Packing Light

I was an Army brat–which basically means that I was a brat who had a parent in the military. Dad was a 30-year+ career Army officer.  We lived on base, and I dutifully answered the phone, “Colonel Kisling’s residence, Chris speaking.” “Sir” and “Ma’am” were drilled into our vocabulary along with a healthy respect for authority and rules.

Periodically, Dad would have to travel to another installation on TDY—militaryspeak for “Temporary Duty.” I remember the ritual of watching him pack on the night before a trip. It was an efficient process: the hard-shell suitcase lying open on the bed, contents neatly arranged—uniforms, t shirts, boxers, Dopp kit. Everything was strapped down in its place and there was no sitting on the suitcase to get it closed. He was always done packing early. I would go to bed and he would disappear in the predawn darkness before I woke up.

Later, after he retired, he would also travel regularly—most often to Montana, a majestic land he grew to love. A couple of times a year he would pack up and fly to Billings, where he would meet his brother Dave and they would head out to the familiar, slightly musty cabin in the woods on the East Boulder River. There, they would spend a couple of idyllic, bourbon-infused weeks of fishing, relaxing, and joking. For these trips, the packing process was not quite as efficient. More stuff to take, more decisions to make. It dragged out, and he was never done early.

Tonight I sit in a nursing home on the Texas coast and watch my father, now 86, packing for another journey—his last one. By one measure, it’s his most inefficient process yet. He seems to spend a lot of time lost in dream-filled reverie as he mulls over his list. On the other hand, his eventual choices about what to take are even more conservative than in his military days. He’s packing light this time. In fact, it’s really more of an unpacking.  He’s unpacking the decades, memories, family members, appetite, weight, decorum, and any concern about the outside world.

I find myself unpacking along with him. I clung tightly when we started this process. The air was saturated with poignant memory. I would stroke his cheek, or look at old pictures, or play favorite songs from our family’s years together, and the tears came easily and abundantly. But, through the grace of time, I find myself holding him and the stuff of our shared history much more lightly these days. It’s less about what was and more about what he needs now.  There will be plenty of time to grieve later, I reckon, should I need it.

As the various pieces of his life fall softly from his open hands, there is one thing he clings to. Curiously, he is persistently obsessed with meeting up with his younger brother Peter.  He complains of waiting on the phone for hours trying to get through to him. (There is no phone in his room.) He wants to borrow Peter’s motorcycle. Dad has never really ridden one, and he says he wants Pete to show him the ropes, so he can decide if he wants to get one of his own. He talks about heading West with Pete.  Said he saw him in the hall of the nursing home just the other day.

Hearing Dad talk like that, it’s easy to attach a deeper significance to the words, associated with his imminent transition–and I’m all about taking the easy route these days. Particularly since Uncle Pete passed away from pancreatic cancer in the Pacific Northwest more than a decade ago.

Huh. Maybe that’s it—the reason for the especially light packing for this particular trip. Because a motorcycle just doesn’t have room for a lot of extra stuff. I expect that one day soon I will wake up and find that, once again, he has slipped away in the predawn darkness, though not on a plane this time. Just he and Pete–a couple of boys with their toys–and the open road. And I’ll face west with a smile–and maybe a tear or two–and wave as I whisper, “Safe travels, Daddy. Have fun.”

My New BFF

The other night, during a Skype co-counseling session with an amazing and insightful friend, I remarked how I sometimes catch myself in a weak moment saying some pretty harsh things to myself that (1) I would never say to someone else, and (2) I would never let anyone else say to another person without intervening.

True dat.  (And anyone who is surprised to hear that I still have those moments obviously didn’t read the small print.) Have you ever had this experience of turning on yourself? Leaving your own side and becoming the aggressor?  Funny thing–it has never helped the situation for me.  Unhappiness doesn’t motivate me.  It just makes me unhappy.

I mentioned to her that I thought it would be useful to (once again) intentionally anchor an unshakeable sense of what Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard” for myself–the same attitude that we always strive to bring to our clients in our counseling sessions. Make it one of my unquestioned assumptions, one of the premises and pillars of my existence–no matter how tired or hungry I am, no matter how few things on my To Do list that I accomplished that day, or even if I had just emerged from a particularly ungraceful “blunder” (AKA an “opportunity to learn”).  No withholding of love for myself. Take that question right off the table.

So, she–wonderful person that she is–decided to intervene in the process when I saw her in San Francisco last weekend for a training workshop. She presented me with a gift, a friendship bracelet.  And although it was a gift from her, her stated intention was that it really should be a gift from me to myself.  A tangible reminder, always there, that I am my own best friend.  Double pinky promise.  No take-backs. Best Friends Forever.

She made it well. I don’t think it’s coming off anytime soon. This just may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

How about you?  Do you have a BFF?  I think I know someone who is just perfect for you.

Up for Grabs

My client searched for words. “My father. I think that’s the approval I want.”

Hmmm. Based on what I knew of him and his father, it didn’t seem to be in the cards anytime soon. My client was a free spirit. He packed lightly and moved easily across the earth—immensely talented, inquisitive, and motivated, but far from conventional. His father had chosen a very different path—a more stable and traditional life with a mortgage and a steady paycheck.

I leaned in. “Okay. Imagine for a moment that you received the approval that you want from your father. 100%. What shifts inside of you when you consider that?” He paused for a moment and then let out a long deep breath. “I feel more grounded. It feels more spacious inside.”

Our session was nearing an end, so, for homework, I asked him to consider other possibilities. Could he imagine any other paths to this place of groundedness and spaciousness besides approval from his father? Or was that a locked garden that only his father had the key to? And who got to decide who the gatekeeper was anyway?

The point is this: Very often in our Belief-logic we tie our happiness or comfort to other people acting a certain way, doing a certain thing, or thinking/expressing a certain view about us. We may not even realize we’ve done it, particularly with those people who loom large in our personal histories and have shaped our interior space. The rules tied up in our relationships with them can become part of the air we breathe.

For instance, for some of us, the issue of withheld approval could be tied to some past moment of trauma or distress that is restimulated in the present and carries the message “It’s not safe when my parent disapproves of me.” Or, the concern could be based on some belief we’ve picked up along the way about what the relationship “should be” between a parent and a grown child—perhaps from the advice of a friend we admire, or the model advocated by an author we respect. Or it could be tied to a concern as pragmatic as the potential loss of material support.

Whatever the source, whenever in our psyches we wire our happiness to another person’s actions or attitudes, we give that person (or, more accurately, the thought of that person) immense power over us.  The good news is that we have wonderfully effective tools and strategies we can use to reexamine those connections—to heal them, overwrite them, or reimagine them.

Even if the specific issue is associated with a particular moment in our distant past, it’s not therefore unreachable. The past is always recalled in and shaped by the present. It shifts subtly each time we bring it into consciousness, whether we intend it or not. With intention, however, we can deliberately create a new relationship to past events and people and develop new “rules” and associations by which to live and assess our lives.

What power in or over your life have you put up for grabs?
Are you ready to take it back?

Too Close for Comfort

The weekend before last, a beautiful woman asked me an intriguing question: “I notice whenever I move in close to speak with you, you move back a step. Why is that?”

Hmmm. I contemplated her question as the crowded room buzzed around us. We were on a break during a session in a [fabulous] counseling training program. We had just wrapped an intensive exchange in which our home group had been reflecting on its internal dynamic. She is our group moderator and one of the program leaders—a woman of tremendous insight and empathy whom I hold in high regard. And she really is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen in the flesh.

The answer came to me almost immediately. “Because I want you close, but only as close as I can handle. My internal PR machine depends on maintaining a little bit of distance, so that I can manage your perceptions of me.  If you get a little too close, it might get a little too real. You might see beneath the veneer. You might see things I can’t control and decide not to like me anymore. So that’s why I move back to here.” I took a step back to illustrate.  And I was suddenly struck by a change.  She was clearer.  That is, I could see her more clearly.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I stepped up close to her again and she got a little blurry.  I could almost feel an energy pushing me back as my eyes strained into overdrive in a vain attempt to resolve the image.  I took my glasses off.  My eyes relaxed, she became crystal clear–more beautiful than ever–and I felt completely comfortable in her close orbit.  I wanted to hold that space.

Holy shit.  Maybe it was just my glasses.  I’m nearsighted.  I need my glasses to see things clearly if they’re more than a couple of feet away.  However, I see very close things better without them. Wow. Two completely plausible motivations for an action, which couldn’t be more different from each other.

Which then begs the question: Which one is true?  Does the fact that I realized the issue was with my eyes invalidate the other reason? Is the physical reason true while the spiritual/psychological reason is just made up?

I don’t think so.  My guess is that the immediate physical step back was more motivated by the vision issue.  But it doesn’t really matter.  I was hyperaware that whole weekend of my default M.O. of trying to manage others’ perceptions. Since I was already focused on that aspect of my personality, my English major’s mind immediately alighted upon the backward step as an elegant external analogy for what was going on in my interior landscape.

The eye and the heart each have their own way of seeing. Sometimes they align. Sometimes they don’t.  In this case, they saw different things, but both brought me to the same place.  Approximately one step back.  And now I have some insights to play with that might just allow me to move in a little closer.

Come Home to Yourself for the Holidays

The holidays cast a disproportionate light (or shadow, depending on your perspective) over the rest of the year. Many retailers make or miss their yearly goals based on holiday volume; similarly, the anticipation, celebration, and aftermath of the holidays loom large over one-third of the year and beyond in our psyches. The trifecta of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, with their associations of personal and collective reflection and summation, is a powerful force. The effect can be compounded if, as is the case with me, your birthday falls squarely in the middle of the holiday mayhem.

“Home” is a strong component of the holidays. Maybe it’s something about the days getting shorter and the darkness getting longer that enkindles in us this archetypal urge to return to the primordial hearth, that place where the home fires burn. Regardless of the source of the impulse, many holiday itineraries include a journey back to our families of origin. These can be heartwarming times, full of sentiment and nostalgia and renewal of relationships. They can also be times of tension as we return to family dynamics and roles (and, in some cases, childhood rooms and beds) that don’t fit us so well anymore.

I want to make a strong case for a special intentional journey home during the holidays—home to yourself. Don’t let the holidays happen to you like an accident or run over you like a garland-festooned Mack truck. Use the holidays as a time to stoke your own home fire, so that you can burn brighter for yourself and those around you. Set a goal and some time to get warm and cozy in your own skin. Create a strong sense of yourself as home—a place where you belong, where you are safe, known, embraced, welcomed. If you do that, you’ll be able to handle anything external the holidays throw at you.

We’ll talk about some ways to do that in future posts. For now, set an intention, pull out your compass, and orient it toward your heart.