Songbird

She says the song was hard to write, to play, even to listen to.  She didn’t think she’d ever play it live.  Yet she sits down at her piano without a band or a chorus of vocals behind her, naked of an elaborate set, dramatic lighting and any costume, and she pours the rawest of lyrics into the world in the most achingly tender and beautiful performance.  It’s hard to believe Taylor Swift didn’t write the ballad “Soon You’ll Get Better” for this moment when it so perfectly captures what we all can’t help but be afraid of in this moment.

We were speechless when she struck the last key on the piano, looking into the camera with such heartfelt relief and humility.  While nearly everyone who performed that evening showed incredible courage to put themselves out there absent of their crutches and accoutrements, we know hers is the performance we’ll remember because she was the only one who chose to share such an intensely personal song; her own original song.

The recent weeks have been hard, no doubt. Staying at home seems like such a small sacrifice, especially when my paycheck continues to hit the bank, uninterrupted.  We joke about the yeoman’s job we’re doing here at home saving lives. And in the same breath I feel awkward and uncertain all the time. 

Yes, I’m equipped to work from home and have been doing so for years, but what’s changed is the work I’m doing.  I’m leading leaders who are now balancing home schooling, childcare and work, or wrestling with their spouses and grown children for “the desk”, or going to the garage to sit in their cars to make phone calls. None of our clients are operating in the same manner we’re used to. They’re making unprecedented demands of us to keep their own ships afloat, leaving us with no choice but to make hard calls about relationships when the money stops flowing.  We’re learning who our real partners are; this situation magnifies what we’ve always known in our hearts to be true about who we walk with in lockstep and with whom we disagree fundamentally at the core. 

I’m passionate not just about doing business. I’m passionate about doing good business. Who aligns with our vision, and mission and values?  Who wants to buy what we have to sell?  Not everyone, and that’s okay.  But it’s hard to be the one to say it's time to cut the cord.

I think back to my own divorce, and how I finally found the courage to ask for it.  It wasn’t about anger or bitterness or regret.  Sure, those feelings presented themselves, but they weren’t the real story.  The real story was we just weren’t a fit.  We valued different things, we had our own individual visions that didn’t converge, we couldn’t find joy in each other’s paths, we fundamentally disagreed.

My coach calls it a “growth hangover”, when we spend a disproportionate amount of time out of our comfort zone.  There is no doubt that as we all stay home to flatten the pandemic curve, most of us are battling this metaphorical hangover:  The fuzzy head, the desire to curl up in a ball and sleep all day, maybe even feeling a little bit like throwing up.  What’s really scary is how many of us need tender loving care right now, a remedy for this hangover that has stretched on for 35 days, by my count.  How can we flatten the curve of upheaval staying at home has ignited?

I think the answer is in Taylor Swift’s stirring performance.  Yes, she said she didn’t think she’d ever play that song live. Yet she did because she believes music isn’t always about pleasant feelings.  Amid the uncertainty, isolation, and sadness there is this awesome opportunity for growth if we are vulnerable and courageous enough to sing our own song. We’re all being called to reinvent ourselves in some way, shape or form.  This is a reckoning we cannot ignore, the time to get clear about who we are and who we want to be for the world when we find ourselves able to walk out of the dim bar and into the blinding light of a sunny afternoon.

As I struggle with the hard calls I’m being asked to make during this time, never have I been more attuned to and cleaved to the calling I hear to live my values, to defend my truth. I start crying when he points out I already am. I am Taylor Swift, he says, singing a beautiful song. 

Gem

Heart pounding, I tried to conceal my excitement, and I will confess I wasn’t very good at it. Entering the gallery just before the public walked in for the opening of the Resident & Instructor’s Show, I immediately spotted two of my three submissions, right there on the main wall. The MAIN wall!  (Did I mention they were on the main wall?) 

My first instinct was to flee to the safety of my studio upstairs, where I could jump up and down in a silent scream behind a closed door; but instead I paused at the bottom of the stairs to ask myself what was so wrong with basking in full view?  Here I was in my moment in the spotlight. And while I usually abhor being under one, I knew this particular one begged for reveling; for this was unanticipated recognition at a milestone I had surmised would pass in relative peace.

I hurried back to the display, whipped out my phone and snapped a sloppy photo, commemorating some delicious self-pride I usually don’t allow myself to ingest. And as I lingered, leaking joy, I was told my work had nabbed the attention of the show’s curator, who appreciated the time and patience it takes to create in my medium.

My people came out to support me on that cold and rainy January night. I invited only a few. Feeling perennially unworthy of self-promotion, and afraid my work wouldn’t make it into the show (even though work submitted by every artist was accepted), I didn’t want the word to get out too broadly. I clutched my safety net, reaching out to those who knew me before I ever believed in myself enough to believe this was possible.  The friendships that budded and bloomed among us, angst-ridden, fun-loving, insecure teenagers trying to find our way; the people I shared my wildest dreams with, and the ones who couldn’t be prouder when I realize them.

   

I’ve spent the last year experimenting as a resident artist. My work has been constrained for what seems like forever, limited in my home by a small work space and in my heart by an even smaller tolerance for vulnerability hangovers, that sick feeling washing over us after we’ve revealed the truest parts of ourselves to others. I dared to “go big” at the urging of a fellow artist and friend.  A canvas mounted on my studio wall, I began piecing works together with my door and my soul wide open, inviting in the art enthusiasts who tour the gallery to observe and question. This environment couldn’t help but groom me to muster the guts to talk about work so intensely personal. Those who have watched me work unwittingly help me rehearse; to get comfortable talking about what I do, how I do it, and what it means to me.  They’ve prepared me for this moment of public scrutiny, allowed me to write and edit a story I can tell in plain language with confidence, a story people can relate to.

 

Art is a foreign language to many, even those possessing a tremendous appreciation for it. Who hasn’t studied at least one piece of art, befuddled, and concluded they could easily make it themselves at home in a few minutes time?  Collisions of color and pattern and texture affixed with a seemingly incongruent price or tagged NFS (not for sale) because the artist simply cannot part with a piece that may look like a crazy mash-up to any given viewer. Art is meant to deliver a message that’s often hazily conveyed, with flowery or abstract statements deliberately shrouded to protect a fragile maker. As artists it’s not that we don’t know what this work means to us, it’s that we are petrified we will sound stupid, or maybe too human, telling you about it.

What surprises me on this night, although it probably shouldn’t, are the individuals who acknowledge these deeply held fears, the people who call out my bravery, those who recognize that I’ve chosen to put my heart on my sleeve, willing to risk stumbling through an awkward explanation of self-expression, deeply buried yet starved to be unearthed.

What makes it to the main wall, in my estimation, is what’s deemed fresh and new and interesting and different.  Not the work that’s made as an attempt to please the public, work that’s made with stirring intent to please its unabashedly broken maker.

Inverse

JD Souther recalls the moment he fell in love with her.  In response to his request to cook him dinner, she made him a peanut butter sandwich. And with it she set the tone for the relationship.

 

We opened the new year in front of the big screen in rapt anticipation, watching Souther and several others celebrate Linda Ronstadt in her 2019 documentary, a two-hour tribute to arguably the most nuanced voice of a generation; one capable of thundering and whispering in the blink of an eye. We could relate to Souther’s tale, as the peanut butter sandwich moment is coincidentally part of our love story, too.

Growing up listening to Linda, I often wondered why she didn’t write her own songs.  The answer became clear as her story unfolded.  Her gift was her voice, and her ability to modulate it, to stretch it across an incredible range of musical genres and languages; anything that captured her heart. I write about Linda like she’s gone. She’s here, but Parkinson’s disease has taken away her ability to master the very complex process she knows singing to be.

Her friends on screen emote an undeniable sadness for this loss. I can only imagine how it must feel to her, to surrender such a defining and powerful gift.  As I think about aging, I consider how, by the very act of spending a significant chunk of time on this planet, we inevitably endure loss for which there is no acceptable substitute, no reasonable replacement to fill the void. We watch people and things we value perish or expire. Sometimes it takes the loss for us to recognize just how cleaved we were to the object of our desire; the fact that we are now denied it shining a light on just how meaningful it was to us.

There seems to be this erroneous expectation that the grieving process will end.  That we’ll somehow just get over it with time, and as memories fade, we will be able to plug the hole with another version or flavor of what we had before and move on unaffected.

I replaced running with yoga when my knees and hips told me they could no longer take pounding the pavement. But my heart and my head will never get over the euphoria and freedom running provided; the clarity it brought to my mind; the peace it settled in my soul.

Losses, both small and large, gnaw at me:  Basic Grey papers, my gold standard for their vibrant, original patterns, and wildly saturated colors, unmatched anywhere else. Discontinued years ago, vestiges are sequestered in private inventories for sale if you’re willing to scour the internet and wait for delivery from Malaysia. Dallas Clayton, a beloved and influential Dr. Seussian artist, writer, and community builder who inexplicably disappeared from social media one day with no warning and took with him the daily doses of inspiration I reveled in. The knowledge that Tom Petty and Linda Ronstadt will never perform another song. The curse of timing that placed my mother’s passing before I had the chance to discover my own self-worth and truly accept the love so freely given.

    

If we start to unpack the comfort of hanging back in the fringes, the reluctance to dance at the party, to not get too close, it starts to look like a kind of protection plan we buy into as a shield from inevitable pain. We pay the premiums and receive adequate coverage, but at a considerable cost. It’s a huge miss to play it safe. It’s a huge miss to love less.

JD Souther didn’t mess around after eating Linda’s peanut butter sandwich; they moved in together immediately.  I imagine he loved hard, as it was so obvious to me by the end of the documentary that he’s never stopped loving her. 

“We are never finished with grief.  It is part of the fabric of living.  It is always waiting to happen.  Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.”  -- V.S. Naipaul

So many of us are afraid to love too hard because we don’t trust we will survive the proportionate grief. It takes tremendous courage to be all in, whether it be using our God-given talents to pursue our dreams or to love the person next to us with all our heart and soul. But maybe loving really hard is the exact fuel we need to manage the grief?

Eos

It’s one of the few movies I’ve watched more than once.  I’ve sat through enough viewings to happily hum along with a comfortable familiarity, but not too many that I can’t still be surprised when words or nuances of the storyline I’d swear I never heard before come brilliantly to life.  We happened upon “Four Weddings and a Funeral” on Starz Encore (a channel we didn’t even know we had) and sat fixated in a holiday haze watching Hugh Grant, once again, be the bumbling, can’t get out of his own way, down on his luck yet always manages to win the beautiful girl in the end with his English charm hero he played to perfection in many movies of a similar genre two decades ago.

 

What was new to me this time through the movie reel was the poignant recitation of a W.H. Auden poem, “Funeral Blues”, by one of the characters mourning the sudden death of his life partner.  Hugh Grant and his close-knit gaggle of loveable misfits walk away surprisingly struck by the depth of feelings this man held for the deceased, so caught up in their own lovelornness they had hardly noticed that two among them were practically married.

 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

--W.H. Auden, excerpt from “Funeral Blues”

I caught a rerun of NPR’s Ted Radio Hour this week; musician Sting talking about the writer’s block he suffered at a low point during his magnificent career of one pop hit after another.  What finally broke it, he says, was moving his focus away from himself and on to others.  He made a conscious choice to stop trying to write about himself, finding inspiration when he mustered the courage to look to his roots and contemplate the so-called ordinary people he grew up with, a chapter of his life he’d tried so feverishly to shake off in the name of stardom.  Twenty songs poured out of him to make the Broadway show “The Last Ship.”

A beautiful portrait of a long-lost friend on social media with the hash tag #cancersucks stirs up a torrent of emotions inside me.  Among them, guilt for failing over the last few years to pick up the thread of a lifeline I held to so tightly when she and I were in the same place, in another time.  “She didn’t need you until now,” is his soothing refrain when I admit my shame for letting her go, and my fervent desire to reconnect.

As 2019 comes to a close, every avenue of life is compiling little vignettes bearing the impossible burden of tying all the year represents into a nice neat bow to bring closure to what is, in reality, a mercifully fluid, open-ended opportunity to fall down, dust ourselves off, and get back up again to start anew, no matter what the date on the calendar says.  We don’t need to wait for January 1^st for our fresh start.  We get one every time we rub the sleep out of our eyes, blessed with the miracle of waking to another dawn.

Pang

After it happened, I was moving slowly anyway. So, I deliberately hung out in the locker room knowing she would eventually come in to rinse off and grab her stuff.  I was determined to confide in her and see what she had to say. A major muscle in my back was seizing. Unfortunately, I knew this drill; I sought from her an explanation of its root cause and cleaved to the idea of a cure.

Being an instructor and an avid yogi herself, not only was she knowledgeable about the tantrum my muscle was throwing, she periodically found herself in the very same clutches, and shared the physical therapy no muscle relaxant-prescribing doctor would ever suggest. But more than anything she reassured me I had not injured myself, and that in her experience an angry muscle was a sign she was on the verge of a breakthrough, able to express a posture at a new level once the pain subsided. While I left the studio in physical misery, hope sprouted in my heart.

“Growing pains” is actually a thing for some children who complain of aching legs just prior to a growth spurt. I put some thought to this idea in the context of yoga and decided quickly it makes a bunch of sense. The concept is ubiquitous, but we’re so afraid of hurting, we often fail to acknowledge or accept the role pain plays in activating growth.

 

Every time I transition into a new role at work, I can count on an awkward block of agony where I question my capabilities and struggle to retrieve the confidence so accessible when I was at my peak doing the job I just vacated in the name of career growth. Even in the artistic world, so many creatives will tell you their first work was crap. Amazing art or writing belongs to those who put in the work every day to hone their skills, the ones who instead of giving up keep practicing and turning out the mediocre until one day there is a body of work that when presented together communicates a marked and almost miraculous evolution. I need only to look at my collection of handmade holiday cards dating back to the turn of the millennium for proof.

But, oh, the pain!  When your back, or your heart, or your mind, or your pride, or your grief aches so profusely and incessantly, how are you ever expected to keep going? For those of us lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) to have been here before, we know that this too shall pass.  For everything else, it’s probably a little bit of faith and trust.

I will say that nursing my screaming back was much easier to manage now that I was armed with the good counsel of my trusted yoga teacher. I carried out her prescription of backward bends religiously, and true to her word the non-negotiable recovery time of two weeks I had experienced in the past was reduced to a mere two days.  I was back in yoga class by the end of the week, kicking out my leg and sustaining the hold in standing head to knee pose for the first time in five years of practice.

It’s a routine playing out repeatedly in life. As I heard myself confidently presenting a recent success story to a group of colleagues today, and letting the dissenting opinion wash off my back, I realized I am over the hump once again of crippling self-doubt and jumbled nerves threatening to hold me at bay just before I make the leap to the new level of leadership I need to embrace.

As we come out of the backward bend that is camel pose, the instructor will often say if you feel a little sick or uncomfortable, you’re doing it right. We probably don’t spend enough time telling ourselves or each other those feelings are normal. Imagine life if we did.

Ditch

I count four white toilets as I drive through the neighborhood. Our normally neat street is lined with old sofas, appliances and broken children’s toys stacked at the curb. Tomorrow is Community Clean-Up Day, a moment of amnesty for those wishing to toss out ugly, unwieldy, unwanted trash at no charge. And we know a few things about trash.

Renovating a home while living in it propels the occupants into an iterative cycle of assessment.  Items are packed up and forgotten, unpacked for short term use, and then packed up again as spaces are systematically taken down to the studs and rebuilt. Each phase presents an opportunity to re-evaluate the same item, to decide if you really need that table lamp with the misshapen shade or the juicer that’s never been out of the box. While I purge a fair amount, like many of us, I find parting to be sweet sorrow, and therefore I retain far more than I really need.

 

My appraisal process is suspect. Sadly, the obvious questions carry the least weight and are the last to get asked:  Does this fit me?  When was the last time I used this?   The deciding factors generally revolve around far less practical criteria:  Can I see myself using this sometime in the future?  Does this have sentimental value?  Is this beautifully designed or constructed?  Does this appeal to my senses?

 

Maybe the most valuable question of all is one I’m not asking:  Does this still serve me?

It’s a philosophy my favorite yoga instructor writes about regularly, connecting a yoga practice to the journey of finding your true self. As she inspires us to go after the lives we dream of living, she asks us to consider what behaviors, activities, and people in our lives are no longer serving the person we are becoming. I’ve considered this, and admittedly been shallow in my approach.  I identify what it is I need to step away from, but never dive into why I need to step away from it.

 

I’ve glossed over what it means to hold on to what no longer serves me.  The idea that my habits, my routines, the people I’ve always hung out with, the soundtrack that plays in my head could be a security blanket, fueling my fear of the unknown and providing the excuse I need to stay put instead of moving forward.

I see clients demonstrate this all the time:  Even though they’ve hired us to do the bulk of the work for them, they continue to do their jobs in the same way they always have, creating redundancy and confusion instead of moving into different and more interesting roles.

I start to think about my own behavior.  As the parent of grown children, I find myself wanting to step into their lives in inappropriate ways, tempted to treat them as kids rather than adults who need something very different from me now.  And as a partner, I’m known to choose lecturing (which always gets me in trouble) when what’s desired is listening.

The breakthrough for me in all of this is that I have held steadfast to constructs about life that no longer serve me. Somehow being scolded as a child that I should “know better” manifested into a belief that anything less than omniscience is unacceptable. The quintessential rule-follower and teacher’s pet still believes her place in any hierarchy requires obsequious behavior.

As we move into the final stages of construction on this house, less and less of what I was certain I needed to bring with me feels like it has a place in this new space. I could hold on for nostalgia’s sake, or for pride, or to make a statement about independence, but that’s not what I’m choosing to do with this next phase of life.  I’m going to take advantage of Community Clean-Up Day and leave what doesn’t serve me at the curb.

Beset

“Ugh.  I need it,” is her response when I text her on Friday afternoon to ask if she wants to get a margarita.  I do, too.  If for no other reason than to knock down a little hair of the dog, salve for the vulnerability hangover I’ve been nursing all week.

She meets me at the table outdoors.  I’m salivating at the chance to unload my anxiety on her, only to discover her world has turned upside down due to the notice she received from her company earlier in the week.  She’s been unhappy in her situation for a while now, perhaps the victim of one of Corporate America’s most commonplace and deadly bait and switch tactics:  A new manager.  It’s all done with the best of intentions; the company reorganizes or is sold, and suddenly the leader you had an amazing connection with is in another job, and her replacement is not a match.

Over cucumber margaritas we discover our heads have been pounding from the same malady:  We’ve acted on the compulsion to speak a dissenting opinion to people we believe have power over us.  The choices seem impossible.  We agree our younger selves would have followed grudgingly, rendering ourselves helpless victims, stripped of empowerment or flat out ignored.  We’d probably complain to our friends, not realizing respect for leadership is eroding, and with it sucking all the joy out of a role we once coveted.  Our older selves are a different story.  Years of experience in our businesses and the business of life breed self-confidence and self-security, the ingredients in the shot of courage we slam. We challenge the situation, ask why, maintain our integrity at all costs; we say no when yes is the safer answer. We can’t stay quiet if we try, because following blindly or hitting the mute button when there’s an opening to be heard goes against the beings we’ve grown into.

But there’s no avoiding the hangover. Brene Brown, the world-famous researcher of shame and self-worth coined the term “vulnerability hangover”, the feeling of apprehension laced with a pinch of shame washing over us when we stretch outside of our comfort zone daring to express a controversial, new or dissident opinion to the world.

As we talk through our situations, we wonder how much honesty is too much?  When do we need to share less of ourselves in the name of self-preservation?  I can’t answer the question over one drink on a hot, humid, sunny afternoon, but upon further review I’ll say power raises the stakes. When we’re dealing with people in power, the shot of courage we take before saying our piece needs to be potent because the risk of losing what matters to us is real, making the hangover especially crippling.  It’s so much easier to put ourselves out there in places where we feel safe.

Eventually all hangovers dissipate, the pounding stops, our minds ease.  We’re hydrated by the pat on the back from a friend proud of the courage we displayed.  Someone who heard us simply agrees with our position. Or we acknowledge there was no way we were not saying what we said, regardless of the outcome.

The best advice I’ve come across this week was shared in the hot room at yoga.  If we want our minds to be at ease, we need to be in the present.  Worrying about the future and replaying the past can pitch us into turmoil. Instead of ruminating on all that was said in your moment of vulnerability, take a minute to find a safe place to speak your fears (maybe over a margarita with a friend), and let the present move you on.