Simmer

“Wasn’t it great to have a snow day yesterday,” her words are more of a proclamation than a question. “I got so much stuff done!”  This was not my experience; I wasted massive amounts of time in frustrated hand-wringing over the fact that the weather spent the week dashing my best laid plans.  While I finally made it to my yoga mat to hear my instructor’s delight in this unexpected respite, all my attempts to attend exercise classes during the week were either thwarted or aborted by snow.  She spent her day in frenzied productive bliss; I wallowed, insipid and conflicted, unable to regroup with any kind of positive energy.

I’m an alpha dog, a friend observes. This is not news to me.  I used to think I just like to be in charge.  I’m discovering now that I have pretty much put myself in places where I am in charge.  This, I’m learning, makes me horribly out of practice in situations where I am second in command or expected to partner. And worse yet, I am dissident, defiant and literally unable to bear it when my partner doesn’t see it or do it my way.  How humbling and embarrassing.  Any skills in diplomacy, arbitration or mediation escape me. I am desperate to recoup them; the alternatives are non-starters. Submission leaves me feeling marginalized, dominance is hollow.

When I think about my alphaness, it’s more than not being able to follow along, it’s this feeling that my ability to put my time to my definition of “good use” is stripped from me.  I don’t know how to handle it.

Ambition is a cruel catalyst. There is so much I want to create and achieve in this life. I abhor what I view as the necessary nuisances required to keep me going. I have trained myself to shut it down and sleep at night only because my body flips on the irritation switch when I’ve been awake too long. It’s the same thing with eating.

I’m mad that my hips and knees won’t let me run anymore, as I believe this is the biggest bang for my buck when it comes to maintaining fitness.  It’s the original moving meditation and I’m bitter that this fulfilling practice is no longer an option for me.  I long for the “Born to Run” life of barefoot footfalls and chomping on chia seeds. And this alpha dog misses the family dog.  She was my reason for getting outside and walking at least once a day, if not twice.

I overhear my nephew in a conversation about Stephen Hawking.  His matter-of-fact comment is “the guy’s body just crapped out on him”.  These words come from an 18-year old who has never walked. What rich perspective.

I’ve been told I don’t like change. I ask myself if that’s really true.  I have weathered massive amounts of change, both forced upon me and ignited by me. The transforming is unsettling and emotional, but I can’t in all honesty call myself resistant.  Sure I wish I used the stereo enough to remember how all the buttons work.  Same with the technology in the conference rooms.  But I don’t think this is so much a resistance to change as it is a frustration with my own limitations and an impatience for any learning curve taking time away from my relentless drive to get to what is important to me.

Yoga is good for me in that it begs me to slow down and be kind to myself.  The 90 minutes is excruciating, not because the room is too hot or the exercise is too difficult, but because time is such a precious commodity.  Can’t I get the benefits without investing so much time?  The answer, of course, is no. The instructors always say the postures we hate the most are the ones we need the most.  Apparently I need the whole damn 90-minute experience. And so this is yet another gift yoga presents to me. It just may explain why I am compelled to go to class while at the same time repelled by the time it demands of me.

Maybe the lesson here is striving to create the best experience possible wherever life dictates I spend my time?  I don’t eat lunch with friends. Breakfast, if I eat it, is shoved down behind the steering wheel. People talk about sitting down at the family table for dinner at night, resurrecting this lost art of connecting over a meal. What if this happened three times a day?

The other lesson is gratitude. Every alpha dog doesn’t always get her day. But lots of great stuff comes her way every day. Maybe if she was brave enough to step into the paws of a beta dog or even an omega dog she would learn how to be instead of do?

Stephen Hawking says, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”  A snow day seems like a safe place to start.

Parity

“I want to be a human being, not a human doing.”  Her challenge hangs in the air as we’re packing suitcases for a week at the beach, two Type-A personalities trying to unwind how we will balance the guilt we feel leaving behind our busy work schedules with the glee and inspiration we know will appear when we unplug. We’ve just spent a piece of the morning sipping coffee in a hot tub high in the mountains attempting to solve this and other world problems.

We talk about work as an addiction, albeit an acceptable addiction; something just as debilitating as alcohol or drugs, yet strangely coveted because society has deemed constant running on the corporate treadmill as the path to monetary rewards spelling happiness and success. But aren’t all addictions the same in the end, excessive practices waxing compulsive with the power to eventually consume us?

 

Think about it.  The runner pushing her legs unhealthy distances week after week in the name of training for a marathon.  The gamer in front of his screen, fingers working the joystick level after level on a quest for the top.  Our unnatural attachment to social media and the constant checking up on what everyone else is doing or, more importantly, how they are responding to us.  Are we living our lives or posting our lives?  These behaviors, and others like them, when practiced in excess can intrude on our relationships, isolate us and diminish the quality of our lives. 

I’ve decided the warning flag is time. It’s not the activity itself that is offensive, but how long or how often you are subjecting your body or your mind to any one task. Vices stealthily overtake us when we continually dose more than is prescribed.  I remember vividly friends who, while many of us had to bribe our children to read, deprived their son, a voracious reader, of books as punishment for bad behavior.  With only a finite number of hours in the day, when we spend a disproportionate amount of time on one activity, we leave room for little else.  We humans need a rich life of social interaction, quiet meditation, physical activity and heads-down concentration. Spending too much time in any one place starts to interfere. And those who make us aware of our imbalances tend to be the ones who care about us the most, those who suffer when we are absent from other parts of life.

   

So maybe the answer isn’t to completely disconnect from your work while on vacation.  Sounds horrifying, I know, and it’s not healthy to be that person who attempts to conduct business at the same pace on vacation as at home.  You may think you’re staying on top of things, but while your travel companions silently steam, your back-up at the office is wondering why you asked them to cover for you in the first place. What I’m suggesting is checking in, reading messages periodically and responding only to what’s critical, or taking a call or two to keep what feels urgent moving.

Conversely, and infinitely more difficult, I submit we don’t completely disconnect from vacation while at home.  How can we routinely carve out time for other elements of life during work days that have grown exceedingly protracted with the onslaught of technology?   We think we’re expected to be available and responsive in the wee hours of the morning, during the lunch hour and deep into the night, but are we?  What would happen if we set boundaries around our time or allowed other activities to weave in and out?  Can we truly define and maintain our own balance?

Human being or human doing?  In order to thrive and find happiness we are both.  

Tiller

The secret ingredient, he tells me, is chicken poop. It’s late on a Sunday afternoon in June and we’ve finally found the time to put a few plants in the ground for some semblance of a vegetable garden.  He turns the soil in a small section of the bed, amending with precious fertilizer from the neighbor’s coop. He suggests I transplant the lettuce, an uninvited yet welcome guest who shows up perennially, and sometimes in the wrong place.  I’m reluctant to move it, given what I know about flowers and their aversion to an uprooting during the blooming season.  I’m not confident the plant will rebound this summer.

Each one of us sows an enormous amount of seeds in a lifetime.  Some of these seeds we deliberately and lovingly plant with full intention. We take responsibility to water, feed and nurture them as they grow.  We guide them as best we can, give attention and direction we hope will lead to a bumper crop.  We love them into the harvest, ripe to be plucked and shared with the world.

Other seeds we may not even be aware we are sowing.  The seed of perspective inspiring an adversary to see things differently, or the seed of a new idea sparked into fruition.  The seed of a question propelling another in a new direction. Or the seed of wisdom causing someone to reconsider a decision. It takes someone coming back to us saying, “Hey, you’ve changed my life,” for us to even know we planted a thought that grew, that we’ve made a difference.

This life is a journey.  We can’t begin to understand our true impact, how we affect every individual we come in contact with.  We can’t anticipate which seeds will germinate and grow and which will never make it out of the ground.  But that’s the beauty of it, and why we need to keep sowing.

 

Every New Year’s Eve we feel compelled to assess the last 525,600 minutes of our lives, but the reality is our work isn’t completed in calendar year blocks.  What if you thought about 2017 in terms of the seeds you’ve sown?  And the cultivating you’ve done to bring those seeds along?  I bet you’d feel richer.

I’m grateful I had the courage to sell my house this summer; I see my kids blossoming now that they are out on their own.  I’m grateful I made it my mission to meet talented individuals in my organization; I’m helping grow careers.  I’m grateful I gave myself permission to go on vacation this year, to spend time connecting with family and friends, immersed in the cultures of San Diego, New Orleans, Northern Wisconsin and Seattle.  I’m grateful for every time I stood on my yoga mat and told myself I am enough. I’m grateful for every time I decided to listen to someone who needed to talk. I’m grateful for the new life I’m creating with an amazing partner.

The transplanted lettuce didn’t make it, despite all the water and chicken poop.  But the transplanted me is thriving.  

Happy New Year!

Genesis

Just before check-out guests at this hotel find beside their beds a paper bag holding a hagenia bulb in soil.  Part of Bisate Lodge’s reforestation project, this is a gift they won’t take home. Hands cupped liked shovels they dig and blanket this sapling in the Rwandan earth, and through this act unwittingly assume ownership of the tree it will become. For now, the hotel employees instruct, they must return to see how it grows.

It’s more than just the beginning.  According to Oxford Dictionaries it’s “the origin or mode or formation of something”.  And it’s hard work, I don’t care what anyone says. Doors and websites for new companies open for business only after countless sleepless hours of blood, sweat and yes, sometimes tears. Expectant mothers slog into the delivery room at the nine-month mark anxious to free their bodies from the exhaustion of incubation. God put so much energy into creation even He had to rest on the seventh day. 

I become a gardener at my house on Vineyard Lane.  I choose this house specifically, with intention to raise my family and cultivate roots to spread deep and wide. I till not only my children, but our small patch of land. With a sunny, southern exposure in the front yard, I want textured purple, white and pink perennials.  Delicate, willowy gaura and heavenly scented lavender replace thorny brambleberry. Spiky-centered coneflowers make way for iris, allium and monarda.  Most plants yield fairly easily for me. But one tree holds on for dear life.  I try several times over the years to pull her out, but this tree’s roots gird her, unwilling to surrender to the hacking of my pernicious persistence. Eventually I give up.

Comfortable in this home where we all grew up, even though each of us wants to move on, none of us takes steps to actually do it. We are all stuck when I make the bold move to put the house on the market. With the sign in the front yard I feel pregnant, so focused on the frenzy of preparations, I think about little but the logistics leading up to the moment of change:  Closing the doors on the moving van is a lot like pushing the baby out of the womb.  What now?  I fail to scout within myself, underestimating my feelings in the aftermath; not only the brand new circadian rhythm to be created for the business of life, but the wringer of emotions to fitfully twist through.

The deeper our roots, the more difficult the uprooting. 

There are times over the course of the last (almost) four months where I feel like that tree in my front yard, so unwilling to allow myself to pulled out of the ground even though I am the one doing the pulling. But it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  I achieved exactly what I set out to do in that home, richly and religiously fertilizing the soil with the stories of our lives, spreading roots of unimaginable depth and breadth. A life this abundant is jarring to dig up.

With the gift of perspective that a little time brings, I now wonder how we can become more like saplings, make ourselves easier to separate from the ground we’re calling home?  What if we recognized and accepted that new beginnings happen all the time, and allow ourselves to bloom wherever we find ourselves planted?  Changes we ask for, and circumstances we don’t ask for, throw us off the planned course and set us on a new and uncertain path.  We need to permit ourselves a little grace, acknowledging the magnitude of our emotions, granting ourselves the time we need to become comfortable in the new normal. 

New beginnings are hard enough, we make them harder when we fight ourselves. As human beings we are marvels in adaptability, resilience and resourcefulness. When we trust we can find ourselves no matter where we are, we undoubtedly will.

I drive into the old neighborhood periodically and look at my front yard. I do feel a tremendous sense of ownership for all I have cultivated. When spring comes again I will want to take a peek at my beloved and intoxicatingly fragrant Thalia daffodils. I wonder if the new owners will take on the crusade to remove that tree with the unforgiving will.  If they do, they are certainly in for a fight.  She’s a Rose of Sharon.

We are saplings

Forever uprooting

Into new beginnings.

Homing

She tells me I’m special and I just don’t realize it.  No, she’s not my mother patiently cooing words of encouragement to my morose teenaged self.  She’s a co-worker playing an invaluable role in my career.  For years she’s been coaching me to change the way I think about myself, to rise on the inside to the stature I’ve achieved on the outside.  She’s the one who, when I refer to executives in the company, looks at me with that face and says “You are an executive.” I just don’t realize it.

I believe we are somehow programmed to ignore our own specialness.  Opposite of the narcissist incapable of self-awareness broadcasting his grandeur at every turn, we are blind to our majesty, shrugging off the idea that whatever it is we absolutely excel at is extraordinary. 

This is a big mistake.  If you think that thing that you are really passionate about creating, promoting, solving, or eradicating can’t change the world, you’re wrong.

As a token of appreciation for all she does for me, I bring her a box of my Christmas cookies. Over the years she alludes to the fact that this holiday leaves a sour taste in her mouth.  This year she tells me biting into my cookies has changed this. I’m incredulous and immensely touched.  Who knew a box of beautifully packaged and crafted homemade treats could profoundly impact an individual?  She insists it has.  My gift changes her world. I am beaming.

I used to believe this search for emotional gratification is pathetic, a bit embarrassed when I realize I crave job changes, not for more money, but to quench my thirst for appreciation.  What is wrong with me that I can’t be happy with the paycheck and find other avenues where people are more willing to express gratitude?  But it’s a manifestation of our humanity.  Once we’re fortunate enough to be able to afford the basic necessities of food and shelter, we are driven to fulfill our emotional needs.

 

We gingerly put our most personal work out there, willing to risk rejection or indifference because it’s work we are compelled to create, it’s unlike any other and in our heart of hearts we know it’s spectacular.  When we receive accolades we’re fueled to create more.  When we don’t we’re defeated. We want to pack up and take our onlyness elsewhere. Craving the environment that welcomes and celebrates our best selves is not something to shun or feel bad about.  It’s a signal to embrace and act upon.

 

We’re all parched beings craving the elixir of recognition and appreciation, aching to be noticed, to be called out as special. We gravitate towards those people who hydrate us with their generosity to validate our worthiness, to call out our specialness, to point us to our extraordinariness.  They fuel our sparkle and shine so we persist, so we can change the world.

He sees the way the cookies are presented in the box.  He is offered a taste because she’s willing to share.  He comes over to me to let me know how spectacular they are.  He suggests I may have missed my calling.  Have I?  Should I just quit this day job as an executive and open up a seasonal bakery?

After some contemplation I decide I am answering my calling, every day. I am a lot of things.  I am an executive.  I am a baker.  I am an artist. I am a writer. I am a mother.  I am a daughter, sister, aunt, friend.  I am partner to the most extraordinary man. I take on new roles all the time, I bring what only I can bring to them.  When what I offer is cherished and nurtured, I blossom into a greater role.  When it’s not, I know it’s time to make a change to get to that place where who I am is once again honored.  I am changing my world everywhere I go.  I just don’t realize it.

Masseter

He says I grind my teeth, but my prognosis is good.  He prescribes a mouth guard I plunge into boiling water and mold around my teeth. If forced, I’ll sheepishly admit I am not vigilant; I wear it sporadically.  While I can’t necessarily see in my mouth the evidence of this suspected grinding, it explains the root of a recurring dream waking me with a start when I believe for a moment I’ve broken my molars. He suggests this activity is not confined to sleeping, but sneaks in during my waking hours. Maybe I want to wear this mouth guard during the day? 

When my yoga instructors encourage us to relax our jaws,  I begin to notice I am a habitual jaw-clencher. It’s arguably the strongest muscle in the human body, right up there with the heart pumping blood and the uterus pushing out babies. And it’s interfering with my peace.

As I commit to myself to make room for more balance in my life, I know I am putting in less hours in front of my computer.  However, it’s clear my brain continues to work overtime.  I awaken in darkness attempting to solve complex puzzles.  While every other muscle in my body stiffens overnight from lack of use, my jaw feels like it’s been on the treadmill.  Clearly, the work is seeping outside my waking hours and I’m not sure why.

In my nearly 20 years of employment at my company I think I’ve held something like 14 different roles.  Some are formal declarations of a new job where I actually pick up my things and move to another location with a new client and team, others are casually communicated additions of responsibility lobbed my way as I walk past my manager’s desk; remarks like “I’ve been thinking you should oversee all the projects in Latin America.”  One thing that’s consistent as I’m fortunate to move up the ladder is the need to redefine the meaning of work. 

To my closest friends, I am brave enough to divulge I have a hard time describing what it is that I do in my current job. How, I wonder, do I sum up how I spend my time during any given day and the value it brings to my company?  I notice I am required to constantly pivot. I can have up to ten meetings in a day, all on entirely different topics.  This leaves little time to be thoroughly prepared for any conversation, nor to do anything traditionally described as “real work”. 

I continue to be amazed that meeting people is actually a job requirement.  I might not have a position for someone I meet, but if I’m doing my job well, I’m talking to people I might want to recruit at a future point in time.  It’s my job to remember every individual who impresses me and stay in touch so I can make a hire when the right position presents itself. 

Taking clients to lunch and carving out time to talk to them is part of my job.  If I’m really good at it, I’m asking pointed questions geared to draw out their biggest problems. It’s my job to listen, to observe, to understand what’s working and what’s not working, to diagnose and put a plan together to make changes.   

And it’s my job to delegate nearly every piece of what I’ve formerly described as “real work” that comes my way.  Because if my time is tied up with those tasks, I don’t have time to do my job.

It all sounds crazy to me, and no wonder up until now I haven’t been able to accept nor succinctly summarize what it is I do!  I can credit Seth Godin and his blog post "Mental load and the worry cache" with the ah-ha moment allowing me to turn the corner and embrace my new normal.    

At the onset of my current job I feel like the first-grader in late August who comes home at the end of those first few school days and needs a nap. It’s a kind of mental exhaustion wiping us out until we figure it out, until we settle into new expectations and a new routine. I need to accept that what I’m doing IS the real work. 

All of this delegation can clearly manifest itself in worry; however, when I look at myself from this new vantage point, I realize it’s not the fear that someone else won’t do the work as well as I would, it’s the accountability and the fear my decisions may result in failure, as Seth describes, that truly keeps me up and wears me down. It causes my mind to work 24/7.  And if I’m being really honest, I would bet the new role I’m playing with my kids since they’ve moved out is causing the same jaw-breaking consternation.

So the question becomes how to quell the fears, and repurpose this energy into something positive.  Leaving worry in the dust is easier said than done.  But maybe it starts with the understanding failure is part of the business of life and we are all more than capable of recovering from it. The most powerful muscle we can exert on any situation, by far, is belief in ourselves.

Riff

We’re attempting to meet for dinner, my sons and I.  We’ve tried two dates now, only to end up aborting both at the last minute because he is hung up unexpectedly at work. The text messages flying back and forth culminate in frustration:  “I hate this adulting thing, planning stuff is so hard now.” 

The Urban Dictionary defines adulting as follows:  “to do grown up things and hold responsibilities such as, a 9-5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grown-ups.”  I’ve been thinking lately that I hate this adulting thing, too.

Lying on my yoga mat the tears well up in my eyes. The instructors repeat this often:  Letting go of thoughts and feelings that don’t serve us can often manifest itself in strong emotions during class. Even though this is a practice, and every time I step into the hot room I’m repeating the exact same postures in the exact same order, today’s class is the most difficult I can recall in months.  I am struggling to get through, uncharacteristically taking a break to lie down in the middle of standing separate head to knee pose.  All I can think is I don’t want to work so hard anymore, not at yoga, maybe not at anything. 

I’ve spent my entire life trying to prove I am not a sloth.  It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember where I ever came up with the idea I deserve the label.  Maybe it’s a product of my contempt for the painful shyness I’ve slowly learned to accept and manage over the course of my adult life.  I have never been afraid of the work, just afraid to put myself out there.  And so I go the extra mile, ensure I’m extra prepared because when I do speak up, I need to be certain my facts are correct, my thoughts measured and logical.  I wonder if this compulsion to prove my fortitude has just worn me out over time.

There is no doubt adulting is a lot of work, in fact there are times when it feels like a chore. It requires, among other things, discipline, maturity, accountability and consistency to fulfill our obligations and keep our dependents safe and sound. It means doing the right thing when no one is looking, because our kids are looking.  They are always looking. It can seem like our lives are not our own.

But adulting also brings autonomy, the privilege of choice and a delicious freedom to express ourselves. We get to live life on our own terms, to create a sanctuary we call home that may look vastly different than where we came from. Adulting brings a tremendous amount of joy if we can allow ourselves to experience it.  I’m taking steps to not only recognize it when it shows up in ordinary time, but to seek it out and allow some space to invite it in.  Because we should be able to carry out our responsibilities and care for the ones we love without taking everything so seriously.  Adulting shouldn’t always be hard.     

Of course I will go back to yoga in a day or two.  I will continue to push myself. And I’ll also be a little kinder to myself.  It’s hard to compare yourself to others in the hot room; you’ll fall out of the posture the moment you take your eyes off yourself. I’ve been called out by an instructor as the strongest person in the room. Others must be allowing themselves the breaks I can’t seem to grant myself. I decide the world will not end if I choose to contribute not only to the energy in the room, but also the humanity.  

I wish I could I tell my son the challenges of adulting will pass, that it’s only a phase or a rite of passage.  But the reality is adulting is demanding at its onset, and continues to play a refrain throughout the course of any life. What I can encourage him to do is to be grateful for his independence, and to seek out and embrace the joy and solace there for the taking.  He’s on a journey every one of us on the planet, no matter who or where you are, finds rocky at intervals along the way.  Sometimes it’s just helpful to know we’re not alone.