I’ve been a tutor for 40 years, and I’ve never encountered a lazy student.

Scratch the surface of laziness and underneath you’ll find fear, confusion, frustration, lack of knowledge, lack of skills, anger, sadness…

And, often, just plain exhaustion.

Willpower is a limited resource, and the demands of the school day can drain a student of her ability to attend and persevere.

The critical person enters the room, feeling irritable…and he scans the room, looking for something or someone to point to as the cause of his irritability.

I’m paraphrasing John Gottman from a wonderful 3-minute YouTube clip entitled The Best Predictor of Divorce.

I think it’s instructive to the critical person to enter the room…and find it empty. What will he do with his irritable feelings now?

Perhaps he’ll fill it right away with another lover, or with material objects. Perhaps she’ll clutter it with work or other busy-making activities.

But what if the critical person simply sits in the empty room and experiences the irritability? What might he learn about himself? Perhaps she’ll find that her feelings aren’t deadly and that, in fact, she is fine just the way she is.

And doesn’t this go for all of us? Spending some stretch of time alone, with no other person to affix our moods to and no external factors to blame for the way we feel…what might that teach us about our worries?…our melancholy?…and our happiness?

In the fall of my senior year of high school, I applied to one college. I was accepted. I attended.

This was waaaay back in 1977, and many of my peers report similar experiences. Most of us somehow wound up attending institutes of higher learning. “Choice” doesn’t necessarily feel like the right word to describe the processes that got us there.

In the abstract, I can imagine having searched more thoroughly and located  a school that would have been a better fit for me. But, I can’t actually name that school. And this is despite my being in a line of work that acquaints me with the features of hundreds of colleges and universities.

For better or worse, I truly never thought in terms of selecting the “right” college.

Ana Homayoun describes the angst that I and my similarly clueless peers were spared:

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, and the main reason is because I stare at that blank computer screen and I’ve got SO MUCH to say, I can’t decide what to write about first.

I’m like a mule stuck between at least twenty intriguing potential-subject haystacks, paralyzed by the sheer number of interesting things I’ve been reading and discussing, all of which I long to express in print.

None of which is happening.

It’s wonderful to have variety and selection. Who doesn’t enjoy freedom and flexibility and a cornucopia of options? Who doesn’t thrill to a banquet spread before them?

In fact,  too much choice can be absolutely stultifying.

I see this in my students all the time. I live and work in one of the most affluent areas of the country, and the kids I tutor have every sort of choice. We all believe these kids “should” be grateful for all their privileges, yet often they are paralyzed by them.

What to wear? What sports to play? What friends to hang out with? What to do with one’s free time? What music to listen to?…and, of course, those truly terrifying questions:

We just got back from a trip to Barcelona, one of the foodie meccas of Europe, and I was very glad that I had just finished reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

Otherwise, we might have been overwhelmed by the riotous quantity of eating options. We could have spent all day agonizing over the restaurant choices and trying to decide which one was “the best.”

Instead, we did what Schwartz recommends: we limited our options. Each day, we perused the menus of two or three eateries, and we selected one of them.

We wound up having wonderful, memorable meals. Truly, in Barcelona it’s difficult to dine badly. And we felt satisfied and happy about our choices…happier than if we had invested hours researching and deliberating.

One big problem with having too much choice is that the human brain hates the feeling of loss, more that it enjoys the experience of gain.

Instead of leaping right into my 2012 agenda, I’m focusing today on what I’ve learned in 2011. Here’s my list so far:

• I really do know how to be happy. Listening to my own internal voice and allowing myself to Be Leigh, works well for me. This includes becoming OK with the parts of me that so often feel less-than-ideal, like my messiness / lack of attention to dress and housekeeping, and my enormous need for oceans of reading and sleeping and quiet-contemplation time (which eat up so many hours and make me less “productive”…well, so be it!)

[On Saturdays my topic of focus is A Small, Good Thing, inspired by one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories.]

My career as a tutor takes me from one house to another, and at this time of year I’m availed of the special treat of seeing so many folks’ holiday decorations.

I’ve learned to always stop and take a moment to enjoy and admire and comment. People put so much work into decorating, and those ornaments and displays often carry deep meaning for their proud owners.

I’m quite sure that’s not what really happened, but here’s the story:

For me and my neighbors, trash pick-up day is Friday.

I live in a little town, where there’s no municipal sanitation crew. Everybody hires one of several local mom-and-pop companies to pick up their trash.

The guys who collect our garbage are a father and son team with a small garbage truck (a modified pick-up truck). The men grab each can and swing it up and dump the contents into the truck by hand. They do that ALL DAY. I get tired just watching them.

I wrote about my dad yesterday, and today I’m thinking about my mother.

She was very fond of this old-timey saying:

If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

I know, I know…pure Pollyanna…

but those words actually sank in.

November is the month in which both my parents were born and both passed away, so it’s peppered through with dates that make me think about them and about Life and Mortality.

My dad spent his last days in a beautiful hospice. One of us stood with him at the window, looking out at the gorgeous autumn leaves, and asked him: Are you sad that this is the last Fall you will see?

He replied:

I’ve had a wonderful life, and now it’s over, and that’s OK.