Artistamp

You would think I am a student again, back at college cramming for exams.  As a Contributing Artist to The Sketchbook Project with the submission deadline looming it feels oddly similar. I've been working all weekend.  Here's a look at the fruits of my labor:

Colorimetry

I am the red.  You are the blue.  Basic color theory tells us that together we make purple.  The purple is where we come together as human beings and create a hue that is unique to us.  So much of our time together is in blending to create that perfect purple.  The trouble is we each see color differently, have a distinct picture of what our ideal shade looks like. And so we mess with the saturation:  You might think we need a red that is a little more jewel-toned; maybe I think your blue should be slightly deeper, because, oh, that shade we’d create together would be nothing less than stunning.

What if, instead, we simply put our colors together and live in the blend we make as we are?  What if we find that sweet spot in our intersection, that vantage point from where you get to adore my red and I revel in your blue?  What if we just stay there, wherever there is, enjoying each other?  Because no one else on earth can create our purple. It’s the joy in love we often forget to behold.

Throes

Knee deep in this year’s submission for The Sketchbook Project, I’m wondering if I’ll come up for air between now and the day the postmark is slated to hit the envelope.  Good thing the weather forecast for the weekend calls for hibernation.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Trove

I dream that time travel or some type of supernatural powers or pure magic allow my grandmothers and I to be present together when we are all in our forties.  We wallow and weep, commiserate and celebrate. Imagining the conversations the three of us could have I’m certain the collective experience, spirituality, wit, grit and wisdom would surely light a world on fire.

 

These ladies both possessed the power to brighten up a whole room with their fiery personalities, although they expressed them quite differently.  My maternal grandmother was fierce, some might say a little brash; hardened from a life lived raising her young daughter on her own while residing with her mother on Fletcher Street in Chicago during the late forties and fifties.  She worked in a man’s world when women didn’t, in the melting pot of the city, taking public transportation to the loop every day; an experience I’d bet fed her old world prejudices, as well as fueled her vim and vigor. She retained an inviting, easy sense of humor bred in mischief, making me believe she was that girlfriend daring you to step out of your comfort zone into wild, reckless, iniquitous fun.

I’m quite sure my paternal grandmother had no idea what to do with her.  Equally fervent, ardent and grounded in her views, she brought irrevocable, unequivocal faith to the equation.  She possessed a kind, earnest authenticity and rawness, almost more than my teenaged self could bear. She had a way of clasping your hand, looking deeply into your eyes when she spoke to you, as if penetrating straight to your soul.  I think it scared me; I didn’t know who was inside me at the time. How could she be so confident I was all goodness, blindly believing in the tangled mess that was me? 

Maybe she just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what’s inside all of us. Those amazing gifts we’re born with, stored in the exquisite vessel that is our bodies and minds, waiting for us to unearth them when we finally catch that scintilla of light to be broken open into our full sparkle.

I decide to live the life I imagine.  This doesn’t mean a list of prescriptive goals with boxes to check in the New Year, it means a way of being, taking infinite forms.  I want to place myself into the hands of another, in all the diverse, unexpected and beautiful ways this can be:   With people I’ll never know, holding my art in their hands as they turn the pages of my sketchbook, or savor my words in published hardcover.  In relationships with the people I encounter every day, from those waiting to be known in the elevator to that one individual I choose to know deeply, intimately, exclusively.

 

I’ve spent the past year windward to fear, my face in the storm for causes I’m not necessarily passionate about, for someone else’s dreams.  I want to channel all I’ve learned about facing fear into chasing my own dreams and desires.

Life is a cache of glittering, delightful connections to be made in the present moment, wherever you are, with the power to take you exactly where you want to go. I want to be brave enough to make them.  I want to open my treasure chest and brighten up a whole room. Are you in it with me?

This is my 200^th blog post.  In 2014 I plan to catalogue them, to begin organizing them for print. Which are your favorites and how have they inspired you?

Panacea

When she says she’s working on compassion in 2014, but freely admits she doesn’t do empathy, she sparks a debate.  Do you need to be empathetic in order to be compassionate?  Most of us in the conversation agree that yes, empathy is a prerequisite for compassion.  I’m not ready to commit; however, I’m intrigued by this question and want to dig a little deeper.  From a purely academic perspective, vocabulary.com defines the two words like this:

empathy (noun)  – understanding and entering into another’s feelings

compassion (noun) - the humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it

I can see why it is tempting, especially for those with a bias for action, to want to skip empathy and go right to compassion.  Empathy is feeling; compassion is feeling plus doing.  Lots of us want to be problem solvers, heading straight to the fix.  The trouble is we often gloss over the feeling part, in favor of getting right to action that will make things better.  We want to get out of the uncomfortableness of feeling which can seem of little value.  When we’re doing it’s easy to see tangible evidence of the support we’re providing.  We busy ourselves with action to avoid the helplessness of living in the emotion.

Empathy gets lost because feelings are impalpable.  We think we’re being compassionate, but as we focus on the action, we’ve inadvertently eliminated the emotion.  To be truly compassionate individuals, we need to do the hard work of feeling; this is ultimately what compels us to act so powerfully humane.

When I look up compassion in the Urban Dictionary, which I love for its Wikipedia-style real-world (and sometimes shocking) interpretations, I see this: “It takes guts to care.”  Not what I’d describe as particularly eloquent, but to the point.  It’s hard to get into other people’s feelings, especially when they are hurting.  It makes us uncomfortable.  We just want to make the pain go away, especially when we’re the person inflicting the hurt. Here’s my case in point:

I ask him if he has New Year’s Eve plans, if he’ll go on a date with me.  He tells me he needs to think about it.  It takes only one heartbeat for the pride and excitement swelling in my chest to deflate; it’s a foregone conclusion that with the need for deliberation, even if he comes back with an affirmative response, the evening is destined to be an awkward disaster.  So I’m more than relieved when his verdict denies me.  He’s cajoling me, though, attempting to make me feel better as I recoil disappointed, discomfited and dismayed.  I put a halt to the text messages when it becomes apparent that he is uncomfortable in my pain and wants me to do his emotional labor by telling him I’m fine.  I know I’m not fine, and I need to give myself the chance to feel the gamut of emotions that exhibiting vulnerability with this invitation fires at me.

This is how we find the guts to care for others, by having the guts to care for ourselves first, doing the hard work of acknowledging, accepting and expressing our own uncomfortable feelings.  We can’t truly understand what another is feeling unless we’ve been there ourselves.  When we sweep our own feelings under the rug we don’t experience what it’s like to live through them and to come out on the other side okay, or maybe even better than we were before we started. 

So here’s what I decide:  I get to feel everything I need to in this situation, and I don’t need to come back to him until I’m done.  For me this means reassuring myself I didn’t misread his oeillade. Attractions are extremely visceral.  We can’t do anything about them, and they are impossible to hide, especially to a keen observer. But we do deny them, all the time.  I wasn’t wrong in my assessment; he just chooses to deny it.  I get to feel proud of myself for my boldness, dismayed by his choice to turn me down, embarrassed for disclosing a feeling he doesn’t share and disappointed that we won’t be going out. And I get to own these feelings outright.

When we do our own emotional labor, practice living in the uncomfortableness pain and suffering bring us, we equip ourselves for empathy. The feeling component of compassion matters just as much, if not more, than the doing. So many times in life there isn’t an action any one person on the planet can take that will right the wrong that’s been done to us.  But knowing that someone understands, cares and is brave enough to sit in the tide of emotion darkness inflicts on us is the most powerful antidote ever made.

Yes, empathy is required for compassion.  If you don’t know where to begin, begin with you.

Oneiric

“You can’t see the end from the beginning when you play where no one else is playing.”  --  Whitney Johnson

I read these words and it’s instantly apparent why everything I’m after in life these days feels so darn hard to attain.  That project at work that will transform how our business operates, my teenager following the road less traveled to adulthood, my personal quest for epic love.  I’m not on a chartered course anymore, anywhere.

In life we get extremely comfortable walking a highly-socialized, “everyone’s doing it”, prescribed path.  Assignments at work follow a rote pattern of deliverables, a cadence of operating we know like the back of our hands.  Of course our children go to college after high school and become white collar workers.  We have the means, so naturally this is what they’ll do.  Marriage follows its patterns as well, one of them being this:  Buy a house in the suburbs with all of the requisite stuff, birth and raise children, retire and live on a golf course.  There are manuals, directions, models to follow for all of this.  We know how to get these things done and feel successful. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, as long as we are happy and fulfilled with it.

But we’re all born with dreams, those desires that excite and terrify us at the same time.  We barely dare to articulate them because they are so far left of center. If we let them bubble up and spill over, we’re going to disrupt the status quo, change the world maybe.  So we keep them contained in the glass, sipping slowly on what’s safe.

 

Sometimes we go after our dreams outright. Sometimes life pushes us off the path, presenting an opportunity to work on groundbreaking innovation at work, giving us a high school graduate who can’t see himself in school for another minute, or causing us to make choices that net a chance to enter into a relationship on new terms.  And suddenly everything is hard, not only because we have never been here before, because no one involved has been here before either.

We can get paralyzed.  We don’t know what to do. Without any guidance we’re so afraid of failing, we do nothing at all. We can get frustrated, distressed over the need to write the manual or chart a new course.  What if, instead of being upset, we look at the situation as an opportunity to create something uniquely ours that’s never been done before?  Isn’t this place where there is no documented right or wrong the perfect place for all of us imperfect souls to play? 

In Johnson’s post, titled "Where There's a Why, There's a Way" , she submits that when we are clear on why it is we’re doing what we’re doing, we’ll figure out how.  This is what I tell young people I coach on long term career goals; don’t worry about how you might achieve your goal, get used to saying it out loud. If you truly want it and believe it, you’ll find a way to make it happen.

And so this is how it is:  Believing so completely that the product we’re creating will transform our industry keeps me coming back to the drawing board restructuring our approach.  Believing wholeheartedly that my son is capable of reaching his potential on his own terms keeps me constantly looking for new ways to equip him and support him on his journey.  Believing emphatically that the best relationships are not stepped into under perfect circumstances, but are living, breathing, ever-evolving creations of the two unique souls comprising them keeps me pursuing the one in front of me. These are my passionate whys bringing the strength, tenacity and determination to keep me forever modifying the how.

   

The reality is, I don’t want to play in the space everyone else is playing in. And maybe that’s because I believe I am built to play where no one else plays.  When I ask a colleague for feedback, she deconstructs my leadership in these words: 

“You are very thoughtful about how you consider everything and you decide on your tactics based on what's going to yield the most value long term. Then you cautiously and correctly go after it meticulously and you alter your pace and focus based on reactions of everyone:  Eye on the prize and a very intellectual approach to getting there.”

What a priceless gift her assessment of my skills is.  I’ve never been more challenged in my life than I am right now, but with those words never more confident that I’m in the place I need to be, that place where no one else is playing.

I recently invited someone who’s never been here before either to come and play with me.  I wonder if he’ll accept.  

Voluminous

“Christmas is a love story.”  I read this on my electronic newspaper in the early hours of the 25th, before even getting out of bed. I dry my eyes and shoot the link to two girlfriends.  I open it up several times over the course of the day to read again.

I’m weary, there’s no denying it, and the spirit evades me.  Christmas is meant to be the prize, the big, joyful culmination of weeks of preparation, but every year, for me, it lands with a hollow thud despite my best efforts to make it different. I’m certain I’m not alone in this, and this writer speaks to me; clearly she sees this too.

 

“The story goes that love was about to be born, but no one had room to welcome it.  Everywhere was full, booked, closed, busy. But love found room, as it always does, in the most humble, surprising places.”

I feel full, booked, closed and busy.  Not just with the squeeze of holiday preparations, but in ordinary time with work, raising teenagers, and the last seven years spent raising myself.  It seems like there is no room to welcome love. All I’ve been able to see are the burdens another would need to be willing to take on if love were to come in.

“Whether your heart feels festive, lit and tinseled, or barren, drafty, dirt-floored, and covered in straw, love will come wherever there is room.”

Hope bursts out of this message. Love can live anywhere. It doesn’t need festive and tinseled to feel welcome. Even in my barren draftiness love can exist.

“Love is coming either way. Welcome or not. Ready or not.” 

Maybe it’s time to stop preparing and just make some room.    

Read Kristin Armstrong’s full post "Making Room".