On Monday Grace was home sick from school. She mostly lay around reading and watching TV, but midmorning we decided to go out for a slow walk. She believes, as I do, that fresh air is the cure for everything. She asked to walk to the library. When we got there she parked herself for a solid 25-30 minutes on the floor and paged through books. When we left, she slipped her hand into mine and sighed, “Oh, I feel so much better. I think the library fixed me.” Me too. It always does.
I’ve written before that I am an INFJ. And I’ve also described the basic discomfort I felt while at business school. Recently, Penelope Trunk wrote about something that explains the latter in terms of the former with a clarity that was like turning on a light.
I probably ought not have been as surprised as I was by the data Penelope Trunk shares that less than 1% of all women fall into the Myers-Briggs type ENTJ. Yet that is the dominant personality type at the business school I attended, enormously disproportionately represented in the class. I know this because we all had to take the test, and the results were shared widely and clearly, and it was said over and over again that ENTJ was “the type” that had long succeeded at the school and, perhaps more germanely, in the business world.
I sort of can’t believe I have never known this single piece of information, which seems to encapsulate so much of the dissonance that many women I know feel in today’s business world. I am not sharing this to point fingers or to complain. Not at all. I think there is much to be said difference and for forging a new path in a well-mapped and crowded terrain. But this data point does help me understand myself and the world better, much the same way reading Susan Cain’s Quiet did.
It makes me wonder how it is I wound up in an environment where I was (and am) so different. Why did I seek out a place where I did not fit, where I felt so other? Maybe, however, circumstances matter less than our internal wiring, because the truth is when I think about it I have almost always felt somewhat other. I have almost always felt as though I was watching the world through a thin pane of glass, close to but essentially apart from the action.
And maybe some subconscious part of me knew that aspects of me did fit in this world. l am both an introvert and a connector, and I do genuinely love the significant part of my life that occurs in the business world. Maybe there isn’t one single place I fit, after all. I have more than once described the contradictions that exist in every cell of my body.
I think it’s notable, though, that at least one business school the dominant personality type is one that is so minutely represented in women. This can’t be separate from the passionate response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece about having it all. That response interested me because it was twofold. Yes, there was the assertion – and I agree with this – that traditional models of professional success are often incompatible with a hands-on approach to parenting small children. But even more, I observed many, many women, myself included, writing whole-heartedly about how “having it all” meant many, many different things to different people.
I wish I had a clearly defined thesis, or any kind of neat conclusion to this post. I’ve been thinking over this tangled mess of themes and questions for a long time now, and a clean answer eludes me. I think there is value in continuing to expand the notion of success in the world. I also think that recognizing the norms of situations we find ourselves in is powerful, because it helps explain why we may feel dissonant inside them. I suppose that is the conclusion, after all: there is power in understanding, even if it that knowledge does not offer neat solutions and tidy resolutions. Life eludes clean categories, I’ve found. The best we can do is continue to try to understand ourselves and the environment in which we live.
Tell me, what is your Myers-Briggs type? I am endlessly fascinated by this.
Be in love with your life. Every detail of it. – Jack Kerouac
I saw this quote over the summer and knew instantly that I wanted to write about it. This is so much of what I think about, write about, feel these days. It’s taken me a very long time to fall in love with my life. A very long time. But I have, and I am.
But that life is full of challenges, both big and small. It is full of disappointments and heartbreak, fury and fighting, mess and ugliness. Every day contains some of these things. For some reason – I suspect it’s my settling into this season, the square middle of my life, the beginning of the afternoon – I grow ever more accepting of the tarnish that is an inevitable part of each day’s sterling silver gleam. These days, I far less often allow these troubles the power to occlude the brightness of the rest of my life.
You can’t have one without the other, after all. Maybe that’s what midlife is, realizing this. Every detail is required to paint the picture. Another thing I believe is that you can dislike small things – about your life, about your relationships, most crucially, about your self – while acknowledging their essential role in the whole. I don’t know if that’s exactly what Kerouac meant, but that’s how I choose to read his words (believing as I do that actually loving every single detail in its own right may be challenging!).
And so, yes, I am in love with my life. With all of it. I embrace the shadowy valleys that are as integral to the topography of my life as are the peaks and the wide, sun-drenched plains. After all, we are only here for a brief, shimmering second; the least we can do is throw our arms around – and ourselves into – the whole of our lives, as they are, right here, right now. As my friend Stacy Morrison so gorgeously put it, recently, “I see now how much I want to live my life in a way that honors it, by paying attention.” I want to honor it all: light and dark, joy and pain, beauty and ugliness. All of it.
(Speaking of silver, those spoons are Grace and Whit’s, a gift on Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago. I bought them here.)
Mindful
Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver
photograph taken last month at a special place on the New Jersey shore
Once in a great while I like to share some things that have caught my attention around the interwebs (and the world).
Barnstorming – It’s rare that I find a blog that I relate to this intensely. I read the whole thing in one single gulp, practically, tears rolling down my face, gasping often. Emily refers to the top of the ferris wheel, she quotes Madeleine L’Engle, she talks about how what she witnesses in this world brings her to her knees, she cites my favorite poem, Wendell Berry’s The Work. I’ve found a more elegant, more eloquent version of myself.
A Mighty Girl – a site with deep, detailed reviews of books, music and movies for “smart, confident, courageous girls.” I have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s here, but I’m already smitten. I have found books to suggest to Grace here and I definitely intend to use it as a resource for birthday presents for my goddaughters and other girls in our lives.
Cherries and Cheese: O’Hare Revisited: I can’t get Emily Rapp’s powerful words out of my head. They glow with truth, with wisdom, with all that I’ve ever believed: “I feel, as that moment opens, so truly alive that I am surprised that the world doesn’t burst open: a perfect mix of bottomless sadness and heart-swelling joy.” I love everything this woman writes, but this piece moved me even more than usual.
Mumford & Sons’ Babel – I’m hardly alone in loving this new album. But I do. Especially I Will Wait and Lover’s Eyes.
Camouflage – I’m just feeling camo lately. Skinny pants from the Gap, a studded jacket from Zara: I can’t get enough of the print. Luckily my 7 year old son thinks it’s about the coolest thing, too.
On Loving a Teenager – Karen Maezen Miller has been inspiration, guide, and teacher to me for a long time. These words about parenting a teenager – “Love is the space between us. There is so much space.” – both frighten and reassure me. I can see this next stage of motherhood over the horizon, and I’m so grateful to have Karen’s wise counsel as Grace and I move towards it.
I’d love to hear what you are loving, reading, immersing yourself in lately, either online or off!