Tag: growth

Old Routine, New Fit

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“I am still in the process of growing up, but I will make no progress if I lose any of myself along the way.” – Madeleine L’Engle

I’m sore. Do you ever do the thing where you go back to doing something you used to do all the time only to find out it feels totally different?

On Saturday morning, I was gifted a few free hours because my kids wanted to have a babysitter. Before I had kids, I used to spend almost every Saturday morning either hiking or doing my favorite sets of stairs, the Capital Hill stairs – 13 flights for a total of 290 stairs for each ascent. And descent, of course that is obvious, but as a math person, I couldn’t just let it go. Anyway – with free hours on a Saturday morning, the Capital Hill stairs seemed like an obvious thing to do.

As I was doing them, I felt how long it’s been. I’ve changed and grown (rounder, mostly) and finding my rhythm was hard and uncomfortable. My legs felt leaden, my knees stiff. There is a beautiful garden next to the top third of the stairs created by Ann and Dan, a couple that bought two properties there in the 1960’s, one for their house and one for the garden. Then they gifted the land with the garden to the City in the late 1990’s. Next to the garden was a plaque that commemorated that history and noted Dan’s passing at age 96 in 2020.

As I noticed all these differences, including the fact that I’ve lost my ability to sip from my water bottle while on the go without spilling all over myself, I started to feel all the versions of myself that have done the stairs. The 20-something woman who was building confidence for climbing mountains, the 30-something woman who was trying to keep in touch with that adventurous part of herself that her husband had little interest in, the 40-something woman working out her comfort with discomfort after divorce. All the way to now, the 50-something woman using a set of stairs to remember where she’s been.

Soon enough all the lessons I’ve learned about doing stairs came back to me. Take one step at a time, go slowly using a barely perceptible rest step when it gets hard, and pause for a deep breath before the last 90 stairs.

Yes, I’m sore today. But it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to find out that as I change and grow, my hard won lessons go with me.

Speaking of growth and change, I have a companion piece posted on The Heart of the Matter this morning, Growing Like a Weed.

Practicing Abundance

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“Plant seeds of happiness, hope, success, and love; it will all come back to you in abundance. This is the law of nature.” – Steve Maraboli

When I was in college, I was in a sorority with a lot of young women from well-off families. This wasn’t a stated objective in the recruiting process, as evidenced by the fact that I got in, but probably the result of legacy and connections. If some of my friends asked their parents for money, they’d come back to find $100 bills in their mail slot. They drove new cars – like beautiful convertibles – and they didn’t even have to share them with their siblings.

I was envious of their money. It seemed like they had it so much easier to me.

Thankfully, I’ve gotten over my envy of money. And not because I drive a brand-new car or have piles of $100 bills lying around.

It’s because I’ve moved on to being envious of people with time. I read something the other day about someone who had time to sit in their garden for a half hour and listen to the birds. I loved it except for the envy hangover I got. And my friend, Eric, has been off for the past three weeks driving through Joshua Tree and connecting with friends to do long-distance bike rides down the California Coast. Oh, how I long to have the time for a lengthy workout free of worry of whether it’ll make me too tired to be a good parent.

I’ve already given up cooking anything complicated, doing the dishes, and folding the laundry so what else am I to do?

I can rationalize away my lack of time – justify that I had oodles of time in my 30’s and 40’s when others were raising their kids. But it doesn’t help. Here’s the only cure I’ve found: practicing abundance.

If I can stop looking for a day to do yard work, I open to the possibility of doing it for fifteen minutes and getting some dirt therapy. Especially this time of year when I find it so cathartic to dig out what’s dead to make room for new growth, I get so much benefit when to keep my head down and only focus on the little patch in front of me. When I do, the same healing that comes from digging in to feel our roots arises. I can make a big difference in a small place.

I’d love to have many moments to string together to have lunch with a friend. Sometimes the pressure of knowing I can’t do this with ALL my friends keeps me from reaching out to ANY of my friends. Ridiculous, I know. When I do schedule something with a dear friend, I try to tack an extra 15 minutes on the end. It’s a cushion that rarely matters to the rest of my schedule and helps me feel the luxury of really being there.  

While I rarely feel the burn of a great workout, I’m often sore so it reminds me that I am always doing something. It might not be a lengthy workout that goes from cardio, strength training, and then a little fun interval at the end, but I have plenty of opportunities to exercise something other than my patience. When I’m on the floor playing, I can be intentional about getting up off the floor without pushing off anything. And I can repeat the exercise a few times to get the extra burn. If I’m out walking with young bike riders, I can run along a little bit too. It’s reminding myself to be conscious of the little steps I’m already doing that seems to make a difference.

My abundance practice is not perfect – but as my meditation teacher, Deirdre, says – that’s it’s called a practice, not a perfect. It’s these little things I learn that keep me from moving on to being envious of youth. Because I wouldn’t give up these pearls of wisdom that I’ve picked up along the way to go back.

(featured photo on Pexels)

Speaking of abundance, I’m grateful for all the places that I have to post and interact. This morning, I’ve also published a complementary piece on the Heart of the Matter blog: The Subtle Shaping of Our Brains

Sunday Funnies: Dec 25

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Another installment from my dad’s humor cards.

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.

When we cleaned out his desk after he died 7 years ago, I was lucky enough to stumble on this stack. I pull it out regularly to have a little laugh with my dear Dad. Now when I post one of them, I write my note next to his and it feels like a continuation.

Inside Work

Marjorie Camper and her six-year-old son were working in the garden one spring day. Mrs. Camper was absorbed in her work while the little boy explored the miracle of growing things exploding everywhere. All at once, he picked a daffodil bud, sat down on the ground and studied it.

Then with his two little hands he tried to force it open into full blossom. Frustrated, her cried out, “Mommy, why is it that when I try to open the bud, it just falls to pieces and dies? How does God open it into a beautiful flower?”

And before his mother could give an answer, he made his own “A-ha!” discovery and said, “Oh, I know! God always works from the inside.”

from Don Maddox, Covenant United Presbyterian, Corona, CA

Light, Water & Soil

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“People grow when they are loved well. If you want to help others heal, love them without an agenda.” – Mike McHargue

When I picked Miss O up from school the other day she handed me her mystery science project. It was a little plant in a shot size plastic cup. The experiment was for each table of two kids to divide up – one would leave their plant in the light and the other would put their plant in a dark cupboard for a week. They made predictions about what would happen.

Miss O’s plant was a little radish seedling that had been in the dark cupboard for a week so I was surprised to see that it had three little shoots popping through the meager soil. Miss O’s conclusion about why her plant survived the dark cupboard was that it could survive there but not thrive.

As she handed it to me, Miss O said to be really careful. She was super proud that it had survived. And I promptly bumped my hand and spilled it all over the seat. I scooped the little dirt back in, apologizing and trying to restore calm.

Then I handed it back to Miss O in the back seat and she spilled it. Holy cow – if this plant survived, it was going to be a miracle, not science! But I scooped it up once more and when we got home, put a little fresh dirt in, watered it and put it in the windowsill.

All the while I was thinking about the conditions for growth. I hazard to guess that we’ve all been in the dark cupboard for a week. I think I was in there for a couple of years as I went through my divorce and before I found meditation.

But when we make it through, what do we need to really thrive? For me, it’s meditation, sleep, time in nature, playing with my kids, and conversations with deep and thoughtful friends (online or in real life).

I often poison my soil by eating too much sugar and spending too much time in front of a computer but when I balance it out, I can feel my roots growing deeper.

Amazingly, Miss O’s little plant is doing great in the windowsill. If it keeps growing this way, it’s going to need a different container but I suppose we humans do that too as we navigate the different phases of life.

Leading In My Microcosm

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“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” – Dalai Lama

I got angry at my kids yesterday morning. It was a mixture of things – things were tense on a work project so I was already primed and then Miss O’s first words on a Monday morning were “Why does Mr. D get to?” But it was a completely whopper of one – “Why does Mr. D get to sleep in his own bed?”

Umm, it’s as if all the efforts I’ve made to get her to sleep in her own room instead of mine were completely forgotten. The lighting, the sheets, the help cleaning her room, the cozy warm blankets. And I’ve done this multiple times, over and over and still she wanders into my bed in the night or chooses to start there.

So the injustice of the question pricked me and I got angry. I didn’t yell but I said it was a completely unfair question that not only had we had talked about before but also was her choice, walked out of the room and slammed a few cupboards as I was making lunches.

Anger is not an emotion I’m comfortable with. I grew up with an older sister that was consistently angry and my mom can flash pretty hot although she doesn’t do it very often. It’s not that I swallow my anger – it’s that I don’t feel it very often. I feel frustrated, disappointed, discouraged much more often than I feel mad. Or at least so I think.

But it was what happened next that surprised me. My kids didn’t fuss at all at getting ready for school on a Monday morning. They did everything they were supposed to when they were supposed to do it more or less without whining, crying or protesting. They banded together, helped each other, and cooperated beautifully.

In that respect, my anger made things work way better for me. And it made me wonder if it’s such an effective tool, why would I not choose to use it more often? Other than the fact that I’m not a very good actor and couldn’t pull it off.

That’s a theoretical question of course. My experience growing up taught me how corrosive anger is. If I used anger as a tool, I might get what I want on the surface but I wouldn’t have many real relationships – not ones where people were vulnerable and shared. Not relationships where we could dare to explore together. And it would undercut the honest expression of growth and humanity.

It reminds me of the “power over” model. Researcher and author Brené Brown differentiates power over as power that leverages fear as opposed to power to, power with and power within which are collaborative and growth models for power.

In respect to my kids, I might be able to control them better for a time if I tried to pull off a power over model but it feels like it would be a step backwards in all the learning we’ve done to try to acknowledge our emotions and still do what needs to be done. Moreover, it feels like it would prime them to go out into the world thinking that fear is an effective strategy in dealing with others. And my teeny, tiny microcosm, that feels like I’d be adding to the aggression of the world instead of the compassion of the world.

In short, it feels like that the power over/anger/fear model is being a crappy leader. Especially when using Brené Brown’s definition of a leader as “anyone who holds him or herself accountable for finding potential in people or processes.” 

So, on the Monday morning in question, I choose to instead apologize for my anger and we went off to school and work with hugs all around. I sense that I’m choosing a style of parenting that takes more energy for now but in the end benefits our relationships with each other and the world. And that seems worth the effort.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Going Round in Circles

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“While the world is full of wondrous sights, inner peace comes from staying home.” – The Tao Teh Ching

I live next to a little lake in Seattle. A lake that is about 2.8 miles in circumference. In the morning, I take Miss O to school on the north end of the lake, Mr. D to daycare on the east side of the lake and then home to work on the west side of the lake.

And then most afternoons I do the circuit again and pick up my little family.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why sometimes it just seems like I’m going in circles and others it feels like a beautiful rhythm.

When I feel like I’m just going in circles, it’s when I’m in a rut or really impatient for what comes next. In those moments, what I’m doing just feels like something rote especially because I’ve lived somewhere around this lake in one place or another ever since I graduated from college 30 years ago.

The cure I’ve found for this is to slow down and notice what I’m seeing – the ducks, the water, the runners, the sky. Anything to tether me more closely to the sensation of today instead of the culmination of all that I’ve seen in the yesterdays.

And when I’m in the space to appreciate the rhythm of my trip around the lake, I have this beautiful sensation of knowing what’s important to me. It’s an exceptionally warm sense of gathering my family and the idea that we’ll all be together again and bundled in close.

So I’m growing to appreciate the metaphor of this full circle trip. The letting go and then collecting. It reminds me of all the other cycles: being fully open but then needing to shut down, time of great productivity and then needing to relax. Or, as I wrote about in the When I Write post, the mystical, depth of my mood in the morning contrasted with the state of the evening when I’m a shallow as a muddy puddle and just as unclear.

For all of these contrasts, there is always one that I prefer – being open, greatly productive and deep. Or in the bigger cycles of life like birth and death, or seasons of light and dark, I’d choose birth and light every time.

But unless I’m resisting, I always learn from the less favored part of the cycle. Usually that’s when I get to see the connections and meanings. When I can lean in to what I don’t like, I find the heart of the matter.

So round and round the lake I go, dropping off and picking up which allows me to honor all the other cycles and hold my little ones more dear.

(featured photo is a picture of the lake that I took from the plane on my return from my trip about 6 weeks ago)

Growth and Comfort

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“In any given moment, we have two choices: step forward into growth or step backward into safety.” – Abraham Maslow

“How’d the paddle boarding go?” my friend Rachel asked Miss O who responded, “Good.”

Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. I’d planned a special outing for me and my almost 7-year-old to rent paddleboards and go out on the small lake near our house one afternoon after camp last week. Both of us were so excited to have the time together and to get out on the lake. Miss O has paddleboarded in a little inlet by my brother’s boat and seemed to get the hang of handling the board and the paddle so it was going to be a great expedition to be able to go together. We’d talked about the fact that it would be a little choppier and windier where we were going and made a plan if either of us fell in. Miss O said she was prepared.

But when we got out there, the wind pushed her around and at her light weight, she had trouble controlling the board. She got frustrated and it seemed like every sentence that she said out there started with “I can’t…” I offered to tow her and she didn’t want to do that because she wanted to do it herself. We talked about setting our sights on somewhere she could paddle to but she said she couldn’t do anything but circles. I asked her what she thought she could do and the answer was nothing.

I was flummoxed. I know Miss O can step it up to a level of toughness with teachers, coaches and other family members. She has been going to a different camp every week of the summer and when she’s nervous she takes a deep breath and says, “I can’t skip this first day because if I do, then tomorrow just becomes the first day” and then she squares her shoulders and walks inside.

But when I’m around, and this has happened in many different scenarios, she doesn’t show the same resolve and instead tends towards tears and hugs. In the choice Maslow presents in the quote for this post, she chooses to step backwards into safety more often than not when I’m present.

I asked her about paddleboarding in the quiet, calm time before bed that night and, she said it’s because she doesn’t want to cry for anyone else but she can with me.

It strikes me that this might reveal that support and education are mutually exclusive for most of us. That is to say, we can’t be in our comfortable spot and grow. I think about all the times that I’ve done business projects with more experienced colleagues or climbed mountains when someone else was leading the group. I know in those cases I relaxed in a way that made it harder for me to access mental toughness.

That is a beautiful part of being part of a group or family or partnership. But I’m starting to see that when I’ve grown the most, it’s when I’ve moved outside my comfort zone and in many cases, done things alone.

Which brings me to the heart of her answer to my friend, Rachel. Miss O knew that paddle boarding hadn’t gone well but has reached the age where she wanted to cover it over with a “good.” But that makes me very grateful that she, at least for now and maybe forever, can cry with me.  She’ll have plenty of other opportunities to learn from other people and experiences but even when growing, we all need a comfortable spot to come home to rest.       

Growth Mind-Set

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“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” – Mahatma Gandhi

My mom, who will turn 83-years-old in a few weeks, just put on a piano concert for her senior living residence. It’s something she’s done since the pandemic started, trying to fill in the entertainment schedule especially for those who can’t readily leave their apartments. She has to do three performances to keep the audiences small, they performances have been broadcast over the in-house tv and she learns new music for each one.

All that is to say, my mom is a pretty confidence and very capable person. She still practices speaking Russian, a second language she learned in college and even typing out messages to her Russian friends in her What’s App phone application.

But when something goes wrong on her phone and computer, she brings it to me. Often she’s already figured out the solution but she just wants me to confirm it. Which I am more than happy to do. But it always amazes me and amuses me that she has a blind spot in her confidence.

According to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book, The Confidence Code, this is not at all unusual, especially with women. Drawing on the research of Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, they describe:

“Most women think their abilities are fixed, Dweck told us. They’re either good at math or bad at math. The same goes for a host of other challenges that women tend to take on less often than men do: leadership, entrepreneurship, public speaking, asking for raises, financial investment, even parking the car. Many women think, in these areas, that their talents are determined, finite, and immutable. Men, says Dweck, think they can learn almost anything.”

The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

And the way past that fixed assessment of abilities is to adopt a growth mind-set according to Dweck. It ties with confidence because “Confidence requires a growth mind-set because believing that skills can be learned leads to doing new things. It encourages risk, and it supports resilience when we fail.”

When I first had children, I remember reading several articles about not praising your child for being smart but instead to focus on praising them for their efforts. It turns out that this is exactly the thing for building our own growth mind-set as well. When our internal dialogue is focused on effort and improvement, we reinforce the internal story that we can learn.

Sometimes we have blind spots in our abilities on purpose. We don’t learn things because our partner, friend or child can do it for us. It works fine for us as long as when life requires us to do those tasks, we adopt that growth mind-set, believe we can and then support that with the patience and praise for our efforts as we learn.

I’ve seen my mom do that in these seven years after my dad passed in the many things that were his specialties like taxes and car maintenance. Either through nature or nurture, I think my mom has a growth mind-set. I’m happy to be her computer help but notice that when I do it, she usually looks over my shoulder to see what I’m doing. Maybe by the time she’s in her mid-eighties, she’ll no longer need me for tech support.

This is my third post in the series delving into confidence. The first was I Can and the second was Fear and Confidence.

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Fruits of Blogging

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“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

I have just passed the milestone of posting to this blog 300 days in a row. Writing a blog has been so personally gratifying to me, mostly because of the community of friendship and support I feel with fellow bloggers on this journey.

So I looked around for studies about blogs and found some interesting conclusions that come from a paper published by the Canadian Center of Science Education. The paper entitled The Effectiveness of Using Online Blogging for Students’ Individual and Group Writing studied a students who were learning English as a Foreign Language. Studying their writing styles before and after a 14-week period of blogging, here are some of the key take-aways that caught my eye:

  • Not only do learners better improve their writing skills through blogging practices, they can also build their self-confidence as writers and attract a wider audience.
  • Blogging practices play an active role in encouraging learners to experiment, take risks and foster their awareness to be private and public writers.
  • Blogging helped both individual learners and groups come up with more engaging ideas.
  • As practice time progressed, learners using blogging tried to transform their writings when they acknowledged their audience and expected or anticipated a level of interaction in the form comments, criticism or support.
  • Blogging became a space where they could improve their writing, and where numerous readers and bloggers were also arbiters in matters of language usage and mechanics, cohesion, coherence, idea generation, debate, discussion, critical thinking and so on.

I couldn’t find a study that verified the positive benefits of interacting with an interesting and interested group of people with whom one would have never met otherwise and who comment in ways that inspire and delight. But I don’t need a study to affirm that – because I live it every day! Thank you my blogging friends!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Growing and Blooming

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“What we love, others will love and we will show them how.” – Wordsworth

When I was 22-years-old and moving into my first post-college rental, my dad helped me find some used furniture. Some people he knew where moving into a retirement community so we looked at the items they were getting rid of and bought a kitchen table, two chairs and a Christmas cactus. I donated the table and chairs when I bought my first house a few years later but the Christmas cactus has been with me now for 30 years.

It was my first proof that I could keep something other than myself alive. Now I look at that cactus and see it as a reminder of my most important lessons.

It blooms beautifully once a year and then sheds all those flowers as it prepares for its next feat. It’s best to shed the past so you can work towards the next thing.

The cactus does not appear to be doing anything for 50 weeks but then bursts with color for 2 weeks. Most of our work happens on the inside.

Every now and then it’s drooped in the soil it is in and needs to be repotted as its roots grow deeper. We need some new perspective/work/material from time to time in order to stay vivid.

Sometimes it blooms closer to Thanksgiving rather than Christmas. As you get older, you learn to care less about expectations and more about flourishing in the way that works for you.

The growth on the side nearest the light blooms first but eventually, the darker side blooms too. If you water all of yourself, both your bright side and the shadow side will bear fruit.

 Although it’s a cactus, it has no prickly parts. It’s possible to live a long and beautiful life without thorns to protect you.

This weekend I came across my son picking up the dropped flowers with some tweezers and putting them on the stand. It made me think of my most important work. Trying to create a calm, loving space in which others treat things with kindness.