a state-of-the-art medical lab, far cleaner than the one where his scientific breakthrough occurred.

“If you had worked here, think of what you could have invented,” his guide remarked.

Fleming’s cool response: “Not penicillin.”

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

In July 2010, amidst continued fall-out from the Great Recession, the New York Times published a front-page story about an unemployed college graduate living with his parents in a Boston suburb who’d just turned down a $40,000-a-year job as an insurance claims adjustor.

“I am absolutely certain that my job hunt will eventually pay off,” said 24-year-old Scott Nicholson, a Colgate University honors graduate with a degree in political science, explaining his decision to hold out for something better even after two years of fruitless searching.

The piece quickly became notorious, setting off a tsunami of online comments—1,487 at last count—the vast majority expressing outrage at what readers perceived as an absurd sense of entitlement enabled by a too-indulgent family.

“Turning down a job for $40,000 a year after graduating from a second tier (at best) school because he is too good for the position? The kid deserves whatever hardship he endures,” was one typically harsh response.

I recently thought back to this article—and the heated debate that ensued—when I got a call from a friend who heads up a big department of a big organization. She’d read some of my posts about the challenges of looking for work after the Great Recession and wanted to share her own quite different perspective.

“I can’t give jobs away!” he (or she—I promised anonymity) insisted. “Nobody knows how to work anymore. They’ll say ‘I might have to miss yoga today, and that’s not okay.’”

I have to say I found this fascinating. And while it was (and is) hard for me to believe that the situation for employers is really quite so bleak, I did start to notice other signs of similar frustration. For example this plaintive tweet from a local tech entrepreneur, formerly of Microsoft: “Why do so few job applicants bother to follow up? And some of the best cover letters don’t even show up for interviews.”

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that such behaviors, along with the resulting frustration, can be traced to a profound confusion about what work is and is not, as well as what it should be—a confusion now thrown into relief by the stressor of hard times.

It’s not news that the so-called millennials—the cohort now entering the workforce—grew up with extraordinary expectations fueled by Baby Boomer parents who encouraged them to dream big. Further feeding such attitudes was the Oprah-fication of American popular culture along with self-help classics such as Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow and the mega-bestseller The Secret, which posits a “law of attraction” that allows each of us to “manifest” our desires. Even the popular maxim that “anyone can be president” (never mind the nation’s declining place on social mobility measures) can be traced to this cultural strand.

At the same time, our nation is deeply rooted in the Puritan work ethic, with its emphasis on frugality, discipline, and self-reliance. Such teachings have been with us from early days, finding expression in the best-selling writings of Benjamin Franklin up on through present-day political rhetoric. (Think Mitt Romney’s tireless if problematic claims of being a self-made man.)

Follow your dreams, whatever it takes.  Pay your own way, whatever it takes.

That millennials are struggling should come as no surprise, given these exacting and often conflicting cultural expectations. Those of us who came of age in the Boom Years may have managed to bridge the two. But when money is scarce and jobs are few (Hello, New Normal!), this is no easy feat.

So what’s a millennial supposed to do? Presented with conflicting absolutes, how are they supposed to choose?

This is precisely the sort of dilemma considered by Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan in In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. As Kegan sees it, we live in an age where demands are many and often at odds, and guidelines for choosing between them are scarce. At the same time, relatively few of us are sufficiently grounded in our own beliefs to stand up to social pressures and chart an independent course—to be what Kegan calls “self authoring.” That’s not such a big problem when society’s expectations are consistent. But when a culture makes the sort of conflicting demands that ours routinely does, things can turn ugly very quickly.

Which is where many millennials find themselves right now: Wanting to do the Right Thing but without a way to decide what that right thing is. Where is the line between self-confidence and entitlement? Where is the line between admirable risk-taking and foolish behavior? Where is the line between being responsible and giving up?

Depending on whom a millennial asks, they’re likely to get different answers, and regardless of which one they choose, they’re likely to find themselves at odds with someone whose opinion they value. There may not be much that we can do right now to change this cultural context. What we can do is to acknowledge that Scott Nicholson and other millennials have good reason to feel dazed and confused.

Edited 3/15/12: Various non-substantive revisions for style and clarification.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

I launched this blog late last year with the goal of exploring strategies for dealing with the psychological aftermath of the Great Recession.

Since then, I’ve cast a pretty wide net, with posts focused on economic and labor policy as well as personal tactics for navigating Plan B Nation, but in a world where so much is beyond our control, I remain especially intrigued by how we make the most of the limited swath within it.

To that end, I’ve spent countless hours reflecting on what behaviors and approaches best equip us thrive in these turbulent times. A recent (and surprising) addition to my list: The quality of playfulness.

A big push in this direction came some weeks back when I started reading Havi Brooks’ seriously playful Fluent Self blog. And when I say “seriously playful” that’s exactly what I mean. As I dove into the magic-kingdom secret-language world of The Fluent Self, I watched myself soak up playfulness like a parched plant soaks up water.

In particular, I was drawn to Havi’s explicit attention to the deployment of language—the inventing of new words and metaphors to transform experience. It’s something I’ve been playing (playing!) with for the last couple of weeks, and while the whole thing is still a work in progress (game!), it’s been a fascinating exploration.

Playing with language often seems to help me step back. To detach from whatever experience I’m having, and assess it from a different angle. It stops being The Truth. It becomes Something to Look At. Playing with language can be an act of kindness toward myself.

An example of what I’m talking about:

The other day, I was feeling especially oppressed by the running “Project List” I keep on my computer. Taking a leaf from Havi’s book, I decided that—just for fun, as an experiment—I’d try calling it something else. I jotted down my five priority items and labeled them “Scruffles.” Strange and even kooky as this may sound, I instantly lightened up. “I need to do my Scruffles,” I told myself, and quickly knocked them off.

Similarly, when I recently found myself brooding over something that I’d thought through zillions of times before, I coined a new word for the experience: Quandrification (the practice of proliferating quandaries).

As with “Scruffles,” this new word also made me smile.  And once I was smiling, I began to see different possible ways of being with the underlying feelings.  I didn’t have to keep re-playing my thoughts like a broken vinyl record. I could ask myself “What do I need right now? What would make this better?”

A lot of what I’ve written about on this blog is familiar territory—things that I’ve known in some shape or form seemingly forever. Practice gratitude and patience. Invest in relationships and community life. Connect with a sense of purpose. Break big goals into the smallest possible steps.   It’s not the concepts that are new but rather the challenge of weaving them into life in Plan B Nation.

But playfulness? I hadn’t really given it much thought. And if I had, I likely would have dismissed it out of hand. This nose-to-the-grindstone feeling of moving stolidly forward, isn’t it to be expected? Isn’t that simply part and parcel of life in Plan B Nation?

I’m beginning to think not. At least not most of the time. Yes, playfulness can seem frivolous, an unnecessary add-on. But that’s only until we start to see that it’s absolutely essential.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.

It’s not a Mac. It’s a Lesnowvo ThinkPad.

Saturday was really busy though I got almost nothing done. I did, however, spend a lot of time lost in cyberspace.  If the day passed in a blur, my take-away was clear: The time has come for me to reclaim my so-called (online) life.

But how to go about it?

In the social media culture wars—Facebook, force for good or evil?—I come down unabashedly on the positive side. Thanks to the Internet, I’ve reconnected with childhood friends and made many new ones. I’ve found jobs, kept up with the news, learned where to get my bike repaired, and heard about new novels.  Simply put, I can’t imagine my time in Plan B Nation without the support, good cheer, and humor that I’ve found online.

That being said, there are limits. I hit mine last weekend and went looking for strategies.

I started with one of my favorite bloggers, Havi Brooks, who thinks of the Internet as a river and has a comprehensive technique for managing her time there. I liked the idea in theory, but it didn’t really speak to me. Then I came upon an image conjured by R. Taylor, who said he finds it useful to think of the Internet as a mall.

The Internet as Mall. Bingo! I felt a click.

It’s said that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. In fact, this turns out to be the Inuit equivalent of an urban myth, but nonetheless it got me thinking.

There isn’t a single Internet. Rather our Internets are legion.

There’s the information kiosk-Internet, the water cooler-Internet, the research-library Internet, the employment office-Internet, and the linen-and-housewares-store Internet, to name just a few that I frequent.

There’s also the Giant Gabfest Party Internet, and that, too, has its place.

It hit me that the problem wasn’t inherent to any one of these. The problem was in my not being clear on which one I planned to visit. Ditto for what I wanted to accomplish there and how long I planned to stay.

Over the past two days, I’ve been working on this. Here’s what I’ve been doing (most of the time, anyway): Before I sign on, I ask three questions: Which Internet? For what? How long? I jot down the answers. For example: “Information kiosk. Find out how to delete track changes comments on a Word doc. 5 minutes.” Or: Water cooler.  Check FB & email. 15 minutes.”

And you know what? Once I have this sort of plan in place, I’m pretty good at sticking to it. I don’t drift mindlessly from email to Facebook to web surfing. Instead, I do what I came for, and then I leave.

Building on this, it occurred to me that, if I were planning a trip to the mall, I could use a shopping list. In life offline, I don’t drive to the mall to buy printer paper, get home, and then five minutes later, drive right back to buy cat food. No. I keep a list of what I need to do at the mall, and when I get there, I do all it at once.

So that’s what I’ve started doing for my trips to the Internet mall. When I think of an email I need to send or something non-urgent I want to look up (as in: What movie is playing this Friday at Popcorn Noir?), it goes on the Internet shopping list. It can wait for the next scheduled trip.

Not surprisingly, planning my Internet trips and using my shopping list has made me increasingly aware of my tendency to reflexively jump online for no real reason except that my mind is wandering and the Internet is there.

When that Go-There-Now impulse kicks up—and I’ve never seen a better depiction of its siren call than this essay in Orion—I’ve found it’s useful to have a list of Things To Do Instead.  For example: Make tea, pick up 10 things, read the newspaper and put it out for recycling.  Or, to take another tip from Havi: What little thing can I take care of right now that would make life better for Slightly-Future-Me?

It’s always struck me as silly to say that the Internet is LIKE THIS or Facebook is LIKE THAT—akin to saying that the telephone is LIKE THIS or handwritten letters (if you remember those) are LIKE THAT.  All of them are just means, ways to connect. As it happens, Eskimos don’t have hundreds of words for snow. I, however, could use at least that many for my Internet.

Note:  Have you found helpful strategies for managing your time online? If so, please share them below.

© 2012, amy gutman. All rights reserved.