June 2010 – Page 5 – A Design So Vast

A foreign and familiar terrain

June 4, 2010June 4, 2010

Grace had two friends over after school today. They were rowdy, and I may have possibly raised my voice just a wee bit. They were just being excitable seven year olds. But our house is small and they were rambunctious and I was annoyed. Anyway, I let Grace have it. She knew I was not pleased with her behavior.

We then went to school for the end-of-year picnic dinner. Just as the pizza arrived a massive thunder and lightning storm began. It was absolutely pouring. Grace found a different friend and they ran around in the rain. When her friend slipped and skinned her knee badly, Grace came streaking through the rain to find her friend’s mother and me. When the three of them – Grace, her friend, and my friend (the friend’s mother) reappeared in the school building, Grace had a plan. She took her friend’s mother to find a bandaid (which she knew the location of), leaving her friend with me. Later, my friend told me – in front of Grace – how well she felt Grace had handled the situation and I could see my daughter swell up with pride.

As I was tucking Grace in tonight, she was uncharacteristically quiet. “What’s up, Gracie?” I asked her as I rubbed her back. She looked at me, fixing me with her gaze. “Well, Mummy, you know I’m always trying to be good, right?” I looked back at her, feeling vertigo as I stared into her eyes, my own eyes (one of the very few physical characteristics, along with her cleft chin, that she inherited from me). I had a flashing moment of intense identification, that experience where my own child self and my daughter simultaneously collapse into one and burst into a million kaleidoscopic fragments.

My heart broke a little. I leaned down and kissed her forehead, stroking her hair back as I did so. “You don’t always have to be good, Gracie. I love you no matter what.” I whispered that I was incredibly proud of how she had handled the situation with her friend, that she was a good friend, and that that mattered most of all. And then I said again, helplessly repeating myself, “I love you no matter what. You are good just by being you.” How to do this right? How to make her know that she doesn’t have to please me – and everybody else around her – to be loved and worthy?

Oh I am heavy tonight, thinking about this terrain, so familiar to me and yet so foreign at the same time. How different the perspective is when I’m watching someone else embark on it, rather than doing so myself. I want so desperately to walk these hills with her in a way that helps her know how deeply loved she is, and how fundamentally valuable, worthy, and love-able she is, just by being herself. I’m afraid I’m already doing it wrong. The sky has cleared tonight but there’s thunder and lightning in my heart. How do I help someone who is so much like me grow into herself without falling into all of the same painful ruts?

My intention: to honor the not-knowing

June 3, 2010June 3, 2010

(heart-shaped fern, this weekend. i’m sure i would not have noticed this in previous years)

I’m happy to participate in Dian Reid‘s marvelous Self-Evidence and Authenticity Challenge. I encourage you all to visit Dian’s blog and read some of her thoughtful, honest, resonant words. I read them all and learn something in every post.

In an uncharacteristic display of either randomness or inspiration (you decide), I am going to start not at the top of the list (with Compassion), but with Intention. Intention. I like intention better than goal, personally, because it implies an internal rather than external focus. Intention doesn’t share the forced-forward-motion feeling of words like drive, either.

But, really, what is my intention? I am clearly in the middle of my life. These are the rich days of adulthood, the long hours and short years of parenting small children, a time I am certain I will look back on with nostalgia. As Dani Shapiro so beautifully describes in her gorgeous memoir, Devotion, I feel as though it’s taken me a long time to clack, slowly, to the top of the roller coaster ramp, but I know that from here it’s going to go breathtakingly fast. I am increasingly aware of intention, and it feels like it matters more. This feels like a weighty and important question: what is my intention? For now, for today, for tomorrow, for the rest of my life?

The best answer I can give is that my intention is to live inside this life of mine. To accept that the truth of my current life is summed up in three words: “I don’t know.” To embrace the unknown which seems to press against the sides of my days, making itself known at unexpected moments with surprising urgency. The unknown which has flooded in to fill the void that I discovered when I let go of the illusion of certainty. I’ve spent my life following a map, you see, and in my early 30s I realized it was no longer helping me find my way. I had moved into a territory past the border of the map, and I felt lost. Into this sensation of being lost came an overwhelming awareness of the echoing “I don’t know.”

I am learning, slowly and haltingly, that there is no need for a map after all. There isn’t anywhere to go. In truth, it was only once I took my eyes off the horizon and my attention away from the next accomplishment that I started seeing what was right here. I’d spent 30 or more years tripping over the brush in my tracks, totally focused on the next place I was going. I ache to think what gems and surprises I missed.

So I guess that is my intention. To honor the not-known, the unknown, and the I don’t know. To respect that maybe feeling lost is the only way to be found. To give myself the room to learn how to live in a way that is not about the next thing, but about this right here. To take the time to learn how to navigate this land without maps.

porous, Fix You, and simply witnessing another

June 2, 2010June 2, 2010

I listened to Fix You by Coldplay on repeat yesterday morning on my commute to work. It was my second to last day in the office, and my fear of change is really taking root. As I’ve written before, I’m not good at change. I’m especially not good at endings, which feel like they’re piling up right now. I know intellectually that what lies ahead is going to be good, but emotionally I’m still fearful. Because of this I’m in a state even more porous than usual, reflective, melancholy, thoughtful.

I listened to Fix You, over and over, remembering a post I’d written about it last summer. I thought about the notion of being fixed, of needing to be fixed in the first place. I remembered Bindu Wiles’ beautiful post that asserted, in no uncertain terms that constructive critiscim … is a scam. I recalled Kelly Diels’ powerful essay about how we are not put on earth as a corrective action. And I thought about how the idea of wanting to fix someone implies unavoidably that they are broken.

I find myself returning to one of Kelly’s sentences: I am going to meet you where you are. I am not going to try to force you into what I think you should be; instead, I am going to witness you as you are. I am going to try to remember that people are who they are mostly because that is who they are, not because of anything to do with me. I am going to try harder to accept the light and the dark that exists inside everyone – most of all, myself – because to do otherwise is frustrating for me and hurtful for them.

I wonder, though, where the line is between useful, productive self-improvement and accepting the self. I know few things better than that expansive, hopeful feeling of: yes, that is a good point, thank you for seeing me so clearly, let me do a better job with X and Y. I’m not saying we should not listen to others’ input and strive to be better and more mature. In fact I think “self-acceptance” can often be code for not trying to overcome our flaws or redirect bad patterns of behavior. And I know I have learned things from others that have essentially changed how I think about myself and the world – for the better. But how to remain open to this while retaining a fundamental commitment to my self-worth? That is the tension I don’t quite know how to navigate.

One of the myriad reasons I read is to learn about people seeing, knowing, and loving others for their fundamental truth. One of my favorite stories about this is The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book that is, to me, a beautiful meditation on accepting people for who they are, limitations and all. It is about loving someone and being willing to embrace all of the things about them that make them who they are, even the uncomfortable and inconvenient ones.

I suppose, really, all of this focus on relationships with others is just a prelude to working on the relationship with self. As Jung said, the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Maybe my working to accept others fully, to honor their complexities, is a first step towards offering myself that kind of forgiveness and love. Not an easy thing for me to do. I am as bad as the next person at clinging to my hopes of how someone else will react to me, of stubbornly wanting them to behave a certain way, rather than simply meeting them where they are. I realize what this implies in terms of my expectations of myself.

Maybe this time of flux, when it feels like the ground beneath my feet is heaving around, is the perfect time to address some of these challenges. I feel reminded, in a visceral way, of the fact that I am simply not in control of the world around me. May this serve as a reminder also that I am not in control of other people either.

It is, really, very simple. Compassion. Remembering that people are, mostly, doing their best. That behavior that hurts and stings me usually comes from somewhere deep in the other person that has nothing to do with me (I know, shocker, right?). In many cases, in fact, I should feel privileged to be exposed to the molten core of all that is unresolved and difficult for another person. And perhaps I can turn some of that gentleness onto myself. And see that maybe, just maybe, I don’t need fixing myself.