I couldn’t get to bed early enough the other night, so I decided to sleep in. Instead of waking up at 5:15 AM, I canceled my two normal alarms and instructed Alexa to rouse me at 7:00.
She dutifully complied. At the appointed time, I sighed contentedly, stretched, and luxuriated in my bed. I let my head sink back into the pillow for just a few minutes, feeling deliciously decadent.
Okay, time to check in. “Alexa, what time is it?”
“The time is 8:05 AM.”
I bolted upright. HOLY SHIT. I had a Focusmate session scheduled at 8:00 AM―an online coworking appointment. That meant that someone somewhere in the world had been waiting for me and was now working alone, instead of in solidarity with me.
I crashed out of bed and mashed the power button on my computer. While it whirred and muttered about its own rude awakening, I threw on a t-shirt and gym shorts and splashed some water on my face.
When I logged in, I was relieved to see that I’d been matched with Steve, a cheery avuncular fellow that I’ve already done a number of morning sessions with. We touched base and I apologized profusely. He laughed and went back to work and I excused myself to go fill a mug the size of a small hot tub with steaming coffee.
While I was preparing it, I noticed something strange: I felt happy. Like, really happy. I was late, but I wasn’t beating myself up about it. I was a good guy, happy to be here, and I just happened to be late for this one session. It wasn’t a moral failing. It did not portend disaster and dissolution and moral decay.
I was just late this one time. I’m normally not (at least for Focusmate sessions. Date night, that’s another issue, as my longsuffering partner will attest.) If you had been witness to the inside of my unforgiving head over the years, you would know what a revolutionary shift this represents.
Part of the recognition was spurred by a lovely podcast I had heard over the weekend by Rob Bell, one of my favorite observers of this life of ours. The episode was called “Is This Your First Accident?” (Link in the comments.) In it, Rob describes being involved in a minor fender-bender after picking his young daughter up from school. He was TOTALLY at fault. But he didn’t make it any bigger than it was. A moment of distraction, some minor dented metal.
Because he wasn’t busy freaking out and beating himself up, he was able to be exquisitely attuned to his daughter’s experience and also to the driver of the other car. That is, by taking care of himself, he was able to take better care of everyone else.
We are bigger than the things that happen to us. We are bigger than isolated moments of less-than-perfect action. It reminds me of meditation: one goal of the practice is to insert a pause so that you don’t over-identify with and get lost in the trance of what’s happening in your life. To cultivate The Witness behind the hubbub.
So, listen up. You are not your missed alarms. Or your fender-benders. Or your broken china, or your cheat meals, or your rejected novel. Or that argument with your spouse or your impatience with your child this morning or the tear in your stocking or the wonky test result or your stood-up date or your ugly wallpaper or the weedy garden or your empty bank account or your conditional exam pass or your schedule blown-all-to-hell or your chipped tooth or your tyops I mean typos.
Don’t globalize them. Don’t make them metaphors for your life. Don’t surrender your precious value to them. You don’t have to judge them (and yourself) in order to take effective action to change them.
Beating yourself up is an activity, a pattern, a habit. It’s not an “objective” assessment. It’s just a way to kill time―your time, the only time you’ve got.
Don’t you have better things to do with it?
Life as an Airport: Just Passing Through
I’m an excited little kid when I go to an airport. Always have been. I could watch those big beautiful jets take off all day.
But sometimes, while I’m waiting for a flight, I’m struck by the poignancy of what’s going on around me. It seems like an airport is a fitting metaphor for this life. A strange assortment of people thrown together for a limited time. A continual stream of comings and goings.
Some fly first class, with designer luggage and access to fancy lounges and the front of the line. Others are traveling on a shoestring, with duct-taped duffle bags, discount-store snacks, and no frequent flyer accounts.
Some zoom confidently down the concourse chatting on their smartphones, while others shuffle nervously along, worried and out of their element, checking and double-checking gate numbers and flight monitors and crumpled paper boarding passes.
Some travel light. Others are weighed down by
So. Much. Baggage.
Sometimes we get separated from our stuff and our people. Weather and physics and history intervene: flights get cancelled and the best-laid plans get scrapped.
Sometimes we miss a critical connection and end up stuck in one place for a long time.
Some of us guardedly retreat into neck pillows and earbuds, while others walk in wide-eyed wonder and lean into conversations with potential new friends.
In the airport of your life, what concourse or jetway are you on right now? Maybe it looks like a corporate office or a grocery line or a waiting room. Stop and take in your fellow travelers. Especially the ones who seem most different from you. Soften your gaze and heart for a moment.
Where do you imagine they’re coming from or going to? What stamps do their passports hold? What routes have they traveled? What happy reunions, tearful farewells, hopeful new adventures, difficult missions, and bedside vigils lie behind and before them? Always, always, the comings and the goings.
Whisper a prayer. Silently wish them bon voyage―a good journey.
Wait. What was that? Did they just call your flight?
Is it already time to leave?
When Giving Up Responsibility is the Responsible Thing to Do
I realized a while back that my sense of responsibility, my uber-conscientiousness, was getting in the way of my support for clients. It’s a bit of a paradox.
Responsibility is a well-worn groove in my psyche, something that was pounded into me by the catechism and other influences as I was growing up. The word is often conflated for me with guilt and blame. As a teacher/therapist once told me, “Chris, I don’t know what happened to make you so hard on yourself, but it’s deep.”
But this trait which I valued early on, and which was commended by the authority figures in my life, turns out to be less useful these days. When I’m coaching, rather than making me sharper, it can get in the way of my being present and having access to all my resources. Because I have too much at stake. My value as a coach and person is on the line.
Like, if I’m not careful, I’m going to screw this up. And I’m the “expert,” responsible for “saving” my clients, so I have to be super-hypervigilant for all the ways and means to do that.
(Of course, there is a golden lining here: if I’m to blame when things go wrong, then I can take the credit when they go right. Which suits my corresponding Savior Complex just fine.)
But you know what? Approaching the work like that is exhausting. And not very fun. And it becomes a limiting factor with respect to the number of people I can work with in a day and over the long haul. It takes a lot of energy and focus to walk that tightrope every session.
It’s also not a very flattering or useful construct for my clients. It demeans their agency and capability. When I become aware that that storyline is active, I pause and remind myself that we’re both experts, bringing unique and invaluable perspectives to this collaboration. We’re on a journey of discovery together.
Lately, I’ve been redefining responsibility as “response ability”: that is, what can I do to make sure I’m as responsive and creative as possible, so that I’m able to meet the unfolding (and fascinating) process that is my client with maximum resourcefulness and effectiveness?
And it turns out it looks a lot less like efforting and a lot more like relaxing. Experimenting. Trusting (myself and the client). Playing. Dancing. All things that I have done in sessions, by the way.
What is weighing on you that might actually benefit―and produce better outcomes―from being easier with yourself? Maybe the most responsible thing you can do is to give up some of that responsibility.
“It’s Not Supposed to Feel Like This”: The Lie in the Way of Your Progress
There’s this thing I often do where I put off something (especially a long-contemplated task, or beginning a new habit) because “I’m not in the right mood.” If by some miracle I do convince myself to start, I can easily get disenchanted if the task doesn’t unfold with the frictionless ease, confidence, and grace that I was imagining. Especially at the beginning.
Traditionally, at that point I’ve had an impulse to back off. “I’m gonna wait till it feels right.” That thought is based on the assumption that the Right Time would feel different. It would be easy and in flow.
But flow often doesn't happen right away. It comes after you get over the initial hump of resistance. In fact, maybe that feeling of not-rightness is precisely how a thing often feels at the beginning. It’s right for it to feel not-right.
Face it: you might be using muscles and skills and/or directing your energy in ways and contexts that you may not be used to. It takes a lot more conscious effort than that easy-peasy picture in your head. The hinges are creaky. They need some oil. The door has to be opened and swung back and forth a few times.
Expecting it to be otherwise could be yet another mask for perfectionism (i.e., if it’s not perfect, it’s not worth doing). Perfectionism in turn is often fueled by shame―the fear of being found out. The fear that you’re damaged goods and not as accomplished as you think you’re supposed to be, and everyone is going to see it.
Lately, I’ve committed to getting up super early (for me) every morning and exercising first thing, followed by meditation. And the implementation is a lot harder than the picture in my head. The first thought I had the other morning in the pool was “I must be doing it wrong. This feels way more clunky than I imagined.” But then I stopped. How the heck did I think it was supposed to feel to my out-of-practice body?
One caveat: this sense of “not-rightness” I’m talking about here is primarily driven by unfamiliarity and lack of practice. There’s also a kind of “not-rightness” that comes from an internal compass―like some sense that there are suspect motives/conditions in play or some other kind of bad juju afoot. I’m not suggesting that you should ignore that kind of impulse. Or, if the thing you’re bumping up against is some kind of severe anxiety response or hyper-arousal, it may be a sign that you’ve got other work to tend to first.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the power of visualization. I’m a fan. By all means, visualize getting it done. And include in that vision the possibility of it “not feeling right” at the beginning. Visualize it being crunchy and then getting easier over time. But don’t create an expectation of effortlessness at the outset that you will then weaponize as a stick to beat yourself with.
Odds are, if it feels awkward, klunky, or plain wrong at the beginning, you’re right on track.
The Stories We Spin, the Stories that Spin Us
The other morning, I was looking over a project in my backyard with discouragement, reviewing all that there still was left to do. A wild tangle of bamboo and vines and gnarly roots lay before me, where I needed to create a path for a drainage pipe. My arms and legs already bore the scarlet scratches and welts from my pitiful progress to this point. Surely this was supposed to be easier; I must be doing something wrong. My internal compass pointed firmly south of the State of Competence.
And then I caught myself.
WHOOOA. Stop. I had gotten up at 5:15 AM. I exercised, then I scrubbed all the eaves of the house,* and I had already harvested a big pile of dead bamboo from the jungle before me. And this was all in the hours before my day job. Enough for now.
The poet David Whyte says, “When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also.” I realized that I was looking at the project and making up a story about it, myself, and the drudgery of existence with tired, overheated, uncreative eyes.
I was also listening to an audiobook--a captivating tale of a real magician’s search for wonder. Curiously, I was just at the place in the narrative when the hero had reached the point of giving up and needed to back away from his craft. The correspondence between his mood and mine was striking, and I wondered if his account had also influenced my own feelings.
In any case, I decided it was time to stop and shower. (It was a damp, steamy Louisiana morning and my soaked shirt dripped with sweat.) But my body did not at all want to go inside yet, and I decided to honor that impulse. So, I maneuvered to a circumspect part of my backyard that was sheltered from the neighbors’ view. I stripped down to my skivvies, and turned the cool spray of the garden hose on myself.
As the water flowed, I contemplated writing about the experience. And then I wondered how the very intention to write about it might actually be shaping the experience that I was having. You know, the way the habit of sharing photos on social media can influence the way that we look at our experience, the way we take the photos, and can subtly guide our choices of the photo-worthy situations that we put ourselves into. #lifebyinstagram
“Better stick the dismount,” I thought, “so that I have a good ending to this story to tell.” And then I thought about how recognizing that shaping impulse within me was also something that I could write about, so that you all could think I was particularly introspective and insightful.
Oof. Too much meta for a Thursday morning. I decided to let go of it all and just be completely present to the experience. So, I went all in (or all out, depending on your perspective): I dropped my drawers and stood buck (and butt) naked under the cloudy sky for the next ten minutes. My thoughts yielded to the soft thick grass under my feet and the cool clean water coursing down my body, washing me and my stories clean.
*Note: I do not typically scrub things like eaves. (Read “NEVER.”) This task was in preparation for getting new rain gutters installed. Just didn’t want you thinking I was some kind of a fanatic.
