Viewing entries tagged
resilience

Voyage and Return

It is 5am, and I’m downstairs on the couch, sitting right up against the front window. I reach my fingertips out, and feel the remains of the night chill on the glass. It’s beginning to get light outside, but there isn’t any colour yet - just a vague pastel blue grey. There’s a tree by the street, every leaf still and monochrome like a pencil sketch. I know that each minute that passes now will lift those leaves into more vibrance, along with the sky, the streaky clouds, and the limestone wall along our garden bed. And sometime between now and then, the sun will have risen, and the day will become distinct.

January to me feels like this time between first light and sunrise. A no-mans-land of vagary and indistinct shapes, each new day bringing a little bit more colour and clarity to the year, but, who really knows when the sun will actually crest the horizon. After the mad hustle of December, January is a reprieve for some, a recovery for others, a reward for yet other others.

I don’t know if it’s because I have kids, or because I'd shot weddings for so long, or both, but January was never any of those things for me. It was just, messy. School holidays meant a kind of responsibility-overload, paired with the hourly deadlines of editing the outstanding weddings of the last 8 weeks, and then topped off with all the existential questions one asks of oneself each new year:

“where am I going?”
“what really matters in life?”
“did I live a life worthy of living last year?”

In those past years, the only way to survive was to compartmentalise. In this moment, I am fully present with the kids. In this next moment, I am fully present with my editing. The next moment, going for a walk, spending time with loved ones, laughing at a thing.. It went moment by present moment, each of them disconnected from the other.

It’s not like that anymore, thank goodness. For something unsustainable, I sustained it for too long. But, January is still messy.

This year, I’m finding it useful to assign a plot archetype to the month of January. For me, it’s a VOYAGE AND RETURN plot. A protagonist heads out into the big world, experiences some things, and returns changed somehow. There’s a transformation, or an elixir brought back, or whatever else. So I’m looking back over the month as if I have just returned from a great voyage, and I’m sifting through my pockets of experiences, searching for elixirs.

With the sun already warming up the sky, and the leaves across the street bright and dancing in a new breeze, I find that my pockets are full of elixirs. I have a hope here, that I feel so deep. It will support us the whole year I reckon. Rach and I have communities that we can work with and play with, who love us and believe in great things. I find so many vials of encouragement, gifts from distant lands reminding us that we are all connected, and all valuable.

January hasn’t been a mess. It has just been a journey, and we have returned with dusty clothes and happy kids, a renewed focus and a burning drive to create things in the world.

We’re tired, but we are together, and we are as excited about the year as those dancing leaves seem to be about the new day.

On uniqueness and identity

I discovered this in a notebook from a few years ago, and after all the conversations Rach and I have had this week I think it must relevant somehow… If you’re not feeling very unique this week, then read on..

--

Yesterday evening I found my ten-year-old, Jeremy, flopped on his bed, tears rolling down his face, eyebrows all furrowed and eyes kind of furious.

Two minutes before that, he was happily working through his Harry Potter Lego castle, generally joyful and chatty.

This huge crash in emotions was triggered by one little experience: Shasta, his younger brother, asked him for help with a new drawing app on his iPad. It was an app that Jeremy himself found just a few days earlier. He loves to draw, and wanted to create some new styles and comics, so researched the right tools, and eventually found this one.

Jeremy was so excited about this new tool, and had been studiously learning how to draw things. He had just started his first comic panel.

And then, disaster hit.

His brother got excited and inspired by what he was doing, and asked if he, too, could have the app. I saw no problem in it, and said yes, and all of a sudden Jeremy’s energy dropped a little.

Twenty minutes later, Shasta is asking for help, holding up a screen already filled with drawings and colour and comics that look as good, if not better, that Jeremy’s own work.

I can imagine what happened next in Jem’s mind, because we still do this as adults:

First, a sharp feeling of injustice, that someone just stole the “thing” that makes us, us. Then, jealousy - this other human is producing really good work. And they seem to be doing it with more ease than we ever did. And lastly, resignation - that compounding sense of “what’s the point, now?”

And, what is the point? Someone else can do what I’m trying to do, and it seems better, and they make it look easier. So, why bother anymore?

It’s pretty disappointing. All of a sudden, the desire to create dries up, the feeling of uniqueness and individuality crumbles to dust, and we are left with frustration, jealousy and often anger at that other “better” person.

So, I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, watching this little face leak angry tears down hot cheeks, and I ask “is this because of Shasta and that app?”

Jeremy’s gaze is locked on a spot on the wall, but fresh tears appear on his lashes. He nods, and says, “Shasta didn’t even care about drawing until I got the app. He just did it because I’m doing it!”

“Does it matter?” I reply. “That he has the same app as you? You guys produce very different work, so no one would compare and say one is better than the other?”

“But it was MY thing. And now he’s doing it too!”

And there it was: “It’s my thing.”

—

Comparison breaks us, and I hate it. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to, but over thousands of years of us humans relating to each other, we have managed to turn comparison into something dark. Now when we see a difference in another, instead of applauding the diversity, we make a judgement of better and worse.

And ownership diminishes us. It tells us that we are what we own. It makes us believe that our uniqueness comes from the tools or titles or toys we hold, instead of the vast galaxy of resource that exists in our physical, emotional and spiritual being.

Who you are is found in the totality of your being. Everywhere you’ve been, everything you love. Everything you believe. All that you allow to waterfall through your heart and onwards into others. As far as unique and beautiful humans go, you’re freaking untouchable.

And you know what the great irony is? I KNOW this about Jeremy, but he’s going to spend the next decade slowly believing it for himself. So every time he turns to me with defeat in his eyes, I’ll tell him again, “you are beautiful and unique, little one. Do your thing, stay open, relax, it’s ok. Keep the channel open."

__

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

- Martha Graham

A slower determination

Rach and I are reading Margaret Wheatley’s “Perseverance” this morning.

At 5:30am, the sun has just crested the horizon, the sky is already an apricot wash, the temperature is already 12 degrees.

And she and I sit naked in a bed, cradling our coffee cups, reading words so wise, we can’t do more than a page a day.

Wheatley writes that in the Chinese language, the character for perseverance is often the same as the one used for patience. Which I find really validating, to be honest. Perseverance often carries with it the expectation of pushing through, being tenacious, fighting forward. But, the ancient Chinese scribes used the character for slowing down, resting and waiting, managing during a slower organic growing of oneself.

I think it’s one thing to have a deadline, work all night, “persevere" to complete a task - it’s cinematic, right? The audience applauds when the lawyer doesn’t sleep for a week and finds the loophole to win the case.

But, it’s a much more courageous thing to believe, and do, over a longer, slower period of time. We need more than adrenaline when the timeframe is months and years. When the work is a life’s work.

We need patience. Grace for ourselves. It’s a slower determination that lasts the distance of a lifetime. And that’s a whole different skill set.

Perseverance doesn’t yield. It sees us through to the end. It sees the difficulties and pushes through. But it’s not a fight. More, a deep resilience that gets us through the mundane, the everyday. It’s a daily acknowledgement:

"I am everything, and I am nothing, both at once.
And I will go softly forward ever forward into this life, with patience and determination.
I will grow as the tides and rivers grow, in ebbs and flows, but ever strengthening.
There is no hurry."