I was traveling with my family recently, which resulted in me utilizing my smart phone a lot and the computer very little. Which means the ratio of my consuming content to creating content was quite high.

I browsed my Twitter feed any time I found myself waiting for someone to go to the bathroom or change into a swim suit or fetch the bug spray. While fending off boredom I came across the fight between the two Honests. In one corner we have Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company, and in the other we have a hilarious tweeter/author/blogger with her Twitter handle, book and blog, The Honest Toddler. HuffPo explains the battle with lots of links, should you be waiting on someone to go to the bathroom or change into a swim suit or fetch bug spray.

Mostly, this post isn’t about the battle for who owns “honest.” Considering that once upon a time I, too, got a sharp warning from a corporate lawyer, I doubt that I could be objective about The Honest fight.

Instead, while poking around, I found the true identity of The Honest Toddler (not really a secret) and found Bunmi Laditan’s grown up blog. Which, unlike her wildly popular alter-ego toddler blog, currently has no google pagerank and very few comments (moderation, perhaps?). I feel like I did on my honeymoon, when Roger and I found a deserted nook on a Greek island beach that we had all to ourselves (until a couple of days in when other tourists stumbled upon us getting suntanned in all sorts of places).*

Bumni, with prompting from her friend Doug, a performance coach for athletes, writers and entrepreneurs, brings up the idea of instinct in her gutsy post, Advice from a Mentor and Intestines. Doug speaks about differences: between what we feel and our feelings, and between being nice and being kind.

And even if we believe we know the right thing, we’re always trying to FEEL the right thing as we do the right thing.  But we can’t tell the difference between what we feel and our feelings. In other words, if you can FEEL the right thing based on experience, you don’t have to rely on this fight between feel and feelings.

— and —

It comes down to the difference between being nice and being kind.  Being nice is doing what will make others like you.  Being kind is doing the right thing knowing in the long run it is what’s best.  You have to be kind as a mother.  Being nice screws up your kids up in the long run, but they like you in the moment.

(Emphasis mine.)

That was the mentor aspect of her post’s title. Bunmi then follows with the intestine angle, finding similarities between our digestive and our cognitive processes:

“If you love something let it go.” Is this about farts?

— Honest Toddler (@HonestToddler) July 26, 2013

A fart is just a whistle from the wrong side of the tracks/tract. Stop judging.

— Honest Toddler (@HonestToddler) July 26, 2013

It’s funny- I wrote about farts all day on Honest Toddler; the perceived silliness a small child might have at the idea that we need to be apologetic about the digestive process. One might say that the body’s biological process by which it breaks down food molecules through chemical reactions for the purpose of absorption mirrors the cognitive process by which we consume and interpret our daily experiences.

— and —

While it’s impossible to find shortcuts when it comes to the breakdown of fats, proteins and carbohydrates so that they can be separated into waste and energy, the belief in the presence of instinct is a game changer when it comes to the consumption of life: separating the infinite possibilities and choices into what we’ll absorb into our experience and what we’ll let pass.

She goes on to equate digestive enzymes with a “biological representation of instinct.” She wonders if the tummy ache one gets when ignoring one’s gut instinct is akin to suffering from malfunctioning or imbalanced digestive enzymes.

“I knew this was a bad idea.” I can recall times that I didn’t listen to my gut, didn’t tune into my inner knowing. I went on dates when I knew I didn’t want to. I took jobs I knew were wrong for me. I bought products that I knew couldn’t possibly live up to their billing. I still on rare occasion take the nice way out instead of the dealing with what I know to be true. When I do this, I pay the price in my gut and sometimes in other ways.

To be honest means to live in integrity — to bring integration among what one knows, what one says, what one does (getting back to the Honest fight).

How about you? Are you attuned to your instincts? To what degree are you able to be honest with yourself? Do you have a story about a time when you chose “nice” over “kind” or didn’t listen to your inner guidance system? Leave a link if you write up your story.

Image courtesy of dream designs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

* (Upon further research I find that Bunmi Laditan has a more developed blog in her name on the WordPress.com platform, which looks better trafficked, but I still like the deserted nookish one better.)

Not long ago I wrote about what a cad John F Kennedy was. Not news to anyone, but in the news because of a book. As some of you pointed out, the President is not able to refute any claims, so we must be aware that we may never know the truth about his philandering.

Speaking of never knowing the truth, who was responsible for JFK’s murder may go down as one of the biggest mystery/controversy of my lifetime. Commissions and reporters have investigated, forests have been felled for the resulting documents, barrels of ink have been spilled — all in attempts to find the truth. When I was a child I thought that one of the perks of going to Heaven would be that there and then, I would know the full story of Kennedy’s assassination (I was an odd child).

With this post I want to marry the philandering with the assassination.

I try to put myself in Jacqueline Kennedy’s place. What would it have been like to have your friends and family, your husband’s political enemies and the media know that your husband was stepping out on you? Did she feel pressure, either internal or external, to DO something — grin and bear it, shut the hell up, make a statement, make a stink? Did she ever want to leave him? How did she deal with anger and a sense of betrayal? Or was it possible she felt neither? And most importantly, did she still love him, despite the huge (to me) flaw of infidelity? The heart doesn’t always follow the mind.

Have you ever seen the Zapruder film? I ask because a friend of mine recently admitted she’d never watched it. For all her life she hadn’t wanted the images of a person’s moment of death imprinted in her mind. I had seen it countless times, sure. Before the Internet, the Zapruder film was shown repeatedly every year around Thanksgiving. Always grainy, always as if you were looking into the wrong end of the telescope, always choppy.

But advancements in technology have resulted in enhancements to the film. I found a high-def, closer-up, frame-by-frame video on YouTube. I’m not embedding here, but click over if you want to watch. From frame  226 you can see the first shot and Jackie’ reaction to it. The most difficult frames to watch (for me) begins at 313 with the second shot. You can imagine that from her vantage point, she realized that her husband had been mortally wounded. By 344 she begins to flee the car by crawling over the back of the trunk.

Who could blame her? Adrenaline pounding, sudden shock that her husband is dead — who would have the presence of mind to sit still for that? It’s no wonder that the fight or flight mechanism kicked in and she tried to get herself out of the line of fire.

But that’s was not what she was doing. According to Clint Hill, the First Lady’s secret service agent, she was not madly fleeing.  “She was reaching for something. She was reaching for a piece of the President’s head.”

How mindful is that? Even under that extreme stress few of us will ever face, she was caring for and loving her husband (my interpretation of her actions), gathering the pieces of him — no matter the cost to her, emotional and otherwise.

That, I believe is astounding. I could imagine such action perhaps, for a Great Love, a Fairytale Love, a Perfect Love — was that what Jacqueline Kennedy had with her husband? But love is not that simple outside romance novels and story books and the minds of disappointed perfectionists. This was real life. Real, messy, complicated, multi-layered life in which competing emotions can occupy the same space at the same time.

This is where my mind goes when I try to put myself in Jackie Kennedy’s place and marry the philandering with the assassination.

Has there been a time when you’ve held two opposite emotions? How did you deal with the tension between the two, and did resolution ever come?