Tag: digging deep

Digging Deep vs Leaning In

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“I don’t promise you it will be easy. I do promise you it will be worthwhile.” – Art Williams

My 6-year-old daughter mentioned that she wasn’t excited to go to school yesterday because she had “reading rotation.” I don’t exactly understand why she doesn’t like it but it’s something about being with her group and having to move through the different stations of school work. So we counted the number of days she has of reading rotation left in the school year – nine. She decided nine was more than doable.

But I was left thinking about “counting the days.” It made me think of the difference between digging deep and leaning in. I remember when I started working out to climb my first mountain and I was working out on these set of stairs on Capitol Hill in Seattle where there are 13 flights for a total of 290 steps. As I did these the first time I thought, “I can do anything for 20 minutes.” This became my mantra for digging deep to get through short-term pain.

Then it came time to climb and I thought “I can do anything for two days.” And adopting that attitude got me through a great deal of repetitive tasks and tough conditions.

When I had first had kids and the sleepless nights were getting to me, I remember thinking to myself, “I can do anything for two years.” Well, I’m not sure I could have done sleep deprivation for that long and fortunately didn’t have to find out but saying that mantra helped get me through.

I can do anything for x amount of time is my mantra for digging deep. It works – it helps me push through a perceived limit by tricking my brain. But there is a point where digging deep becomes a habit to not only push through challenges but also to bear down and push through life. At that point digging deep becomes a liability.

By contrast, the biggest gift I received from the rich healing days when I first started meditating after my divorce was learning how to lean in. It was a lesson I got from Pema Chödrön’s book When Things Fall Apart. It was my awakening that it doesn’t work to avoid things – we need to lean in to them instead and take the power away.

I’ve heard this likened to the martial art of Aikido – that by leaning in to a punch, you take away its power. You get it closer to the source so it doesn’t have a chance to build up steam and turn into something bigger.

You lean in to the things that make you uncomfortable to find out why. You lean in to the arguments you have with your partner to find the root cause of what isn’t being said. You lean in to the fear of what you don’t want to do to find out what associations can be untangled.

For me, it’s a subtle difference between digging deep and leaning in. Digging deep is for when I have to grind things out. Leaning in is for when I can stop things from blossoming into something that has to be endured.

We close enough to the end of the year that I’m sure my daughter can dig deep to get through her remaining reading rotations. But perhaps next time we should practice the art of leaning in so we find out what is making an activity hard and disarm it.

(featured photo is my daughter on the Capitol Hill stairs in 2017)

To Sit or To Stand

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“Our bodies are our gardens – our wills are our gardeners.” – William Shakespeare

My friend Phil guided big mountains for more than 40 years. His adventures have included guiding Dick Bass when he dreamed up the Seven Summits goal to climb the tallest mountain in each continent, being the first American to climb the Chinese side of Mt. Everest, and after climbing all seven summits in his 30’s, he did them all again in his 50’s with his wife when she wanted to reach the goal. When I met him 20 years ago, he had just summitted Mt. Rainier for the 400th time and I’m not sure where the count stands today but somewhere around 500. All that is to say, he’s climbed and guided a lot. And the only person he lost in a mountaineering accident was his assistant guide on Mt. Denali. They had two rope teams coming back down from the summit when a client on the assistant’s rope team started having trouble with a crampon on his boot. The assistant guide unclipped from the rope to help and then fell to his death.

I think of this story when I realize I’ve extended myself too far to help someone. I have a very strong tendency to “dig deep” when I need to access that extra gear to pull through. I learned it from climbing – that extra push to get to the summit and that auxiliary well to draw from when the conditions change and getting to back to the parking lot is farther and tougher.

With parenting, I find myself digging deep a lot. When a child needs help with that last 1000 feet to the car and I put them on my shoulders. Or something falls through with child care and I need to take care of my kids in the day and work at night. Or another parent in our village has an emergency so I change my plans to pick up the slack and have to cancel my self-care time. Or COVID hits and everything is canceled…

All very worthy reasons that I’m more than happy to dig deep for. But when I climb into bed exhausted for the 300th night in a row and my hips and back ache because I spent another day “digging deep,” I wonder if this is the way to live. That is to say, am I destroying myself because I don’t know my limits when I should say stop and rest?

Then this delightful post from the MSW Blog reminded me of something else I learned from mountain guides. It was my very first climb when I learned this maxim from them: If you can stand, you can sit and if you can sit, you can lie down. And when I see Phil these days, he exudes that. He’s retired from guiding and looks as completely at ease sitting back in his leather chair as he did on the mountains. And he’s still full of mountain wisdom that tells us you can’t lead a team if you aren’t caring for yourself too.