I noted elsewhere in this space that I went on weight loss drugs mostly because I  wanted to give eighty-year-old me the best shot at life and good health possible. Another decade of obesity was counter that agenda. Eighty-year-old me sometimes chimes in on my financial decisions, too. She will often tell me, “I am glad you put that money in an interest bearing account, kiddo. Inflation is a thing, and I will still need some good chocolate on my grocery list!” She also reminds me, “You can’t take it with you, and that is a worthy cause. Pony up and be grateful you can help.” The old girl speaks her mind.

Six-year-old me has different wisdom to offer. I was still wetting my bed at that age, much to my horror, but six-year-old me soldiered on any way, and learned to run a load of wash in the middle of the night. She knows what it’s like when the body just Does Things–gets morning sick for eight straight months, has migraines, loses hair, gets wrinkly–and she tells me that it’s just part of being human, and not the sum of me as a person. Cope as best you can, and keep moving forward. What a comforting view of matters.

Sixteen-year-old me goes more in the bad example column. She made stupid romantic choices, and stuck by them with ferocious stubbornness. Not to be outdone, twenty-eight-year-old me made even dumber wrong turns. I feel compassion for the loneliness and invisibility that drove my decisions at those ages, and I am also still carrying the regrets those choices inspired. Sixteen- and twenty-eight year old me have to occasionally whop me upside the head with a stout, “Don’t be like us. LEARN from your mistakes.” Tough love, I suppose.

Fifty-year-old me is agog at having signed her first publishing contract–at fifty! She wanders around grinning and telling me, “The best is yet to be!” Sometimes, I want to smack her, but her joy is so real and she just might be right. The party is far from over.

I could go on. Fifteen-year-old me was pretty selfish, and thirty-four-year-old me was seriously down. She got the notion to get her backside on a horse, and lo, that medicine still helps me keep life in a gentler perspective.

All of these incarnations of Grace are still very much with me, and I have learned from each of them. Maybe this Ages of Me view of myself is part of why I seldom feel lonely. We are busy, us girls, living life and trying to make sense of it, and that’s a team effort!

Do your previous selves and future selves ever pipe up in your life? Do they inspire, guide, or make you wince?

PS: The print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon, and the first batch of ebook ARCs has gone out. If you’d like an ARC file, please email me at graceburrowes@yahoo.com.

I am not one to give up on a book I’m reading, but I recently set aside a biography of Frederick Douglass. It was well written, wonderfully researched, compelling, fascinating, and really, really sad. That guy struggled his whole life for a just cause–struggled to the very limits of his human endurance–and saw only inadequate progress, all but thrown away almost as soon as it was won, and now we’re backsliding on that progress again at warp speed. For my nighty-nighty reading, I am not up to the challenge of absorbing that content.

The material is important, and I will finish the book, but it cannot be my bedtime reading.

Bedtime reading, from the time I was in grade school, has been for detaching from the day, going to a place where justice triumphs, truth and courage carry the day, and love conquers all (by the end of the book). It takes about twenty minutes for a good story to reduce our stress by nearly two thirds, improve our sleep quality, enhance our vocabulary, broaden our capacity for empathy, and fortify the neural wiring that supports our capacity for critical thinking.

I need that kind of bed time reading. I also need to get my hands in the dirt. We are one third of the way through May, and I am way behind with my annuals. Playing catch up will be excellent stress reduction, and when I see the dahlias, impatiens, and geraniums all over the property, I will be very glad I spent that time out in the fresh air and sunshine. I might even bust over and get some hanging baskets.

I need to walk where it’s green and growing, in nature, such as old farmland still makes that claim. I found a woods to walk in near the horse barn, and I will be making time to stop there again as the need for shady paths grows in the coming weeks.

I need to be around animals. Domestic animals, especially, and I like seeing wild animals going about their business too. My particular friends are cats and horses, but I am very fond of dogs, bunnies, birds in the wild, and cows. (Raccoons, not so much.)

As a therapist once said to me, “If you need it to be happy, you need it.” These are elements of my life I need to be functional and happy–good bed time reading, flower gardening, walks in nature, beasts. And how wonderful for me, I can have them all right now, and that has made much of the present tumult bearable.

What simple, available measures are helping you keep your balance these days?

PS: A print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon. I will do the Ingram Spark print version too, but that takes a few weeks to process, and is always more expensive than the Amazon edition (blast, darn, and phooey).

I was at the horse barn this week, taking a mighty steed to his stall after a lesson, and one of the other volunteers mentioned that she was looking for a paying horse barn job. She is mid-twenties, and new to the equine scene, but a quick and enthusiastic learner who has a natural aptitude for working with horses. She was convinced that lack of experience was going to doom her ambitions.

“Don’t sell yourself short. Experience can be a real liability. For some people, experience can result in close-mindedness, an unwillingness to learn, and a tendency to cling to out-of-date practices. Give me somebody willing to work hard and learn over somebody who knew it all ten years ago. Besides, you truly love horses, and that’s worth any number of years simply making a living off them.”

She just stared at me, and then started to tear up. She’s college-educated but going through that, “Maybe my ladder has been leaning against the wrong building this whole time,” questioning which seems to accompany the quarter-life crisis

I conclude that my perspective–inexperience can be a tremendous asset–was the first encouraging word she’d had.  I could only speak from that viewpoint because I recall how easy it was to come up with a plot a hundred books ago. The ideas fell in a gentle shower, and characters whispered to me of all manner of compelling flaws and wounds. Writing life was sweet, and I had no idea what a gift my inexperience was at the time.

As I was driving home, it occurred to me that my exchange with my barn buddy was a micro-example of qualities I love about my season in life. In earlier years, I might not have been aware enough to realize my fellow volunteer was asking for reassurance in the first place. In the second, I would not have had a ready argument against experience as the sine qua non. Of course, the ideal employee will have some experience, and also an open mind and a willingness to work hard, in addition to a heart for horses, but that wasn’t the point to make at the time.

I have made good hires and bad, I have been a good hire and a poor fit. I have needed encouragement, and been given some when I didn’t expect it. I’ve also been dismissed, ignored, and told my dreams were ridiculous. I hope all this living has made me a kinder, less self-centered person. If nothing else, all this living has made me want to be a kinder, less self-centered person, and I will never be too old to strive in that direction.

What do you like about your current season in life?

If you want to see me shoot around the room backward with flames pouring out of my nose, just tell me, “We are each responsible for our own happiness.” I’m not sure why I get all riled up at this phrase, but I suspect it has something to do with representing myriad foster children who went from lousy homes to lousy foster homes (maltreatment in foster homes is estimated conservatively at 25% of placements), while being told they should be grateful to have any roof over their heads.

Or it has to do with rampaging cow elephant menstrual cramps for which no medication was supposedly effective until I was well into adulthood and then it was available only with a prescription. I am talking “pass out from the pain” cramps. Every month from age twelve.

Or it has do with South Sudan, Gaza, on and on and on.

I do believe that I am responsible for accepting and managing my feelings. I am responsible for my actions. I am responsible, if I’m miserable, for trying to change that. I type those words, though, from a place of enormous, multi-faceted privilege. I am relatively healthy, I am solvent (finally, for now), I am white, I am single, I am dwelling where the air and water are pretty clean, I was taught to read and write… all good things, but even somebody with all those high cards can get wrapped into an abusive relationship, poverty, disease, or all three at once.

To me, telling that unfortunate person that they are sad, overwhelmed, anxious, and cynical because they just “choose” to focus on the negative is hubris beyond description. It’s a variety of victim shaming and blaming masquerading as a truism, and one that excuses abusers, wealth hoarders, and snake oil salesmen from the consequences of their actions.

So, this is me with my nose aflame. I’ve posted a similar rant about “Ma’am, just calm down.” (Flames out my ears). I am also no great fan of, “What do you learn on your good days?” though that one (of which my mother was fond) doesn’t quite rise to the level of flames. Can’t we just have a bad day from which no Calvinistic sermon must be wrung? And I give, “No job worth doing is easy,” a side-eye, mostly because my mom used that to describe parenting me.

Lots of jobs worth doing are delightful–arranging flowers to take to a friend, baking brownies for the office, walking the dog, sending a get well card… even writing ranty-blog posts can be a pure joy, especially the part about looking for pet pictures to go with the words.

What received wisdom grates on you? What aphorism do you hear with an inward side-eye? “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger”? “If at first you don’t succeed…?”

Photo Credit: Ridin’ Buddy extraordinaire, Alison Duvall

There sure are a lot of people making money off the non-profit sector!

This revelation has dawned as I’ve begun researching how I can raise money for my therapeutic riding barn. As sure as tech loves algorithms, if I’m nosing around the topic, “Grant funding for…” then I am besieged by a bazillion newsletters, workshops, webinars, and free!!! downloads, all purporting to make fundraising so much easier.

I was particularly intrigued by one shop that was featuring a presentation on The Trust Equation, put forth in The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. This 25-year-old book (with updated anniversary edition) is posting on Amazon as I write this as the No. 1 bestseller in the consulting category.

The residual message is as follows: Trust is comprised of four factors: Credibility (do you have the skills and standing you claim you do?) Reliability (do you keep your word?) Intimacy (can you appropriately handle sensitive personal information?). As I read that list, I’m nodding along. If a doc is going to prescribe treatment for me, I want all three of those factors in place, but the critical factor is apparently number four.

In whose interests are you acting? If you have all the creds, you always show up and follow through, and you treat sensitive information respectfully, you can still blow the trust test by being blatantly self-interested. The doc who prescribes a course of treatment for me that just happens to occur over the next twelve months in their office, at the low, low price of half my retirement because insurance just doesn’t take snake oil and raspberry ketones seriously… I’ll get a second opinion.

If self-interest is a trust killer, I wonder how we are to navigate, in a society that keeps so many of us in scarcity situations, and saturates media and culture with scarcity messages, and exempts next to nothing (including very especially health care and higher/applied education) from profit motives.

The logical end point of a society focused on greed and scarcity is that neither people nor institutions can be trusted. Everybody–docs, teachers, lawyers, journalists, farmers, dog walkers, day care providers, architects, CPAs–has loans or credit cards to pay off, and if we don’t have loans breathing down our necks we have the prospect of an impecunious old age staring us in the face.

Even if people are motivated by genuine altruism, in an environment where greed is normalized and even applauded, we don’t trust altruism and good moral health when we run smack into them.

This is all very bleak, and yet, I still believe most people are honest most of the time, and there’s science to back me up on that. Especially if we’ve had a solid primary school education, we tend to have active shoulder angels and a sense of empathy for others.

And yet, I’ve been schnookered, by bosses, boyfriends, clients, even family members. My trust radar has let me down in some pretty serious ways. How do you know whom to trust? Does it matter who trusts you?

PS: Pre-order links are up for An Heir of Possibilities!

Mom and I in Ireland ca 1981.

My mother was an aggressively competent housekeeper and cook. She mitered the corners of our bed sheets, ironed our pillowcases (in a precise sequence of folds so the pillowcase only had to be turned over once), and had dinner on the table every night at 6 pm, for a household that for years included at least nine people.

I thought she was a little nuts. Ironing pillow cases? If you make your bed without a lot of frills nobody sees that pillowcase, and if it stays on the bed for more than one night, it gets all wrinkly. Why in the world…? She tried to show me how to miter corners on sheets, and I asked her why bother doing it that way?

Her answer: If you’re ever in the army you’ll have to know how to do it exactly like this.
Me to myself: Welp, guess I won’t be enlisting, will I?

Mom and Dad in retirement

As I grew older (and less snarky?), I realized how very, very little agency my mother had compared to me. She was a registered nurse, but “had” to quit nursing when she got married, because nurses were not allowed to be married. Huh? She could only use credit cards in my dad’s name. She never learned how to figure a 15% tip, she ran the household on the budget my dad allotted to her. She had no checking or savings account in her own name. She was so painfully Catholic that the only birth control she’d use was rhythm, and that was apparently ineffective.

All she had was that house and that kitchen, so she made the tastiest, most comfy, inviting lemonade she could out of it. I have been thinking about Mom (and all the moms) this week, as I have felt overwhelmed by world events. Her generation dealt with the aftermath of WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, McCarthyism… they sent grown children off to Vietnam, endured the assassinations and violence of the 60s, watched Watergate unfold… How often did Mom feel as if she was powerless to do a stinkin’ thing about a world run amok?’

But she put together great meals, was the surrogate mom to the grad students far from home, always had time to visit with the neighbors, and was always willing to get up and dance for joy. Maybe she was a little nuts, but she was also resilient, resourceful, and for the most part, lots of fun.

Her example inspires me. I am no sort of cook and my house is a roofed campsite. What I can do is go on walks, where I express thanks for the birds, flowers, clean air, bugs (even the bugs), the sound of water in the stream, the scent of mowed grass, the quiet, the freedom to walk at mid-afternoon, the ability to walk…

The world does not suddenly right itself if I go on a thank-you-birds walk, or if I bring cookies to the barn, or plant a flat of pansies by the mailboxes, but I am a little righted, and that is an excellent place to start.

Mom ironed pillowcases, I plant pansies that won’t last but a few weeks. How are you keeping your balance these days?

PS: Final cover for A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions!

For the past couple weeks I have been bottle feeding a kitten. I came home one night, saw that the corner of the porch where the mama had made her nest was empty. I figured mama cat had moved the nest, as mama cats will do. Well… nope. I walked into the house, and there was this one little gray scrap of feline yelling her fuzzy head off about knowing her rights and this is an outrage and bring me a flagon of ale, wench!

The particular mama cat making free with the porch was feral. Had never been in the house to my knowledge. How the kitten got into the house will forever remain a mystery. Her eyes weren’t open yet, so that’s a nope.

Anyhoo, she’s driving me nuts. Getting her to take a bottle was easy, but wee little kittens should be offered six to eight feedings a day, preferably on a strict schedule. There goes my REM sleep. The little darlings are prone to diarrhea and dehydration even when being fed the fancy milk replacer that I happen to keep on hand. My kitten forgot to read the part about the strict schedule. Some days she’s a bottomless hog, other days she is morally opposed to eating.

On those days, I fret and worry and offer the bottle every hour, often to no avail. I hate the dragging anxiety, the dragging spirits, the sense of being unequal to the challenge of getting this kitten safely past infancy.

In other words, I feel with this kitten a ghost of what befell me when I was the single working mom of a new baby. Beloved Offspring did not sleep through the night for THREE YEARS (yes, I tried everything that was legal), but who could blame her when the person who brought her into the world was gone eleven or twelve hours a day? If she wanted to spend time with me, 3 am was always wide open.

In her first four years of life, I bought my first and only house, and was promptly laid off. Found a job, got laid off again. Money was a constant issue (no child support). Her health was a constant source of anxiety. I was not a big sister to any babies for whom I had any responsibility, I never babysat infants. The internet hadn’t been invented yet, and ye gods… That feeling when you know something is wrong with your child, but they can’t tell you what, or if it’s serious or just gas again…

When I look back on that season of my life, it was hell. I was alone, exhausted, bewildered, and scared, with no end in sight. People would say to me, “Enjoy these years when she’s little. They go by so quickly!”

They did not go by quickly at all, which probably explains why, now that I have two grandchildren, I am pretty happy to admire them for the most part from afar. I am snakebit when it comes to infants. I forget just how I came to be that way, but the kitten is providing an vivid reminder. She is emphatically renewing my compassion for the parents of infants, and also my compassion for a younger me.

I tried so hard, I was so overwhelmed, and I felt so inadequate.

When you look back, are there, “I don’t know how I did that” times in your life? Is there a period about which hindsight has become kind sight?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the value of friction. Not in the sense that rubbing two sticks together creates friction, and therefore heat, and sometimes fire, though fire is pretty impressive, but in the sense of a human being trying to do something, and having to exert effort, endure frustration, muster patience, apply creativity, and otherwise struggle to produce a hoped-for outcome.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is supposed to get rid of “all that friction” for us. You want the perfect menu for a twelve-person get-together that includes two vegans, somebody who is gluten intolerant, a farm-to-table evangelist, another guest who is lactose intolerant, and two friends who “hate” vegetables and believe every meal should include meat.

No problem! Just ask your AI assistant for solutions, and in nanoseconds… there you go, complete with recipes, a budget, estimated time to prepare, ideal task sequencing, nutrition parameters, and wine pairings. Friction gone!

My dear mother, who could put on one heck of a dinner party, would grieve the loss of the hours spent on search-and-compare-recipes missions that this easy-peasy approach would “spare” her. She would detest the idea that a recipe should be followed to the letter (always salt to taste, never just dump in the suggested amount). She would positively enjoy trying new wines while building her menu, and she would be delighted if her guests found the results of her experiments satisfying. Get rid of the friction, and it would no longer be “her” dinner party. She would be the scullery maid working for her AI “assistant.”

The greater concern I hear about overuse or misuse of AI is that we will become even lazier morally and intellectually than we already are. We will lose our talent for gnawing away at tough problems, for keeping an open mind through reasoned debate. Our ability to sit with a difficult issue while pondering contradictions will atrophy. Why spend years even learning a foreign language when Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and dozens of other programs can translate your email better than you could after three college courses?

I’ll tell you why: I’ve studied five different foreign languages, and I don’t speak any of them well, but each one taught me something cool about English, or about the culture of the lands that spoke that language. The pay off was in the study, not in the mastery. That is to say, the friction–putting the old proboscis ad carborundum–was the gift, not the grind.

We are designed to value what we struggle for, which is part of the psychology of weeder courses, boot camps, church missions, competitive promotions, and parenting. This is how we are wired and how we have been wired for millennia, so how do we find meaning in simply following the directions AI hands us?

I don’t want a life of doing what the Bot says I should or watching what the Bot suggests I watch. I want an interesting life, with meaningful challenges, thorny questions, moral accountability, and work that tests my skills and stamina while allowing me to make a contribution beyond my own subsistence. For that reason, I cannot ever see the day when I will write a book in a process that in any way relies on generative artificial intelligence (and also, because much of it is built on piracy, but that’s another post).

Where do you come down on  the risks of AI? Over-hyped? The tech we’ve been waiting for? Fine in moderation provided we have enough water and power?

PS: An Heir of Distinction published Friday on all the retail platforms!

Several experienced therapeutic riding instructors were hanging out in the tack room once upon a time, while I imitated a fly on the wall. They were discussing the extent to which even in able-bodied children, fine motor skills seem to be in decline. The young riders do not wield pens or pencils to the extent their parents did. The children often don’t have to lace up and tie their shoes (Crocs are technically shoes, I suppose); their clothing might not feature buttons, zippers, or buckles when Velcro will do instead.

On the simplest horse bridle, you’ll find four buckles. An English girth has four more, and stirrups are generally adjusted by means of buckles. If a rider has never met the concept of a buckle, then how to open, adjust, and fasten a buckle can be perplexing.

One of the instructors went on to lament that she had to show a child how to use a broom (a swept barn aisle is a safer barn aisle). I learned that sweeping with a broom used to be an occupational/physical therapy staple for several reasons. First, it’s simple. No on/off switch, no this-side-up baloney, no left-hand or right-hand limitations. Pick it up and go.

Second, brooms are safe. Yes, you can ka-bong somebody over the head with one, but there’s no electricity, no sharp anything, no cord to trip over. Third, a broom is cheap and has a useful life of nearly forever.

But fourth–and to me most significantly–using a broom requires cross-body movement. You can use a broom without moving a hand past the mid-line of your body, but that’s much slower than whisk-whisking along, shoving the dirt from your dominant side, past your non-dominant foot. This kind of activity lights up both sides of your brain at once, which makes learning or even cognitive processing of any sort easier (thus explaining the pediatrician’s delight when a baby starts to crawl).

Who knew? And maybe this is why sweeping is one of VERY few domestic activities I affirmatively enjoy. Scrubbing the cabinets results in the same sort of, “housecleaning was done here” visual difference as sweeping the floor does, but I prefer sweeping. It’s gentle, quiet, makes a visual difference, and gives me a sense of having imposed order on chaos as scrubbing does not. I suspect the cross-body brain boost is a large part of why I feel more settled after having swept the floor. The term “meditative” comes to mind, whereas I find a lot of other domestic chores either tedious (folding clothes) or tiresome (scrubbing the instantly-self-dirtying floors, walls, appliances, and counters).

Do you enjoy some simple, old-fashioned activities more than others? Do you still wash and dry dishes by hand or avoid the electric toothbrush gizmos? Maybe you do mending by hand or bake your own bread?

When are the old ways still the best ways for you? I suspect in each case, there’s a sound neurological or emotional benefit resulting from your “simpler” choice.

PS: The first set of Advanced Reader Copies for An Heir of Distinction have just gone out. The web store ebook has gone live, as has the Amazon print version. The retail edition comes out on Friday. If you’d like an ARC file, please email me at graceburrowes@yahoo. com.

In the past year, I’ve seen more power outages at my little farmhouse than in the previous five years combined. Not sure why–high winds, drought, aging infrastructure, or maybe Potomac Edison has been economizing on preventative maintenance in a jurisdiction chock full of big trees?

Nah. Well… let’s leave it at all of the above. In any case, a lot of what I consider productivity requires a computer connected to the internet. Or–house work counts, right?–running water. At the least, it’s nice to have some illumination while using that broom, but if the power goes out at night, that’s a lot of candles.

I have water, firewood, snacks, and dry pet food stockpiled. I also have candles, matches, and flashlights, but that doesn’t address a need to use time productively or enjoyably. Today’s outage wasn’t quite three hours, last weekend’s was closer to eight. What to do? What to do? If the weather is acceptable, I’ll tackle some yard work, but I’m certainly not up to eight straight hours of outside chores.

What I have done is nipped upstairs (warmer than downstairs), snuggled under the covers with Tavis of Feline Perfection Fame, and whipped out the old Nook. Can go about 12 hours on battery, is self-illuminating, and always has two or three books I want to read.

And yet, I always feel a little defeated when I am backed into this option. What if I fall asleep and take a nap? What if I can’t get to sleep tonight because I took a little siesta? What if I run out of books? When will the electricity come back on so I can Be Productive?!

But then I recall how many days I’d get off the school bus as a kid and trudge up the hill to the house, only to find my mother reading in bed at 4pm, the remains of a little plate of cheese and crackers on the night table. She might have taken a few naps, and for sure, she took breaks. And yet the house was always tidy, dinner was always on the table at 6 pm.

All the science out there says naps make us healthier, breaks make us way more productive, and getting our feet up from time to time is a great idea. I love how hanging out with Travis helps me slow down and cheer up, and yet, I still feel as if I need a power outage to excuse the “indulgence.” The habit of working just because I can keep my eyes open, is deeply ingrained, and–I know this–not healthy.

I one day soon hope to have a solar house and to drive an EV, but before that day arrives, I hope I already know that breaks are good for me, and that they actually help me avoid the human power outages that no amount of electricity can fix.

Are a you napper? A put-your-feet-upper? What breaks have you learned to take even if the power is on?