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Rose-Colored Glasses

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“You know what’s funny? When you look at someone through rose colored glasses all the red flags just look like flags.”- Wanda Pierce

This was previously published on 7/27/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

A few weeks ago I had plans to take my kids to a wedding in Leavenworth, WA a couple of hours away from where I live. On the day we were to leave, my stomach hurt. I chalked it up to a deli sandwich that I’d eaten the day before and loaded the kids into the car anyway. My only concession was to bring a can of Ginger Ale to calm my stomach but I judged my ability to go and take care of two young children was fine because that was as bad as I was going to feel.

I’m a congenital optimist. That is to say, I don’t work at having an optimistic attitude and it took me at least 40 of my 53 years to figure out how deeply my outlook is colored. And even that is an optimistic estimate because I’m still working it out. There are a few things that my optimism has categorically gotten wrong:

  • Dating: Nothing in common? No problem, I just figure that makes it interesting.
  • Traffic: Despite living in a metro area with consistently bad traffic, I always go with the low end estimate of travel time.
  • Weather: When it’s raining, as it does often in Seattle, I think it’s great because that means it going to stop when I want to go out for a walk.

The Ancient Greeks inscribed “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. I’ve found that self-awareness to be a powerful tool to help correct for my inclinations. Specifically, to help me peel back the rose colored layer that my mind adds to pretty much every scenario. It helps me to add 15 minutes to my travel time, dress appropriately for the weather and realize that I don’t need to sign up for every date.

Even as I’m optimistic that I’ve learned how to adjust for my optimism, life presents me with new opportunities to be self-aware. As I traveled on that trip with my kids out of town, my stomach pains got worse and I had a couple of sleepless nights crammed in a hotel room with my 2-year-old and 6-year-old. Now I realized my optimism had told me that how sick I was when I first got the symptoms was as bad as it was going to get. Oops!

Fortunately, it wasn’t all that bad and I just needed to power through getting us home safely. And since optimism has signed me up for a lot things I think are going to go great and turn out to require a lot of resolve (I can think of at least 2 mountain climbing trips in this category), I am plenty experienced at powering through.

Mark Twain said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.” Maybe that’s because if optimism hasn’t killed us before we reach old age, then it’s poor form if we haven’t figured out that it’s all a trick of the mind. I don’t think my optimism is going to ever go away but when I see it now I laugh and say, “Hi, Old Friend!”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Expansiveness

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“People change when we are cherished.” – Father Gregory Boyle

This was previously published on 8/31/2022 – heads up, you may have already read this.

When my inquisitive daughter was about 3 ½ years old, we had a conversation about perspective. We looked out our back door at the houses around and I asked her to count how many she could see. Three. Then we went to the second floor and I helped her count – seven. And then we went to the roof, looked at all the houses we could see and concluded it was more than she had numbers for. I told her something like “This is what perspective looks like when you get older, you know that everything fits into a larger picture and you are able to see more of it.”

Even for my very verbal daughter, this was mostly lost on her but I could see her trying to think about it. When I recently heard a Ten Percent Happier podcast with Father Gregory Boyle and he presented the most expansive view of love and its power to change that I’ve ever heard, I felt a little like my daughter trying to understand perspective. His view is so big and powerful, that it might take me years of practice to fully understand.

 Father Gregory is a Jesuit priest whose work as a pastor in the poorest parish in Los Angeles that was also in the area with the highest gang activity led him to start Homeboy Industries. It’s a number of different businesses than serve to employ and train former gang members and serve the community.

Even though Father Gregory was talking about love in terms of gang intervention, a topic that has little intersection with my experience of life, his expansiveness offers a whole-hearted practice of love that I found mind blowing in its potential to change us from the inside out. Here’s how he described it in a nutshell:

“The practice – Catch yourself before you are judgmental. How do you stand in awe at what people have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it? You are catching yourself all the time.”

Father Gregory Boyle

And when he was asked if he ever messes that up his reply was, “Only all the time.”  

Providing more detail on the practice, Father Gregory described,

“So part of the invitation is to catch yourself. Our hard wiring would direct us to demonize. Demonizing is always the opposite of the truth. You are about to do it with the shooter in Uvalde. At no point are you cosigning on bad behavior. You are just saying two certain things. Everyone is unshakably good.  We all belong to each other.

“Now let’s roll up our sleeves. How do we help people? How do we pay attention? How do we notice people before they buy high-powered weapons? How do we include people? How do we move people out of the isolation that depletes their sense of hope? How do we infuse people with hope for whom hope is foreign?”

Father Gregory Boyle

 Father Gregory just buried his 255th kid that died as a result of gang violence. And yet he still is touting this incredibly hopeful vision of how we belong to each other. The work he’s done over 40 years is phenomenal, heart-breaking and transformative. His take on burnout and how to avoid it was fascinating.

“You go to the margins not to make a difference, you go to the margins so that the folks there make you different. If you go to the margins to save the day, and rescue people, fix people or even to make a difference, it’s about you and it can’t be about you. So you burn out. You burn out not because you are so compassionate but because you made it about you.”

Father Gregory Boyle

Like any athlete that has practiced his or her jump shot so many times that it looks easy in their hands, Father Gregory makes loving people no-matter-what sound simple. I know, as I suspect we all do, that it isn’t easy. But maybe that’s something that perspective teaches us – that simple ideas when practiced over and over again have amazing power to change.

For a light-hearted post about loving whoever shows up, please see my Wise & Shine post today: The Inspiration to Write: A Short Vignette

Sunday Funnies: August 6

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A re-run of my dad’s humor cards. They make me chuckle all over again – so I hope you enjoy them whether it’s the first time or second (first posted on 6/26/2022).

The backstory: My dad was a Presbyterian pastor for 40 years. He kept a well curated stack of humor cards – little stories he heard, found or saw and then typed onto 5×7 cards. Then he wrote in the margins when he used that particular item. His humor was often an easy way to settle in to something deeper – by laughing and thinking about the buried truth in these little nuggets, it paved the way to an open heart.

Perspective

A father and son in a huge rig were plowing their large acreage. At the end of a long hot day they came to the last run, alongside the highway. At the end the corner was too sharp to turn without spoiling part of what they’d done, so they opened the gate onto the highway and figured they would turn their 40 foot rig around there.

About the time they were in the middle of the highway, a small racy sports car came up over the hill at about 90 miles an hour. The driver panicked when he saw this huge 40 foot rig across the road in front of him and thought for sure it was the end, until, just before he ploughed into them, he saw the open gate into the field. So he spun off the highway, jumped a ditch, zigged and zagged across the soft dirt and then smashed into a tree.

The father turned to the son after watching this whole scene and said, “Whew, we got out of that field just in time!”

Deep Contentment

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“In some ways, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but less.” – C.S. Lewis

Things are going great. I was handed a new job so providentially that I would have been thumbing my nose at the Universe to turn it down. We’re getting a new puppy, and dogs are one of my favorite things on this planet. My kids and I just returned from a beautiful week of vacation and we are healthy, centered, and bonded.

I mention all this not to celebrate the good fortune but as a back drop for what comes next. I mean, celebrating the good fortune is also worth doing, but it’s not what I’m getting at here. It’s that I experience a lot of moments as I’m looking down this future thinking, “Holy crap, how is all this going to work?” My excitement for what is to come is peppered with sharp spikes of anxiety. I know it’ll be a lot of work and there are going to be tough moments, but I don’t know what they will be.

This is when I realize that faith is as important in the up times as well as the down. My dad once told me what he wished for his kids in terms of faith, “But life has been so rich for me because of what I have come to know of God through Jesus that on that level I yearn for you to know the same deep contentment and certainty that you belong to God and God loves you.”

It’s his phrase “deep contentment” that keeps coming back to me when I feel anxious. To watch my dad navigate life – the ups and the downs was to see what deep contentment looks like. It looks like someone who made life seem easy. It looks like someone who had an incredibly deep well of grace and love for others. It looks like someone who was centered, focused, accomplished an incredible amount, all the while, smiling with this knowing gleam in his eye.

In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave an incredible commencement speech at Kenyon College. It included this,

“You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s speech, combined with the words from my dad, reminds me that I get to choose my faith, and use it to fuel my contentment both when life is good and when life is hard. When I do that enough times, I become less buffeted by the winds of fortune, whether they be up or down, and I start to find deep contentment of my own.

For a sister post about anxiety, please read my Heart of the Matter post: Borrowing Trouble.

For more about my dear dad, I’ve written a book that is available on Amazon: Finding My Father’s Faith

The quote for today post came from Mitch Teemley, Less Glory, Please?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Family Dynamics

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“Gotta move different when you want different.” – unknown

Last Monday I got frustrated with Miss O when we were getting ready for school. Or should I say, not getting ready for school. I prompted her five times to get her shoes on, she got mad at me for repeating myself. I told her that I wouldn’t have to repeat myself if she would put her shoes on…nothing new. I’m sure a conversation that happens between kids and parents in households all over the world since the beginning of time. Or at least since shoes became a thing.

So we were both irritated when I dropped her off to school. And then Mr. D was silent as we drove on. By the time we walked in the front door of his pre-school, it was clear that he was upset. We sat in the chairs outside his classroom for a while, and then had a tearful drop-off which is unusual for Mr. D.

This has happened enough times for me to discern the pattern – Mr. D is so attuned to the emotions of the household that any disturbances in our mostly good natured vibe affect him, even when the upset doesn’t involve him.   

Wow, families are complex. Now I don’t have to just be responsible for my own emotions but also the impact that I’m having on the group and vice versa?

I think about what it was like in my family growing up. My sister was usually upset about something, my brother was tired of hearing her complain and just disconnected, and I felt that I needed to be no problem since my parents were having to deal with my sister. It’s a pattern we maintain, by and large, to this day.

My mathematical nature likes patterns – they are so useful to predict what will happen next. But sometimes patterns just hold us in a mindless call and response. Until one person breaks out by saying, “I’m so tired of this banter that keeps us from saying anything real,” the other person(s) in the pattern may not realize there is something habitual that has been holding everyone in place.

Thinking back to my little family, I think this applies too. When I get tired of the same conversation about the same shoes, I’m always surprised how effective it is to change the dynamic by changing the order. Shoes before breakfast helps break the stalemate. What’s harder is changing the natural tendency that Mr. D has to carry the tension. Maybe that’s a case of where making it visible helps to dispel it. Hopefully that works because we aren’t going to stop wearing shoes.

I’ve written a companion piece on the Heart of the Matter blog about some advice I got from a friend long ago to never back a kid into a corner and instead always offer them a way out: Building Bridges to Each Other. Please check it out if you have a moment.

(featured photo is a pair of Converse high tops that Miss O got as hand-me-downs)

Podcast Episode 3: On Mountaineering, Martial Arts, Overcoming Challenges and Motherhood

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I was so lucky to be able to spend time podcasting with one of my favorite blog buddies, Betsy Kerekes. Here is the link to our podcast and show notes for our fun discussion about handling the tough things in life – specifically mountaineering, martial arts, overcoming challenges and motherhood.

Wynne Leon's avatarThe Heart of the Matter

When I was new to blogging, I spent some time looking for bloggers that were good writers, aligned with what I was interested in, and who I was inspired by. I lucked out by finding, Betsy Kerekes on Parenting is Funny.

There’s much to love about Betsy but I think what stuck the most for me is that she tackles hard things with humor and grace. This is true for parenting and now that she’s changed her blog name to Motherhood and Martial Arts (MMA), it’s true for martial arts too.

I’m not a martial arts practitioner, but in the great stories she tells about learning, getting injured, and keeping up the practice, I’m inspired by her grit all wrapped up in a lovely package. Whatever it is she practices, she moves me to laugh about all the great lessons she learns.

So I know you’ll love this entertaining podcast…

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Strong Back, Soft Front

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This week it seems like I’ve had to be very firm with myself to focus on the things I have to get done and not just the things I want to get done. At the same time, I’ve been trying to hold compassion for all the things that are unsolved in me. It makes me think of this wonderful phrase from Roshi Joan Halifax – Strong Back, Soft Front.

Wynne Leon's avatarSurprised By Joy

“Do small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa

Last night we returned from a small outdoor party right at my son’s bedtime. I went to take off his shoes and socks and start to get him ready for bed and he was lying on the couch, head on the pillows, looking very much like a little grown man taking a load off after a long day. When I told him it was time to get his jammies on and stooped to pick him up he said, “No tank ooo.” At 23 months “no thank you” is his most powerful phrase and although I’d never claim that he fully understands the politeness of it, it’s still quite effective.

It makes me think of a phrase I first heard used by Brene Brown, “strong back, soft front” but I believe was originated by Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher. Strong back…

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The Current Underneath

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I was reminded of this great story from my meditation teacher about how she disturbed the quiet, calm, lovely atmosphere of a yoga class to scream out the door. I thought it was worth sharing again.

Wynne Leon's avatarSurprised By Joy

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” – Dolly Parton

Last night I was out with my kids as they biked, my 5-year-old on her new big bike and my toddler on an old-school Radio Flyer tricycle. I suggested to my daughter that she go all the way around the block on her bike while my son and I worked best on how to make progress on his trike. This was a new freedom for my daughter, riding away from us on the sidewalk and being on her own for a whole block albeit one she knows well because we walk it all the time. She’d done it several times and was exhilarated by the freedom until the time when she came to the long back straightaway and didn’t see us. My son and I had made enough progress…

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Airing the Wounds Out

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Something that I did right the other day when my kids had a melt down reminded me of this time when I got it wrong. I’m so grateful that life gives us opportunities to learn — and to heal when we don’t get it right.

Wynne Leon's avatarSurprised By Joy

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” – Winston Churchill

My kids and I spent the weekend with my brother and sister-in-law. Sitting around their semi-circular teak dining room table with a padded bench seat, I was reminded about a conversation we had there about a year ago.

“My mom said I should go find another mom,” My daughter said to my brother and sister-in-law. It was all I could do to not explain but because they are wise, they teased out the story from her. She was having a fit that seemed to be part of what came with being four because I wouldn’t let her do something. It had been going on for a while (it seemed like a fifteen minutes although it was probably five) and she said, “I’m going to find a…

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