Day 18 Reflection: Focus

I’m beating my head against the keyboard facing this topic, wondering how I can write about this without stating the obvious: We need focus to fulfill our goals.

We have valorized focus, declaring it a quality that leads to greatness. However, too many things disrupt focus: background noise, mental distractions and worries, a cheesecake staring one in the face, too much challenge in the task, even the amount of sleep one has gotten the night before.

It is not always possible to be focused. It’s often the case that people are too scattered, or too worried, or too overwhelmed to focus. It’s time to ask for help, take a break, get a good night’s sleep, put away the cheesecake, and try again.

Day 16 Reflection: Wonder

The way the light spills into the hallway, I realize that I have never truly seen light before. White light, moonlight from the window, turns the stairwell into shadows. I look out the window, and high in the sky floats a huge moon, ancient and luminescent. It is my moment, mine and the moon’s.

Day 15 Reflection: Curiosity

I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with my curiosity.

This probably has to do with the fact that, at the age of seven, I got caught going through the drawers of a buffet at my friend’s house. I wanted to know if all buffets were catchalls for stuff like the one at my house, and what kind of clutter my friends’s parents collected. I seriously didn’t know I did anything wrong. (That was a lot of my childhood, getting yelled at for things I had never been told were wrong.)

As a adult, I’m still very curious. Most of the time I save my curiosity for the most appropriate things, like research: “How much debt do college students have? How do they feel about it?” Or writing: “What would Luke Dunstan do in this situation?”

But then there’s the rubbernecking at accidents. The burning desire to ask personal questions. The gleaning of details on the Internet about teens dying of suicide and celebrity nervous breakdowns and the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter. I am not proud of myself for these, because with each click on such articles, I vote for privacy to be invaded and websites to post hate.

I suspect that curiosity is hardwired in the brain as a mechanism to protect one from harm — if I know what caused the accident, I will avoid the same fate. If I know the motivation of the mass murderer, I will spot the next one before he attacks. The truth of the matter, though, is that fate is capricious enough that no amount of information can guarantee safety. So I keep the personal questions at a minimum and only to the people closest to me, and I drive on when I see the accident.

Curiosity, they say, killed the cat — but satisfaction brought it back. Sometimes we never get satisfaction, and that’s okay as long as we don’t try to get it at any cost.

Day 14 Reflection: Hunger

Hunger, the gnawing in our stomach and uncanny fear in our bones, disconcerts us. Wired in our most primitive brain, hunger presses us to seek sustenance so we don’t die.

We have borrowed the word ‘hunger’ to describe other forms of sustenance, usually in a spiritual sense. We hunger for love, for truth, for justice, for a right relationship with the earth or with our conception of God. The word is fitting, as our desire for these needs can grow uncomfortable and urgent in our souls.

Hunger drives us, no matter what its source. Hunger doesn’t take us on a gentle walk through the orchard after dinner, but sends us in pursuit of what would make us satiated and whole. We walk with hunger on a rocky path, but we barely note the stones because we are in pursuit of our sustenance.

Hunger reminds us that we are akin to the other creatures of the world, who need, who toil, who search. We may hunger for more than basic sustenance, but we do hunger.

Day 13 Reflection: Search

Humanity searches.

The poorest search for sustenance and shelter. The disenfranchised search for justice. The lonely search for love and belongingness.

We all search for meaning in a harsh, capricious world.

It’s hard to live in such a random world, where one’s life can be turned upside down by a natural disaster or a crash of the economy. It’s harder to live in a world where the wicked game the system and come out on top, where structures that disadvantage people by race and social class keep people down.

We all search for something beyond ourselves, for comfort, for meaning. Some find it in a Supreme Being, others find it in nature or music, still others find it in service to higher ideals. Sometimes our attempts to order our world yield injustice, as when we decide that those who are advantaged deserve their status by order of a deity. Sometimes, when we realize that what we thought was natural order are actually the structures of injustice, we make meaning of the need to right wrongs.

We define ourselves as the seekers of the Mystery — followers of the Book, calling ourselves Christian, Jew, or Moslem; Hindu or Buddhist or Zoroastrian; seekers of Truth. No matter how far we travel on our path, the Mystery of life will always be just beyond us, hiding in a random world.

Day 12 Reflection: Heal

I have been in a state of healing for most of my life.

I grew up with childhood trauma — sexual abuse and rape, bullying, an unstable parent. I will talk about resiliency later in this series, because today I want to talk about healing.

This is hard to write, because society tends to tell survivors to ‘get over it already’. The heart and mind don’t work that way. Childhood trauma changes one’s whole trajectory — how one sees oneself, what one believes is possible, how abnormal one feels compared to the children around them who haven’t faced the trauma and who blithely live their lives without picking around the traumatic experience.

I didn’t start healing until I left my hometown for college. Before that, I was still immersed in the toxic culture of the town and could not see my life as anything but pain. In my new life, however, I met people who loved me for myself, wreckage and all.

It was only then that I began to heal. I think love is an integral part of healing, because it shows us that we are more than the sum of our damage. It’s hard to let love in as an abuse survivor, but I had friends who persisted in loving me, and I became the person I had been denied.

I’m still healing, many many years later. It’s much better; the nightmares come rarely, and the memories have faded to neutral-toned snapshots, devoid of the pain. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out if I hadn’t had the childhood I had. But my life has turned out so much better than I had dreamed as a child, which I credit to healing.

I will likely heal for the rest of my life, as do many (if not all) of us. But healing is possible.

I’

Day 10 Reflection: Partnerships

I like to work alone. I feel working with people complicates things and takes up extra time. It’s not as efficient as working on my own. I have to work around other people’s schedules, and …

I imagine many of you reading this are nodding your heads in agreement. It’s just easier to get things done on our own. Unless, of course, they’re things too big for us to accomplish. Or we don’t have the know-how to do them.

So we seek partnerships. And we find partnerships difficult, because we have to deal with the messy tension of working with other people. We struggle with communication at times. We see the problem differently, and the solution differently as well. We have different priorities, different perspectives. Even in the best of partnerships, we struggle at moments, because we’re not psychic twins with our partner.

But partnerships have a power that working on one’s own lacks. The power that comes from those different perspectives. The advantage of having a complement of skills to address a situation, to find a solution. The ability to tackle big problems.

The power of a partnership is worth giving up a little independence, stepping back to negotiate rather than charging in and doing something, and having sole control of the vision.

Day 9 Reflection: Acceptance

“It is what it is.” This phrase has always bugged me, because I want to fix things. I want to make things happen. I want to be in charge of my destiny. All I need are some affirmations and I can —

Sometimes, it turns out, I can’t.

Sometimes I don’t have the energy to put more effort into something to influence the outcome. I give what I can, and then I accept that I’ve done the best I can, and I take my needed rest. I find this with my writing career, which thus far has not taken off. Because I have a full time job which supports my family, I cannot devote myself to full-time writing, so I write as much as I can and then accept my time and energy limitations.

Sometimes I don’t have the power to change reality, and I have to accept it. I cannot bring a loved one back to life. I can’t reverse a layoff. All I can do is accept and mourn and adapt.

Sometimes, though, it’s dangerous to accept things as they are. Injustices may be too large for me alone to solve, but that doesn’t mean I should dismiss them with “It is what it is”. I have limited power to change others’ minds or to change society, but I must address what I can rather than accept. I accept that I can’t change the world, but I try, and I listen to those who face the injustice so my energies go in a helpful direction and are not wasted.

At the end of the day, “it is what it is” … for now.

Day 8 Reflection: Mistakes

When I was in college long ago, I dated an engineering student. I remember telling my mother at the end of the semester that he had gotten a D in his differential equations class.

“Does he know what he did wrong?” she asked.

I told her he had no idea why he’d gotten the grade.

“That’s too bad,” she noted. “He won’t be able to fix it if he doesn’t know.”

People don’t like admitting their mistakes. It’s easy to assign an external factor to failure — the teacher hates me, the instructions were too difficult. But without admitting mistakes, one can’t work out the solution.

Sometimes mistakes can be catastrophic. A few days ago, something caused a deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Ethiopia, the second such crash with a 737 MAX 8 in six months. Several countries’ airlines have quit flying the model in the belief that a mechanical failure took down the craft. One of the holdouts, and the country that flies the most 737 MAX 8 aircraft, is the US. One hopes that the US isn’t trying to cover up a catastrophic mistake by an American company with false confidence.

We have a crisis of responsibility in leadership because of the inability of people to admit making mistakes. Politicians pass blame to others or make equivocal statements: “Mistakes were made.” They fear that taking responsibility for mistakes will alarm the electorate, who don’t like admitting their own mistakes. This leads to the crisis — taking responsibility for mistakes is the sign of a true leader, one who is willing to learn for the sake of her constituents, yet leaders present themselves with a flawless facade for the sake of electability.

We need to admit our mistakes to learn from them, to fix them, to grow and to become wise.

Day 7 Reflection Part 2: Looking Inward at Resilience

I manifest resilience in my life, and I find it’s one of my most enduring characteristics.

There are many ways in which my life has been privileged — I was born into a white middle class family, I have been gifted with a good deal of analytical and verbal intelligence — but I have had to overcome a childhood of bullying, unstable parenting, sexual abuse, and the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as Bipolar 2. I have made it to 55 years old with a reasonably well-balanced life.

As I wrote that, I realized that I (as I suspect many do) began to conflate resilience with accomplishment and judging my resilience by the degree of my accomplishment. This transmogrifies an ordinary, developable skill into an attribute of the rarefied few. This is the script of what I referred to yesterday as inspiration porn: ” … overcame a difficult childhood/debilitating disease/life-shattering accident to become a lawyer/doctor/marathon runner/fill in the blank with an accomplishment most of us reading the story couldn’t manage. If I look at what I’ve accomplished (a modest career at a small Masters I university where I’ve made few waves, six novels that I can’t get an agent for/published) I don’t feel very resilient. But if I look at what I’ve survived, and the current quality of my life, I feel very resilient indeed.

If we want people to be resilient, we have to believe that resilience is ordinary, is learnable, is measurable by one’s quality of life and not their level of achievement.