Tag: inspiration

Creating a Clean Slate

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“The power of imagination makes us infinite.” – John Muir

There is a small room on the top floor of my house that isn’t on the way to anywhere so it’s filled with kids toys: wooden blocks, games, a big dollhouse, barbies. I was helping (that’s code for doing all the work while my kids were present) clean it up the other day and wondering why kids don’t want to play somewhere that’s messy. After all, they aren’t living up to any social mores that tell them they need to be tidy. And when we were interviewed on the local news during the heat wave, my toddler licked ice cream off the table so some portion of the greater Seattle area knows he’s not worried about dirt, dust or germs. It must be something like to be creative they need a clean slate.

That reminds me of my writing process. I meditate and then I write. Meditation declutters my head of to-do lists and chatter. And clears the game board so I am free to make new associations. Most importantly, it erases any sign of “me” so my inner editor is not calling the shots.

Something I read in Shonda Rhimes memoir, The Year of Yes comes back to me as I think about writing. To paraphrase (because at the moment I can’t find my copy of the book which has certainly been disappeared in kid chaos) that her writing process is such that it feels like she has to run 5 miles to just get to the start of writing. And then if she’s interrupted, it’s like she has to run 5 miles back to get back to reality. And to start again, it’s running another 5 miles. I’ve heard other writers describe their process similarly like Brené Brown saying that she has to go deep to write and normal life ceases to be possible.

These descriptions make me think that like with my kids, creativity is sparked when we make some space to begin. There is a Zen saying, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day unless you are busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” And that makes me laugh, but mostly because it’s true. Just think of what I could create if I could clear my mind…

Low Battery Indicator

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“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” – Corrie ten Boom

The battery in the carbon monoxide detector ran low last night. At 11:21pm actually which is when I opened my eyes and realized that the high-frequency pip-pip-pips I was hearing weren’t actually a part of my dream but something else. Then I was thrust into comical action mode as I, being as quiet as I could, hunted down which safety device was emitting these sounds before it awoke the kids. When I got my hands on the thing I stood by the kitchen sink trying to slip out the battery and sleepily tried to reassure myself that it was just a low battery warning and not an alarm itself. On one hand, I wasn’t sure I even knew what it would sound like if it was trying to alert us but on the other hand, there was nothing on inside the house that I thought could be producing carbon monoxide.

I was pretty sure it was low batteries. But that isn’t a 100% and a lot of worries can slip through that crack between pretty sure and positive. And I’m quite sure I’m not alone with this, but when I’m worried, it’s hard to go to sleep.

Worrying for me is that need for certainty. To be certain that everyone is safe. To know what will happen in that meeting I’m thinking about. To have a response to any criticism that I could imagine might arise. To know the end of the story. Worry is the indicator that my faith is running on low batteries.

As I climbed back into bed, I suddenly felt exhausted by my monkey mind worrying through all the factors prompted by a device that is supposed to keep us safe. The only thing I think of was to count the things I was grateful for instead…

That the kids didn’t wake up

That I have other detectors that were silent

That my heart was beating slower now

That now I had an idea of what to blog about in the morning

That I managed to get a good night’s sleep after all.

Sibling Supportiveness

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“There’s a sun in every person – the you we call companion.” – Rumi

My kids and I were sitting on my bed reading books before bed and my 6-year-old daughter leaned over and kissed my toddler on the head and said, “Love you, Baby.” He said, “No kiss, La-la.” And so I kissed him on the head and he said, “No kiss, Mama.” But he was smiling so we kept kissing him and he kept saying “no kiss” and laughing.

My kids have such a sweet relationship. When they are in the car and my toddler hears a siren or other noise that scares him, he’ll say, “cared”, my daughter will say, “Want to hold my hand?” and he does.

I work hard to make this happen. I sit with them as they work things out and act as interpreter. I also narrate why he mimics her so much because he thinks she’s the coolest thing ever. I do this because I grew up as the younger sibling of someone who hated me. She was four years older than me which is the same age difference as my two kids. When we’ve talked about it as adults she said, “I don’t know why I was so mean to you.”

My opinion is that my sister has always struggled with feeling like she didn’t belong in our family because she was the one “realist” amongst a pack of optimists. I came along and the easy, happy disposition I was born with challenged her fighter, questioning nature and it is her makeup to push back.

Whatever my sister’s reason was, I find it fascinating to think about the dynamic now. Having kids that are the same age difference has been fear-inducing and healing for me. I was terrified that the same pattern would repeat itself. And now I’m starting to trust that there isn’t any scary truth that four years difference makes siblings not like each other.

There isn’t a more influential factor on my parenting style than the wounds of my childhood. I was scared to live with my sister – scared that anything I professed to love she would destroy. If I had long hair, I was scared she’d cut it off at night, if I liked a particular stuffed animal, I was scared she’d take it or destroy it. To be fair, I don’t think she ever did – but she threatened a lot. And I think I’m still scared of admitting I love something in case that means it’s taken away.

My mom was tired of kid squabbles by the time I came along as the third child. She was ready to move on with her own professional and personal development and given how talented and smart she is, that was only natural. But it meant that telling her my fears or about the conflict was not a fruitful path. She’d call it tattling or say we both caused it, no matter what happened. There was no path to resolution for me as a child – no understanding, no naming it and no way out of fear.

So every day I work at building trust between my kids and making sure they are source of comfort, not anxiety for each other. It heals me alongside helping them. It’s another reminder to me that nothing is wasted in this life – every wound can become a source of knowledge and inspiration. I hope that long after I’m gone, when they are scared, they will still talk to each other about it and hold hands.

Fear of the Dark

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“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

I have a clock that projects the time and temperature onto the ceiling of my bedroom so that lying in my bed I can open my eyes and when they finally focus, I can see what time it is without so much as moving a muscle. It’s a pretty silly gadget but I’ve had it for more than 10 years and since it continues to display the time, I can’t very well justify getting a new clock. But it has to be dark enough in the room to see the numbers so I was surprised this morning when I awoke at 5:24am and could see it on the ceiling. The 16-hour days of summer have passed and even though it took me a couple more minutes to adjust to that and get myself out of bed, I loved getting up in the dark, it has an extra layer of quiet.

When I was younger, my sister used to call my “Pollyanna.” Which I think was a compliment but our relationship is fraught so it’s hard to tell for sure. Whether she meant it kindly or not, she definitely was using it according the Meriam-Webster definition “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” In other words, I’m a little bit sunny – or maybe a lot.

So it’s taken me a long time to appreciate my dark sides. Like how uncomfortable I am when things are edgy and pessimistic. And my inability to foresee that things just might not work out. The era of COVID has been a terrible time to be an optimist – I’ve been wrong on every prediction of when things would go back to “normal.”

Just as I’m enjoying the shorter days, I’m also learning to accept that I can be both light and dark. In fact, sunniness without some down time is exhausting. There’s very little I can do about my optimism which seems to be innate but as I’ve learned to listen to my fears, anxieties and wounds I’ve found a deeper humility by leaning into all of me. As I help my kids name their frustration, disappointment, envy and jealousy, I am finding it easier to name mine. The other day when I was feeling envious of a professional colleague who seemingly has no trouble promoting themselves, something that is very difficult for me, I named it and instantly felt more human.

When I rolled out of bed in the dark this morning, I found it more accepting of my sleepiness and more sacred in the quiet. Somehow, it’s easier to bring all of me, light and dark, to the meditation cushion when the sun hasn’t yet come out. The candles I light every morning glow brighter in the dark and I’m starting to discover that I need to accept both in order to fully see.

The Other Side

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“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” – Buddha

Last weekend I took my kids to a swimming beach in a very wealthy suburb of Seattle. It was beautiful – the grounds perfectly maintained, a recently built dock of all the latest materials so no one would get a splinter, a cabin as beautiful as you would hope for a restful lakeshore vacation for the lifeguards to use when they were off rotation and a play structure with no graffiti. It felt like an idyllic break from the signs of homelessness, addiction and lawlessness that are so evident in Seattle these days.

Within 10 minutes of peeling off our top layers and getting into the water I heard a father chastise his son, who looked about 10-years-old, “You are just a dumb kid.” And because I’ve read so much about how shame doesn’t work, especially in parenting, I felt shocked because I can’t recall hearing someone shame their kids in the six years I’ve been a parent. I’m in no way claiming that it doesn’t happen in the big city but just that I haven’t heard it.

We moved on to the play structure which was almost deserted except for two other kids. My daughter breathlessly ran over to where I was standing told me that a little boy who was about a year older than my toddler was punching my son in the stomach. The child’s mom was about 50 feet away, completely uninterested, so I walked over and the child had taken a lap around the structure and was now pushing my son. As I carried my son away from the child, I thought again how odd that was both to have kids touching each other these days and to have parents totally tuned out. These little incidents reminded me of the adage that money doesn’t solve everything.

My dear dad spent fifteen years as a senior pastor in a Presbyterian church in a very wealthy community before he retired. I remember the gist of many sermons he delivered to the very generous and lovely congregation was that quite often the problem with money is that it makes us think we don’t need faith. Whew, that at least is one problem that I don’t have. 😊

As I drove back to my middle-class neighborhood, I was thinking about our universal humanity. That I with my kids, the homeless heroin addict on the street and the wealthy patrons at the park on the other side of the lake all have hearts that ache for love, lungs that long for clean air, and backs that get tired when they carry too much. Maybe we only differ in how far we think we are from suffering. It made me remember again that there is no way to drive away from suffering but instead I just have to meet it, in me and in others, with as much faith and empathy as I can muster.

Collective Confusion

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“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

I had a birthday party for my daughter and for the first time in ages was together with parents of kids my age. The kids ran around the park and enjoyed the fun of playing together outside, some kids not having seen each other since her pre-K program was abruptly shut in March of 2020. Talking to the other parents, all masked and vaccinated, I heard over and over again the worry that there are no good choices for our kids as they go into 1st grade this fall.

I think this is the first time I’ve experienced this kind of confusion affecting a group collectively but I certainly have faced it individually. So I sat this morning on the meditation cushion to try to muddle through it. When there are no good choices, where do I turn?

I come back again and again to the awareness that something has held me up and nourished me even as confusion swirls around me. When I think I’m an individual making choices, I feel alone but when I feel I am a part of a Universe that flows like a river, I start to relax and float.

Listening for the quiet in any given circumstance helps me to settle. Imagining a pond, I can only see to the bottom when the water is still. When a rock is thrown or the wind whips the surface, I can no longer see the depths. So I still myself as much as possible to find the transparency again.

When I settled myself and relaxed this morning, I felt the weariness and worry that I attribute to this pandemic although as I write this I realize it may have also just have come with parenting. There is a little bit of self-pity in that worry as if am begging for someone to give me a break. But none of this is personal. When I laugh it away, I feel lighter as if I’ve gotten of one thing that is no use to me.

As I come back to my center, I find that I just need to find the right next step and that the Divine is present to guide me to it. When I see it this way, I stop worrying about how all this will work out and just return to now. I can accept that the water will get muddy again and first grade for my daughter might not go how I think or want but try to settle out of my confusion. There is some comfort knowing that other parents are struggling with the same but at the very least I can return and again to stillness so as not add to the collective momentum of disquiet.

The What If Game

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“The real happiness of life is…to enjoy the present, without any anxious dependence on the future.” – Seneca

I was dropping my daughter off for an outdoor class the other day and she was already a little nervous because her friend that is also signed up for the class wasn’t coming. Then we arrived and she saw that there was a substitute coach that she didn’t know as well and he had an Eastern European accent that made him a little difficult to understand. The perfect storm. Her anxiety was real and she started with the what if questions: What if he asks me to do something and I don’t understand? What if I say something and he can’t hear me because of my mask? For each question I answered, there were at least two more.

When I awoke this morning, my mind was filled with it’s own what if’s. Questions because it’s August and as I mentioned in this post listing the lessons I learned over 20 years of owning my own business, my work is always slower in August. Questions because the school year is about to start for my daughter. Questions because the Delta variant is surging.

All valid questions and the anxiety is real. But as my mind raced through all the troublesome scenarios that could happen, each of them scarier than the previous because they were building, my foot started to itch. As I reached down to scratch it, I realized that it was the only thing that was happening at that moment that I needed to attend to. From there, I just needed to find the next thing to do which was to make a cup of tea and meditate. As I write this, I still have all the questions about what the future will bring but the awareness that in this moment right now, life is actually just fine. In a few minutes I will wake up the kids and keep finding my way through the day by identifying the next thing to do.

When I was dropping my daughter off and the questions kept coming, I said to her, “I’m not going to play the what if game. You are resourceful and capable of handling this class and no matter what, it only lasts one hour.” It worked and she had a great time. I’m finding it works when I give myself that speech too.

Put Down the Controls

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“Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It’s a way to live.” – Jacqueline Winspear

The other night I went in to check my toddler in his crib before I went to bed. I slipped in and the movement awakened him. I heard him sit up and roll over so I stood there motionless until I thought he’d settled back down. I knew it wasn’t long enough for him to really fall back asleep but I stepped out anyway, too exhausted after walking 17,849 steps while caring for two children all day to stand there any longer. And he started crying. He was upset because of something I did and I was too exhausted to do anything about it but to silently curse myself.

As I listened to him crying through the wall, I had this moment when I realized that I’ve created no space for the Divine in my parenting. That is to say, I think everything is my responsibility and my fault. When I delivered each of these two miracles, there was no denying that they were these perfect gifts from God but then I’ve taken the job and responsibility of a parent so seriously that I have forgotten I’m not in control.

I’ve come so far in the other areas of my life to have faith and to see how everything comes together for good. My dad dies and then in the same year my daughter is born. A project is delayed because of a reorganization at the client company and then I have time when the request comes in from my favorite non-profit to help with their technology. I’ve started see this beautiful symphony of how it all works out. I’ve relaxed into trusting the Divine hand in the flow of life and so even when I don’t understand, I’ve learned patience to find out the why that will reveal itself sooner or later. I’ve let go of a lot of control and in return seen the give and take of this beautiful mystery of life.

But parenting and the fun, funny and tough moments and the mistakes I make while being in charge, I take so personally. In my enthusiasm to do a great job, I have completely forgotten that enthusiasm means “with God”. I made the choice so intentionally to become a single parent, I forgot that is only in this dimension but if I look higher, I have a partner in this most important and meaningful job.

My dad had this phrase, “You have to care less without being careless.” He was talking about golf. But his years as a pastor infused a wisdom that overlaid most everything he said. In this game of life, I need to relax my grip and care a little less about parenting so that God can help me swing everything.

My son cried after I woke him up for only a minute or two. It was long enough to have this epiphany. Like magic that challenges our assumptions about what we know and see, the Universe used that moment of exhaustion and disappointment to startle me out of my insistence that I am in control.

Minding My Own Business

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“If what you believe does not impact how you behave than what you believe is not important.” – Shaykh Yassir Fazaga

This year I’m celebrating having my own business for 20 years. It’s hard to unpack all that means to me but my business was there before I got married and carried me through when I got divorced. It gave me the flexibility to trek to Everest Base Camp for 3 1/2 weeks when I was single and has given me the time and money to have kids as a single woman now. It’s held different structures like when I had business partners and employees and like now when I am a sole proprietor with subcontractors. There have been ups and downs that seemed so huge that they’d swallow me at the time but now in hindsight are now just good stories. While many of the things I’ve learned are specific to my company’s focus which is to provide consulting to businesses about how they can better implement computer collaboration like document sharing and approval processes, the three most key lessons are life lessons:

  • Always pay everyone else, including the government, before you pay yourself. I remember the first payment I got 20 years ago was for $5,000 and it seemed like so much money that I went out and bought a tile saw so I could tile the floor of my home office. But once I paid the state and city taxes, my start up costs and legal fees, my take home was about $1,200. I could still afford the tile saw but I learned not to look at any payment as my money. Instead I pay my expenses often before the client remits payment so that when I look at the bank account, I know how much I can pay myself.
  • Finish your projects and create relationships, and your reputation will take care of much of your marketing. After my business partner told me of my now ex-husband’s infidelities and it became clear we needed to all go our separate ways, I was left maintaining a small office building that we all still owned together. It was after the financial crisis of 2008 so the building was worth less than the mortgage and we couldn’t sell it. So I went to the local SBA office to talk with someone about how to restructure the loan. He gave me a series of things I had to do, accounting, legal and structural and told me if I did, we could restructure them. It took me five months of hard work and when I made an appointment with him and returned, he said, “Wow, you came back. Not many people do.” Which made me cry. And I also was able to reshape the loan to work until I could sell the building. That same tenacity in finishing projects and maintaining my reputation through all circumstances has worked to give me repeat business and referrals that have made the business easier to run over time.
  • Have faith. Every year at this time, my business slows down in late summer because people are on vacation. It doesn’t matter that it’s different customers on one year versus the next, it always happens. And I always worry. So the third lesson is have faith. I think of it like the story of Manna in the Bible. Enough manna would fall each day to feed the Israelites when they were in the desert. But they couldn’t store it from one day to the next. They had to have faith it would come again the next day.
    So I spend August doing my part – honing my skills and reaching out to people and sooner or later my pipeline fills and the business continues. Like with all problems, worrying only drains the energy out of what needs to be done so I’ve learned take a deep breath, focus on faith and keep working.

I’ve heard the phrase “it’s not personal, it’s business” many times. It seems often right before someone is unkind or unfair to someone else. I’m guessing whoever coined that phrase didn’t run a small business for 20 years because at some point it becomes indistinguishable. But when your values are infused in your business, it can be a beautiful thing.

A Safe Place

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“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. ‘Pooh!’ he whispered. ‘Yes, Piglet?’ ‘Nothing’ said Piglet taking Pooh’s paw, ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’ “ – A. A. Milne from The House at Pooh Corner

The other day I picked my son up from preschool and my daughter from spending an afternoon with my mom and from the instant we were in the car together, the fussing started. My daughter was covering my son’s eyes and he didn’t like that, she didn’t like her attempts at play not being well received and the crabbiness mushroomed from there.

As a mom with two young kids, I’ve thought a lot about being someone’s safe place. My kids fuss, fret and freely object with me in a way that they don’t with anyone else. Often it’s after they have been somewhere else and behaved marvelously according the reports I get, that they fuss the most. It’s as if holding themselves together comes with this letting down of the hair with me. I’m pretty patient but whining gets my goat. I don’t whine (not out loud at least) and I hate (thinking about whether there is a less potent word to be used here but nope, hate is accurate) when my kids whine. Crying, having a fit, objecting strongly – all of that I can handle but whining, especially symphonic whining that moves from one kid to the next and ARGH!!

It’s the idea of being someone’s safe place that both fascinates and saves me. In a world where it’s not possible to be happy all the time but not acceptable to express anything but happiness, safe places are where we get to act out that shadow side. Our safe people are the ones who can help us process the grime that collects during the day and practice shaking it off, sometimes by creating friction and rubbing up against others who help us shine again.

When my daughter was about 3-years-old she became very interested in the Narrator in the Winnie-the-Pooh chronicles. She wanted to know who the voice was that was providing context and integrating the story. She’d want me to pretend I had a microphone and narrate her activities. I’ve come to think of being my kid’s safe place like being that personal narrator – someone who helps them understand the bigger story around the things they are seeing and learning when out and about in the world. Someone who helps them figure out how they are feeling and reacting to it all.

Once I learned from Mark Nepo that the German root of the word friendship means place of high safety it changed how I think of that hallowed ground between friends. Because I believe we do the same thing for our friends that I do for my kids – we help each other work out our stories. We listen to the bumps, bruises, moments of awe and renewal again and again if necessary until we work out our narratives.

When I see it that way, I feel less abused by the acting out. While I’d prefer that I bring out the best in my kids, I can handle when it seems I bring out their worst. I can find grace for the fact that I’m allowing the authenticity of my kids to show and opening the opportunity to talk about our values, respect for others and ways of handling things when we are overloaded with information and activity. And when I sometimes growl, “Stop whining” which isn’t my best either I’m glad I get to work that out in my safe space too.