The Social Climb

Every human group has a social ladder, even if the group’s core value is decrying the horror of a social ladder. In the city where I grew up, your rank grew with the size of your house, the number and make of the cars in your driveway, and the shine of your stuff. In the outdoor world where I’ve spent much of my young adult and adult life, your rank grows with how far, how fast and how hard you climb or run or bike or boat. In the little mountain town that is my chosen home, your rank grows by how much do-gooding you do and by how fervently you pursue personal growth. In the part of Boston, where I live now, your rank grows by the number of academic diplomas you’ve accrued, and who issued said diplomas. Each group has its distinct currency. There are many places I have not lived and thus many social ladders whose rungs I am unfamiliar with, but I do know that each place I’ve gone that is inhabited by people, there is a social ladder. And each ladder is—at least for me—in some ways enticing and in some fundamental ways repulsive.

Modern day philosopher, Alain de Botton explains this phenomenon in his book Status Anxiety in this way: “Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.” This second tale—the more secret and shameful one—is the quest to gain status.

Botton’s book examines how the western world has defined status for the last several generations, and how it reached such a fever pitch with the birth of the idea of the United States being a meritocracy. This myth of meritocracy is so firmly lodged in the American psyche that to question it is to question the bedrock of the country. But like all stories we tell ourselves, this one is only true for certain people with certain circumstances. Yet because it’s in the groundwater, it feels like an immutable truth that everyone in the United States can indeed pull him or herself up by those bootstraps and clamber right on up to the tippy top of the ladder. There are enough such stories that the truer reality—of success being a confluence of privilege, luck, timing, and a pinch of ingenuity—gets lost in the roar of the American Dream. Prior to the idea of meritocracy, if you were a person of low societal status, you could blame your lot in life on circumstances beyond your control, but as Botton says, “to the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now adds the insult of shame.” Not only are you of low status, but also it’s your own damn fault that you are all the way down there at the bottom of the ladder.

In his poem, Desiderata, Max Ehrmann poignantly notes: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” Yes. A thousand times yes. Comparison is a curse I carry very close to my heart. I am a champion comparer. A gold medalist at this point--I feel sure, and I know I'm not alone in this misery making footrace. But I do not think, with all due respect to Max Ehrmann, that it is an IF you compare yourself, but rather a WHEN you compare yourself. Comparison, 'thief of joy' that it may be, feels rooted in human social fabric.

While you can’t fully escape status anxiety, you can find a new group, and you can consciously exchange your old social ladder for a new one that reaches in the direction of different virtues. But the ladder does remain, because, as social creatures, part of our individual story is defined by how we live in relation to others. Another tactic, besides swapping ladders, is that you can try to covet status less. Perhaps some truly enlightened souls can arrive at a state of not caring a wit for what society thinks of them, but for us mortals, the aspiration is likely going to be to soften, rather than to vanquish, comparison tendencies. I fundamentally mistrust anyone who says they’ve moved beyond comparison. Of course, I think some people are more skilled at the important practice of cultivating self worth than others, but any self-reported flawless track record invites my skepticism. As Botton says, “Nothing could be nobler, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else.” And that commonality includes wading in the muck of desiring status.

My life trajectory has been erratic. I’ve dipped my toe in many ponds, and settled in none. I know I don’t want my social ladder to be one of material wealth acquisition, but I say that from a position of wealth, so if all my resources burned up, I’d likely be singing a different tune. I also know that I’ll never run fast or far enough, or be physically daring enough, to earn acclaim in the outdoorsy world, though I will persist in that world as a mediocre performer because I love it. And while I love the virtue of the do-gooders, the humorlessness that sometimes accompanies this ladder can be truly insufferable (and I say this from a place of knowing how devastatingly humorless I can be sometimes). This is the ladder where people decry the ladder, without realizing that they are on their own set of rungs made slippery by the blood of bleeding hearts.

So picking a ladder, it turns out, isn’t so easy. I suppose ultimately you choose the ladder or ladders that you think are less bad and more in tune with your soul, and hopefully don’t forget that the ladder you are climbing is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.

And what of this possibility of softening? Of caring less about what the world thinks of you? Botton states: “We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.” Humor it seems is the answer here. Developing a greater sense of humor about how small, insignificant, and terribly un-special, even the most special among us are.

David Whyte, my favorite poet, said this in a public conversation: “I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid 40s or 50s…But another step of maturity is actually realizing that the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go. That you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up, and make way for something else…” I do not think that Whyte was endorsing a group swan dive off the proverbial cliff here, but rather was doing what the most skilled artist do best: getting us to see the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be, and allowing us to see the beauty (and importantly the humor) in that reality.

So Many Kinds of Love-A Reading List

Connection is biologically hardwired. It is fundamental to our survival as a species—if not mammalian babies would surely be abandoned. When you strip away connection a baby is just a screaming mass of needs and demands with nothing to give and everything to take. But biologically, we are wired to love and care for our offspring—to take the long view—and to attend lovingly to that tiny human until it passes safely through its most powerfully needy phase into more subtle and nuanced needy phases.

This survival necessity provides a clear biological explanation for the purpose of connection, but the roots of connection are deeper still. Connection does far more than just grease the skids on the baby-propagating machine. It is, for most of us, what gives meaning to our lives, well beyond those first years when our survival is most obviously tied to another human.

There are so many kinds of love that we can experience in a lifetime. The German language alone has thirty distinct words for different kinds of kisses—and kissing is just one expression of those many kinds of love. It would be impossible to catalogue all of the kinds of love that exist in this world, but what follows below is reading list that speaks to some of the most prominent categories of this most important part of the human experience—of the connective tissue that ultimately gives meaning to our brief lives.

1. The life-giving love of authentic friendship. Friendship is remarkable because it is so voluntary. No DNA chains attached. Just two people who connect at a soul level—making the unbearable more bearable and the light all the brighter. Nobody captures this kind of love more aptly or more beautifully than Truman Capote in A Christmas Memory, where he chronicles the friendship between an old woman, Ms. Sook, and a young boy, Buddy.
   

2. The devoted love of a pet. Human animals can be so incredibly cruel, and sometimes it is the love that crosses the species barrier that is the most healing balm. It is not an accident (I think) that Dog and God are anagrams, for I have met far more dogs than humans who dwell in the realm of sainthood. The devoted, undeserved, unfailing love of a beloved pet is captured in Eleanor Atkin's Greyfriar’s Bobby, which tells the true story of Bobby, a devoted Skye terrier, who sleeps for years on his master’s grave—an old shepherd who would have died alone, if not for the company of Bobby.
   

3. The dedicated love of long-time partnership. This audacious kind of love aspires to much, and is perhaps only truly experienced when the aspirations are crushed and both people choose to remain anyways, giving time for something greater than the first blush of new love to take root. Two books speak powerfully to the evolution that occurs in long-term partnership. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea describes the three marriages that exist within a long single marriage—that each iteration has its time and place, and that in the end all are just right and beautiful. And Alain De Botton’s The Course of Love: A Novel which, similarly arrives at the conclusion that people are only ready to be married after they’ve "enrolled in the curriculum" for years; when they have arrived—not to the promise land—but rather to a delight in the reality of what it means to live a life intimately with another.
   

4. The fierce and eternal love of family. Mary Karr, a memoirist, once said “A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” This sentiment gets at the complexity of a love that is wrapped up and weighed down by chains of DNA. Sometimes the dysfunction is too much, and the only way to save your own life is to initiate the painful process of breaking away from the chains, but for those of us who are lucky, the chains don’t really feel like chains at all—but rather like the benevolent tether that keeps us moored in this wild, fast spinning world. For this reason, Jeannette Wall’s memoir, The Glass Castle is especially striking. The family life she describes is in many obvious ways deeply dysfunctional, but what pulses louder and clearer than the dysfunction is the fierce and eternal love that exists within the family. It is a shining example of what it means to love someone even while you hate them, and to know that the circumstances of a life can be restrictive in a multitude of ways, but that those circumstances cannot constrict the boundless edges of love.
   

5. The hard-won love of reality. For many this is the hardest love to achieve, because it doesn’t respond to roses or Milk Bones or apologies. It requires the laying down of fantasies about how life should or could be, and accepting life as it is, in this moment, without excessive wailing or head banging—without despairing defeat. Byron Katie’s Loving What Is offers a roadmap and philosophical underpinning to arriving at this kind of elusive, hard-won love.

And perhaps the book that sums up the messy, hard to define, giant concept of love best comes from Margery William’s children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit. In this story the little stuffed rabbit and the stiff Skin Horse are discussing what it means to be real. And this notion—of realness—is by necessity at the heart of true love. 

“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

A Soft Beginning

I have often approached the New Year with an ambition to tighten up: tighten my waistline, tighten my budget, tighten my unruly life. These New Year’s Resolutions are heavy with residue from a Puritan cultural heritage and reek of the “keeping up with the Joneses’” mentality. And not once has one ever stuck. And that is not because I’m a quitter. In fact, in most areas of my life my “stick-to-it-ness” is over the top. I’ve finished marathons on knees that were screaming for the last ten miles. I’ve stayed in jobs for years that I knew were bad for my soul. I’ve spent sleepless nights finishing projects that didn’t really matter all for the simple reason that quitting wasn’t an option I gave myself. So why, if I can muster up the resolve in all these other instances, have my New Year's Resolutions all been spectacular failures?

I’ve been wondering about this in the days leading up to January 1, 2017, and I don’t have an answer, but I do have a hunch. The word “resolution” comes from the Latin past participle stem, “resolvere,” which means, “to loosen.” In my mind resolve and resolution are about hardening, holding tight, being firm, and steeling oneself, but that is just baggage that I (and many others) have heaped onto the term. If you peel back the layers all the way to the core, you arrive at: “to loosen” or “to unbind.” And I think missing this core concept—of loosening—has something to do with my history of failed resolutions.  

Most notably I’ve spent years cultivating a practice of being hard on myself. I’ve gotten the same feedback since I was in elementary school: that I need to be less self-critical and more self-compassionate. While I admired self-compassion in theory, I spent years wondering whether it wasn’t just an excuse to be lazy and complacent. A way to explain away days spent on the couch eating Hostess cupcakes and watching reality TV. But I understand now that self-compassion and self-indulgence are not even in the same family.

There are three terms I’ve learned over the last few years that lend heft to my understanding of self-compassion--grounding the term lest it float away on the winds of pop psychology.

The first is Wabi Sabi, a Japanese term described by Buddhist author Taro Gold as “the wisdom and beauty of imperfection.” This aesthetic and philosophy is hard to define in English, in part because it is so inimical to our notion of beauty, but it is easy to understand when you see a Wabi Sabi piece of pottery—simple, natural, and perfectly imperfect.

The next term, Metta, translated as lovingkindness, comes from the Buddhist tradition. Again, the concept defies translation, but the marriage of the words 'loving' and 'kindness' into one run-on word is intentional. The traditional practice of a Metta begins with a mediation where you extend lovingkindness to yourself, and then gradually widen the circle to include those you love, then those you feel neutral towards, and then those you dislike or even hate. While it might seem that the last step—of loving those you hate—is the most impossible, I think the first step of extending love to self is frequently harder but nonetheless crucial to the success of the successive steps.

And the final term comes from the German tradition—Schadenfreude—a pleasure that is derived from seeing another’s misfortune. If this seems incongruous with Wabi Sabi and Metta, it’s because it is. To a large degree. But not entirely. The Germans, so frequently cast as stern and unrelenting, have (I think) the most fine tuned sense of humor. I love a culture that can call a spade a spade, and moreover can laugh about it.

So there are the terms: Wabi Sabi, Metta, and Schadenfreude. And here’s what I’ve gleaned: find beauty in the imperfections of your life, love yourself and others, and maintain a sense of humor about your broken, dark parts. I think these facets of self-compassion are the true building blocks of a resolution—or a loosening. They are not however the materials we are trained to reach for as we dream up all that we will accomplish in this next trip around the sun.

I know how to pick up the whip and crack it on my own back. What I’m less skillful at is setting the whip down. But the whip is broken. It’s never gotten me where I want to go, so I’ve been learning how to retire that tool over the last few years. Last year a friend introduced me to a new tool: The Desire Map. This tool conceived by Danielle La Porte is a way to reframe the resolution making process by focusing on your “core desired feelings.” Your core desired feelings capture the essence of how you want to feel across all areas of your life, and they serve as a kind of internal compass once you are aware of the points of your personal compass rose.

I think I’ve landed on my core desired feelings for the coming year(s). They are feelings I've been thinking, and occasionally writing, about for the last few years, and probably longer. My core desired feelings are: joyfully connected, content, expansive, and alive. I know this sounds a bit like a description of an Edible Arrangement. Schmaltzy and trite. But it isn’t. This, I’m convinced, is the yellow brick road to sucking the marrow out of life. Here's hoping for a soft start to 2017 and a heartfelt path in the years ahead moving towards the things that really matter. 

The Empathy Tool Box

This Christmas, my gift is: The Empathy Tool Box, for those people out there who perhaps subscribe more to the stiff upper lip school of emotionality, but who have people in their lives who they love, who live in the land of feeling all the feelings. I've read (or watched) each of the resources that follow dozens of times, and the ideas within are now stitched into the fabric of my being. When paired, I think they make a comprehensive Empathy Tool Box, to be put to use during the trying times. 
 

THE TOOL BOX: 

1. THE DEFINITION OF EMPATHY (NOT WEBSTER'S...BUT ONE THAT GETS RIGHT TO THE HEART OF IT) :

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.”

— Pema Chodron

2. UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY:

In this short animation, Brene Brown describes the fundamental difference between these two related, but wildly different concepts. When someone is in grief, they need empathy—sympathy will actually make things worse. 

3. KNOWING THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY

Empathy is about connecting with another person's feelings (which are universal...hence the connection can be authentic), but it is important to remember that you can never fully understand another person's particular story line (even if it seems quite similar to your own, even if you love them more than anyone else, even if you really, really want to). Nowhere is this concept more beautifully stated than in Brian Doyle's exquisite essay, Joyas Volardores, in which he writes: 

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.

— Brian Doyle

Empathy is about flinging the windows wide, wide open, but knowing that you can never fully immerse yourself in another person's inner world. This is a lonely thought, and also a truth. It is damaging to presume that your beloved's grief is a replica of your own.  

4. UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF A NON-EMPATHIC RESPONSE (OR: HOW TO NOT KICK A DOG WHEN HE'S ALREADY DOWN) 

This is crucial, and the importance of knowing what not to say (because it's usually what we say that get's us into trouble) and what not to do, cannot be overstated. There are two readings that speak powerfully to this truth. The first, is a letter and response from the Dear Sugar Advice Column (now gone book...Tiny Beautiful Things). Cheryl Strayed (Sugar) responds to "Stuck" a woman who miscarried six and half months into her pregnancy. Stuck closes her letter with this: 

“My daughter, she had a name. She was loved. I feel like the only one who cares. Then I feel like shit for mourning “just a miscarriage” after nearly a year. I’m stuck.

— Stuck

Strayed's response, which is best read in full, like the letter that prompted it, includes much wisdom, but this particular line stands out as the wisdom that is essential to The Empathy Tool Box: 

“Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over any thing. Or at least not any thing that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away.

— Cheryl Strayed as Dear Sugar

Feeling grief is okay. Feeling grief on your own timeline is okay. It's just people who are uncomfortable with grief who make it not okay. Don't be one of those people. Better to do nothing than to cause harm. And better to be empathic than to do nothing. 

And, this heart wrenching pair of letters is complimented by blogger, Tim Lawrence's Post: "Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason," which gets right to the heart of the words and behaviors that harm instead of help. The antidote to the "emotional, spiritual and psychological violence" caused by a phrase like: "everything happens for a reason" is the truth, kindness, and wisdom in this lifeline of a phrase: 

“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

— Tim Lawrence

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Say it, sing it, write it--this is the mantra of Empathy. There is no return to a magical land of "before" or "normal" when something terrible happens. Perhaps, with time, your world grows large enough to hold your grief and joy side by side, but the grief never vanishes. Being an empathic support is a life long commitment. Nothing organic (like feelings) is linear. The natural world move in circles, so it stands to reason that while Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us a more nuanced understanding of grief, her linear model could never stand the test of time. 

A Grain of Truth

Graffiti at The Duomo

We were driving through the twisty mountain roads of North Carolina headed to a mutual friend’s wedding. We’d known each other for years…more accurately we’d known of each other for years. We had worked in the same small summer camp, but our summer social lives didn’t intersect. We knew each other from a distance. She turned to me on that ride that day and said, “So what really happened? Your life looked perfect on Facebook. You were one of those shiny, happy, people I hated.”

This friend—this arbiter of the truest truth—called my bluff. And she was right. I, like most everyone else, presented my shiny, happy life through social media. My life working abroad was so easy to frame in the best light: There were bike rides through Tuscany and gelato by the lake and baguettes by the Eiffel Tower and Nepalese Tea houses and Bavarian forests and castles and waffles and chocolate and my handsome partner and I enjoying it all. Only I wasn’t. Well I was some of the time. But often I was crying. In my bedroom. In a bush outside my classroom. Over a jammed photocopier. On my handsome partner’s shoulder.

I knew my life was shiny and happy in all ways, except for one significant way: that it wasn’t. At least not for me. At least not in that moment of my life. And the guilt I felt about that reality was the cherry on top of the misery sundae.

Lest I paint an untrue picture again, let me be clear: there were many genuine shiny, happy moments. My partner was as good hearted as he was good looking. There was solace and love and deep friendships and marvel at the beauty of the world. But despite all that was good, I fell apart. I didn’t want to. But I couldn’t not.

In the years since my most profound unraveling, I’ve re-connected with the core of me that somehow got lost along the way. And that gift is incredible, and also soaked in blood. There was no shiny, happy path back to my core…just a gnashing of teeth, a ripping, a clawing, a gasping, a surviving, and eventually a glimmer of hope, that grew brighter and brighter.

Birth is messy (or so I’ve heard). Re-birth, it turns out, is messy too. Along the way I marinated my brain and heart in the wisdom of the wise, and came out believing in these truths: that shiny and dark are two sides of the same coin and life will have both if you live with eyes and heart open; that joy and sadness can be bedfellows; that certainty is an illusion; that conflicting truths are perennial; that the heart’s capacity to love can grow infinitely, but that that growth is always accompanied with pain; and that progress is a widening circle, not a line.

I feel like I have (to embrace the cliche and to quote my favorite Indigo Girls song) “been to the doctor, been to the mountain, looked to the children, and drank from the fountain…” and still, still, STILL…after it all…I find myself from time to time in the dark rabbit hole of social media looking at other people’s lives thinking…”They are so shiny and happy…they bypassed all the bad stuff and just got all the goodies.” And even sometimes think—looking back at my own photos of sunsets on the cliffs of Capri and hiking along the Amalfi Coast— “I had all the goodies…didn’t I?” Amnesia to the reality of my own existence mere years ago. And a blind spot to the truth I know: that nobody actually gets just the goodies.

I had a student two years ago tell me I couldn’t possibly understand her life, because my life was perfect. It broke my heart. Because there are lines of professionalism that I could not fully cross to tell her that my heart had been broken into a million pieces and was still fusing back together, and that it would break again and again in the process towards healing, and that this first breakdown of her young life, would be followed by more—but that joy would be there too. So I told her all that as best I could when the rulebook dictates that you can’t speak openly.

And still. I post my shiny, happy pictures. Like most people. But there are a few people (like my friend from that twisty car ride, who is now a dear friend, and still a staunch believer in sharing the truest truths) who share the good, the bad, and the ugly in equal measure. I can write it, but I can’t yet pair it with a photo essay. Perhaps, someday I will. For now, this post is the grain of salt that belongs on the side of each of my photos.

In this holiday season of merry and bright, and in this social media dawn of shiny and happy, it is worth remembering that that dark and sad are always nearby. That they too have a place at the table and should be welcomed more graciously into the fold. 

Implicit Bias

Un-hemmed in by codified rulebooks, artists are often our harbingers of truth. Songwriter Robert Lopez and composer Jeff Marx co-conceived and created the musical, Avenue Q, which one of the longest running shows in Broadway history. A number from the first act, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” touches on an uncomfortable truth that bears revealing. One verse of the song goes: “I think everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes/ Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes/ Look around and you will find/ No ones really colorblind/ Maybe it's a fact we all should face/ Everyone makes judgments based on race.” This supposition could easily be extended to myriad other facets of identity beyond race.

Ignoring the reality that we can never fully understand the experience of another human being and that we can never approach another human being from beyond our own experience is a form of deleterious idealism. And Dr. Banaji’s research, which she discusses in an interview on On Being titled, “The Mind Is a Difference Seeking Machine,” confirms this.

Dr. Banaji is a psychology professor who studies implicit bias, and she is a co-founder of Project Implicit. She starts her conversation saying this: “I do believe that, in our culture and in many cultures, we are at a point where our conscious minds are so ahead of our less conscious minds. We must recognize that, and yet, ask people the question, ‘Are you the good person you yourself want to be?’ And the answer to that is no, you’re not. And that’s just a fact. And we need to deal with that if we want to be on the path of self-improvement.”

You can go to Project Implicit and take a number of quizzes that will reveal your own hidden biases. It’s uncomfortable to see them, but in this political arena buzzing with bias, it seems important that each of us take a long, hard look in the mirror before resorting to lamenting and gnashing our teeth over the state of affairs. Even those who are well intentioned and strive to be open and accepting are not, as it turns out, able to bring those intentions to full fruition. The bias of others can feel daunting and debilitating, but work on self is always available, and in fact the only place where a person has full agency to ensure change.

If Dr. Banaji’s On Being interview strips away the veneer of desire and exposes reality, then Dr. Doty’s On Being Interview, “The Magic Shop of the Brain” offers a path by which to move reality closer to our ideals. Dr. Doty is a brain surgeon and the founding director of The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. In his interview he speaks of the ways in which modern science is starting to catch up with ancient Buddhist philosophy.

Dr. Doty received his first lessons in mindfulness from an earth-mom sort named Ruth in a magic shop by happenstance when he was a child. Interviewer Krista Tippet says this to Dr. Doty: “One of the things that Ruth, your teacher in the magic shop, was teaching you is something we now call neuroplasticity. And yet, that word did not exist in 1968. And that is this simple and astonishing idea that our brains can change across the lifespan, and we can change our brains through our behavior. You must have watched that discovery and the naming of this with a sense of homecoming, I’m imagining.” To which he responds, “…we used to think that the brain and the neurons was all immutable, and nothing could be changed. And, really, the gift that Ruth gave me was my first experience with neuroplasticity. Fundamentally, in the six weeks that I interacted with her, what she taught me truly rewired my brain.”

Krista Tippet and Dr. Doty go on to talk about how our current neural pathways suffer from evolutionary baggage of fight or flight from the "other." Dr. Doty explains, "The problem is that, by the nature of the baggage that we were just talking about, we are oftentimes easily put into a position of being fearful, because when we're fearful, what happens? We have a tendency to shut down, we don't want to have new experiences, we want to have familiarity, which is typically being with people who look like us, act like us, who think like us. And when you shut everything down, it does give you a sense of being safe, but it also keeps you chronically on pins and needles, wondering if you're going to be attacked. And so this is the danger of tribalism. And David Desteno, a neuroscientist, has done work in this area, where you can break down these artificial barriers of separation by looking at another person who may seem very different. Then you start seeing things with more clarity. And, really, what all this is about...is to see ourselves and the world with greater clarity." He goes on in the interview to reference studies where brain scans show various parts of the brain shrinking or growing with the practice of mindfulness--that this skill can alter our brain, and in turn alter the way we interact with the world. 

In a world roiling with “othering” coming from all directions it seems it is time to attend to this sort of practice.

Loss

Pauline Boss, a Family Therapist, coined the term "ambiguous loss."  Ambiguous loss is, in part, a conceptualization of grief that dismantles the popular idea of five tidy stages that once endured, end with closure. Closure is a seductive idea, but the reality of loss and grief, at least in my experience, has never been linear or finite. This summer I was startled to find fresh grief over something I thought I was through mourning. The poem that follows came out of that experience. 

I am diving into that
bottomless blue pool

exploring the margins
that grow wider
with each approach

Where is this pain? 
Where does it live
on a cellular level? 
And can it be excavated? 

I know the answer
to this last question, 
and still I dive deeper. 

But there it remains
in an unreachable
fiber of my being

My world has grown larger. 
This pain will make it
grow larger still. 

Just when I think she’s gone
Grief reemerges,
and crawls into
bed next to me. 

I know this pattern,
and it is not
without tenderness
that I greet her. 
 

Several of my dearest friends are dealing with their own losses and manifestations of grief this week. As we talk, the line from Rilke’s poem, "I live my life in widening circles..." floats in the back of my head. The widening circles may provide a new perspective on, and relationship to, grief, but the process of saying goodbye to loved ones or to cherished ideas or hopes or expectations is revisited again and again throughout a lifetime.

I have been delighted to discover in my own life that keeping grief as a companion does not preclude joy. That closure is not in fact necessary for a happy life. And that living my life in widening circles ensures that there is in fact room for the full spectrum of human experiences to comfortably co-exist. 

Containing Multitudes

Privilege has afforded me the opportunity to see first hand myriad ways that a person can choose to live his or her life. And this exposure raises the question again and again: How is it that I want to live in this world?

Whenever these thoughts arise it is Sylvia Plath’s image of the fig tree from The Bell Jar that comes to mind:

 “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

This image of the figs of possibility has resonated so much with me that I internally refer to the different life paths I could take as “my figs.” Imagining all those figs twinkling out on the branch, and knowing that in choosing one I give up another gives weight to Kierkegaard’s insight that there is such a thing as “a despair of too much possibility.”  

So how do you choose (if you are lucky enough to have such choices)? Because the truth is you cannot have them all. Or rather, you can perhaps sample many figs, but if you want to truly savor one, then you have to let some doors close and let some paths remain unseen. And I'm getting to a point where I know that while a feast might be alluring, a simple meal is what I actually want. 

Every time I have elected to let one life path go, I’ve been filled with sadness, and sometimes even incredible grief, and always a curiosity of, “what would that path have been like?” I think these feelings are normal, but not altogether helpful for finding contentment in the life I am actually living.

Walt Whitman gave voice to one of the greatest paradoxes of human life when he asked:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

I have to imagine that the many figs on the branch are manifestations of the many aspects of an individual human being. One thing that feels essential to me, is that whatever life path I pick, it must have space for the multiple, contradictory elements that are part of my sense of self. There is not enough time, even if I live to a ripe old age, to live out each and every life fantasy, but I do believe that it is essential to choose an external path that creates space for exploring the full inner landscape. And perhaps that is all the guidance I need for making my choices. 

The Art of Becoming

I’ve been a teacher for seven years. My classrooms have been diverse: working farms, wilderness areas, and brick and mortar schoolrooms. Universally, the most rewarding part of being a teacher has been bearing witness to my student’s “A-ha” moments. I say bearing witness, because no good teacher would claim that they produced these “A-ha” moments—the most any teacher can do is create conditions conducive for profound learning to take place, and from there the student is responsible for making the magic happen. Indeed it works this way outside of formal scholastic settings too. To have an idea become part of the fabric of our being it has to—at some point—feel as though it is coming from us, rather than to us, a personal revelation that recalibrates the way we see the world.

When I began the collection that is the foundation stone of this website—Collective Wisdom—I realized with some measure of disappointment and also a good deal of relief that the wise people in our world whose work I was reading regarding the human experience were all saying the same things. Not word for word, but their core ideas were comparable. And yet, despite this enduring collective wisdom, each individual must rediscover the pulse of the human experience for him or herself.

Several years ago when one of my personal “A-ha” moment was beginning to crystalize, I was charged with teaching a sixth grade science course that began with a unit on plate tectonics. The unit guide I was given advised me to make a pudding (to represent magma) and layer cookies on top (to represent the plates making up the Earth’s crust), and heat the confection and watch the show. The cookies would jiggle on the heated semi-solid pudding, and the young scientists would understand the world in miniature. In truth, it seemed like a lot of work on my end, and a big leap on my students’ end, to equate a small bowl of pudding with the Earth.

Perhaps it also seemed like an insufficient lesson, because just a month prior to teaching that unit on plate tectonics, I’d been a student myself on a backpacking course in the Wind River Range where giant, shifting boulder fields had been my first tangible lesson on the Earth’s fundamental tendency to shift and change. This “A-ha” moment, of the uncertainty of the world we live in shattered me. I cried for hours in camp that night, wishing to un-learn what I knew, and knowing that I couldn’t. It seemed unlikely that pudding and cookies would create the conditions for this same kind of learning. 

In a recently aired conversation with Krista Tippet, Dr. Xavier Le Pinchon, the French geophysicist who helped create the field of plate tectonics stated: “I was educated in a world that we call “fixist.” Things were not moving. And we discovered that was completely wrong. Actually, the Earth is an extraordinary living being with motions of the oceans and continents and thousands of miles and continuously changing, evolving.” It was 1968 when Pinchon formally introduced this idea to the world. Darwin’s publication of On The Origin of Species predated Pinchon’s discovery by 109 years. The ideas of plate tectonics and species evolution that move on the scale of geological time seem to me to beg the question of change on the scale of human time. Are we, in tandem with our species changing over the long haul, fundamentally changing as individuals over the course of our short lives?

The notion of “Human Becomings”—that we are individuals in progress, always unfolding over the course of our lives—is not original, and still it has been one of the grandest revelations of my life thus far. It was the “A-ha” moment of my twenties, and it continues to fuel my studies now. This sense that we are all human becomings is an intuitive one, born out of self-study. But like all ideas (unless you are a rare bird like Darwin, who even must share some of his limelight with Wallace) this idea is a shared idea by many people.

In the recently aired Invisibilia podcast: “The Personality Myth” co-hosts Lulu Miller, Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel explore the question of “whether there is such a thing as a stable personality.” Psychologist Walter Mischel, in a follow up article about the podcast states: “It’s no wonder that we’re drawn to this idea that personality is important and stable. It makes us feel better…when it comes to human beings, we really don’t have tolerance for realizing that there is an enormous amount of instability…” If fear is one side of the coin, Mischel points out, possibility is the other. The possibility of growing and changing into someone kinder, someone more patient, someone more compassionate.

Still, if the world under our feet is shifting (albeit slowly) and the people around us are shifting, then we are left to navigate our lives without the hope of clear direction and without the possibility of guarantees. We are good at building up a false sense of security and making plans that feel immutable, but the world is even better at reducing these fairytales to dust. If the revelation of my twenties was the reality of the uncertainty of the world and all of the inhabitants of the world, myself included, the question that I hope will guide my thirties is: how can I acknowledge the fear that accompanies this instability while simultaneously breathing into the possibilities? 

On Death and Dying

I was late to get my period. Years later than all the rest of my peers. Late enough that it was decided I should see someone about it. A slew of tests and exams yielded nothing—nothing good and nothing bad. The doctor I was seeing recommended one final test to rule out his list of potential bad things that might be going on. He thought it was unlikely, but possible, that a tumor on my pituitary gland was the culprit of my missing period.

Just months prior my beloved grandmother had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor and had died shortly thereafter. It was hard for me not to equate tumor with death sentence. At home that evening, sitting with my dad on the couch, I asked, “What happens if they find a tumor when they do the MRI?” He responded, “We’ll do everything we possibly can to take care of you.” “And what if it’s incurable?” I asked. “We’ll hold you and love you while you die,” he replied.

I’ve grown up in the southern culture where people candy coat bad news and criticism to the point that you are never quite sure if they love you or hate you. In a sea of sugar, my dad’s reply stood out in sharp relief.

My MRI turned out to be just fine, and my late period showed up on its own accord a few years later—an imaginary brush with death. I spend my days working with, and for, healthy young people. I lead high school aged students on extended backpacking trips, and my colleagues are the sort that find pleasure in running ultra marathons and ascending sharp peaks. As such, I’ve had very little experience with the only certain eventuality we all face.

Last summer, however, on the bus ride back to town from a month spent leading a backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, we came across a devastating wreck on the side of the highway. My co-instructors and I were all trained in wilderness first aid, and we stopped, leaving our twelve students on the bus, to see if we could be useful.

There were multiple victims, from a single car crash. Most had been unbelted and were flung forcefully from the car, which was overturned, in the sagebrush. The man I helped was conscious but unable to say more than “My chest, my chest, help!” You take extensive first aid training when you work in the wilderness because help is often delayed. I had done scenarios with fake blood and fake patients many times before. Walking towards the scene from the bus it felt like I was walking into a scenario, but once I had the man’s head in my hands holding his spine stable, nothing about it bore any resemble to a scenario.

I knew the man needed advanced medical care and quickly. That care was on its way by virtue of the first responders--a family who witnessed the crash and provided initial and ongoing first aid. While we waited for the paramedics, my goal was to keep his spine stable and keep his airway open, and if he stopped breathing or his heart stopped beating, to start CPR. These tools and this knowledge felt woefully inadequate however. I think they felt woefully inadequate because they were. Because sometimes no amount of care, advanced or otherwise can save someone. I didn’t know that the man whose head I was holding was going to die in the Emergency Room later that day, but I did know that beyond protecting his spine and his airway, I could shade his face from the sun, and I could talk to him and tell him what was happening with compassion and calm.

When he was airlifted away, and the other victims had left in their respective helicopters and ambulances, and my co-instructors and I returned to our bus full of sobered teens, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. From a joyous morning waking up in our tents, feeling the glow of accomplishment of completing a thirty day course in the wilderness to kneeling beside a man who was dying on the side of the road, was perhaps the widest arc of emotions in the shortest time span I’ve ever experienced.

When my supervisor wrote to ask me about how I was doing with regards to the wreck, I said to her in part: “I know even the most trained medical professionals are not magicians, but that reality doesn’t change how sad it is for a person to die young in a sudden accident. I’m glad we stopped. I’m very sad for the family. I’m grateful our students saw what they saw from a distance and hope it will encourage them (and us) to not gloss over the risks we flirt with everyday in the front-country.”

That sadness and hope remain a year out from the accident. The addendum I would add now is a question—How, do you remain sensitized to the fragility of life, and allow that knowledge to cultivate gratitude for each moment you are not in catastrophe?

Not So Special

Recently, I spent a week in Cataloochee Valley in the Smoky Mountains. A few barns and houses built at the turn of the century remain from the days before Great Smoky National Park came into being. From a distance, these historic buildings are remarkably beautiful, but when you come close, you see that the rough-hewn boards are littered with graffiti. Initials, names, dates, and other proud proclamations of “I was here” are carved into the bones of old buildings. Graffiti, it seems, is one verse in the song of the generation of “special" people.

It took humans a few decades to realize that the chemical fertilizers that initially seemed to be the unbridled miracle that would feed our growing population, were in fact degrading the soil—the very foundation of our food system. It seems now we are experiencing similarly delayed shockwaves emanating from years of children being steeped in the “You are special” message.

I grew up in the rising tide of “special.” I was part of that first wave where every child on the sports team, regardless of ability, received a plastic trophy commemorating the season. As one of those “special” children, it’s been a bumpy ride into the adult reality of my utter ordinariness. And I have to wonder if I’d been born a few decades earlier would it have taken so long for this realization to dawn on me.

The lazy scratching of a name into a board that took somebody else hours to harvest and cut, and real skill and ingenuity to fashion into a building is, I think, an unfortunate cocktail of perceived specialness paired with the uniquely human desire to be immortalized through and by stuff. Perhaps I’m being too hard on my generation. Perhaps every generation has been plagued by the notion of being deeply special (and therefore pardoned from the burden of thinking about anyone else’s needs).

Of course graffiti is just a canary in the coal mine. Our more insidious manifestations of specialness come to fruition on the grander scale of complete environmental degradation. And while I’ve never personally defaced a historic building, I am certainly complicit in leading a life that is net harmful for the environment.

In a recent public conversation, poet David Whyte shared the following reflection: “I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid 40s or 50s…But another step of maturity is actually realizing that the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go. That you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up, and make way for something else…”

If we are to leave this world habitable for future generations, it seems we must learn how to re-write this now embedded perception of specialness. It may seem rather Eeyoreish to wake up each morning and look in the mirror, and say to yourself: “I am not special—I am an ordinary part of the whole,” but maybe with time, the message could shift from sounding like a dark lament to sounding like a reality worth celebrating. What if the monument we sought to create did not exist in the tangible world? What if leaving our mark became vilified, and erasing our traces were exalted? 

This “leave no trace” way of being in the world is perhaps best captured by the philosophy of the original inhabitants of the land that now comprises the Smokies. Native American culture emphasizes living alongside nature, rather than dominating the natural world—on treading lightly rather than leaving a mark. In his novel, Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier writes: “For as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we’d be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.” We’ d do well to set down our pride, and open up to a new (to us) but in fact, ancient way of being in the world.

Wholehearted Qualities

The following blog post is a collaborative effort. The qualities described below are inspired by, and modeled after, Ruth Gendler's The Book of Qualities. In a spring equinox gathering in the NC mountains, we each wrote the quality we wanted to invite into our lives going forward. The results, we feel, are descriptive of wholehearted living.

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Authenticity by Hannah Barry

Authenticity called out to me in the most inconvenient of times. Her voice was quiet at first, so finding her wasn't easy. I traversed mountaintops, scouring their peaks with the belief that she waited above. But each summit I crossed paths with Suffering, Loneliness, and Unhappiness. Finally, it was Intuition's purple candle that guided me through the wilderness, beyond Fear's shadow. I found Authenticity in the deepest crease of the valley, washing her face in the moonlight of a pond. She beckoned me to her, and as I reached the water's edge it was my own reflection smiling at me sweetly.

Clarity by Shelley Heath

Clarity likes to meet up for coffee in the mornings.  She sometimes wears the most beautiful sundresses, but most days she wears her favorite pair of jeans, the ones that fit so well she'll wear them 'til they fall apart.  She's one of those people who carries the most interesting things in her purse, always that one bizarre thing that you need at the time.  She seems to remember everything; not because she has an eidetic memory, but because she turns everything into a song.  If you've ever heard her sing, her voice is unmistakable.  You can hear it for miles even when she sings at a whisper.  Her melodies are so catchy you'll find yourself humming them for weeks, unable to get them out of your head.  

Compassion by Anna Kavalauskas 

Compassion was born in the cold, bright water of the fountain of youth. Her cries were soon soothed by the rippling, chirping, and hushing of the world around her. She grew up holding hands with her cousin, Intuition, and at night they danced in circles around a crackling fire, the deep, starry sky singing above. 

When Compassion encounters Jealousy, Fear, and Self-Consciousness, she brushes their hair out of their eyes and sings them lullabies from her childhood, and they melt into the ground, humble Black-Eyed Susans blooming where they once stood. 

Compassion skips and jumps rope, and the rays of the sun beam from her chest. She loves you.

Enough by Maggie Howe 

Enough is a soft spoken but powerful women who is the childhood best friend of Wisdom. She can be hard to pin down at times, but whenever she speaks you know her words are full of truth. Enough used to be the CEO of a fortune 500 company, which was pretty unheard of at that time. When she retired she turned her focus to improving the lives of inner city kids living in impoverished neighborhoods. She is always trying to make the world a better place, but seems to know how to leave time for herself too. Enough is a complicated women. She's a total feminist, but she still likes to get dressed up and wear make up sometimes. She tries to live simply, but she definitely splurges on unnecessary kitchen gadgets and luxury vacations. She takes pleasure in life's little indulgences, but she doesn't let them them rule her or ruin her strong work ethic. 

Sometimes in the morning I hear Enough's voice whispering in my ear when the alarm goes off, asking me what I will accomplish that day and how it will serve the make the world a better place. Sometimes her words in the morning give me a  little anxiety... but in a good way. These are the words that remind me to use my body and my brain to reach new heights and achieve my goals. I like it better when Enough calls me in the afternoon and invites me to go for a walk outside and enjoy a cocktail on her screened in porch while we watch the sun set together. 

Enough is the kind of friend who can weave in and out of your life. It's easy to lose touch when you or she gets busy with a project at work or a volunteer commitment or marathon training. She's around though, and if you can take the time to pick up the phone and call her she will always answer.  

Expansiveness by Arrington McCoy 

Expansiveness wears fur coats and red lipstick in the winter. She can identify snowflake patterns by taste. On cold nights, she leaves her spare mittens in the woods for the mice, and other small creatures, to find. In summer, she carries a basket full of ripe berries and wildflowers. She always goes barefoot in the rain. One time she walked from the forest to the seashore pressing her ear up against the trunks of trees and then against conch shells. Expansiveness sailed around the world when she was a girl. Now, she does open heart surgery. 

Simplicity by Jennifer Vickery 

I once thought simplicity was so boring. I always tried to give her necklaces with beads and jewels-bright flashy jewels--but she insisted she was perfectly content with her little gold strand necklace. She never made a scene or spoke loudly but her presence was astounding. In her home the colors on the wall were calming and tranquil. 

She lived very small- everything she owned fit into the bed of her truck but she never seemed to be lacking in anything she did or wore or gave away as gifts. 

The children and birds would flock to her. They spoke her language and were best at appreciating her gifts. The older I get the more I envy her beauty and strive to be more like her- in every way possible. 

Stillness by Carlisle Rankin

Stillness...

...is picky. She requires certain factors in order to truly come out of her dark corner. Stillness has been stifled for so long that she feels naked and confused. She has to start all over a lot of the time. Structure is surprisingly important to Stillness. Too much free time can swallow her whole. She knows her role is important--crucial in fact, but she fears that the feelings she may bring forth may sour her existence.

Value by Sophie Ehlinger 

Value has no discerning tastes. Value begins her day hobnobbing with the best of them, and ends it, with simple gratitude, in the mud with the pigs. Value happily resides here- she gleefully resides there. Value both blows kisses and steals them.

Value stores tsunamis, firecrackers, confetti, and salt and pepper all on the same shelf.

Value reeks of lilacs and spritzes a perfume of musk and mold. 

While blindly sitting in the front row of life, Value takes everything for granted. When she blinks, she's sharing the balcony with death- a little higher, and infinitely more humbled. 

Value is an open, engaging, and gracious hostess-
She takes Greed's coat
She serves tea to Yearning
She tucks Generosity in

Value keeps her head on straight-while she flies off the handle

Value solves the puzzle with the right and curses the unlucky draw with the left.

She hitches the ride, takes the leap, and stays put, heels in the ground, head like an ostrich

Value's heart shrinks for peaks and expands for valleys, peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys- thump, thump, thump. 

Value needs not a yes or a no. Value is a goddess. 

Whimsy by Shelley Heath 

Whimsy is this sweet little sprite that loves to dance in the rain and giggle at silly words like "world".  World, world, world; such a weird word.  She's spontaneous and fun and loves to play pranks.  She's petite.  People always underestimate her power until they realize how memorable she is.

Tomorrow will be different

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Ranier Maria Rilke

I borrow the title of today’s blog post from a woman who was in her mid seventies when I met her at a yoga and meditation retreat. She paired her yoga attire with bright red lipstick, and while the rest of us sat a row back, she took her place, front and center in the meditation hall where she flirted shamelessly with our introverted, reserved teacher.

One night we found ourselves at the same table in the dining hall, and conversation soon gave way to peels of uncontrollable laughter. The details of her loves and losses were so fantastically unique that by the end of the meal I was imploring her to write a book.  She said she already had the title—Tomorrow Will Be Different—and that she just needed to put pen to paper.

As I’ve moved towards my 30th birthday, this phantom book title—Tomorrow Will Be Different—has become a kind of mantra in my life. Not because today is bad—far from it—but simply because this is the kind of truth that life teaches you whether you want to receive the lesson or not. A year ago today, on my 29th birthday, I shared this website with friends and family for the first time. In my first blog post I wrote: “my life is very different from what I imagined it would look like.” That statement still rings true a year later. What has shifted over the last 365 days is my attitude towards the inevitable uncertainty of life.

Over the course of this year, I changed the title of this website from Collective Wisdom Circle to Human Becomings. Collective wisdom is still at the heart of this project. The patterns of thought from great thinkers from a variety of traditions were some of the initial rungs on the ladder that led me out of my hole of despair, and the personal stories friends and family shared with me made up the rest of the rungs. The name “Human Becomings” is, of course, a nod towards personal evolution—a process I imagine I’ll be engaging with until the end of my days, and a process that I hope will become a lifelong vocation as well.

In a few moments, in celebration of my 30th birthday, I am putting on my running shoes and heading out my front door to run thirty miles. I'll hit my tenth marathon at the 26.2 mile marker, and the last few miles will be entirely new territory. Beloved friends, family, and dog will join me for sections of my self designed "Dirty Thirty Ultra." I imagine the experience will be terrible and wonderful, mundane and exciting, painful and joyful—in short a microcosm of life itself. Then tomorrow, after the celebration, I'll wake up to a new decade and a path of unknown miles stretching out into my future.

Regrets

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be.” –Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things

“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” –Tim Lawrence from The Adversity Within Blog Series  

I work with teenagers who are fond of saying things like: “I don’t believe in regrets.” When I hear them say this, I silently add on: “Yet—You don’t believe in regrets yet.” My life is not riddled with regrets, but I do have some, and it seems to me that only an unstudied life could yield a life without regrets. There are, as Tim Lawrence suggests, things in life that “cannot be fixed…[things that] can only be carried.”

I regret hating my body for so many years. Like most women I fell prey to believing my body would only be beautiful IF. If it was a certain weight, height, curvature. Mostly now, I love my body. Not in that tube top wearing, belly dance shaking, “I don’t give a f*ck what you think" kind of way, but in a slightly more self-conscious, “I still care what you think, but not as much as I used to," kind of way.

I regret letting jealousy of my brother consume me for so many years. As a teenager and young adult he was perfect in all the ways the world we grew up in defined perfection, and I seethed about it. I can’t reclaim the time I dedicated to ugly fuming over his success. On the whole I don't know that he was too fazed by it, but my venom was definitely a poison for me.

My biggest regret is hurting the man I loved because I was too scared to be honest. I loved him, but I never should have said yes when he asked me to marry him. At that point, I was a partial version of myself, desperately unhappy in the life I was leading, and I was in no way ready to commit to lifetime partnership. But still, I said yes. Then when the doubt was so thick that there was no other option but to face the truth I did not know if I could survive, I called our wedding off. Most adult decisions don’t fit neatly into the categories of right or wrong. I find that language is inadequate in providing a genuine descriptor for this most heart-wrenching decision in my life. The decision was right in many ways, and it was deeply horrible in others. I will always feel guilt and sadness for hurting a man who was good to me, who loved me, and who I loved in return.

In her closing to Tiny Beautiful Things Cheryl Strayed writes: “Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”  I am very much a student of forgiveness. The man I loved, and will always love (even if marriage is not in our cards), says he has forgiven me, and I believe him. I’m learning—continually learning—how to forgive myself.

The horrible things that happen to you, the horrible things you do to other people, the horrible things you do to yourself—they linger. There is no point in running from what hurts—tempting though that fantasy may be. And there is no point in entertaining the fairytale that some bright day we’ll rid our lives of the darkness and just dwell in shiny happiness.

The wise Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron advises us to lean into our discomfort. Leaning in does not make discomfort go away, but it can change the nature of your relationship to your fears or regrets or sorrows.  So I remind myself to continue to lean in, even on the days when I feel like the heel of the universe, even on the days when something senseless and unspeakably horrible has happened. And on the days when I can listen to this advice, I find, remarkably, that I can still breathe in the darkness.

Women’s Circle

The culture of women gathering together has roots as old as human history, and with good reason. Gloria Steinem once stated: “Groups run by women are our psychic turf; our place to discover who we are, or who we could become, as whole independent beings. Somewhere in our lives, each of us needs a free place. A little psychic territory.”  December marks the one year anniversary of a Women's Circle I helped to co-create, and it has become, as Steinem posits, a place of genuine discovery and wholeness.

We have explored the themes of vulnerability and connection, choice and comparison, intuition and ego, confession, mother-daughter relationships, letting go, inviting in, contentment and complacency, and our stories. Our stories, told sitting around a candle lit circle, infuse every gathering whether they are the focus of, or the vehicle for, discussion. Above all our circle is a place for un-masked sharing--with no pretense of perfection. 

And the result is a kind of perfection--a kind that looks like real women, experiencing all of the devastating lows and enlivening highs that life offers. Real women permitting access to their inner sanctums of crazy and divine so that others can bask in the knowledge that crazy is in fact a shared experience and so that we can revel in each other's light. 

A guiding question for our first gathering, December 2014 was: "What do YOU want from this Women's Circle?" My answer from a year ago stands--I want, and have gotten, a community of truly remarkable women. 

We close each of our gatherings with the following song: 

Woman who loves herself, though she may be broken
Woman who loves herself, will never fall.
Woman who loves herself, though she may be shaken,
Woman who loves herself, will never fall.
And I wanna sing a song about our healing
And I wanna sing a song about our wholeness
And I wanna sing a song about us,
I wanna sing about our love.

With profound gratitude for the wonderful women I have as mentors and friends--may the practice of self-love replace our cultural norm towards self-denigration and may the practice of women gathering continue in perpetuity. 

The Stories We Tell

"Speaking isn't neutral. Every time we speak, we bring forth reality...If the realities we inhabit are brought forth in the language we use, they are kept alive and passed along in the stories we tell." -Jill Friedam and Gene Combs, Narrative Therapists

Like many children on Halloween, after my brother and I were done dashing around the neighborhood collecting candy, we came home and set about the business of sorting our loot into like piles. I found the sorting both fun and practical. I could take stock of my larder (low value Baby Ruths on one end with top dollar Reese Cups on the other), which allowed me to bask in my accomplishment and be more efficient in my trading. “Collective Wisdom” is my grownup candy pile. The collection process has been lengthy and is ongoing, and the sorting process has been fun, practical and very healing. 

Apophenia (a term coined in the 1950s) is "the unmotivated seeing of connections"--an idea that speaks to a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information. Being apophenities (a term coined just now) goes along hand-in-hand with being story telling creatures. Indeed, our life stories are really the ultimate expression of our ability to layer meaning onto random events.  

Joseph Campbell is the godfather of seeing patterns in stories. His book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces outlines the Hero's Journey, "a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the worlds mythic traditions." Campbell's study of myths spanning throughout the ages and across the globe, resulted in his outlining of the phases of the Hero's Journey (both the outer and inner), which are shown in the graphic above. The universality of this theme speaks to the idea that at our core--we are the same. When you strip away the names and the scenery and the details and the nuance--you get down to the reality that we just keep telling the same story over and over again. The bad news, for those of us who like to imagine that we are deeply original, is that we are in fact deeply unoriginal in the grand scheme of things. The good news is we can stop worrying about making the next big contribution, and instead can recognize and celebrate that we are most likely adding a new flavor to an already existing product, which makes us co-creators with the rest of the human race as opposed to rarified gurus. 

Brene Brown's most recently published book, Rising Strong, comes on the heels of her books which focus on the importance of cultivating vulnerability in our lives. In Rising Strong Brown talks about the inevitable falls that will accompany living wholeheartedly, and she explains that the choices we make when we are "face down in the arena" about rising back up are as life defining as our initial choice to open to the world. The parallels between Brown's "Rising Strong Process" and Campbell's Hero's Journey are striking and in fact explicit. Her process includes three broad steps: 1) The Reckoning--walking into our story, "where we recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave." 2) The Rumble--owning our story, where we "get honest about the stories we are making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what's truth, what's self protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives." 3) The Revolution--writing a new ending to our story, which we do "based on key learnings from our rumble. [We] use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent and lead." Brown's steps in turn, pair nicely with Byron Katie's Thought Inquiry Process, which is a practical way to navigate the Reckoning, Rumble and Revolution recipe. 

Story telling serves many functions in our lives. The two functions that have stood out in the sharpest relief as I've squirreled away "collective wisdom" are: a tool that breathes meaning and connection into our past life events and a tool that helps us chart a different future.

As important as stories are, they are not implicitly helpful. They can be powerful meaning makers, but they can also keep us trapped in cutting narratives that swirl around in our heads. The ability to discern which stories serve you and which do not is an art. Brene Brown and Byron Katie offer a toolbox for this kind of examination, and Joseph Campbell shows the scaffolding of this journey that we humans have been experiencing since our inception. To use Campbell's language--it is helpful to be able to look back on an 'ordeal' in your life and see it as a gateway to your own 'resurrection.' Likewise, it is useful to know when to pause and take a good hard look at the thoughts we so often mistake as reality and ask, as Byron Katie encourages us to, "Is it true?" And, if in fact, it is not true, then the soul searching work of letting go of an old story, and adopting a new story, begins.

Books for the Ride

My first yoga teacher would frequently end class with this prayer: 

May you be happy,
May you be healthy,
May you ride the waves of your life,
And may you know peace,
no matter what you are given.  

I've found that certain books are good company for certain waves in your life. Here's my list of the books that keep me company when the water is choppy. 

For when you feel deeply alone and like nobody else could possibly relate to your challenge:

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. An unconventional, previously anonymous advice column gone book that is built on radical empathy and delivers the reminder through raw stories to “trust yourself,” above all else.

I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) by Brene Brown. Social worker and self proclaimed “storyteller/researcher,” Brene Brown unpacks what causes shame, and reminds us that the “experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal experiences.”

Post Secret by Frank Warren. An artistic project that invites people to share, via a creative postcard, a secret in their life. Post Secret cards have been turned into several coffee table books, as well as a blog. It is helpful to see that whatever secret you are harboring, you have company.

For when your world falls apart and you are sitting in the shattered mess of it:

Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. In this book Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron reminds us that “suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move.” She gives guidance on how to sit with suffering and lean into the discomfort.

Comfortable with Uncertainty also by Pema Chodron. In this book, Pema Chodron reminds us that uncertainty is the truth of life (in both good and bad times) and that we can learn to rest in the ambiguity.

For when you need to gather tools to make your world larger:

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. In this book Tara Brach reminds us that self-compassion is not a luxury for the idle, but rather, is vital for our health and a key ingredient to living well.

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. In this book Brene Brown makes the case that practicing vulnerability is the most courageous act a person can do, and that doing so is the gateway into wholehearted living. She shares ways in which we can take off the “armor” and start nourishing genuine connection with others.

For when you are ready to weave your struggles into a new story:

Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser. In this book, Lesser focuses on the power of the breakdown to be a moment of transformation rather than a moment of defeat. 

Rising Strong by Brene Brown. A follow up to her previous books on the importance of cultivating vulnerability in our lives, this book talks about the inevitable falls that will accompany living wholeheartedly, and how the choices we make when we are "face down in the arena" about rising back up are as life defining as the initial choice to open to the world. 

For when your soul needs stirring:

A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. A short story that masterfully captures the full spectrum of heartbeats which living can elicit. 

Contentment and Complacency

Written on September 19, 2015

I find positive psychology to be somewhat maddening. Choose happiness! Think yourself thin! Re-frame, re-boot, re-imagine! It seems far too reductionist. Can you really fit global warming or genocide or deep personal tragedies inside the Happy Meal Box? Or what of the smaller sadnesses that are part of life? Do they have a place? 

I’ve learned that generally when something makes me mad, it is not because I’m right and therefore my anger is justified. Quite the opposite—usually I’m fighting against a reality, and I’m mad that I am wrong, or at least partially wrong. I attach to my ideas and throw out the proverbial “baby with the bathwater.” This is particularly embittering when you are pitting yourself against “positive psychology” because it just makes you feel like the ultimate Scrooge.

When I read Thoreau’s Walden for the first time as a 15 year old, I was hooked. I don’t remember a lot of content from my high school classes, but I do remember Walden. One line that was particularly striking to me was: “The fault finder will find faults, even in paradise.” 

Krista Tippet’s recent conversation with social psychologist Ellen Langer on On Being, delves into the science of mindfulness and the ways our ideas can quite literally shape our reality. Langer has done studies where some test subjects are told their task is work and others are told that the same task is play, and the power of these suggestions have real life implications—those who are “playing” are happier in the task than those who are “working.” Her studies also link different ways of thinking to physiological changes. In one study, simply labeling the work of chambermaids as exercise, rather than labor, initiated weight loss, even though the chambermaids were in fact doing the exact same work.

Shawn Achor, a psychologist and champion of Positive Psychology, shares in his beloved Ted Talk: “We’re finding it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality…90% of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world…if happiness if on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, and then we’ll be happier.” 

Walden was published in 1854. Among his many titles, I don’t think Thoreau has ever been called a champion of Positive Psychology, but his line about fault finders is indicative to me that nuggets of truth have deep roots in human history. I’m sure Thoreau was not the first to make an observation of this nature, and the Positive Psychology champions of today won’t be the last. Your outlook shapes your reality. I find no argument with this truth. Where my blood starts boiling is whether or not adopting an internal positive lens is always the appropriate response to life's varied challenges. 

When is being happy with life as it is in this moment choosing contentment and when it is it complacency? Contentment is defined as: “the state of being happy and satisfied,” whereas complacency is defined as: “the state of being satisfied with how things are, and not wanting to make them better.” The implication of these two different terms is that sometimes things are good and you should just appreciate it, and sometimes things could be much better and you are lazy or unimaginative or uncourageous if you stick with the status quo. The quicksand is figuring out what’s what.

I am part of a generation of “greener grass seekers.” Settling is reviled. A lifetime career seems like a fantastical notion. My life is good—no great—in a million ways. And yet, like focusing on the twisted ankle instead of the rest of your body, which feels fine, I find myself currently expending extra energy on the parts of my life that hurt. And the question that invariably creeps in, when I hop into this particular washing machine of thought is: “Should I go?” Implicit in this question is the grain of hope that somewhere or someone else will hold the key to greater happiness.

Twice in my life I have left a place or a person. Those decisions were accompanied by heartbreak and indecision and feelings of utter hopelessness. But both times the decision to go was the right decision for that particular moment in my life. Both times, a switch in my external situation gave space for an internal shift. Both times (in hindsight) I have found real value in my struggle.

I do not want to be fickle. I do not want to be a "fault finder, finding faults in paradise." I also don’t believe that you can simply think your way out of every sticky or uncomfortable or challenging situation. The “baby” of positive psychology to me is that our internal lens is powerful and malleable and we should seek to shape it in ways that serve our lives as well as the greater good. The “bathwater” for me is that despite this truth, there are other truths that feel even truer that positive psychology doesn't seem to fully acknowledge. Ellen Langer rightly points out that many of us convolute inconvenience as tragedy. As practiced catastrophizer, I am guilty as charged. I will readily admit that catastrophizing is a habit worth breaking. But I think the danger of convoluting tragedy as inconvenience is just as significant, if not more so. It is crucial to take time to mourn sad things. A meditation teacher once said to me, “grief is the admission ticket to the present moment." You can't skip grief. You can't just scratch heartache off the to-do list. I also believe in my core that sometimes external change is as important as the internal change. How you find the clarity to know when it’s time to go is still incredibly elusive, however.

There is a lot of wisdom I would like to glean from positive psychologists, but I hope to do so from the perspective of honoring and celebrating the shadow parts of myself. I want to dive into the nugget of truth, but please hold the Happy Meal. 

Embracing Aloneness

One of the fallouts of having an incredibly nurturing childhood was that I developed a fairly unrealistic sense of what I could expect from other people. I had parents who happily let me go on great adventures, even as a young child, but before I left, my dad would always pull me close and whisper in my ear: “If you want to come home…if you need to come home…just say the word, and I’ll come get you.” The fact was, having the sense that I could always come home, meant that I felt an unrestrained freedom to explore. And before reality came knocking, I had this pie-in-the-sky view that no matter where I was, I was not alone—my dad would find me and come get me, if only I said the word.

The thing is, “saying the word” can get fairly complicated. At 26 years old I found myself hiking through a boulder field in Wyoming, with rocks the size of cabins and cavernous cracks between them. I was scared and unsure of my footing and had several heart-stopping, blood-rushing, face-flushing stumbles. It seemed from my vantage, in the midst of the field that the boulders would never end. And though I was out there with other people, we were all struggling through the same terrain, and I couldn’t very well call on them to help me. And I wanted at that point, more than any other time in my life, to call my dad and have him come and get me. But that, of course, wasn’t an option. I had no phone (and no reception for that matter) and there were no homing pigeons in sight. And so I was left with a belated, but nonetheless heartbreaking, realization that as much as my dad meant what he said, there was no way he, or anyone else, could follow through on such a promise.

The raw aloneness terrified me. Especially so because it opened me up to the reality that I wasn’t just alone in the boulder field—that aloneness was a fundamental part of the human condition. Always. As Brain Doyle says in his exquisite essay, Joyas Volardores: “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.”

To be comfortable, even grateful, to be alone in the “house of my heart” is gift that I’m tapping into now, at age 29, for the first time in my life. As a child and young adult, with my fantasy in tact, I was sated by the belief that others would make me feel whole. When that fantasy was interrupted, first in the physical world and then in my own emotional world, I was initially shattered.

The last few years of my life have given me an education in aloneness, and it no longer feels terrifying. I am now able to answer the question Oriah Mountain Dreamer asks in her poem “The Invitation, “I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments,” in the affirmative. 

Being content alone however does not preclude a desire for partnership. I want partnership. Absolutely. But I know that the reality of dwelling in my heart and mind alone is steadfast whether I am coupled or single. And while the fantasy of another human being having the capacity to make me feel whole is still alluring, I can at least recognize it as a fantasy.

The question that keeps knocking around inside me now is: how wide do I want to open that window into my heart? And thus far, the answer is wide, wide open. Perhaps too wide, too fast. That I don’t know. But I do know that I haven’t come up with a reason to fasten the window the tight (or even to close it just a hair) besides fear, and while compelling, fear doesn’t seem like a good enough reason in the end.

We can never fully know or be known by another person, but I’d wager that the capacity to open windows wide and move in so close that the lines of separation feel blurred is as equally profound a gift as “liking the company you keep in the empty moments.” Maybe especially so, when you’re moving towards that other heart from a foundation of your own wholeness. 

Embracing Slow

“I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed”
-Excerpted from “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver

I live in a town (Asheville, NC) that embraces slow food and slow medicine. Cherokee Purples, Ruby Golds, Brandywines…the language of heirloom tomatoes trips off of peoples tongues at the farm stands on Saturday, and the bumper stickers touting: “Local food—thousands of miles fresher” are ubiquitous. Likewise, tinctures and herbal remedies are widely embraced, and acupuncture and holistic healing centers are on practically every street corner. Slow is definitely in. Or more accurately, slow is in in some specific facets of life.

Michael Pollan, one of the champions of the slow food movement, makes the point in his book In Defense of Food that we have fixated (to a fault) on nutrients, believing that all we really need is Vitamin X or Mineral Y, and forgetting that Vitamin X and Mineral Y are a part of a whole, and that when we extract a single part from a vegetable and insert it into a processed “fortified” breakfast cereal, something vital gets lost in translation. In terms of nutrition, we’ve developed tunnel vision and allowed the micro to flood our lens to the point that we’ve forgotten that the macro even exists.

It seems to me, that we’ve done the same with the various slow movements that have gone from niche to trendy to mainstream in the last decade. Slow food and slow medicine are worthy, indeed, but deeply insufficient when stripped away from the context of a slow life.

Mary Oliver writes in her poem “The Summer Day” that she knows how to be idle and blessed. I do not know how to be idle and blessed. Or rather, I don’t intuitively know how to be idle and blessed. 

But I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in situations that encourage leisure, and so while I’m predisposed to keeping frantically busy, I’ve also had occasion to taste the slow life.

This summer was one such occasion. Backpacking trips aren’t always leisurely--especially when you are leading the trip. But this summer, my particular backpacking trip, was an exercise in slowing down. Our mileage was modest and our groups’ needs were low.  More importantly, we were far removed from cell phone range and Internet connection. We were away from our normal social outlets and social obligations. And we were away from our mundane obligations like mowing the lawn and sweeping the floor and folding laundry. This meant that there was more time to read. More time to journal. More time to make elaborate backcountry meals. More time to engage in conversations. More time to play games. More time to sleep. More time, period.

Except of course, there wasn’t really more time. Days are still 24 hours whether you are in a tent in the mountains or in your high-rise in the city. But the days out in the mountains felt expansive and long, and yes, sometimes, when the chapter was finished and the journal entry complete and the mac ‘n’ cheese cooked and the banter done…sometimes, the days even felt boring. A product I suppose of not fully knowing how to revel in idleness. 

But here’s the thing: I can remember each day out there. I can remember where I slept. I can remember specific meals I cooked. I can remember views I took in. I can remember conversations I had. I’ve been back in the front country for a couple of weeks now, and already I am back to my routine of stuffing my days so full that I can’t possibly metabolize all of the experiences, and my memory doesn’t have a prayer of keeping up. And with the side-by-side comparison fresh, it feels clear that something very fundamental is sacrificed on this alter of productivity.

On my last night out in the mountains, I set the intention of bringing slowness into my front country life. My successes are small, but in the face of the many temptations towards busyness, they feel very real. I’m starting my day off with walking my dog, not checking email. I'm not saying yes to every social invitation. I’m leaving work with items still glaring on my to-do list. And it’s been lovely. But it isn’t nearly enough.

Annie Dillard pointed out: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives,” a statement that is both obvious and startling. I hope that the taste of leisure this summer will linger in my heart and mind long enough for it to become a habit in the front country. And I pray that when I get to the end of my life I won’t be writing poems saying: “I know how to be frantic and busy,” but rather, I too will have truly learned the art of being idle and blessed.