Tag: relationships

The Power of Story

Posted in psychologyTagged , , , , , 40 Comments

“Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.” – Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

This is a piece was published previously on 10/19/2022. Heads up, you may have already read this.

Among the many stories my ex-husband told me of his precarious childhood, there is one that sticks out. He was five or six years old, living in Florida and his mom was dating the Hat Man, a man who wove and sold palm frond hats to tourists by the side of the road.

One night after he went to bed, my ex-husband woke up and smelled smoke. He tried to get out of his bedroom but his mom had locked him in from the outside. Finally he escaped out of a window to discover that his mom and the Hat Man had fallen asleep while smoking and drinking too much and set the house on fire.

Now that I’m a parent, I often think of my ex-husband’s story even though we divorced years before I ever had kids. The story of the precocious and energetic young boy who was probably a little bit of a pain in the ass locked into a room so his mom could drink in peace and set the house on fire.

I think of it when I need more patience to coax cooperation instead of compel it. I think of the story when I need extra capacity to provide good care to little ones when I am needing care myself. I think of it when I’m digging deep to do my best when my kids seem to be bringing their worst. I think of the story when I’m grateful that my parents modeled kind and consistent care with me as I was growing up.

When we tell our stories, or when we as writers tell other people’s stories, we often can’t see the effect they have on those who read them. Our narratives have the power to inspire others and become fuel for good and bad decisions. When we do a good job of humanizing the trauma that comes with life, we pass on the comfort of being seen and open the source for healing. We can lay the ground for growth by telling the stories of when life wasn’t so good.

I thought of my ex-husband’s story again the other day when I heard a Ten Percent Happier podcast with therapist Dr. Jacob Ham. He was talking about relational trauma, the small moments of neglect, abuse and fear some children experience from a very early age.

Dr. Ham described this trauma, “What’s really screwed up is as a baby that the only way to deal with fear and terror is to run toward your caregivers. They are supposed to protect you. You scream out hoping that they’ll come to your rescue but if they are the ones hurting you, then it puts you in a terrifying loop where you want to run from them but at the same time your body tells you to go find them. And then you spend the rest of your days trying to figure out how to resolve that paradox.

“I have seen it [the paradox] be worked through. The key term that and I haven’t found a good layman’s term for is reawakening the capacity for mentalization. And mindfulness is a very close overlap to mentalization but the term means knowing that other person has a mind and that I have a mind and being curious about what’s happening in your mind as well as being curious about what’s happening in my mind.”

Which I interpret as that Dr. Ham works with his patients uses mindfulness to notice the deep stories in their minds and unpack their reactions that are fueled by them. In other words, the power of the story runs through this all – to tell where we’ve been, to inspire and inform others and to discover our internal paradoxes when we face ourselves.

No wonder being a writer is such a rich pursuit. Rich in power to change that is, because rich in monetary reward doesn’t necessarily follow. But it should – because it’s important work.

I’ve also published a post today on the Wise & Shine blog today with my favorite quotes about writing: My Favorite Writer Quotes

(featured photo from Pexels)

When You Want to Give it Back

Posted in loveTagged , , , 61 Comments

“The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.” – Leo Tolstoy

The other night as we were getting ready for bed, Miss O asked me, “Mama, with the dogs you’ve had, did you ever wish you didn’t have them?”

Oh, oh, oh, my heart. This was after a tough evening of puppy training with Cooper. He had been nipping at the edges of shorts, knees, and feet, the kids were running from him which he thought was a game. There wasn’t an ounce of calm to be found.

When everyone got settled down to watch a little bit of the Cars movie before bed, there were a few minutes when Miss O got to calmly pet Cooper when he was being good, but it wasn’t enough to heal the tiredness and irritation that come with getting chewed on and chased.

As we headed up the stairs to do the kids bedtime routines, I pondered Miss O’s question and the follow-on that led from it: Is there a gift in this world that doesn’t come with a downside or a moment when we wish we didn’t have the gifts we’ve been given?

I absolutely adore, treasure, and love my kids, but there are occasions when I’m flat out exhausted or sick, and don’t have the sense of humor to understand why they think sitting on my head is the right choice and funny. It’s fleeting, but I certainly long to only take care of myself in those moments. But thank goodness, I always bounce back after I get some sleep, or even just a moment to myself.

Any other gifts that we don’t momentarily doubt? Job? A new car? The place where we live? Our family?

All I could think to say to Miss O is that the work put in on the front end of relationships usually results in great dividends.

With a puppy, training pays off in spades when they are 7 times their original size.

With romantic relationships, authenticity and vulnerability allow true intimacy.

With friendships, when we keep looking for people with whom we can let down our hair.

With kids, when we create secure attachments.

It was just two weeks ago when I overheard Miss O’s mic drop moment in the car bringing the puppy home and explaining to him, “And you are something called my new best friend.” The problem with her new best friend is that he can’t automatically understand when she wants to play and when she wants to snuggle.

Funny how much I relate to wanting all my friendships to be effortless, only to discover that they grow when effort is applied. I suspect that for Miss O and Mr. D, learning that through raising a puppy might be one of the best gifts of all.

False Positives

Posted in friendshipTagged , , , 48 Comments

“A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us be what we should.” – unknown

Recently I was driving my eight-year-old daughter and her friend to camp. In the back, one was teaching the other to blow bubbles with Hubba Bubba bubble gum and between spit, pops, and crackles, they were talking about a girl they were in camp with.

“She doesn’t like it when we cheer her on and give encouragement,” one said.

“Yeah, it makes her grumpy,” the other replied.

At which point I couldn’t hold my silence any longer and asked my daughter, Miss O, why she doesn’t like it sometimes when I give her encouragement. She teased out that she doesn’t like it when I cheer her on and she’s not close to her goal, when it feels like the gap of accomplishment is too big for the praise she’s receiving.

But, I countered, sometimes the person doing something can’t actually see how close they are.

Our conversation made me think of the work of friendship. How we hold a space for each other that’s based on who we know the other can be. And yet, it can sometimes miss the mark if our ideas get outsized, are based on an old idea of who our friend was, or comes across as inauthentic.

Miss O’s comment reminds me that no amount of perceptiveness or encouragement on the part of a friend works if we haven’t done our own inner work to be able to hear. Listening to these two young girls talk, made me realize that some of our self-limiting beliefs can start really early in life. It left with me a feeling of introspection that I chewed on for most of the day: patterns, beliefs, encouragement, friends. It made me want to drive carpool every day just to heart two eight-year-olds remind me of the basics of life.

For more of the wisdom of children, please check out my Heart of the Matter post about what my 4-year-old son taught me about the power of working for something, Working for Joy.

The Wisdom of Dogs

Posted in loveTagged , , , , , 54 Comments

“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.” – Orhan Pamuk

When my beloved dog, Biscuit, was alive he was one of the wisest creatures I knew. That is a bold claim to make about a golden retriever who loved people so much that when his favorite ones came over he’d start running at one end of the house, and then end up sliding the last ten feet before gently slamming into them. Not really the image of wisdom that is tip of mind when the word is uttered, but I just think of that as part of his charm.

Because his wisdom showed up in other ways. Loving people being one of them. Also the ability to be excited about life wherever it took him, even if he wasn’t in the driver seat, and he embodied the Carl Jung quote, “Please remember, it is who you are that heals, not what you know.”

I’d put signs on him and take pictures and while it seemed like I was the one doing the work, I swear it was just some observational connection to what he was telling me.

I say goodnight to dear departed Biscuit on my way to bed every night. I go into the living room, pick my way past the toys on the floor in the darkened room lit only by the street lights outside, to touch the cherry wood box that holds his ashes, and simply say “hi” or “love you” or a sentence about my day.

On the night before we were to pick up the new puppy, Cooper, I delivered the news to Biscuit and to my great surprise, he answered back. I know, it sounds like a Peanuts cartoon, but I swear the thought just came into my head, “Okay, you’ve gotten a new dog sooner than you’ve found new love.”

Yikes! In the six and a half years he’s been gone, that has never happened before. Of course, the effect was much more impactful since that’s the case. If I thought I’d been talking to my dead dog for all these years, I wouldn’t have much listened.

So what was Biscuit teaching me in this instance?

My observation about life is that life follows our intention, even for things like love that aren’t in our control. It reminds me of a podcast with Mark Petruska where he explained being a master manifester – really picturing what we want, clearly setting the intention, and then participating in the way things fall in place.

I think dear Biscuit was pointing out that my intentions have been ambivalent where romantic love is concerned. I haven’t spent much energy on it, and every time I try to imagine it in the life that I have now, I waver a bit.

When I went back to talk to him the next night, he was silent so I can only guess he’s said as much as he’s willing on that subject. Like all the wise ones, he knows not to talk too much and let the listener fill in their own blanks. Okay, my wonderful dog, I’ve hear you.

Speaking of podcasts, and listening, Vicki and I are doing a two part series about what we’ve learned so far about starting a podcast. This first part is about what we’ve learned about trying from doing a podcast: Episode 31: Trying Podcasting Part 1 with Vicki and Wynne. Check it out if you’re interested!

Sharing Wisdom

Posted in inspirationTagged , , , , 45 Comments

“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

This is something I posted on 1/26/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

In March of 2001, I trekked to Everest Base Camp with my friends Phil and Sue who were attempting to summit Mt. Everest that year. They had invited a few of their friends to join them on the 30 mile trek in and we’d assembled in Katmandu, Nepal to gather our last few supplies before flying in to the starting point of the trek.

It was on a rickshaw trip around the city, that one of my fellow trekkers that I’d just met, a 59-year-old man told me “Life begins at 40.” Given that I was only 31-years-old at the time, this particular piece of wisdom irked me. Taken literally, it implied that I should just waste the next 9 years.

Over the next few weeks as we were trekking, I found out his back story. He had been married in his early 20’s, had two kids but that marriage had broken down and he was divorced by the time he was in his mid-30’s. It was a contentious divorce and his relationship with his sons suffered.

By the time he was in his 40’s, he’d found success as a business owner, gotten remarried to a woman he adored, and shaped his life to look more or less like the balance of freedom and love he’d always wanted. Hence his statement that life begins at 40.

Why is it so hard to pass wisdom from one human to another? We have to pack it up in a suitcase so that it’s portable and then the recipient needs to have some hooks to hang it on when they unpack it.

In this case, I didn’t think much about the wisdom he’d offered me until I was about to turn 40-years-old. It was a tough time in my life – I’d recently been told of my husband’s infidelities, and I was struggling with the idea of failing at marriage while trying to hold it all together.

While I believe the age was just a coincidence, when I thought back to my fellow trekker’s story, it held a lot of comfort for me. Because it represented an example that life can rebuild itself even better after it’s all fallen apart. The wisdom, when I distilled it for me, was that we can have multiple chapters in our lives that still add up to a glorious story.

Isn’t that why we share our wisdom and stories? So that someone else can take them, draw strength from them when needed and they repackage them in a way that’s meaningful?

On that trip in 2001 to Everest Base Camp, after we’d been trekking for a few days, I woke up one morning a couple of hours before anyone else was up. I was so excited to be in the Himalayas, I decided to hike around to see if I could see Everest in the first light of the day. After about 40 minutes, I finally found a place to sit and watch the sunrise illuminate one of the most distinctive mountains in the world.

When I’d finally hiked back 40 minutes, everyone else was up. One of our guides said, “Does anyone want to get a first look at Everest?” and I joined the group. About a 5 minute walk from our campsite, in the opposite direction I’d gone, was a magnificent view of Everest.

Packaging up this story, I’d pass along this wisdom. “You will take some wrong turns in life, go down the wrong path and expend a lot of extra energy. But even in that case, enjoy the view, laugh about how you got there. Whether you go the short way or whether you go the long way, always look out for the presence of Wonder.”

What’s a piece of wisdom you share?

I’ve posted a related piece about wisdom gleaned during my podcast conversation with playwright and author Jack Canfora in a story about Laurence Olivier on the Wise & Shine blog: Do It Again: The Gift of Having to Repeat Ourselves

(featured photo is mine – a view of Mt. Everest from the Tengboche Monastery. Everest is the one with the snow plume caused by winds from the jet stream.)

Loving Our Differences, or at Least Understanding Them

Posted in loveTagged , , , , 57 Comments

“Bless the people who see life through a different window. And those who understand their view.” – unknown

Sometimes the people closest to us see things differently. I’m throwing that out there as my opening line although I suspect that it surprises no one. But it is one of the conundrums that fascinates me.

Here’s an example. My 84-year-old mom and I were recently talking about the information I learned from the Ten Percent Happier podcast, The Science of Longevity with Dr. Peter Attia, a longevity specialist. Specifically, we were talking about exercise and how it really is the wonder “drug” of aging well. I shared with my mom the measures that I wrote about in my Healthspan post: that longevity research has found we should be doing both aerobic and strength training for the best outcomes. For aerobic fitness, VO2 max which measures lung capacity among other things, is the longevity predictor and grip strength is what they use for strength training.

About a month after that conversation, my mom told me that she’d been using a stress ball to increase her hand strength. Then she added she’s been working on lung capacity using the breath device they gave her after she broke her ribs in the ping pong accident when her competitive nature got the best of her common sense.

Huh, I marveled – she’s directly working to improve the two factors we’d discussed. As an aside, let me say that my mom exercises a lot – golf, bike riding, strength training – so these are not the only things she’s doing. But given the information from Dr. Attia, I would have never thought to work specifically on lung capacity and grip strength. Since they are indicators, I took the information to remind me that I should work out more, both aerobically and strength training, figuring that if I did that, it would affect the things they measure. Sort of the indirect method. In fact, as I type this, I realize that I think that it’s kinda cheating to affect the things directly as I worry that I’d miss the point of overall fitness.

Two people and two different reactions to the same information. Not only that, two people from the same family so it’s not like some different cultural bias is at play. It highlights a difference between my mom and I that I’ve often thought of as the forest and the trees. My mom is incredibly detail-oriented and often sees the details I miss.

I recently sent her an adorable picture of Miss O petting a bunny and her response was, “Do you think Miss O minds the hair in her eyes?” I had to go back to look at the picture to see the one wisp of hair out of place. (see featured photo) My reaction was, “Sheesh, Miss O’s hair was pretty tidy that day because usually it’s way worse than that!”

Because I’m a forest person. If most things are flowing towards the end result in a somewhat reasonable fashion, I’m happy. Picking out the details in a day or a project that are a little out of order is not something I’m good at. Really, I don’t really care if something is a little wonky. It would take a lot of energy for me to get worked up about it – so I don’t. To put it succinctly, my mom is a great line editor. I am not. But give me an idea you are working on, and I can contribute a lot of enthusiasm about the big picture.

Here’s where I appreciate aging. I have come to find that the truth of life is not my way or my mom’s way. I think we’re both right. I no longer feel like I have to convince anyone, especially my mom, that she needs to see it my way.

But I still find it absolutely fascinating how differently people see things and that it presents a challenge when communicating, to find a way to speak my truth and feel seen. Often that is much harder to do with my mom because it feels like she gets stuck on the details. That’s where I’m thankful that I’m a big picture person, because I can rest easy knowing she loves me dearly and given her exercise regimen, will probably be around to do so for quite some time!

What to Do With Our Inner Meanness

Posted in meditationTagged , , , , , 63 Comments

“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.” – Mark Twain

This is something I published on 9/7/22. Heads up – you may have already read this.

The other night my seven-year-old was being short-tempered with her younger brother and snippy with me. I asked her not to take out her mood on others and she replied “I don’t know what to do with the meanness!”

Huh. Isn’t that a great question? I was raised in a household that believed “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Which I think has it about half right – not saying mean things is an admirable goal. But since just stuffing it down is likely not to work long-term, what do you do with the meanness?

Tend the Body

On the night in question, my daughter was both tired and stressed. In fact, I think I can pretty accurately say that if one of my kids is grumpy, there’s about a 90% chance it’s because they are tired, hungry, cold or sick.

And that goes for me too. If I’ve depleted my energy reserves with a hard work out or am tired because I haven’t slept well, I’m much more likely to think, if not say, unkind things.

As my colleague on this blog, Jack Canfora said in his brilliant post on Things I Think I’ve Learned So Far, “There will be things you do and say in an offhand way that will stay with others their entire lives, for better or worse.” So how do we tip the scales so that those things are more often for the better?

Mind the Mind

Dr. Dan Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author, talks about the structure of our brains. In his terms, fear and anger reside in our downstairs brain, the brain stem and limbic region, whereas thinking, planning and imagining reside in the upstairs brain, the cerebral cortex and its various parts. The more we exercise integration of these two parts by making sound choices, delving into self-understanding, practicing empathy, posing hypothetical moral questions, the better we can apply higher-level control over our instinctive reactions. From The Whole-Brained Child, those are the recommendations of what we can do to help kids integrate the upstairs and downstairs brains but they work equally as well to mold adult brains too.

As Daniel Kahneman notes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.” Cognitively busy being shorthand for when we tax our brains with concentration, complex computations and choices.  So we need to find a way to give our busy minds a break.

Feed the Soul

For me, giving my mind a break comes from meditation. I call sitting down on my meditation cushion “Irrigating the Irritation” because it so often helps soften where I’m stuck. It delivers me from the petty complaints by introducing a bigger sense of perspective.

This matches the experience reported by brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor when she had a stroke that quieted the mental chatter of her mind and opened her up to a sense of deep inner peace and loving compassion. Studies of Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns have shown a similar shift of neurological activity for those engaged in prayer and meditation.

From a recent study published by the Oregon State University, they found that meditation can help replenish mental energy in a way similar to sleep. In fact, according to the lead author of the study, Charles Murniek, “As little as 70 minutes a week, or 10 minutes a day, of mindfulness practice may have the same benefits as an extra 44 minutes of sleep a night.”

Of course meditation is hard practice for kids. There are techniques like box breathing and just counting to ten that help in the throes of big emotions but I haven’t gotten my kids to sit for more than five minutes at a time on a meditation cushion. However, I’ve also noticed that just sitting and coloring also brings about some mental rest, both for kids and for me when I do it alongside them.

What to Do with the Meanness

I tell my kids that my job is to keep them healthy, safe and kind. I know the kind part is a stretch because kindness is a choice they’ll have to make. Also because I have my hands full just trying to practice kindness myself. But at the very least, I can help find ways they can manage their meanness and in doing so, help myself to do the same.

I’ve also posted today on the Wise & Shine blog about first sentences that draw us in: Great First Lines. Check it out!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Unstructured Flow

Posted in meditationTagged , , , , 52 Comments

“To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of things that are happening inside of you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

My kids and I on vacation this week at a beautiful spot on Whidbey Island – one of my favorite places in all the world and only a couple of hours away from home. We’ve rented a place right on the beach and it is stunning. I’m typing this on a crisp summer morning sitting at the picnic table on our patio. It’s an extremely low tide so one of the local herons is fishing in a tide pool 100 yards front of me. The morning is so calm that I can see the shadow of the heron reflected on the water. The boat just beyond it is glinting in the first light.

My 84-year-old mom joined us here for a few nights, my friend Eric is coming for another few nights, and then my kids and I have had a couple nights and days on our own. Given the proximity to Seattle, we’ve had a parade of other visitors – my meditation teacher, Deirdre, came for a few hours, a gang of Eric’s long-distance cycling friends paraded through, and a different friend is coming today.

Now the heron in front of me is chasing a seagull away from its tide pool that it must consider to be its own. I could be anthropomorphizing here but it seems to have lost its focus on its own peaceful pursuit of what it was doing and now has concerned itself with what the seagull is doing instead.

Which is a lovely allegory for how vacation feels to me. Without the regular routines and structure to key off of, it seems like vacation is a constant negotiation of what we all need and want to do. The wide openness of it makes me feel I have to maintain some definition of my own in order not to be swept away in the tide of what everyone else wants, and my own desire to please.

Like the heron, I spent the first part of the week maintaining definition of what’s mine – my sacred time, my bed, my plate, my activities – and that left me feeling like I was playing defense. Then I read this paragraph from Mark Nepo during MY sacred time and it helped me to realize that the key is permeability:

“Another paradox I continually struggle with is how to let others in without becoming them. How to open the door to compassion without the things and people we feel for overpowering us.”

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo

For me it has come down to relaxing my boundaries so that I can feel the flow. It’s not guarding my space like the heron, but instead finding the play and playfulness in being with others. Coming closer when we are exploring on the beach, and snuggled up after time in the pool, and then moving away when I need a moment just to expand my senses and take it all in.

Which brings me to the quote from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh that I used for this post. When I meditate, I almost always find some answer or ease that helps me to navigate life. When everything else is unstructured, as it is here on vacation, or hectic, as it is in regular life, this is the practice that helps me with both. Usually by finding that I can release whatever I’ve dammed up and find that flow and faith in the Universe again and again.

Vicki Atkinson and I talk about meditation and how self-care can make us better humans on this week’s episode of the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast. Search (and subscribe!) for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts OR Listen to on Anchor Episode 28: How Self Care Can Make Us Better Humans with Vicki Atkinson

(featured photo is mine – the beautiful beach in front of me)

Navigating the Gray Area

Posted in life lessonsTagged , , 43 Comments

“Love is a feeling, marriage is a contract, and relationships are work.” – Lori Gordon

This is a repost of something I posted on 11/30/2022. Heads up, you may have already read this.

When my brother was in his twenties and a couple of years into marriage, he explained to me his theory about the cleanliness threshold. He drew out a chart where he illustrated the state of the household mess and that when it increased, it hit his wife’s threshold for a messy house long before it hit his. Therefore, she was always cleaning it and he never thought it was messy. The diagram looked something like this with the gray area as the space between her threshold and his:

Since I am six years younger and wasn’t married at the time he told me, I thought he was imparting some great wisdom about marriage. It wasn’t til later that I realized that his diagram depicted a way of looking at all our relationships.

Because our thresholds on any number of subjects will likely vary in a great number of areas from those around us: what qualifies as noise, when do we experience hunger, pain tolerance, ability to withstand uncertainty, desire to take risks, and our willingness to express ourselves or seek relief when we are exhausted, overwhelmed and sad to name just a few. So how do we live with others in the gray area between our tolerance level and theirs?

Believe Them

My years as a parent of young kids have taught me that it goes better when I believe them when they tell me how they feel. In that way, we don’t end up debating the truth of the feeling but instead can move to finding out what to do about it.

There are times they’ll tell me they are sad, frustrated, disappointed and I might say, “It’ll be okay” if we need to move on. But I try not to argue that they should be feeling something else like grateful, happy or blessed because it compounds the feeling. They stay stuck trying to prove what they are feeling instead of transitioning to the next phase of how to make it better.

Try to Laugh About It

The other day my 7-year-old daughter was goofing around before bed. Despite my numerous admonitions that she was too tired to keep safely doing cartwheels and should instead try to quiet her body, she kept throwing herself around the room until she ended up hurting her arm pit and her crotch. At that moment, I had the choice of being irritated that she didn’t listen or making a joke about those being two very unlikely body parts to get hurt at the same time. We ended up laughing all the way to bed about how that happened.

On a recent Unlocking Us podcast with Brené Brown, Drs. John and Julie Gottman were talking about their latest book, The Love Prescription: Seven Days to More Intimacy, Connection and Joy. They made the distinction between turning toward a bid of attention (responding or engaging when your partner says something like “look at that blue jay out the window”), turning away (ignoring) and turning against (responding with something like “why are you interrupting me?”).

In happy relationships, people turn toward their partner’s bids for attention 86% of the time, couples who were not successful only turn toward each other 33% of the time. John Gottman explained the result, “Couples who increase their turning toward wind up having more of a sense of humor about themselves when they are disagreeing with one another, when they are in conflict.”

As Brené Brown summarized “Turning toward gives us a sense of confidence about our togetherness.” From there, it’s easier to find what’s funny about this daily existence.

Live Directly

In his book, The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo gives an example of being at an ice cream shop with a friend and eating their cones when the table next to them became boisterous. As he became more irritated, he asked if she wanted to go. But his friend was fine and in saying so, she noticed the look on his face and asked, “Do you want to go?”

He laughed as he realized he was couching his needs into some form of thoughtfulness instead of owning his own feelings. Relationships are so much easier when we claim our own stuff and live directly.

Navigating the Gray Area

My brother’s marriage from his 20’s, the source of the threshold theory, didn’t work out. Turns out his wife had a different standard for telling the truth about significant things. I suppose there needs to be another line on the chart for boundaries. Regardless, I learned a lot vicariously about living in the gray area with others. The longer I live, the more gray it gets but also easier to navigate if I believe others, laugh about it and own my own stuff.

I’ve written a companion piece to this one on the Wise & Shine blog about WordPress relationships: Do You Like My Writing or Are We Just Friends?

(featured photo is mine – a heart of the week from Whidbey Island)

Let’s Be Unreasonable

Posted in inspirationTagged , , , 59 Comments

“Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.” Condeleeza Rice

When Miss O was about six months old, I went out to dinner with a couple of business acquaintances that had kids were teenagers and young twenty-somethings. As I was enjoying fantastic Chinese food in the dark atmosphere of a fancy downtown Seattle Asian fusion restaurant, one of the women slipped in an aside that has stuck with me for all these years. It was something like, “You can’t reason with kids that are 2 ½ to 4 years old.” Wide-eyed with new motherhood, I wondered what holy hell that would be.

Now that Mr D is about to turn four years old, I’ve gone through the window that the woman mentioned twice. That’s enough to realize that it isn’t as precise as I took her comment to be at the time. And also enough to find some interesting lessons about what lies underneath “reasonableness.”

I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person. This is a perfect spot to insert some joke about whether others in my life would say the same. But more or less, I think they would. There may be an exception about my propensity to bite off a lot but as I wrote in my Being a Yes-Sayer post, I’ve got Shonda Rhimes on my side on that one.

But watching the small examples of humanity I see in my children has made me realize three things:

Routine: When reason doesn’t work, routine often does. I’m guessing this is how most parents of small children manage to make things happen. But looking at my life I see how much I do simply by routine – yoga, meditation, writing, showering, making breakfast to name just one routine that I do every morning. And it flows because I don’t question it. Also, when it’s interrupted, I’m very unsettled.

Override: There’s a lot of things little kids don’t want to do. I’m thinking specifically about inserting a stick with bristles and flavored paste in their mouths to scrub all sides of every surface, and then go to bed. But when some parental influence is exerted, it usually happens.

Cue to the end of the night when I’m sitting in my chair reading. Guess what? I often don’t feel like getting out of the chair, brushing my teeth, putting on face creams (there’s a lot more these days), and going to bed. But I do it. Watching kids makes me think about how many things we do in a day that we don’t really want to do – eat vegetables, go to school/work, brush our teeth, wash our hands. I’m sure the list varies for everyone but to one degree or another we are doing a ton of things that we don’t “feel” like doing. I think we all deserve some recognition and applause.

Delight: Reason is not a pre-requisite for delight. In fact, my observation is that reason might hinder delight when we are too focused on the above routines and overrides. Mr. D was riding his training wheeled bike in a bike lane along a well-traveled route the other day when he got off to crouch down and point out the ants he saw also commuting down the road. He was fascinated by the activity and direction and wanted me to join in on his delight. I, however, was almost too preoccupied by trying to get us out of the lane of bike traffic even though no one was coming.

It’s a scene that plays out over and over with my kids. There are a myriad of wonders up, down, and around, and these beautiful young minds around me point them out to me. Only then do I notice, and when left on my own I only tune into a FRACTION of what they see.

Maybe this is why I feel a little sad leaving this “window of unreasonableness” as coined by my colleague. Sure, we’ll get a lot more done – but I’d like to keep the congratulations and delight.