Tag: leaning in

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)

Counting What Counts

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and nothing everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein

Yesterday I went to the store with my kids and my five-year-old daughter wanted to bring her own money to buy a new toy. She packed an entire backpack full of supplies for our 10 minute drive to the store so it wasn’t until after she picked out something that we realized that she hadn’t brought her wallet. I agreed to loan her the money to buy it and she would pay me back but the Barbie accessories she picked were more than she had saved up. Not wanting to make this a lesson in indebtedness I didn’t make much of a point that I was happy to spot the difference. But later when she was showing my mom what she’d gotten, Olivia said, “But I lost all my money.” Stifling a smile I urged her to explain further and she then amended her statement to be “I gave all my money to my mom.” (Like it was some charity thing). I chuckled about that for the rest of the afternoon because this follows on a conversation where I tried to get her to change five-1’s for a five dollar bill but she didn’t like that trade. She wanted to keep her ones and also have the five so she found five coins in her piggy bank and wanted to trade that.

Knowing that this is a common hurdle for kids, I’m not too worried that she’ll get it. But it strikes me that we all face similar lapses in thinking when it comes to counting and what we value. We use “likes” as measures of acceptance when it’s really one insightful comment that makes us feel heard. We count how many times the nanny has left us without extra diapers instead of celebrating how well-cared for the kids are. We count how many kids socks we have to pick up at night when we’re tired instead of the smiles and looks for reassurance we answered in the day. We count how many extra pounds are on our bodies because COVID has made it hard to go to the gym instead of feeling the one amazing beat of life our hearts give us to keep going. We count how many days until life changes instead of leaning in to enjoy the closeness of life now. We count how many friends we do or don’t have instead of realizing that it’s the wholeness of the Universe that can make us feel loved.

I’m an engineer so I love numbers. The only way I’ve found to come back to what matters is to sit in meditation. It’s the time when I do nothing while seated on my meditation cushion that makes the most difference about the quality of everything else I do.